Horace Greeley and the Tribune in the Civil War

Horace Greeley (1811-1872) was an American author and statesman who was the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, among the great newspapers of its time. Born to a poor family in Amherst, New Hampshire, he was apprenticed to a printer in Vermont and went to New York City in 1831 to seek his fortune. In 1941 he founded the Tribune, which became the highest-circulating newspaper in the country through weekly editions sent by mail. Among many other issues, he urged the settlement of the American West, which he saw as a land of opportunity for the young and the unemployed, popularizing the slogan “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” He endlessly promoted utopian reforms such as socialism, vegetarianism, agrarianism, feminism, and temperance, while hiring the best talent he could find.

In Horace Greeley and the Tribune, which was first published in 1936, Dr. Fahrney represents thorough research not only in the field of the New York Tribune, but in a great mass of printed material on the war. Well outlined and well written, it should prove both useful to the historian—offering the best guide through the mazes of the shuttlecock, loop-the-loop policy followed by the emotional editor of the Tribune—as well as to the student of journalism, who will find in it an explanation of how the most influential journal of the land in 1861 became one of the most distrusted four years later.