Horace Greeley Versus Thomas Nast: Docent Sheet

Battle of Opinions: Horace Greeley and Thomas Nast

            In the 1800s, America’s most famous journalist was Horace Greeley, founder of The New York Tribune. The nation’s leading cartoonist – often referred to as the first real editorial cartoonist – at that time was Thomas Nast. And both of these giants of the public press would visit St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

            Horace Greeley was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, the son of poor farmers. He left school at age 14 and apprenticed in Poultney, Vermont, as a printer at The Northern Star. After moving to New York City when he was 20, he went on to found a weekly digest of other magazines’ news, The New Yorker. His great fame would come after 1841, when he merged his newspapers into The New York Tribune (which would last, in some form, until 1967). Determined to make his paper different from the tabloids of the time, Greeley created modern American journalism by combining “energy in news gathering with good taste, high moral standards, and intellectual appeal” (Nevins, Dictionary of American Biography, 1931). Already a lecturer himself, he featured the lectures of others.

            In 1854 the new Republican Party was founded, and Greeley spoke for it with the Tribune – especially by opposing slavery and slave owners. During the Civil War, he demanded that Lincoln take a stand for emancipation. But after the Civil War ended, he seemed to soften his views, arguing for release of former Confederacy president Jefferson Davis and saying the South had already changed far enough.

            German-born cartoonist Thomas Nast, who came to America at age 16 and whose cartoons in Harper’s Weekly through the 1860s supported the Civil War’s Union forces and the post-war Reconstruction, also successfully used his talents toward the downfall of corrupt New York City politician Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall. In general, his cartoons supported American Indians, Chinese Americans, and the abolition of slavery, and opposed segregation, the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the ignorance of voters who supported corruption (he included Irish Americans in this).

            When Horace Greeley ran against Ulysses Grant for the US. Presidency in 1872, Nast mounted a relentless campaign of ridicule against the newspaper owner and his views, labeling him as a killer of black Americans. The cartoonist’s campaign was so merciless that not only did Greeley’s campaign fail, but Horace Greeley suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown, and died just weeks after the election.

            Greeley’s visit to St. Johnsbury was surely during his campaign in 1872. Nast toured the United States in 1873 and again in 1885 and 1887, and his visit to St. Johnsbury included discussion of his cartoons, which were described with delight by the Caledonian-Record at the time.

President Abraham Lincoln’s Letter to Horace Greeley, a year into the Civil War:
 
Executive Mansion,
Washington, August 22, 1862.

Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.

I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Yours,
A. Lincoln.