In the first number he announced his intention of excluding the police reports which had been so valuable to “our leading penny papers”—meaning the Sun and the Herald—and of making the Tribune “worthy of the hearty approval of the virtuous and refined.” It was a week before the Sun mentioned its former friend, and then it was only to say:
A word to Horace Greeley—if he wishes us to write him or any of his sickly brood of newspapers into notice, he must first go to school and learn a little decency. He must further retract the dirty, malignant, and wholesale falsehood which he procured to be published in the Albany Evening Journal a year ago last winter, with the hope of injuring the Sun. He must then deal in something besides misstatements of facts.... Until he does all this we shall feel very indifferent to any thrusts that he can make at us with his dagger of lath.
Soon afterward the Sun rubbed it in by quoting the Albany Evening Journal:
Galvanize a large New England squash, and it would make as capable an editor as Horace.
But Greeley was a lively young man, in spite of his eccentric ways and his habit of letting one leg of his trousers hang out of his unpolished boots. Only thirty when he started the Tribune, he had had a lot of experience, particularly with politicians and with fads. He still believed in some of the fads, including temperance—which was then considered a fad—vegetarianism, and Abolition. He had been, too, a poet; and his verses lived to haunt his mature years. He had to give away most of the five thousand copies that were printed of the first number of the Tribune, but in a month he had a circulation of six thousand, and in two months he doubled this.
Greeley had the instinct for getting good men, but not always the knack of holding them. One of his early finds was Henry J. Raymond, who attracted his attention as a boy orator for the Whig cause. Raymond worked for Greeley’s New Yorker and later for the Tribune. He was a good reporter, using a system of shorthand of his own devising.
On one occasion, at least, he enabled the Tribune to beat the other papers. He was sent to Boston to report a speech, and he took with him three printers and their cases of type. After the speech Raymond and his compositors boarded the boat for New York, and as fast as the reporter transcribed his notes the printers put the speech into type. On the arrival of the boat at New York the type was ready to be put into the forms, and the Tribune was on the street hours ahead of its rivals.
Greeley paid Raymond eight dollars a week until Raymond threatened to leave unless he received twenty dollars a week. He got it, but Greeley made such a fuss about the matter that Raymond realized that further increases would be out of the question. Presently he went to the Courier and Enquirer, and from 1843 to 1850 he tried to restore some of the glory that once had crowned Colonel Webb’s paper.
In this period Raymond and his former employer, Greeley, fought their celebrated editorial duel—with pens, not mahogany-handled pistols—on the subject of Fourierism, that theory of social reorganization which Greeley seemed anxious to spread, and which was zealously preached by another of his young men, Albert Brisbane, now perhaps better remembered as the father of Arthur Brisbane. But Colonel Webb’s paper would not wake wide enough to suit the ambitious Raymond, who seized the opportunity of becoming the first editor of the New York Times.
Other men who worked for Greeley’s Tribune in its young days were Bayard Taylor, who wrote articles from Europe; George William Curtis, the essayist; Count Gurowski, an authority on foreign affairs; and Charles A. Dana.