Horace Greeley, Conclusion

This will be my fourth and final comment on James Lundberg's book about Greeley. I'll have nothing inspiring to say. I'm tying up a loose end. Hence the photo of shoelaces.

This discussion on which I am focusing today is on p. 93 and concerns events of 1855. That year, the Know-Nothings were meeting in convention. Like the Republicans, the Know-Nothings were a new life from the carcass of the Whigs. Greeley was worried that the Know-Nothings would be strong enough to foil the Republicans in the following year's election and would throw it to the Democrats.

In 1855 the Know-Nothings held a convention in Philadelphia in order to firm up a unified party position more elaborate than their shared nativist sentiments.

Greeley's Tribune sent correspondents to Philadelphia. Lundberg says they were there to expose rifts over slavery within that party. The rifts were, in fact, potent, and presumably to Greeley's delight the anti-slavery Know-Nothings were expelled from the convention, presumably to contemplate whether they had any choice left other than the Republican Party.

The Trib's correspondent wrote, "Thank God! There is a North at last."

Lundberg's endnotes direct us to a book by Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery (1992).

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