Sold – Horace Greeley Hopes For a Quick and Successful End to the Civil War

I long ago decided that I would not quit my more immediate post of duty for any purpose that did not seem to me essential until the war for the Union shall have ended

Horace Greeley was the voice of the media outlets in the North before and during the Civil War. His New York Tribune reached over 1 million readers, giving Greeley the ability to influence public opinion throughout the nation. The secession crisis in the winter of 1860-1 found Greeley strongly opposed to making concessions to slavery. At first he argued that succession should be allowed if a majority of southerners truly wanted it, but once war came he switched his stance and demanded a vigorous prosecution of the war to victory and the early end of slavery. It was he who, in 1861, started the call “On to Richmond” that pressured President Lincoln to insist on action from his generals. Greeley denounced more conservative Republicans, like Francis and Montgomery Blair, and criticized Lincoln for proceeding too cautiously to eradicate slavery. When Lincoln finally announced his Emancipation Proclamation, Greeley applauded the decision. His reluctance to support Lincoln’s renomination in 1864 lost him some popular support, as did his premature efforts to bring about peace negotiations. After the war, he joined the Congressional Radicals in supporting equality for the freedmen. At the same time, Greeley favored measures to restore relations with the South. In 1867, he recommended Jefferson Davis’s release from prison, and he signed Davis’s bond. He gradually grew disaffected with the Grant administration because of its corruption and indifference to civil service reform, and also because of its continued enforcement of Reconstruction measures in the South. Nominated by the Democrats and Liberal Republicans for president in the 1872 election, he was beaten by President Grant and died just a few weeks later.

Autograph Letter Signed on his Tribune letterhead, New York, February 20, 1863, to publisher George W. Childs, who would soon join Greeley as owner of a major newspaper – the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Like Greeley, Childs was a Union man. “I long ago decided that I would not quit my more immediate post of duty for any purpose that did not seem to me essential until the war for the Union shall have ended. In pursuance of this resolve, I am obliged to decline your kind invitation. That your new post office may soon be in the daily receipt of letters from the capitals of every one of our 34 states, and that they may bear none other than a U.S. postmark, is the fervent prayer of yours, Horace Greeley.”