7. The New York Tribune became one of the nation’s most influential newspapers
Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune offered daily editions in New York, and a weekly edition which was distributed throughout the emerging west in the 1840s and 1850s. The weekly edition’s influence was such that one journalist, Bayard Taylor, claimed it rivaled that of the Bible in the American Midwest. Greeley expounded views out of sync with the government. He opposed the American war with Mexico, the expansion of slavery into the conquered Mexican Territories, and the Compromise of 1850. He also opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed settlers in those territories to decide for themselves the issue of slavery. When it passed, he supported packing the territories with settlers from free states. His famous exhortation for young men to go west was based as much on his desire to rid New York of homeless and unemployed immigrants as his desire to see new lands settled.
Greeley relied on the loyalty of his readers, both in New York and across the country, and they repaid him by making the New York Tribune arguably the most influential of all American newspapers during the antebellum era. Southern post offices refused to deliver his weekly Tribune, and it was forbidden in trains and depots across Dixie. In the North it was widely read, quoted, its contents discussed, its opinions debated. Its journalistic integrity was seldom questioned. American readers, other than Southern secessionists, trusted it implicitly. Greeley himself did not enjoy such widespread faith in his integrity, in part because he made many forays into politics himself, despite declaring his newspaper nonpartisan in all matters. Greeley was trusted to the point he conducted personal interviews of Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, Brigham Young, Ulysses Grant, and many other luminaries of his day.