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Text originally published in 1936 under the same title.
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HORACE GREELEY AND THE TRIBUNE IN THE CIVIL WAR
BY
RALPH RAY FAHRNEY, PH. D.
Associate Professor of History,
Iowa State Teachers College
FOREWORD
Professor R. R. Fahrney has contributed useful information bearing on many points of our terrible Civil War which is now about to be understood by large numbers of people North, South and West. His theme is Horace Greeley and the famous New York Tribune , perhaps the most influential newspaper of its time.
It is very important these critical days of American history to have new and unpartisan accounts of the activities of that great and unfortunate struggle for democracy. Few men, after Lincoln himself, were more active or influential than the clever if troubled editor of the Tribune. What he hoped for, fought for and was disappointed in will always interest people who really wish to understand our past. I am, therefore, glad Mr. Fahrney is publishing his careful study and I hope many readers may follow his pages which I have read with great interest.
WILLIAM E. DODD
Chicago, July 20, 1936
INTRODUCTION
In order to appreciate the full significance of any study involving Horace Greeley and the New York Tribune during the Civil War, it is necessary to understand from the outset, the strategic position they occupied in shaping the trend of events during an extremely critical period in the life of the nation.
All contemporaries, friends and foes alike, testify that the Tribune exerted the greatest influence upon public opinion of any journal in the country during the period under discussion. At the outbreak of the war, it boasted nearly three hundred thousand subscribersa circulation considerably higher than that of any other paperand it estimated that readers well in excess of a million habitually perused its columns.
Subscription figures only partially indicate the extent of Tribune influence in national affairs. A factor perhaps more important than number of readers concerns their distribution. Strangely enough, the Greeley organ was not primarily a New York paper. There were other dailies, better adapted to the commercial atmosphere of the city, that rivaled and even eclipsed its circulation within the metropolis. But through the Weekly and Semi-Weekly editionscondensed replicas of the Dailythe Tribune spoke to a vast rural aggregation distributed throughout every state in the Union, preaching a doctrine and expounding a philosophy which its readers could readily understand and appreciate. Instead of being limited to preponderant influence within a particular locality, a widely distributed constituency scattered from Maine to California, furnished the basis of a power national in scope, and at times enabled the editor to mold public sentiment more effectively than even the President.
Furthermore, in so far as Tribune adherents were unevenly distributed throughout the north, they were concentrated in those states occupying the most strategic position in national affairs during the Civil War era. With the exception of New York, more people imbibed Greeley doctrine in Pennsylvania than in any other state of the Union, and the Keystone State was generally regarded as pivotal in connection with the more important political contests of the period. Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana ranked next on the Tribune roster, all more or less doubtful participants in the various controversies which arose in connection with the struggle for preservation of the Union.
Any discussion of the famous New York journal would be manifestly incomplete and inadequate without paying considerable attention to the eccentric editor, for in all essential respects, Horace Greeley was the Tribune. To be sure, by 1850 the paper possessed a formidable editorial staff, but the press had not yet passed completely out of that stage in which the policy of a journal was closely identified in the public mind with the outstanding personality guiding its fortunes. Unquestionably, with a few exceptions, Tribune policy was Greeley policy regardless of who wrote the editorials, and for that matter, it would have been difficult to convince the great mass of rural subscribers from western New York to Iowa that the old white-coated philosopher did not pen every line in their political bible.
Herein lies the crux of Tribune power and influence. Horace Greeley was more than the editor of a great newspaper. He had acquired an enviable reputation as an expounder of political views, and had actively sponsored organization of the Republican party on a national scale. His persistent advocacy of free land and free labor identified him with the idealistic phase of the Republican movement, soon to be compromised by practical considerations, but adhered to tenaciously by a considerable element in the great Northwest. In short, the Tribune made Greeley, and Greeley made the Tribune , and the Civil War provided the setting in which they exerted a tremendous influence on the destinies of the nation.
It is the primary purpose of this study to acquire an estimate of Horace Greeley as a political force in the period under discussion, and to determine the effect of Tribune policy in molding public sentiment with regard to the crucial questions of the day. The first chapter traces the rise of the editor to a position of influence during several decades of political and journalistic adventure preceding 1860, relating him to the principal characters and events of that era, and providing a background for a more intensive study of subsequent developments. Tribune policy is then traced through all the major activities and controversies which led to a conflict between sections and, during the war, so disrupted unanimity of purpose at the North as to render the Union perilously near permanent and complete disintegration.
Many have dipped into the Tribune here and there and have been invariably impressed with its vagaries and glaring inconsistencies. No doubt the criticism is partially justified and is not more than one could expect considering the strange quirks and impetuous perturbations of the editors mind. And yet, thorough examination of the famous New York journal, carefully avoiding any breaks in various series of editorial pronouncements and relating them to contemporaneous events and influencing factors as well as to the inner workings of Greeleys mind as revealed by his private correspondence, discloses a fairly consistent policy cleverly bent and altered at intervals to meet unexpected developments and shiftings in public sentiment.
