Abe wrote Horace back!

When the President wrote the Tribune!

Happy Juneteenth, everyone! There was a brief discussion on Morning Joe about the famous Abraham Lincoln letter written in response to a Horace Greeley editorial in the New York Tribune that was just one of the most surprising - and effective - decisions made by a sitting President.

Greeley was bombarding Lincoln about the issue of slavery, the New York Tribune was relentless and what do you know, the President wrote back. Kindly, thoughtfully and progressively - though he did it in such a clever way.

I’m proud to say that I taught this letter - and the Greeley editorial - to my Journalism classes back in the day and let them know a little bit about my fellow New Hampshire guy, Greeley. Who led a most interesting life (and had one of the worst-looking beards in existence.) You might also say, he discovered Henry Thoreau.

So here it is, once again. Enjoy!

Proudly growing up in the great Granite State, one of its most famous natives was Horace Greeley, the erstwhile founder of the New York Tribune, one of America’s earliest and most prominent newspapermen, later a Presidential candidate, someone who got the President to write a response to one of his columns and if that wasn’t enough, you might say he was the discoverer of the great Henry David Thoreau.

I’m waiting to be discovered myself. Time is running out, I suspect. The funny thing is, even though he came from Amherst, New Hampshire, just a hop, skip and jump from where I grew up in Brookline and Nashua, they didn’t teach us jack about the guy. We learned Franklin Pierce was our 14th President, the only one from New Hampshire, who generally is ranked near the bottom of the list of Chief Executives we’ve had. (He might move up one spot in a couple years.) But Greeley, nothing. He might as well have grown up in Vermont with the maple syrup crap.

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Horace Greeley, a New Hampshire native, played a key role in Thoreau’s writings.

In 1843, Thoreau went to New York, trying to establish himself and dropped in on Greeley, starting a weekly called the New York Tribune. A friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s unofficial mentor, Greeley was excited to greet Thoreau calling him “a hearty New Hampshire boy as one would wish to meet” and promising to help him get published. Thoreau did manage to get a couple pieces published but was truly discouraged. To Emerson, he wrote: “Literature comes to a poor market here, and even the little that I write is more than will sell.” “Only the Ladies Companion pays,” he wrote his mom, “but I could not write anything companionable.”

Henry, I feel your pain. I wrote about going shopping with the wife. Tough assignment.

Three years later, Thoreau penned an essay on British essayist Thomas Carlyle, a writer who seemed to get under his skin in a way he couldn’t shake. Biographer Laura Walls described Thoreau’s essay to “read(ing) like a final exam in a long self-taught course in how to stop sounding like a Harvard graduate, how to start reaching farmer and mechanics as well as preachers and professors.” Greeley paid him $75. Then, he wrote about a visit to Maine and got $25. After some more writing, Greeley sent him a check for $50. Greeley was trying to break Thoreau nationally.

That kind of dough sounds groovy. I just got a royalty statement yesterday that includes this line: TOTAL EARNINGS: $1.75. Really. For a book that sells for $30.

But Thoreau moved on to other things like writing his essay on Civil Disobedience “Resistance To Civil Government” and one of the all-time classic books, “Walden” about his two years, two months and two days living at Walden Pond on Emerson’s land. Way to go, Henry, though it took a while for the book and the essay to really connect. But when it did, holy maple syrup!

So this other New Hampshire writer asks where’s my Horace Greeley? I’ve been pumping out Substack posts like crazy, (some of them ARE crazy) how about 296 posts in 283 days, on everything from chess to baseball to Roxy Music to teaching Hamlet to record stores to boxing to football to Charles Dickens to shopping with women to J.D. Salinger to Vladimir Nabokov to Shakespeare to Taylor Swift, I mean, come on?

One of my posts on Paul Westerberg, drew 6,876 views, 68 “loves” and 77 subscribers! (Ed. Note: Now it’s over 26,000 views) Thoreau never did that! That’s legit, isn’t it? For a New Hampshire kid? Any Greeley-related book agents out there?? Strike now while the iron is hot…

Back to Greeley. (Hope you’re laughing.) This I also didn’t know about ol’ Horace, who, as you can see from the picture, looks like a fun guy. Well, as the Civil War was breaking out, Greeley was relentless about the abolition of slavery, writing about it, challenging President Lincoln, who, you’d imagine, was fairly busy at the time trying to keep the Union together.

So Greeley writes an open letter “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” to Abe on August 19, 1862.

To ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States: DEAR SIR: I do not intrude to tell you--for you must know already--that a great proportion of those who triumphed in your election, and of all who desire the unqualified suppression of the Rebellion now desolating our country, are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of the Rebels…The rebels are everywhere using the late anti-negro riots in the North, as they have long used your officers’ treatment of negroes in the South, to convince the slaves that they have nothing to hope from a Union success-that we mean in that case to sell them into a bitter bondage to defray the cost of war…”

Three days later, Abe writes back: Executive Mansion, Washington, August 22, 1862

Hon. Horace Greeley:

Dear Sir. I have just read yours of the 19^th addressed to myself through the New York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I don’t believe it would help to save the Union…I have here stated my purpose according to my view of Official duty: and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

Yours, A. Lincoln

As you have probably guessed, there aren’t a lot of times when American Presidents have taken the time to write back to a critical columnist. We will perhaps soon see if they’ll accept crayon or a Sharpie.

Meanwhile, here I sit, pounding the keys, hoping to strike some combination of words, phrases and punctuation that will bring my own Horace Greeley forward with contracts and checks and the kind of thing a New Hampshire native should do for another Granite Stater.

But I’m not holding my breath.

John Nogowski’s “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” and “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and “Last Time Out” and my new book, “Diamond Duels” are all still available on Amazon. Really.