Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood by James M. Lundberg (review)

Clad in his signature white coat, Horace Greeley strode into celebrityhood as editor of the New-York Tribune. Yet the meaning of his career remains elusive. As James M. Lundberg points out in this perceptive book, Greeley “has been eluding his biographers” ever since James Parton, better known for his sprawling Life of Andrew Jackson (1860), penned a heroic account in 1854 (2). More recently, scholars have cast Greeley variously as a quintessential Whig reformer, a socialist, a liberal nationalist, and a personification of New York City in the age of capital.¹ Greeley defies categorization because of his zeal for everything from Sylvester Graham’s dietary regimen to Albert Brisbane’s adaptation of Fourierism, as well as his propensity for hairpin political turns. How do we classify a man who denounced the slave power and later posted bail for Jefferson Davis?

Lundberg takes a different approach in Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood. By attending both to Greeley’s towering influence and his jarring setbacks, Lundberg identifies a thread of consistency running through Greeley’s eccentric career. Determined to rally a fractious country behind his ambitious vision of progress, Greeley repeatedly collided with reality. Only after his disastrous 1872 presidential bid did Greeley, who had only weeks to live, seem to realize that he “embodied the inherent problems of American nationhood, rather than its transcendent harmony” (11). Less focused on Greeley’s philosophical gymnastics than on his overriding ambition to play the role of heroic genius, Horace Greeley successfully explores the theme of failure.

Lundberg sketches Greeley’s hardscrabble New England upbringing before delving into his public career in the nation’s publishing capital of New York. Greeley’s labors on a series of literary journals and Whig newspapers informed his long tenure as editor of the New-York Tribune, established in 1841. Inspired by the wide circulation of penny newspapers but disgusted by their prurient and sensational content, Greeley believed fervently in the power of print—and in his own destiny to wield that power for good. Mingling an Enlightenment faith in progress with a Romantic fascination for heroic geniuses (such as himself) and a strong dose of nationalism, Greeley resolved to make the Tribune “a force for social harmony, consensus, reform, and even mass instruction” (27).

Greeley’s pursuit of this dream shaped his three-decade career with the Tribune and helps explain his puzzling twists and turns. He first embraced the Whig Party, relishing its commitment to social reform and economic uplift. Although convinced that slavery and its defenders were stumbling blocks in the path of national progress, Greeley initially eschewed sectional confrontation and reluctantly supported the Whigs over the Free Soil Party in the 1848 election. Six years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act prompted him to take a stronger stand against the slave power. While he hoped that the emerging Republican Party would attract white southern nonslaveholders, Greeley became a sectional spokesman whose blueprint for national progress reflected decidedly northern ideals. Thus the aspiring peacemaker stoked the fires of sectionalism.

Throughout the Civil War, Greeley remained both a Republican and a Lincoln administration gadfly. He shifted from conciliator to all-out warrior and from impatient emancipationist to self-appointed peace negotiator; but Lundberg argues that throughout the conflict, Greeley continually sought to extract a higher purpose—national redemption—from the carnage. Alas, the war refused to follow his script. During Reconstruction, Greeley still longed to serve as national unifier, and while he offered some support for African American civil rights, it was reconciliation among whites that mattered to him most. Hence did he aid Jefferson Davis, critique Radical Republicans, and attempt to wrest the presidency from Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Like his antebellum and wartime crusades, Greeley’s postwar quest to restore national harmony was “bold, optimistic, and wildly unsuccessful” (146).

Lundberg’s crisply written account makes a...