UNLV journalism professor Gregory Borchard always planned to write a book about newspaper editor Horace Greeley. But when he learned that Greeley’s great-great-great grandson was enrolled in his history of journalism class, the project took on new importance.
“It was a surprising twist of fate,” Borchard says.
It was also an incredible stroke of luck, as the journalism historian was given access to the Greeley family album, which complemented his own meticulously researched collection of newspaper articles, personal letters, and biographies of Greeley. These materials also helped form a more complete picture of Greeley’s interaction with another important 19th century figure: Abraham Lincoln. It is this interaction that interests Borchard.
He notes that although a variety of works have been written about Greeley and Lincoln as individuals, “few, if any, have attempted to interpret the life of each on equal footing, with both contributing to a shared legacy.”
His book, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley, answers this need with a careful examination of the writings and behaviors of the two men in the years leading up to and encompassing the Civil War.
Borchard begins the book by identifying key beliefs that influenced both men at the start of their careers. Greeley and Lincoln were members of the Whig party and avid supporters of the philosophies of Henry Clay. Both also shared “a belief in a government based upon the will of the people and their natural rights,” and both men abhorred and sought to end the practice of slavery in America, Borchard writes. Also, neither Greeley nor Lincoln had the benefit of a formal education, but each possessed the intellect and drive needed to rise above humble beginnings.
Greeley’s rise led him to the New York Tribune, where he served as editor for nearly 30 years; shortly before he died, he was a candidate for president.
Lincoln famously worked as an attorney and served in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives before becoming president.
Greeley and Lincoln’s shared lifelong admiration of statesman Henry Clay united the two men in a way a common commitment to politics could not. In the months preceding Clay’s bid for the presidency in 1844, Lincoln spoke eloquently and often on Clay’s behalf. Greeley campaigned extensively and risked the Tribune’s credibility by claiming “the Whigs would carry New York by 20,000 votes.”
When Clay lost to James K. Polk, the event marked what Borchard calls “a critical turning point in the careers of both men – for Lincoln as an Illinois legislator and Greeley as a popular New York publisher – leading both of them to congressional office and revealing to the nation both who they were and what the subsequent trajectories of their lives would be.”
Lincoln became a rising star in what Borchard describes as the era when the Whig Party collapsed and the Republican Party was born. At the same time, Greeley’s readership and reputation as an editorial writer grew.
“Greeley’s contemporaries appreciated his ability to write thoughtful articles and reach an admiring audience that included erudite city dwellers, farmers, and homesteaders,” Borchard notes.
In 1848, both men occupied seats in Congress, Lincoln as an elected representative from Illinois and Greeley filling a vacated House seat for three months. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the United States, a position that Greeley helped him secure.
In the tumultuous months immediately following Lincoln’s election – when abolitionists pressured Lincoln to end slavery and South Carolina led the movement to leave the Union – Greeley regularly excoriated the president through his newspaper, exhorting him to suppress the rebellion and avoid war.
After the first shots were fired on April 12, 1861, however, Greeley changed directions and his paper published a series of columns urging Lincoln into war, asking him to “stand firm in preserving the union and defeat secessionists with military force.”
In 1862, Lincoln prepared the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation and presented it to advisors, some of whom wanted it released immediately. Soon after, Greeley wrote an editorial in the Tribune titled “The Prayer of Twenty Million” that called for Lincoln to wage war against the South in the name of ending slavery.
In response to Greeley’s piece, the President published a letter in the National Intelligencer that argued he would preserve the union as his paramount mission. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it,” Lincoln wrote, “and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation in September 1862, to which Greeley responded that the president’s “conversion to the abolitionist cause” was the result of his paper’s extensive coverage of the issue. Although clearly some measure of hubris was involved, Borchard points out that Greeley’s role in “popularizing the idea that the Civil War should become a fight to free all people” is often overlooked.
By the time Lincoln was reelected in 1864, Sherman’s campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas was moving the war to its end. Following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Greeley reacted with words of “respect and emotion.” He described Lincoln as “a man, not a superman” – an assessment, Borchard writes, that “students of history almost 150 years later can trust in many ways more than the president’s most worshipful contemporaries.”
Although a number of accounts have suggested that Greeley and Lincoln were “anything but friends,” they were, according to Borchard, “political and intellectual allies.”
“As contemporaries, as intellectuals, and as self-made men, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley worked to preserve the union and end slavery,” Borchard says. “In doing so, the two men also provided for future generations astonishing examples of citizens – not superheroes or demigods – with individual legacies every bit as large as their sum.”
