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