442 p. + Plates, engraved on wood and printed on a sepia background + Plus a facsimile of Greely's handwriting. Original full cloth binding. The boards tooled in gold and blind with an illustration showing a large newspaper printing press. Spine slightly chipped at head and tail. 12mo. Contemporary ink autographed ownership of John H. Small. Horace Greeley (1811-1872) was born into a poor farm family at Amherst, New Hampshire. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a newspaper editor in Vermont, and worked as a printer in New York and Pennsylvania. The twenty year old Greeley moved to New York City and found various jobs, which provided some capital, and in 1834, he founded a weekly literary and news journal, the New Yorker. It gained an increasing audience and gave him a wide reputation. However, it failed to make money, and Greeley supplemented his income by writing, especially in support of the Whig party. His connections with Thurlow Weed, William H. Seward, and other Whigs led, in 1840, to his editorship of the campaign weekly, the Log Cabin. The paper's circulation rose to about 90,000, and contributed significantly both to William Henry Harrison's victory and Greeley's influence. Greeley also directly participated in the Whig campaign by giving speeches, sitting on committees, and helping to manage the campaign in New York State. In April 1841, Greeley set himself on the path to national prominence and power when he launched the New York Tribune. The Tribune was multifaceted, devoting space to politics, social reform, literary and intellectual endeavors, and news. It was very much Greeley's personal vehicle. An egalitarian and idealist, Greeley espoused a variety of causes. He popularized the communitarian ideas of Fourier, and invested in a Fourier utopian community at Red Bank, New Jersey. He advocated the homestead principle of distributing free government land to settlers, attacked the exploitation of wage labor, denounced monopolies, and opposed capital punishment. By the eve of the Civil War the Tribune had a total circulation of more than a quarter of a million. This number, however, vastly understated the paper's influence, as each copy often had more than one reader, and it was the preeminent journal in the rural North. Greeley opposed slavery as morally deficient and economically regressive, and during the 1850s, he supported the movement to prevent its extension. He opposed the Mexican War, approved the Wilmot Proviso, which called for the restriction of slavery in territories gained as a result of that war, and denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Greeley's free-soil sentiments brought him quickly into the Republican party's camp. He attended the national organization meeting of the party at Pittsburgh in February 1856 and the Republican Conventions of 1856 and 1860. The secession crisis found Greeley strongly opposed to making concessions to slavery, and once war came, Greeley joined the radical antislavery faction of the Republican party and demanded the early end of slavery. While much admired, Greeley was also regarded as eccentric and odd, in both his personal appearance and his reformist ideas. His behavior during and after the war raised widespread doubts about his judgment. When in 1872, the anti-Grant Liberal Republicans and the Democrats nominated Greeley to challenge Grant, Greeley was attacked as a fool and a crank. So merciless was the assault that Greeley commented later that he sometimes wondered whether he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary. He suffered a tremendous defeat in the election, carrying only six border and southern states. L2/SE
