Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune

330 Pages·2009·2.009 MB·English

by  Adam Tuchinsky

HORACE GREELEY’S
NEW-YORK TRIBUNE

HORACE GREELEY’S
NE W-YORK TRIBUNE
CIVIL WAR–ERA SOCIALISM
AND THE CRISIS OF FREE LABOR
Adam Tuchinsky
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and New York
Copyright © 2009 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage
House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2009 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tuchinsky, Adam-Max.
Horace Greeley’s New-York tribune : Civil War-era
socialism and the crisis of free labor / Adam Tuchinsky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4667-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Greeley, Horace, 1811–1872. 2. New York tribune.
3. Socialism—United States—History—19th century.
4. United States—Politics and government—1783–1865.
I. Title.
E415.9.G8T83 2009
973.7—dc22 2009019267
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Figure 5—Southworth and Hawes, American, 19th century;
after: John Plumbe, American ( born in Wales), 1809 –1857;
Margaret Fuller, 1850 –55; photograph, daguerreotype; plate:
10.8 x 8.3 cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.); Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston; gift of Edward Southworth Hawes in memory of
his father Josiah Johnson Hawes, 43.1412.
Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jennifer and my two little Whigs, Sophia and Eli

Contents
Preface ix
A People’s Newspaper 1
1. The Emancipation of Labor 18
2. Transcendental Cultural Democracy 58
3. The French Revolution of 1848 and
the Radicalization of the Tribune 82
4. Marriage, Family, and the
Socioeconomic Order 108
5. Land Reform, Pragmatic Socialism,
and the Rise of the Republican Party 126
6. The Civil War and the Dilemma
of Free Labor 165
7. Liberal Ambiguities 212
Notes 243
Bibliography 285
Index 305

Preface
This book is an intellectual history of the New-
York Tribune during the Civil War era. The Tribune of that period was in many
ways a unique institution. It had a mass audience, with the largest national
circulation of any newspaper in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.
But it was also an institution that published many of the leading minds
of the age. It was part of a surge of penny papers that made an extensive
variety of printed material available to ordinary readers, but like later opin-
ion magazines it distilled for a general public many of the more progressive
reform ideas of the time. With a relatively consistent ideology, it contained
within its pages rigorous debate on most of the important social and politi-
cal questions of the day. Its reach was also international, reflecting the way in
which nineteenth-century social reform was a transatlantic venture. Forging
important connections to reform communities abroad, the Tribune’s domestic
politics were shaped, in part, by international events. But the Tribune was also
a mainstream newspaper, a leading organ of both the Whig and Republican
parties, so it bridged the worlds of politics, literature, and social reform.
Over the years, there have been a handful of works on Greeley and the
Tribune, but few of them address the central thematic question of this study:
How was it that the leading ideologue of the Whig and Republican parties
was also, throughout nearly his entire public life, a socialist?1 In answering
this question, most previous work on the subject has followed the lead of
James Parton who remarked in his 1872 biography of Greeley that his paper’s
socialism was not to be taken seriously. Its columns on socialist theory, he
wrote, were regarded as “articles to be skipped.”2 To the populist biographer
William Harlan Hale, nineteenth-century socialism was little more than a
utopian humbug, bohemian “nonsense” that was out of step with the con-
cerns of ordinary workers. Later, writing at greater length on Karl Marx’s
decadelong tenure as the Tribune’s European correspondent, he implied that
socialism was simply alien to the American experience. “Few episodes in
journalism seem more singular and unlikely,” Hale concluded, “than this
association of the frowning ideologist [Marx] of Soho on the one hand and,
ix
x PREFACE
on the other the moonfaced, owlish Vermont Yankee known affectionately to
legions of readers in North and West as ‘Uncle Horace.’ ”3 This study, in con-
trast, views socialism as central not only to Greeley and the Tribune’s circle of
intellectuals and reformers but to the emerging American reform tradition.
The core contribution of this book is to present the Greeley-era Tribune as a
journal that was at the center of a profound reexamination of conventional
political economy in a moment of rapid social and economic change.
Greeley launched the Tribune in a period marked by transportation, market,
and communication revolutions. The end of the paper’s Greeley era coincided
with industrialization and the emergence of a modern industrial working
class. Apart from the final year or two of his life, he and his paper wrestled
with the significance of these changes in a distinctly progressive way. Their
discomfort with the prospect of a permanent wage-earning class inspired
a sense of engagement with political economy and the labor question that
resulted in one of the first popular discussions of socially democratic liberal
principles in the history of the United States. In its pages, the Tribune put
forward a series of reforms designed to protect independent producers from
proletarianization. Though never explicitly anticapitalist, the Tribune also rec-
ognized the way that markets aggregate wealth, capital, power, and freedom in
the hands of the few. In this basic sense, it set forth the idea of social equality
as a critical element of American democracy.
My effort to identify and contextualize the Tribune’s social democratic
ethos takes part in a number of important and ongoing scholarly conver-
sations. In a chronological and empirical sense, it contributes to the large
literature on party ideology in nineteenth-century America. Most previous
work on the history of party ideology has understated progressive elements
in the cultures of the Whig and Republican parties and has failed to focus on
the connections between the second and third American party systems. One
of the major books on the subject tries to unite the two eras, but posits an
unlikely political tradition that links Abraham Lincoln to Andrew Jackson.4
The institutional focus of this book enables it to connect the two eras, but in
a different way. This study maintains that the search for cohesive party ide-
ologies is fundamentally flawed; ideological differences within parties were
nearly as stark as the differences between them. There was also incredible
diversity among state party organizations.5 Parties were, instead, institutional
vehicles within which ideologically coherent factions wrestled for power.
The Tribune, for its part, became the representative voice first of the “reform
Whigs” and then the Radical Republicans, and I maintain that the intellectual
origin of both factions’ commitment to antislavery and various kinds of labor
reform was rooted in liberal socialism.