Page:The Biographical Dictionary of America, vol. 04.djvu/404

 GREELEY

GREELEY

thoroughly discouraged he was directed by a friendly Irislimau, a fellow boarder, to the job printing establishment of John T. West, who gave him work on a 33mo. New Testament with Greek references and marginal notes. This work had been refused by experienced compositors and young Greeley accomplished the task without as- sistance and to the satisfaction of Mr. West. He then found work in the offices of the Evening Post, the Commercial Advertiser and the Spirit of the Times. With Francis V. Story he started the Morning Post, a one-cent paper, the capital being furnished by Dr. H. D. Shepard and the type by George Bruce. This ventm-e was short lived, but Greeley & Story continued as book and job print- ers and prospered, having contracts to print the Bank Xote Iteporter, and tlirough Dudley S. Greg- ory of Jersey City, secured the printing of a suc- cessful lottery association, publishers of the Constitutionalist On the death of Mr. Story in 1832, Mr. Greeley's brother-in law, Jonas Win- chester, became his partner and in 1834 the suc- cessful printers Greeley & Co., with a cash capital of §3000, established the New Yorker with Horace Greeley as editor. The first nimiber of the " new weekly literary and non-partisan political jour- nal " appeared March 22, 1834, and its success gave to Mr. Greeley a position among the leading joui'nalists of the day. Before undertaking this venture he had refused to join James Gordon Bennett in establishing the New York Herald and commended to Mr. Bennett a fellow printer who became a ])artner in establishing the Herald. The politic<il campaign of 1838 gave birth to the Jeffer soman as a Whig organ of the state committee, the name being suggested by Mr. Greeley, who was employed to edit the paper by Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward, his salary as editor being fixed at $ 1000 per annum. He continued to edit the New Yorker, directing its policy to conform with the conservative tone of the JeJJersonian, which was discontinued in the spring of 1839. In the presidential canvass of 1840, H. Greeley & Co. established the Log Cabin, published simultane- ously in New York and Albany. Of the first num- ber of this campaign paper 48,000 copies were sold and in a few weeks 60,000 subscriptions were re- ceived at the publishing office, which sub.scription list was afterward augmented to over 90,000, a cir- culation unprecedented in the history of journal- ism. Mr. Greeley did not maintain the conservative spirit shown in the columns of the Jeffersonian, but made place for political cartoons, campaign poetry with music, and lectures on the elevation of the laboring classes. The Log Cabin of April 3, 1841, announced that on Saturday, April 10, 1841, the Tribune, "a new morning journal of politics, literature and general intelligence," would be issued at one cent per copy, four dollars

per year to mail subscribers. In September of the same year the Log Cabin and New Yorker were merged into the H'eekli/ Tribune which be- came the largest circulating weekly publication in the United States. Thomas McElrath became his business partner in 1841, and to his skill as a manager of finance the Tribune, foimded by Horace Greeley, owes its great success and ac- cumulated wealth. The politics of the paper passed from Whig to Anti-slavery Whig, then to Republican and before Mr. Greeley's death to Liberal Democrat. His personality always domi- nated the paper and overshadowed the a.ssociate editors employed in the office, and Raymond, Dana, Young, Curtis, Taylor, Fuller and Fry were conspicuous in journalism only after they left the Tribune. In 1848 he was elected a representative in congress to fill the unexpired term of David S. Jackson of New Y'ork, and .served during the second session of the 30th congress. He favored the establishment of homesteads in the public lands and opi^osed the system of mileage to repre- sentatives as subject to abuses. He visited Europe as a U.S. juror to the World's Fair in London in 18.51, and while in that city, appeared before the Parliamentary committee on newspaper taxes and gave an exposition of the newspaper press of the United States. He again visited Europe in 1855 as commissioner to the Paris exposition and in 1859 made a journey across the plains to San Francisco, Cal. He was a presidential elector for the state of New York in 1864; a .delegate to the Loyalists convention in Philadelphia in 1866, and a delegate at large to the state constitutional convention of 1868. He opposed civil war in 1861, and rec'ommeuded the exhausting of every resource looking to a peaceful solution of the question at issue. When South Carolina fired on the flag at Fort Sumter he advocated the calling out of 1,000,000 volunteers to put down rebellion When the 7.^,000 volunteers called for by Jlr. Lincoln's first proclamation were in the field, he urged their immediate moving on Richmond; and when repeated disaster attended the B'ederal arms he recommended the emancipation of all the slaves. When Jeff'erson Davis was a prisoner in Fort Monroe he went upon his bail-bond to secure his release, notwithstanding the fact that the act ruined the sale of the second volume of his '■ American Conflict." At the national conven- tion of Liberal Republicans which met in Cin- cinnati, Ohio, May 1, 1872, Mr. Greeley was nominated for President of the United States, re- cei ving 482 votes to 187 for Charles Francis Adams. He was also nominated at Baltimore, Md., by the Democratic national convention on the first ballot, receiving 688 votes out of 736 votes cast, and in the election that followed, after making a nersonal canvass of most of the states, beginning