Robert C. Williams - Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom

Thank you for buying this ebook, published by NYU Press.

Sign up for our e-newsletters to receive information about forthcoming books, special discounts, and more!

Sign Up!

A publisher of original scholarship since its founding in 1916, New York University Press Produces more than 100 new books each year, with a backlist of 3,000 titles in print. Working across the humanities and social sciences, NYU Press has award-winning lists in sociology, law, cultural and American studies, religion, American history, anthropology, politics, criminology, media and communication, literary studies, and psychology.

HORACE GREELEY

Champion of American Freedom

ROBERT C. WILLIAMS

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

2006 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Robert Chadwell, 1938
Horace Greeley: champion of American freedom / Robert C. Williams.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-9402-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-9402-5 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Greeley, Horace, 18111872. 2. Presidential candidatesUnited StatesBiography.
3. Newspaper editorsNew York (State)New YorkBiography. 4. United States
Politics and government1849-1877. I. Title.
E415.9.G8W55 2006
973.711092dc22 2006000867

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All illustrations appear as a group following .

I came to Horace Greeley from the outside, not the inside. I had no intention of writing his biography. Rather, I was engaged in a study of the shifting meanings of the words liberty and freedom in trans-Atlantic political discourse in the nineteenth century. This included a wide variety of research and reading into some major figures of the timeJames Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, Karl Marx, Julia Ward Howe, Giuseppe Mazzini, Alexander Herzen, John Brown, William Linton, Adam Gurowski, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Thomas Carlyle, Abraham Lincoln, and Francis Lieber. I soon began to realize that virtually all roads led through them to Greeley. He and his newspaper, the New York Tribune, were a kind of international switchboard for a trans-Atlantic conversation about liberty and freedom at a time when the main issue of the day was no longer British tyranny, but American slavery.

Doing history is always a collective effort. Like Horace Greeley, I had conversations with many friends and scholars before completing this book. Clearly the historian is ultimately responsible for the words on the printed page. But this book simply could not have existed without the kind assistance of many other people. Listing them below is a very small measure of gratitude for what they have given me over the past few years as I attempted to follow the trail of Horace Greeley, a prolific writer and correspondent who left his traces all across America. They listened patiently, they commented intelligently, they corresponded efficiently, they searched diligently, and they cooperated fully. None of them, of course, bears any responsibility for the shortcomings of a work to which they gave their attention in many ways, large and small. I am grateful to all of them:

Ben Alexander, New York Public Library; Polly Armstrong, Stanford University, Libraries, Palo Alto, CA; Gabor Boritt, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA; Laura Grace Bruss, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Melissa Bush, Hargett Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, University of Georgia, Athens; Philip L. Cantelon, History Associates Incorporated, Rockville, MD; Ruth Czar, East Poultney, VT; Christine Derby-Cuadrado, Barker Library, Fredonia, NY; Leslie Fields, Gilder Lehrman Collection, J. P. Morgan Library, New York City, NY; Peggy Ford, City of Greeley, CO, Museums; Edwin Geissler, New York City, NY; Melissa Haley, New-York Historical Society; Britta Karl-berg, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Erik Lunde, Michigan State University, Lansing; Harold Miller, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Steve Nielsen, Minnesota State Historical Society; Kristin Nyitray, State University of New York, Stony Brook; Catherine Rod, Grinnell College Library, Grinnell, IA; Suzanne Schultze, Greeley, CO; Betsy Towl, New Castle Historical Society, Chappaqua, NY; Ann Williams, Center Lovell, ME.

I am grateful for the generous support of Davidson College, especially to the late James Vail and his wife Peggy, friends whose generosity provided the Vail Professorship I was privileged to hold. I am also in debt to my daughter Katharine for a superb editing job on the original manuscript, and to Deborah Gershenowitz and Despina Gimbel of NYU Press for their fine and final editing job. They all must be credited, but not blamed, for what follows.

Robert C. Williams
Center Lovell, Maine, August 2005