If Horace Greeley is remembered at all today, it’s most often for the line, “Go West, young man!”—advice the crusading New York newspaper editor and antislavery advocate might have agreed with but probably never delivered in exactly those words. For much of the 19th century, however, Greeley was widely considered the best-known man in America, as celebrated for his writing as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, all of whom he published, with many becoming close friends.
When a splinter group of Republicans, disgusted by the rampant corruption of the current administration under their own party’s Ulysses S. Grant, decided to run a third-party presidential candidate in the 1872 election, it came as little surprise that they drafted Greeley for the task. The editor’s campaign got a further boost when the Democratic Party, unable to agree on a candidate of its own, threw its support to him, too.
But after a promising start, Greeley’s presidential bid ended not only in defeat but also tragedy.
Still benefitting from his reputation as a Civil War hero, Grant won the popular vote handily on November 5, 1872. Twenty-four days later, on November 29, Greeley died in a private mental sanatorium at age 61. The country could only wonder: What had happened?
At the time, many believed Greeley had died of heartbreak caused by both his humiliating election defeat and his wife Mary’s death, after a long series of illnesses, on October 30.
Greeley had stopped campaigning earlier that month so he could stay at Mary’s bedside and was, by all accounts, devastated by his loss.
The campaign itself had been grueling, in part because of the effort Greeley put into it. In the month of September alone, writes historian Robert C. Williams in Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom, he delivered nearly 200 speeches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.
Greeley also faced vicious political attacks, discomfiting even for a man who was accustomed to controversy. From 1841, when he founded the New-York Tribune, until his death three decades later, Greeley was a tireless advocate for causes large and small.