Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
It didn’t take long for Horace Greeley, the nation’s most loved, hated and widely read newspaper editor, to become impatient with the progress of the war. From the moment news of Major Robert Anderson’s surrender at Fort Sumter reached New York City, drumbeats and bugle calls for immediate military action could be heard in the columns of Greeley’s paper, the New-York Tribune. Never mind the logistical challenge of assembling, arming and training a suitable military force — the people, or at least the editors, were ready, and there was hardly a moment to lose. What appeared to be lacking, from Greeley’s perspective, was a necessary vigor from President Lincoln and his administration.
Within a week of Lincoln’s initial call for volunteers on April 15, 1861, the Tribune was already sharply critical of his apparent sluggishness. The people stood ready to fight “with old flint-lock muskets if [they] can get no better,” Greeley said. But, he wondered, “will the government stand by the People?” Before April was out and military operations had still not commenced, he was reminding Lincoln that “we are at war with these pestilent rebels and traitors,” and urging “heavy and instantaneous blows at Maryland and Virginia.”
Why the rush? When Greeley called for the out-and-out conquest of the South on the first of May, he betrayed some of the logic behind his impatience. “We mean to conquer them,” he said, “and we shall do this most mercifully, the more speedily we do it.” In other words, the Union could be saved and much bloodshed spared with swift, decisive Federal action. And swift, decisive action would be effective because the Rebels were weak, disorganized and unlikely to fight if their cause of independence appeared lost. Moreover, Greeley believed that secession had been the work of a small minority of fire-eating fanatics; a quick blow and a little taste of the full force of the Union Army would embolden the silent majority of Southern Unionists he believed had yet to be roused.
Then, in the middle of May, an accident while on vacation upstate kept him from the Tribune’s offices for weeks. While chopping trees on the Chappaqua farm that he kept as a kind of bucolic theme park, Greeley badly gashed his right knee with his axe. As he nursed his wound at home, day-to-day editorial responsibilities fell to his young deputies, who carried on his cries for immediate action (presumably with their boss’s endorsement) at an increasingly hawkish pitch.
On May 30, Fitz Henry Warren, Greeley’s new Washington correspondent, filed a panting dispatch in which he described the Union forces at the capital as if they were Caesar’s battle-hardened legions ready to conquer Gaul. “On to Richmond!” Warren thundered in a refrain that would follow Greeley to his grave. “Unloose your chivalry, Man of high command … pierce the vitals of Virginia, and scourge the serpent seed of her rebellion on the crowning heights of Richmond.”
Warren’s immoderate “On to Richmond!” slogan may well have been lost to history in the Tribune’s tiny type and dense columns of war correspondence had not Greeley’s managing editor, Charles A. Dana, given it new life a month later. As Lincoln and his commanders continued to deliberate, Dana threw the full weight of the Tribune behind Warren’s idea that Richmond must be taken posthaste. Beginning June 28, the paper’s masthead bore in boldface what Dana called:
THE NATION’S WAR-CRY
Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!
The Rebel Congress must not be allowed
to meet there on the 20th of July!
BY THAT DATE
THE PLACE MUST BE HELD BY THE NATIONAL ARMY!
Greeley quickly came to regret his subordinates’ choice of words. When Union General Irvin McDowell’s reluctant push toward Richmond became the debacle of Bull Run on July 21 — roughly on the schedule so aggressively prescribed in the columns of the Tribune for weeks — furious recriminations against Greeley from the Northern public and press poured in from all quarters. Henry Jarvis Raymond’s Times blasted the “insane clamor” of “certain reckless journals” and their “senseless and incessant cry of ‘Onward to Richmond.’” Thurlow Weed, the veteran editor of the Albany Evening Journal, noted simply, “the ‘on to Richmond’ dictators have added another year to the war, an hundred millions of dollars to its cost, and opened graves for fifteen or twenty thousand more soldiers.”
Still working in his boss’s absence, Dana made matters worse with a ham-handed call for the only measure that would satisfy a “decimated and indignant people”: the immediate resignation of Lincoln’s entire cabinet. When Greeley returned to print a few days later, he did so to swear his innocence in the affair. On July 25, he published a “card” in the Tribune under the title “Just Once.” “The precise phrase ‘Forward to Richmond!’ is not mine,” he said, “and I would have preferred not to iterate it.” As for the “article calling for a change of cabinet,” Greeley vowed that he had not written it.
For many, Greeley’s denial was laughable. He and the paper, which he had founded in 1841, were one in the public’s eye, and few outraged Northerners cared or believed that someone else had actually been responsible for presuming to voice the “nation’s war-cry.” James Gordon Bennett, Greeley’s longstanding rival at the New-York Herald, came back with a rollicking mockery of “our afflicted friend of the Tribune, the repentant male Magdalen of New York journalism.” How unreasonable indeed it had been for the public to “accuse Massa Greeley of writing for the newspaper which he has been supposed to control. He solemnly asseverates that the accusation is false.”
Still, Greeley remained defiant in public. Even as he disavowed the “Forward to Richmond!” slogan and Dana’s tone-deaf call for the cabinet’s resignation, Greeley stood by his paper’s larger critique of the administration’s handling of the war as a whole. For a while, he even seemed to relish the abuse. “If I am needed as a scapegoat for all the military blunders of the last month, so be it! Individuals must die that the nation may live . … Now let the wolves howl on. I do not believe they can goad me into another personal notice of their ravings.” Privately, however, he was falling apart. At the very moment when he should have been regaining control of his newspaper, the ravings of the wolves of public opinion were pushing him into the grips of a “brain fever” — a temporary bout of insanity during which he didn’t sleep for a week.
Finally, on July 29, he put pen to paper at midnight to scratch out a crazed letter to Lincoln. Greeley’s handwriting was an eye-straining mess in the best of times, but in the depths of despair and insomnia, he addressed Lincoln with an unmatched orthographic squalor. “This is my seventh sleepless night—yours, too, doubtless,” he began. “Yet I think I shall not die because I have no right to die. I must struggle to live, however bitterly. But to business.”
Greeley’s business was to ask Lincoln if he thought victory was still possible. If it was, Greeley pledged his support to the president. Clearly, however, Greeley was decidedly bearish on the Union’s prospects after Bull Run, and believed that perhaps neither man could master the impossible circumstances. “You are not considered a great man,” he told the president, “and I am a hopelessly broken one.” Public sentiment was “gathering and deepening against a prosecution of the war. The gloom in this city is funereal . … On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair.” If defeat was indeed imminent, Greeley counseled Lincoln to seek peace at once: “Do not fear to sacrifice yourself to your country,” for in that case “every drop of blood henceforth shed in this quarrel will be wantonly, wickedly shed.”
Greeley was indeed broken, but not hopelessly or permanently so. He would eventually mend and return to his gadfly journalism, famously pressing Lincoln on emancipation in the summer of 1862. Still, the “Forward to Richmond!” episode was a fitting beginning to what was to be a generally troubled four years for Greeley, and serves as a reminder that while the war made some men, it unmade others. On more than one occasion as the conflict wore on, Greeley would swing pendulously from wild optimism to perfect anguish. That Lincoln was able to continue on amidst stunning reversals is precisely why he would eventually be considered a great man.
Sources: “Will the Government Stand by the People?” New-York Tribune, April 22, 1861; “STRIKE!” New-York Tribune, April 27, 1861; “No Half Measures,” New-York Tribune, May 1, 1861; “To Richmond! To Richmond! Onward!” New-York Tribune, May 30, 1861; New-York Tribune, June 26-July 7, 1861; “Disaster in Virginia,” New York Times, July 23, 1861; Albany Evening Journal, July 27, 1861; “Beaten for a Day — How to Conquer for All Times,” New-York Tribune, July 22, 1861; “Just Once,” New-York Tribune, July 25, 1861; “Massa Greeley in a Flood of Tears,” New-York Herald, July 26, 1861; Horace Greeley to Abraham Lincoln, July 29, 1861 (Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress).
James M. Lundberg has been an assistant professor of history at Sacred Heart University; beginning this fall, he will be a visiting scholar at Notre Dame. His current project is a study of the life and times of Horace Greeley.