Though this paper stopped, the job printing firm of Greeley & Story went on and made money. At Mr. Story's death, July 9, 1833, his brother-in-law, Mr. Winchester, took his place in the office. In 1834 the firm resolved to establish a weekly; and on March 22d, 1834, appeared the first number of the Weekly New Yorker, owned by the firm, and with Mr. Greeley as editor. He had now found his proper work, and he has pursued it ever since with remarkable force, industry and success.
This success, however, was only editorial, not financial, so far as the New Yorker was concerned. The paper began with twelve subscribers, and without any flourishes or promises. By its own literary, political and statistical value, its circulation rose in a year to 4,500, and afterwards to 9,000. But when it stopped, Sept. 20, 1841, it left its editor laboring under troublesome debts, both receivable and payable. The difficulty was manifold; its chief sources were, Mr. Greeley's own deficiencies as a financier, supplying too many subscribers on credit, and the great business crash of 1837.
During the existence of the New Yorker, Mr. Greeley also edited two short-lived but influential campaign political sheets. One of these, the Jeffersonian, was published weekly, at Albany. This was a Whig paper, which appeared during a year from March, 1838, and kept its editor over-busy, with the necessary weekly journey to Albany, and the double work. The other was the Log Cabin, the well-known Harrison campaign paper, issued weekly during the exciting days of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," in 1840, and which was continued as a family paper for a year afterwards. Of the very first number of this famous little sheet, 48,000 were sold, and the edition rapidly increased to nearly 90,000. Neither of these two papers, however, made much money for their editor. But during his labors on the three, the New Yorker, Jeffersonian, and Log Cabin, he had gained a standing as a political and statistical editor of force, information and ability.
Mr. Greeley's editorial work on the New Yorker was a sort of literary spring-time to him. The paper itself was much more largely literary than the Tribune now is. In his editorial writing in those days, moreover, there is a certain rhetorical plentifulness of expression which the seriousness and the pressures of an overcrowded life have long ago cut sharply and closely off; and he even frequently indulged in poetical compositions. This ornamental material, however, was certainly not his happiest kind of effort. Mr. Greeley does his best only by being wholly utilitarian. Poetry and rhetoric appear as well from his mind as a great long red feather would, sticking out of his very oldest white hat.
The great work of Mr. Greeley's life, however—The New York Tribune—had not begun yet, though he was thirty years old. Its commencement was announced in one of the last numbers of the Log Cabin, for April 10, 1841, and its first number appeared on the very day of the funeral solemnities with which New York honored the memory of President Harrison. Mr. Greeley's own account, in one of his articles in the New York Ledger, is an interesting statement of his Theory of a Political Newspaper. He says:
"My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partizanship on the one hand, and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other. Party spirit is so fierce and intolerant in this country, that the editor of a non-partizan sheet is restrained from saying what he thinks and feels on the most vital, imminent topics; while, on the other hand, a Democratic, Whig, or Republican journal is generally expected to praise or blame, like or dislike, eulogize or condemn, in precise accordance with the views and interest of its party. I believed there was a happy medium between these extremes—a position from which a journalist might openly and heartily advocate the principles and commend the measures of that party to which his convictions allied him, yet dissent frankly from its course on a particular question, and even denounce its candidates if they were shown to be deficient in capacity, or (far worse) in integrity. I felt that a journal thus loyal to its own convictions, yet ready to expose and condemn unworthy conduct or incidental error on the part of men attached to its party, must be far more effective, even partywise, than though it might always be counted on to applaud or reprobate, bless or curse, as the party prejudices or immediate interest might seem to prescribe."
Mr. Greeley has now been the chief editor of the Tribune for twenty-six years, and the persistent love with which he still regards his gigantic child strikingly appears in the final paragraph of the same article:
"Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings; the only earthly certainty is oblivion—no man can foresee what a day may bring forth; and those who cheer to-day will often curse to-morrow; and yet I cherish the hope that the Journal I projected and established will live and flourish long after I shall have moldered into forgotten dust, being guided by a larger wisdom, a more unerring sagacity to discover the right, though not by a more unfaltering readiness to embrace and defend it at whatever personal cost; and that the stone which covers my ashes may bear to future eyes the still intelligible inscription, 'Founder of The New York Tribune.'"
The Tribune began with some 600 subscribers. Of its first number 5,000 copies were printed, and, as Mr. Greeley himself once said, he "found some difficulty in giving them away." At the end of the first week the cash account stood, receipts, $92; expenditures, $525. Now the proprietor's whole money capital was $1,000, borrowed money. But—as has more than once been the case with others—an unjust attack on the Tribune strengthened it. An unprincipled attempt was made by the publisher of the Sun, to bribe and bully the newsmen and then to flog the newsboys out of selling the Tribune. The Tribune was prompt in telling the story to the public, and the public showed that sense of justice so natural to all communities, by subscribing to it at the rate of three hundred a day for three weeks at a time. In four weeks it sold an edition of six thousand, and in seven it sold eleven thousand, which was then all that it could print. Its advertising patronage grew equally fast. And what was infinitely more than this rush of subscribers, a steady and judicious business man became a partner with Mr. Greeley in the paper, at the end of July, not four months from its first issue. This was Mr. Thomas McElrath, whose sound business management undoubtedly supplied to the concern an element more indispensable to its continued prosperity, than any editorial ability whatever.
The Tribune, as we have seen, like the infant Hercules in the old fable, successfully resisted an attempt to strangle it in its cradle. From that time to this, the paper and its editor have lived in a healthy and invigorating atmosphere of violent attacks of all sorts, on grounds political, social, moral and religious. The paper has not been found fault with, however, for being flat or feeble or empty. The first noticeable disturbance after the Sun attack was the Fourierite controversy. Perhaps Mr. Greeley's Fourierism—or Socialism, as it might be better called—was the principal if not the sole basis of all the notorious uproars that have been, made for a quarter of a century about his "isms," and his being a "philosopher." During 1841 and several following years, the Tribune was the principal organ in the United States of the efforts then made to exemplify and prove in actual life the doctrines of Charles Fourier. The paper was violently assaulted with the charge that these doctrines necessarily implied immorality and irreligion. The Tribune never was particularly "orthodox," and while it vigorously defended itself, it could not honestly in doing so say what would satisfy the stricter doctrinalists of the different orthodox religious denominations. Moreover, the practical experiments made to organize Fourierite "phalanxes" and the like, all failed; so that in one sense, both the Fourierite movement was a failure, and The Tribune was vanquished in the discussion. But the controversy was a great benefit to the cause of associated human effort; and there can be no doubt that the various endeavors at the present day in progress to apply the principle of association to the easing and improving of the various concerns of life, present a much more hopeful prospect than would have been the case without the ardent and energetic advocacy of The Tribune.