Civil War History

In Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood, James M. Lundberg explores the story of, arguably, the most significant and at the same time most complex newspaper personality in American history. Lundberg also provides a compelling analysis of nineteenth-century issues reflected in the content of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, suggesting Greeley was consistent to a fault in his devotion to the nationalistic ideals espoused by Henry Clay, the Whig statesman who developed an antebellum model of economic organization known as the American System. Clay, Greeley, and other Whig leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, helped make the party an essential political force during the 1840s. Unlike their rivals in the Democratic Party, the Whigs recognized that slavery would eventually tear the nation apart. With Clay as a leading political figure and Greeley as a source for widely circulated news, the Whigs offered a vision of national harmony in which regional sections cooperated to make the sum of their parts greater than the whole. In time, though, varying and conflicting regional interests made impossible compromise over the role slavery would—or would not—have in the nation’s growth, resulting in the catastrophic Civil War.

Lundberg argues that after the war, Greeley failed to read correctly the mood of the public he had in earnest previously sought to engage—Americans North and South who had no reason to believe the American System he championed in previous decades could possibly heal rifts still raw during Reconstruction. According to Lundberg, Greeley’s ill-fated 1872 presidential campaign demonstrated only a poorly judged opportunity for him to try making his vision of a truly united nation a reality one last time. “When he died in 1872, utterly humiliated and roundly drubbed by Ulysses S. Grant in that year’s presidential election, Greeley had become as disjointed as the nation he sought to embody and unify,” Lundberg writes. “He began his career wishing to be America’s oracle; he ended it as America’s prism” (2).

Lundberg succeeds in crafting a lucid and well-written narrative of Greeley’s life, but at the same time this biography also appears to overemphasize the role [End Page 58] Greeley alegedly played in the popularization of nationalist doctrine. Yes, the Tribune did promote Clay’s American System, among countless other “isms” for which the newspaper was famous and from time to time infamous. Yet, Lundberg pays very limited attention to the contents of either competing newspapers in the North and the South or newspapers that elsewhere supported the Tribune’s calls for unity. This approach would benefit from greater contextualization. In varying measures, New York’s Tribune, Herald, and Times—along with countless other newspapers scattered through the nation’s West and South—informed readers who understood the publisher’s personal opinions might at best resonate with their own. In this sense, the Tribune hardly held a monopoly on political thought before, during, or after the Civil War, and it can more clearly be studied as a sample of the nation’s mood, not necessarily the primary source of it.

Lundberg’s assessment of Greeley’s campaign places great weight on the idealistic reformer’s shoulders. “If Rutherford B. Hayes’s greatest virtue in 1876 would be that he was ‘offensive to no one,’” Lundberg writes, “a case could be made that Greeley was offensive to all in 1872” (170). Greeley did earn support from those who had aligned with Lincoln’s own desires to welcome the South back into the Union, but, as Lundberg writes, “it is hard to overstate the depth of Greeley’s failure in 1872, which went beyond mere electoral defeat. The campaign had accomplished almost precisely the opposite of what he had set out to achieve” (174). While Greeley’s bid for the presidency failed spectacularly, the suggestion that he left a legacy steeped in national failure does not quite...