Horace Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America by Mitchell Snay (review)

In his new book, Mitchell Snay has given his readers a fresh perspective on the politics of the antebellum period through the story of one of its most important chroniclers. Snay’s account focuses on Greeley’s participation in and response to the dominant political movements of the day, including the emergence of the Whig Party in the 1830s, the explosion of organized reform activity in the 1840s, and the antislavery push in the 1850s. Since the focus of the book is largely political, its main characters are the leaders of New York and national politics; William Henry Seward, Martin Van Buren, and Thurlow Weed receive much of Snay’s attention. By presenting the intersections between their stories and Greeley’s, Snay masterfully weaves together the particularities of Greeley’s experience with the wider social, political, and economic movements of the day.

Snay introduces Greeley as a rural antebellum New Englander whose life was shaped by the political and economic realities of the early nineteenth century. The grandson of a yeoman farmer, Greeley was both imbued with a belief in the dignity of labor and deeply affected by his family’s poverty after the loss of the family farm during the Panic of 1819. Greeley’s experiences as a young man gave him an enduring appreciation for the “moral significance” of labor that influenced his response to the growth of the working class in his adopted home of New York City during the 1830s. Snay ties Greeley’s first New York City experiences to the politics of Whiggery in the 1830s, a political ideology that appealed to Greeley because of its emphasis on harmony between social classes, well-directed guidance of the market, education as a means of social mobility, and stable distribution of western lands. It also reveals the limits of Greeley’s liberalism, limits that the class antagonisms of 1840s New York would test.

Snay skillfully links the rise of these class struggles to Greeley’s emergence in the 1840s as the leading newspaperman of the country. Believing in the dignity of labor but wary of the radicalizing tendencies he observed in the penny press, Greeley launched the New York Tribune in part to provide a balanced political perspective that would appeal to both laborers and members of the New York middle class. True to his Whig political ideas, he firmly believed that one of the most significant powers of the press was in shaping and refining the morals of the people for the strengthening of democracy.

Snay argues that Greeley’s ideas were stretched to the limit, however, in the context of the New York anti-rent wars of the 1840s and the Dorr Rebellion of 1842. While Greeley was sympathetic to the oppression experienced by New York renters and agreed with the cries for broader political participation coming from Dorr and his followers, he nevertheless feared the radical implications of these movements and, in the end, Greeley sided with conservatives who argued that the New York anti-rent wars and Dorrite Rebellion were exaggerated responses to the breakdown of the ideal harmonious relationship between the classes.

The remainder of Snay’s book examines the descent of the country into Civil War through the lens of Greeley’s political activity in the 1850s and 1860s. Greeley followed a path similar to that of many Whigs during this time. His concern about the divisive nature of the Free Soil Party was one shared by many. Nevertheless, it gradually gave way to acceptance of more insistent antislavery ideas as southern actions increasingly angered him and others and pushed them toward the Republican Party. Tying Greeley to the “Free Soil, Free Labor” principles of that party, which Eric Foner has described, Snay argues that Greeley was consistent in his liberal principles. Economic growth could only happen, Greeley argued, through the promotion of enterprise, improvement, and ambition in a...