Paper Editor And Politician

The Written Word.

Horace Greeley was born into a poor family in Amherst, New Hampshire, in 1811. Greeley's father always struggled and could not provide his son with much in the way of an education, but Greeley took advantage of the family's few William Shakespeare works, and his early apprenticeship as a printer with the Northern Spectator of East Poultney, Vermont, gave him exposure to the news of the day. Not long after the. Northern Spectator failed in 1830, Greeley stuffed his possessions into a bandana and walked to New York, determined to make a living as a newspaperman. Living in a boardinghouse for $2.50 a week, Greeley scraped by as a typesetter but continued to feed his appetite for politics and writing by regularly contributing articles to the Daily Whig, one of the many newspapers run by the Whig Party. In 1840 Thurlow Weed...