Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood

Reviewed by John Bugg

How many New Yorkers could identify the large, weathered bronze statue of a journalist with a newspaper open across his lap that sits in City Hall Park, just off Chambers Street? Probably no more or less than could identify the equally imposing bronze statue of the same journalist, nestled in the park that bears his name on 32nd Street and Broadway, clutching a rolled newspaper at his side. The fact that Horace Greeley is honored by two large memorials in New York City testifies to his massive importance to the city’s history. That Greeley is hardly a household name in 2020, meanwhile, reveals that unlike other major figures in the history of New York, and unlike other prominent agents in the abolition movement, Greeley’s fame has receded sharply in the modern era. Receded, but not vanished: Greeley continues to appear in scholarly accounts of the importance of the press during the Civil War, and every few years he is the focus of a book-length study. He even made a cameo, trademark unkempt white hair and all, in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 Gangs of New York (based on Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book of the same name). Scorsese shows Greeley both walking through the notoriously violent “Five Points” and lounging in an opulent billiards room: though brief, these scenes together show Greeley’s presence in New York City as a kind of bridge between very different loci of power.

But then again, for many historians “bridge” might be something of an euphemism: there has long been a sense that Greeley himself was less a stable, coherent voice within the world of nineteenth-century journalism and politics than an ingenious but protean figure whose words and actions were about as predictable as quicksilver. Greeley’s biographers usually catalogue contemporary reports testifying to this – he is “erratic” and “unstable,” with an “almost violent energy of mind.” “Had God granted him a little plain practical sense,” George Templeton Strong said, “Horace Greeley would have been a great man.” Alongside such accounts run modern speculations that Greeley may in fact have suffered throughout his life from the consequences of oxygen deprivation at birth, and so his “quirkiness” (the word is seldom absent from descriptions of Greeley) may have been less characterological than biological. So then: how do you solve a problem like Horace Greeley?

Biographers for whom ideological consistency is an obvious good that must be demonstrated tend to separate Greeley’s grounding principles – his commitment to the dignity of labor, to the importance of land ownership, to the fundamental concept of personal freedom – from his variously underdeveloped and partially realized deployment of these principles across his life. The liveliest accounts have tended to approach Greeley’s complex career in terms of his energized and rarely circumspect engagement with regional and national politics during some of the most uncertain, unpredictable decades in American history. From this perspective, what we tend to find, as works such as Adam Tuchinsky’s Horace Greeley's "New-York Tribune": Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Cornell UP, 2009) and Mitchell Snay’s Horace Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Rowan & Littlefield, 2011) have shown, is a story of political maturation, beginning with a kind of land-based Whig traditionalism inherited from his (far from privileged) New England upbringing, and then changing, in fits and starts, when faced with the internecine politics first of New York City and then of the nation more broadly. Snay, for instance, has shown how during the anti-rent wars and Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s, and perhaps most famously the anti-draft riots of the 1863, Greeley found himself discomfitingly aligned with a kind of conservative incrementalism, a wariness of the consequences of radical change. Such moments not only tested Greeley’s progressivism, but also troubled his own sense of himself as an agent working on behalf of the public good.

“A rich register of the conflicts and tensions of his age.” So historian James M. Lundberg describes Greeley in the introduction to his compelling new book, Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood. Against this portrait runs Greeley’s chief ambition, and the keynote for Lundberg’s account: “he believed in his own special calling to help realize an American national consensus through the power of print.” Even as Greeley embodied the contradictions of the age, in other words, he sought through his role as editor of the New-York Tribune to harmonize a fractured nation. Lundberg points out that for editors like Greeley, Benedict Anderson’s thesis of the role of print in nation building would not have been a revelation. It was their core professional belief.

But for all of the influence and reach of the New-York Tribune, in practice “the expansive power of Northern print” worked at cross-purposes with Greeley’s unifying agenda, leading him unwittingly to “consolidate expressions of Southern nationalism and distinctiveness.” In Lundberg’s provocative thesis, medium and message pull in sharply different directions, and so “the sectional categories Greeley helped harden before the war were simply too strong and too enduring” when he returned to the mode of national healer afterwards.

Lundberg traces this story through five nicely written chapters. After a short and engaging introduction, the book proceeds in chronological order, beginning with Greeley’s first decade in New York, a time of boarding house life, boundless energy, and professional ambition that finally led to the founding of the New-York Tribune in 1841. Lundberg then tracks Greeley’s growing national profile, as he sought to maintain his Whig-grounded vision of working for a harmonious nation despite the ever-increasing tensions that would eventually lead to all-out war. In his third chapter Lundberg follows Greeley as he leaves the Whig party and forges a Northern anti-slavery position that transformed him into “a symbol not of national unity but of regional divide.” For Lundberg, Greeley is at his ideologically most incoherent during the Civil War period: chapter four tracks Greeley’s political swings, from secessionist to national emancipator. Lundberg’s final chapter considers Greeley as a “reconciliationist celebrity”: the post-Civil War years offered him a fresh chance to promote his vision of a harmonized nation, even as his efforts to extend an olive-branch to figures like Jefferson Davis mystified, and then alienated, whatever Northern support he had left.

If Lundberg’s chapters trace the sweep of Greeley’s life across about four decades, the heart of his story, and so too the heart of Greeley’s career, comes in the half-decade or so during which he attempted to understand and intervene in the unfolding of the Civil War. This is the matter of Lundberg’s fourth’s chapter – it is one of the most engaging in the book, for it shows that what Lundberg styles Greeley’s “startling inconsistencies” emerged from his attempts to find firm ground in the midst of a national earthquake. Particularly striking is Lundberg’s collation of two letters that Greeley wrote to Lincoln in 1861 and 1862, one private, and very public. The first, dated 29 July 1861, shows Greeley in the darkest of moods. “This is my seventh sleepless night – yours too, doubtless,” he opens, continuing, “yet I think I shall not die, because I have no right to die.” Death was on his mind, as it was on the minds of all New Yorkers: “The gloom in this city is funereal for our dead at Bull Run were many, and they lie unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen, scowling, black despair.” Greeley’s own despair led him to tell Lincoln that he would second him in whatever he decided to do, even if this apparently meant the continuation of slavery: “If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the Rebels at once on their own terms, do not shrink even from that.” The Tribune had argued for a strike on Virginia, and even if Greeley was just then away from the newspaper recovering from an injury, he was held accountable for his journal’s war advocacy. Greeley’s own language, describing the city as an open-air morgue, testifies to this sense of overwhelming grief. The other letter, much different in tone and purpose, was printed in The Tribune on August 9, 1862 as “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Taking the occasion of Lincoln’s failure to enforce the Confiscation Act, Greeley excoriates what he sees as the president’s timorous handling of the claims of Southern slaveholders. He argues that if Lincoln would only enforce the Confiscation Act, it would bring a speedy end to the war, for a flood of enslaved people would join the Union side, rendering the Union Army a “‘resistless and triumphant’ force.”

Bringing together these two letters, private and public, allows Lundberg to show Greeley casting around for a way to heal a riven nation. But Lundberg’s argument for Greeley’s wavering becomes less persuasive when he turns to the period that runs from the Emancipation Proclamation to Appomattox. Greeley pointedly urged Lincoln to push for a peace plan that included the need to “‘utterly and forever abolish’ slavery,’” but Lundberg, perhaps following the larger arc of his argument about Greeley’s tendency towards self-contradiction, argues for Greeley’s irresolution on emancipation during this period, and even begins to write of Greeley’s “peace fevers,” curiously taking on the nineteenth-century language of pathology to characterize his commitment to peace. While Lundberg cleaves close to his thesis of a many-minded Greeley, there might be something of a missed opportunity here, for Greeley’s insistence on a causal relation between emancipation and peace asks for fuller consideration. It is to Lundberg’s credit that his book provokes this kind of consideration, and it will certainly provide stimulating reading for those interested not only in Horace Greeley, but in broader questions about the agency of the press as the country came close to unravelling, and about the efforts of those who sought to find ways to heal the nation before, during, and after the war.

John Bugg is Professor of English at Fordham University. He is author of Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford UP, 2014) and editor of The Joseph Johnson Letterbook (Oxford UP, 2016).

Antebellum & Civil War, ReviewsGuest UserMay 5, 2020Comment