From the outset it was a cardinal principle with Greeley to hear all sides, and to extend a special hospitality to new ideas. In March 1842 The Tribune began to give one column daily to a discussion of the doctrines of Charles Fourier, contributed by Albert Brisbane. Gradually Greeley came to advocate some of these doctrines editorially. In 1846 he had a sharp discussion upon them with a former subordinate, Henry J. Raymond, then employed upon a rival journal. It continued through twelve articles on each side, and was subsequently published in book form. Greeley became personally interested in one of the Fourierite associations, the North American Phalanx, at Red Bank, N. J. (1843-1855), while the influence of his discussions doubtless led to or gave encouragement to other socialistic experiments, such as that at Brook Farm. When this was abandoned, its leader George Ripley, with one or two other members, sought employment from Greeley upon The Tribune. Greeley dissented from many of Fourier’s propositions, and in later years was careful to explain that the principle of association for the common good of working men and the elevation of labour was the chief feature which attracted him. Co-operation among working men he continued to urge throughout his life. In 1850 the Fox Sisters, on his wife’s invitation, spent several weeks in his house. His attitude towards their “rappings” and “spiritual manifestations” was one of observation and inquiry; and in his Recollections he wrote concerning these manifestations: “That some of them are the result of juggle, collusion or trick I am confident; that others are not, I decidedly believe.”
From boyhood he had believed in a protective tariff, and throughout his active life he was its most trenchant advocate and propagandist. Besides constantly urging it in the columns of The Tribune, he appeared as early as 1843 in a public debate on “The Grounds of Protection,” with Samuel J. Tilden and Parke Godwin as his opponents. A series of popular essays on the subject were published over his own signature in The Tribune in 1869, and subsequently republished in book form, with a title-page describing protection to home industry as a system of national co-operation for the elevation of labour. He opposed woman suffrage on the ground that the majority of women did not want it and never would, and declared that until woman should “emancipate herself from the thraldom to etiquette,” he “could not see how the ‘woman’s rights theory’ is ever to be anything more than a logically defensible abstraction.” He aided practical efforts, however, for extending the sphere of woman’s employments. He opposed the theatres, and for a time refused to publish their advertisements. He held the most rigid views on the sanctity of marriage and against easy divorce, and vehemently defended them in controversies with Robert Dale Owen and others. He practised and pertinaciously advocated total abstinence from spirituous liquors, but did not regard prohibitory laws as always wise. He denounced the repudiation of state debts or the failure to pay interest on them. He was zealous for Irish repeal, once held a place in the “Directory of the Friends of Ireland,” and contributed liberally to its support. He used the occasion of Charles Dickens’s first visit to America to urge international copyright, and was one of the few editors to avoid alike the flunkeyism with which Dickens was first received, and the ferocity with which he was assailed after the publication of his American Notes. On the occasion of Dickens’s second visit to America, Greeley presided at the great banquet given him by the press of the country. He made the first elaborate reports of popular scientific lectures by Louis Agassiz and other authorities. He gave ample hearing to the advocates of phonography and of phonographic spelling. He was one of the most conspicuous advocates of the Pacific railroads, and of many other internal improvements.
But it is as an anti-slavery leader, and as perhaps the chief agency in educating the mass of the Northern people to that opposition through legal forms to the extension of slavery which culminated in the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, that Greeley’s main work was done. Incidents in it were his vehement opposition to the Mexican War as a scheme for more slavery territory, the assault made upon him in Washington by Congressman Albert Rust of Arkansas in 1856, an indictment in Virginia in the same year for circulating incendiary documents, perpetual denunciation of him in Southern newspapers and speeches, and the hostility of the Abolitionists, who regarded his course as too conservative. His anti-slavery work culminated in his appeal to President Lincoln, entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” in which he urged “that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause” were preposterous and futile, and that “every hour of deference to slavery” was “an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union.” President Lincoln in his reply said: “My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery.... What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union ... I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.” Precisely one month after the date of this reply the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
Greeley’s political activity, first as a Whig, and then as one of the founders of the Republican party, was incessant; but he held few offices. In 1848-1849 he served a three months’ term in Congress, filling a vacancy. He introduced the first bill for giving small tracts of government land free to actual settlers, and published an exposure of abuses in the allowance of mileage to members, which corrected the evil, but brought him much personal obloquy. In the National Republican Convention in 1860, not being sent by the Republicans of his own state on account of his opposition to William Seward as a candidate, he was made a delegate for Oregon. His active hostility to Seward did much to prevent the success of that statesman, and to bring about instead the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. This was attributed by his opponents to personal motives, and a letter from Greeley to Seward, the publication of which he challenged, was produced, to show that in his struggling days he had been wounded at Seward’s failure to offer him office. In 1861 he was a candidate for United States senator, his principal opponent being William M. Evarts. When it was clear that Evarts could not be elected, his supporters threw their votes for a third candidate, Ira Harris, who was thus chosen over Greeley by a small majority. At the outbreak of the war he favoured allowing the Southern states to secede, provided a majority of their people at a fair election should so decide, declaring “that he hoped never to live in a Republic whereof one section was pinned to the other by bayonets.” When the war began he urged the most vigorous prosecution of it. The “On to Richmond” appeal, which appeared day after day in The Tribune, was incorrectly attributed to him, and it did not wholly meet his approval; but after the defeat in the first battle of Bull Run he was widely blamed for it. In 1864 he urged negotiations for peace with representatives of the Southern Confederacy in Canada, and was sent by President Lincoln to confer with them. They were found to have no sufficient authority. In 1864 he was one of the Lincoln Presidential electors for New York. At the close of the war, contrary to the general feeling of his party, he urged universal amnesty and impartial suffrage as the basis of reconstruction. In 1867 his friends again wished to elect him to the Senate of the United States, and the indications were all in his favour. But he refused to be elected under any misapprehension of his attitude, and with what his friends thought unnecessary candour re-stated his obnoxious views on universal amnesty at length, just before the time for the election, with the certainty that this would prevent his success. Some months later he signed the bail bond of Jefferson Davis, and this provoked a torrent of public indignation. He had written a popular history of the late war, the first volume having an immense sale and bringing him unusually large profits. The second was just issued, and the subscribers, in their anger, refused by thousands to receive it. An unsuccessful attempt was also made to expel him from the Union League Club of New York.
In 1867 he was a delegate-at-large to the convention for the revision of the state constitution, and in 1869 and 1870 he was the Republican candidate for controller of the state and member of Congress respectively, but in each case was defeated.
He was dissatisfied with General Grant’s administration, and became its sharp critic. The discontent which he did much to develop ended in the organization of the Liberal Republican party, which held its National Convention at Cincinnati in 1872, and nominated Greeley for the presidency. For a time the tide of feeling ran strongly in his favour. It was first checked by the action of his life-long opponents, the Democrats, who also nominated him at their National Convention. He expected their support, on account of his attitude toward the South and hostility to Grant, but he thought it a mistake to give him their formal nomination. The event proved his wisdom. Many Republicans who had sympathized with his criticisms of the administration, and with the declaration of principles adopted at the first convention, were repelled by the coalition. This feeling grew stronger until the election. His old party associates regarded him as a renegade, the Democrats gave him a half-hearted support. The tone of the canvass was one of unusual bitterness, amounting sometimes to actual ferocity. In August, on representations of the alarming state of the contest, he took the field in person, and made a series of campaign speeches, beginning in New England and extending throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, which aroused great enthusiasm, and were regarded at the time by both friends and opponents as the most brilliant continuous exhibition of varied intellectual power ever made by a candidate in a presidential canvass. General Grant received in the election 3,597,070 votes, Greeley 2,834,079. The only states Greeley carried were Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas.
He had resigned his editorship of The Tribune immediately after the nomination; he now resumed it cheerfully; but it was soon apparent that his powers had been overstrained. For years he had suffered greatly from sleeplessness. During the intense excitement of the campaign the difficulty was increased. Returning from his campaign tour, he went immediately to the bedside of his dying wife, and for some weeks had practically no sleep at all. This resulted in an inflammation of the upper membrane of the brain, delirium and death. He expired on the 29th of November 1872. His funeral was a simple but impressive public pageant. The body lay in state in the City Hall, where it was surrounded by crowds of many thousands. The ceremonies were attended by the President and Vice-President of the United States, the Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court, and a large number of eminent public men of both parties, who followed the hearse in a solemn procession, preceded by the mayor and other civic authorities, down Broadway. He had been the target of constant attack during his life, and his personal foibles, careless dress and mental eccentricities were the theme of endless ridicule. But his death revealed the high regard in which he was generally held as a leader of opinion and faithful public servant. “Our later Franklin” Whittier called him, and it is in some such light his countrymen remember him.
In 1851 Greeley visited Europe for the first time, serving as a juryman at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, appearing before a committee of the House of Commons on newspaper taxes, and urging the repeal of the stamp duty on advertisements. In 1855 he made a second trip to Europe. In Paris he was arrested on the suit of a sculptor, whose statue had been injured in the New York World’s Fair (of which he had been a director), and spent two days in Clichy, of which he gave an amusing account. In 1859 he visited California by the overland route, and had numerous public receptions. In 1871 he visited Texas, and his trip through the southern country, where he had once been so hated, was an ovation. About 1852 he purchased a farm at Chappaqua, New York, where he afterwards habitually spent his Saturdays, and experimented in agriculture. He was in constant demand as a lecturer from 1843, when he made his first appearance on the platform, always drew large audiences, and, in spite of his bad management in money matters, received considerable sums, sometimes $6000 or $7000 for a single winter’s lecturing. He was also much sought for as a contributor, over his own signature, to the weekly newspapers, and was sometimes largely paid for these articles. In religious faith he was from boyhood a Universalist, and for many years was a conspicuous member of the leading Universalist church in New York.
His published works are: Hints Toward Reforms (1850); Glances at Europe (1851); History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension (1856); Overland Journey to San Francisco (1860); The American Conflict (2 vols., 1864-1866); Recollections of a Busy Life (1868; new edition, with appendix containing an account of his later years, his argument with Robert Dale Owen on Marriage and Divorce, and Miscellanies, 1873); Essays on Political Economy (1870); and What I know of Farming (1871). He also assisted his brother-in-law, John F. Cleveland, in editing A Political Text-book (1860), and supervised for many years the annual issues of The Whig Almanac and The Tribune Almanac, comprising extensive political statistics.
The best Lives of Greeley are those by James Parton (New York, 1855; new ed., Boston, 1872) and W. A. Linn (N.Y. 1903). Lives have also been written by L. U. Reavis (New York, 1872), and L. D. Ingersoll (Chicago, 1873); and there is a Memorial of Horace Greeley (New York, 1873).