ILLUSTRATIONS. Steel Engraving of Horace Greeley.. Birthplace.... First School House.. Riding Horse to Plough.. Frontispiece. 23 25 27 Young Greeley's Arrival in New-York..... First Meeting of Mr. Greeley and Thurlow Weed.. Thurlow Weed.... Grand Political Barbecue in 1840.. Portrait of William Cullen Bryant.. James Gordon Bennett, Sen... 55 89 93 93 _101 -109 ..109 Tribune Building - Franklin Statue - Printing House Square. .449 Fac-Simile of Mr. Greeley's Hand Writing. The Body of Horace Greeley Lying in State in the City Hall. THE LIFE OF HORACE GREELEY. CHAPTER I. HORACE GREELEY'S BIRTH-ANCESTRY-BOYHOOD. Birth of Horace Greeley - Ancestry; Father, Grandfather, Great-grandfather His Mother, Mary Woodburn - Her Energy, Stories, Good Nature - The Woodburn Family Of the Scotch-Irish Race - The Puritans Fond of Fun - Birth - place - Learns to Read Books Upside Down - First School Days - A Prodigy at Spelling - Hard Work on the Farm - Old Fashioned New Hampshire Hospitality-The Greeley Family sold out of House and Home. HORACE GREELEY, who became the founder of the New-York Tribune, the most eminent journalist of his times, and one of the most useful and distinguished of men, was born February 3d, 1811, in the town (called township in many parts of the United States) of Amherst, Hillsborough county, New Hampshire. He was the third of seven children, of whom the two elder died before his birth. The father of Horace was Zaccheus Greeley, the mother Mary Woodburn, and they had been married about four years when the little stranger who was destined to become so celebrated first opened his eyes to the light of day. Holy Writ informs us, in a text that has perplexed many minds, that God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Him; which is but a forcible way of saying to a nation of rude men, more easily persuaded through fear than otherwise, that like produces like. It is, after all, but the enunciation of a law of nature believed to be universal. Notwithstanding certain modern hypothoses stated with wonderful ingenuity and subtlety, there has yet been no demonstration, or approach to it, that corn ever produced anything but corn, fruits anything but. fruits, apes anything but apes, man anything but man. The good and ill qualities of races, families, individuals, descend from father to son no less certainly, though not always so palpably, as wheat springs from wheat. Horace Greeley had the advantage of an ancestry of industrious, frugal, honest, respectable, christian families, both on the side of his father and mother for several generations. Three brothers named Greeley (spelled nearly as many different ways as the name of Shakespeare) migrated to America from Nottingham, England, twenty years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. One of them settled in Maine, where there are many descendants; another in Rhode Island; the third, in Massachusetts, near the southern line of New Hampshire, into which State his descendants soon migrated. "The Greeleys of our clan," says Mr. Greeley, "while mainly farmers, are in part blacksmiths. Some of them have in this century engaged in trade, and are presumed to have acquired considerable property; but these are not of the tribe of Zaccheus."1 "My grandfather Greeley," he continues, "was a most excellent, though never a thrifty, citizen. Kind, mild, easy-going, honest, and unambitious, he married young, and reared a family of thirteen, of whom he who died youngest was thirty years old; while a majority lived to be seventy, and three are yet living (1868), at least two of them having seen more than eighty summers. A devoted, consistent, life-long Chris * * 'Recollections of a Busy Life, p. 34. Mr. Parton, in his Life of Horace Greeley, speaks of "Old Captain Ezekial" Greeley in anything but complimentary terms, and makes him out as having been the great journalist's great-grandfather. Mr. Greeley himself expressly says, a few lines above the words just quoted from him, that his father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather each bore the name of Zaccheus. He doubtless knew who his great-grandfather was as well as any one else. . tian, originally of the Baptist, but ultimately of the Methodist persuasion,-exemplary in deportment and blameless in life, I do not believe that my grandfather Greeley ever made an enemy; and, while he never held an office, and his property was probably at no time worth $2,000, and generally ranged from $1,000 to zero, I think few men were ever more sincerely and generally esteemed than he by those who knew him." This excellent and amiable man died in his fulness of days, aged ninety-four. We shall presently see that his son Zaccheus -the father of Horace-inherited the amiable qualities of his immediate ancestor as well as the faculty of reaching the zero point in the acquisition of property; the occasion which demonstrated the latter quality being certainly one of the saddest in the young days of Horace Greeley's life. The father died in December, 1867, aged eighty-six, of which long life forty-two years had been spent in or on the verge of New England, and the remainder in his long retained home in Western Pennsylvania, whereof he had been one of the great band of hardy, industrious pioneers who cut down our American forests, let in the sun, and open the way for the triumphs of civilization and progress. Horace Greeley's mother was a woman of remarkable nature. She had great strength of body as well as of mind. Though lacking in education, she had a natural refinement and delicacy of sentiment whose beauty and loveliness could not be concealed by her toilet of home-spun, nor lost in the drudgery of a hard-working destiny. "My mother," says Mr. Greeley himself, in that admirable series of Recollections which he contributed to the New-York Ledger in 1868, "having lost her mother when but five years old, was, for the next few years, the especial protégée and favourite of her aged grandmother, who had migrated from Ireland when but fourteen years old, and whose store of Scottish and Scotch-Irish traditions, songs, anecdotes, shreds of history, etc., can have rarely been equalled. These she imparted freely to her eager, receptive granddaughter, who was a glad, easy learner, whose schooling was better than that of most farmers' daughters in her day, and who naturally became a most omniverous and retentive reader. |