CHAPTER VII.

HORACE GREELEY.

The Scotch-Irish Race in the United States-Mr. Greeley a Partly Reversed Specimen of it-His Birth and Boyhood-Learns to Read Books Upside DownHis Apprenticeship on a Newspaper-The Town Encyclopaedia--His Industry at his Trade-His First Experience of a Fugitive Slave Chase-His First Appearance in New York. The Work on the Polyglot Testament-Mr. Greeley as "the Ghost"-The First Cheap Daily Paper-The Firm of Greeley & Story -The New Yorker, the Jeffersonian and the Log Cabin-Mr. Greeley as Editor of the New Yorker-Beginning of The Tribune-Mr. Greeley's Theory of a Political Newspaper-His Love for The Tribune-The First Week of that Paper-The Attack of the Sun and its Result—Mr. McElrath's PartnershipMr. Greeley's Fourierism-" The Bloody Sixth "-The Cooper Libel SuitsMr. Greeley in Congress-He goes to Europe-His course in the RebellionHis Ambition and Qualifications for Office-The Key-Note of his Character.

No race has stronger characteristics, bodily or mental, than that powerful, obstinate, fiery, pious, humorous, honest, industrious, hard-headed, intelligent, thoughtful and reasoning people, the Scotch-Irish. The vigorous qualities of the Scotch-Irish have left broad and deep traces upon the history of the United States. As if with some hereditary instinct, they settled along the great Allegheny ridge, principally from Pennsylvania to Georgia, in the fertile valleys and broader expanses of level land on either side, especially to the westward. In the healthy and genial air of these regions, renowned for the handsomest breed of men and women in the world, the ScotchIrish acted out with thorough freedom, all the vigorous and often violent impulses of their nature. They were pioneers, Indian-fighters, politicians, theologians;

and they were as polemic in everything else as in theology. Jackson and Calhoun were of this blood. An observant traveller in Tennessee described to the writer the interest with which he found in that state literally hundreds of forms and faces with traits so like the lean erect figure, high narrow head, stiff black hair, and stern features of the fighting old President, that they might have been his brothers. Many of our eminent Presbyterian theologians like the late Dr. Wilson, of Cincinnati, have been Scotch-Irish too, and with their spiritual weapons they have waged many a controversy as unyielding, as stern and as unsparing as the battle in which Jackson beat down Calhoun by showing him a halter, or as that brutal knife fight in which he and Thomas H. Benton nearly cut each other's lives out.

Horace Greeley is of this Scotch-Irish race, and after a rule which physiologists well know to be not very uncommon, he presents a direct reverse of many of its traits, more especially its physical ones. Instead of a lean, erect person, dry hard muscles, a high narrow head, coarse stiff black hair, and a stern look, he tends to be fat, is shambling and bowed over in carrying himself, thinskinned and smooth and fair as a baby, with a wide, long, yet rounded head, silky-fine almost white hair, and a habitually meek sort of smile, which however must not be trusted to as an index of the mind within. Meek as he looks, no man living is readier with a strong sharp answer. Non-resistant as he is physically, there is not a more uncompromising an opponent and intense combatant in these United States. Mentally, he shows a predominance of Scotch

MR. GREELEY'S BIRTH AND YOUTH

295

Irish blood modified by certain traits which reveal themselves in his readiness to receive new theories of life.

Mr. Greeley was born Feb. 3d, 1811, at his father's farm, in Amherst, New Hampshire. The town was part of a district first settled by a small company of sixteen families of Scotch-Irish from Londonderry. These were part of a considerable emigration in 1718 from that city, whose members at first endeavored to settle in Massachusetts; but they were so ill received by the Massachusetts settlers that they found it necessary to scatter away into distant parts of the country before they could find rest for the soles of their feet.

The ancestors of Mr. Greeley were farmers, those of the name of Greeley being often also blacksmiths. The boy was fully occupied with hard farm work, and he attended the American farmers' college, the District School. He had an intense natural love for acquiring knowledge, and learned to read of himself. He could read any child's book when he was three, and any ordinary book at four; and having, as his biographer, Mr. Parton, suggests, still an overplus of mental activity, he learned to read as readily with the book sideways or upside down, as right side up.

Mr. Greeley, like a number of men who have grown up to become capable of a vast quantity of hard work and usefulness, was extremely feeble at birth, and was even thought scarcely likely to live when he first entered the world. During his first year he was feeble and sickly. His mother, who had lost her two children born next before him, seemed to be doubly fond of her weak little one, both for the sake of those that