Greeley, Horace

1811 - Born on February 3rd in Amherst, New Hampshire. The American statesman and man of letters.

1820 - Before Horace was ten years old, his father became bankrupt, his home was sold by the sheriff, and Zaccheus Greeley himself fled the state to escape arrest for debt.

1831 - He traveled on foot and by canal-boat, entering New York in August, with all his clothes in a bundle carried over his back with a stick, and with but $10 in his pocket.

1833 - Greeley formed a partnership with Francis V. Story, a fellow workman. Their combined capital amounted to about $150. Procuring their type on credit, they opened a small office, and undertook the printing of the Morning Post, the first cheap paper published in New York.

1834 - On the 2nd of March, Greeley and Winchester issued the first number of The New Yorker, a weekly literary and news paper, the firm then supposing itself to be worth about $3000. Of the first number they sold about 100 copies; of the second, nearly 200.

1836 - On the 5th of July, Greeley married Miss Mary Y. Chency, a Connecticut schoolteacher, whom he had met in a Grahamite (vegetarian) boarding-house in New York.

1838 - He had gained such standing as a writer that he was selected by Thurlow Weed, William Henry Seward, and other leaders of the Whig Party, for the editorship of a campaign paper entitled The Jeffersonian, published at Albany.

1841 - On the 3rd of April, Greeley announced that on the following Saturday (April 10th) he would begin the publication of a daily newspaper of the same general principles, to be called The Tribune.

         - He was now entirely without money. From a personal friend, James Coggeshall, he borrowed $1000, on which capital and the editor's reputation The Tribune was founded.

1848-1849 - Served a three months term in Congress, filling a vacancy. He introduced the first bill for giving small tracts of government land free to actual settlers, and published an exposure of abuses in the allowance of mileage to members, which corrected the evil, but brought him much personal obloquy.

1867-1870 - He was a delegate-at-large to the convention for the revision of the state of New York's constitution, and he was the Republican candidate for controller of the state and member of Congress respectively, but in each case was defeated.

1872 - Died on November 29th in New York City.

• "The darkest hour in any man's life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it."