Biography

He loved reading and became an apprentice to a printer in Vermont at age 15. He moved to NYC in 1831, and became a founding editor of a new literary paper The New Yorker. As a liberal Whig, Greeley caught the attention of Thurlow Weed, who asked him to issue political campaign weeklies during the elections of 1838 and 1840. These publications successfully aided the Whig cause and also marked the beginning of Greeley's political partnership with Weed and WHS, a partnership that lasted until 1854. In 1841 Greeley's success encouraged him to found The New York Tribune, which he edited until his death. The New York Tribune was a daily Whig paper that was, "dedicated to a medley of reforms, economic progress, and the elevation of the masses. The Tribune set a particularly high standard in its news gathering, intellectual interest, and moral fervour." Greeley came to be considered the outstanding newspaper editor of his time.

"In the early 1850s Greeley became increasingly bitter over the failure of his Whig colleagues to support him for high public office—a lifelong ambition. He also grew disenchanted with the party’s ambivalence toward slavery, which he opposed on both moral and economic grounds. In 1854 he transferred his allegiance to the newly emerging Republican Party, which he helped organize. Throughout the decade Greeley’s newspaper fed the rising antislavery persuasion of the North. His editorial columns consistently opposed any compromise on the slavery issue as he argued against popular sovereignty (local option) in the territories, called for unrestricted free speech and mail privileges for abolitionists, encouraged Free-Soilers (who opposed slavery in the Kansas Territory), and advocated forcible resistance to federal fugitive-slave hunters.
After the onset of the Civil War (1861), Greeley pursued an erratic course, though generally he sided with the Radical Republicans in advocating early emancipation of the slaves and, later, civil rights for freedmen. Greeley lost much public respect by opposing Lincoln’s renomination in 1864 and by signing the bail bond of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis in 1867."