Horace Greeley, City Hall Park

• Sculptor: John Quincy Adams Ward
• Pedestal: Richard Morris Hunt
• Dedicated: 1890
• Medium and size: Bronze (6.5 feet), granite pedestal (6.5 feet)
• Location: City Hall Park, near the City Hall subway entrance

February 3, 1811: Birth of Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley made his name in publishing as founder (in 1841) and editor of the New York Tribune. The Tribune, known for its national and international reporting, featured such prominent writers as Margaret Fuller, Charles Dana and Karl Marx. Greeley’s editorials railed against slavery, poverty, suppression of women’s rights, capital punishment, tobacco, alcohol and marital infidelity, and promoted peace movements, vegetarianism, labor rights and high tariffs. Read any history of the Civil War, and you’re likely to come across Greeley’s frequent, often contradictory exhortations to President Lincoln. Through the Tribune, Greeley became so well known and well liked that in 1872 he won 43% of the vote in the presidential election against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant.

Greeley grew up on a farm in Amherst, New Hampshire. Given the furor today about “climate change,” I can’t resist including this selection from his Recollections of a Busy Life, 1868:

I well remember the cold summer (1816) when we rose on the eighth of June to find the earth covered with a good inch of newly fallen snow, – when there was frost every month, and corn did not fill till October. Plants grew very slowly that season, while burrowing insects fed and fattened on them. My task for a time was to precede my father as he hoed his corn, dig open the hills, and kill the wire-worms and grubs that were anticipating our dubious harvest.

Incidentally, Greeley didn’t say “Go west, young man,” although he did advise, “Do not lounge in the cities! There is room and health in the country, away from the crowds of idlers and imbeciles. Go west, before you are fitted for no life but that of the factory.”

Greeley Describes New York in 1831

Greeley’s Recollections of a Busy Life is one of the outstanding American autobiographies of the 19th century. Here’s Greeley describing his first sight of New York, in 1831:

New York was then about one third of her present size; but her business was not one fourth so great as now; and her real size – counting her suburbs, and considering the tens of thousands who find employment in and earn subsistence here, though sleeping outside of her chartered limits – was not one fifth that of 1867. No single railroad pointed toward her wharves. No line of ocean steamers brought passengers to her hotels, nor goods to her warehouses, from any foreign port. In the mercantile world, her relative rank was higher, but her absolute importance was scarcely greater, than that of Rio [de] Janeiro or San Francisco is today. Still, to my eyes, which had never till yesterday gazed on a city of even 20,000 inhabitants, nor seen a sea-going vessel, her miles square of mainly brick or stone houses, and her furlongs of masts and yards, afforded ample incitement to a wonder and admiration akin to awe. …

The Winter was a hard one, and business in New York stagnant to an extent not now conceivable. I think it was early in December, when a ‘cold snap’ of remarkable severity closed the Hudson, and sent up the price of coal at a bound to $16 per ton, while the cost of other necessaries of life took a kindred but less considerable elevation. Our city stood as if besieged till Spring relieved her; and it was much the same every Winter.  …

The earnings of good mechanics did not average $8 per week in 1831-32, while they are now double that sum; and living is not twice as dear as it then was. Meat may possibly be; but Bread is not; Fuel is not; Clothing is not; while travel is cheaper; and our little cars have enabled working-men to live two or three miles from their work without serious cost or inconvenience; thus bringing Yorkville or Green Point practically as near to Maiden Lane or Broad Street as Greenwich or the Eleventh Ward was. Winter is relatively dull now, but not nearly so stagnant as it formerly was. – Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 1868

Greeley on Lincoln

From Greeley’s Recollections of a Busy Life:

There are those who say that Mr. Lincoln was fortunate in his death as in his life: I judge otherwise. I hold him most inapt for the leadership of a people involved in desperate, agonizing war; while I deem few men better fitted to guide a nation’s destinies in time of peace. Especially do I deem him eminently fitted to soothe, to heal, and to reunite in bonds of true, fraternal affection a people just lapsing into peace after years of distracting, desolating internal strife. His true career was just opening when an assassin’s bullet quenched his light of life. Mr. Lincoln entered Washington the victim of a grave delusion. A genial, quiet, essentially peaceful man, trained in the ways of the bar and the stump, he fully believed that there would be no civil war, – no serious effort to consummate Disunion. His faith in Reason as a moral force was so implicit that he did not cherish a doubt that his Inaugural Address, whereon he had bestowed much thought and labor, would, when read throughout the South, dissolve the Confederacy as frost is dissipated by vernal sun. I sat just behind him as he read it, on a bright, warm, still March day, expecting to hear its delivery arrested by the crack of a rifle aimed at his heart; but it pleased God to postpone the deed, though there was forty times the reason for shooting him in 1860 that there was in ’65, and at least forty times as many intent on killing or having him killed.

— Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, p. 404

Favorite Greeley quotes

• Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.
• Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.
• The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

More

• Greeley originally stood in a niche on the Tribune building near the Brooklyn Bridge. It and the Benjamin Franklin now in front of Pace University are reminders of the time when Park Row was Publishers Row.
• For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. More here.
• Want wonderful art delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my free Sunday Recommendations list and my Patreon page (free or by subscription): details here.