This Defeated Presidential Candidate, Once the ‘Best-Known Man in America,’ Died in a Sanatorium Less Than a Month After Losing the Election

Greg Daugherty

History Correspondent

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. He was prominent in the fight against slavery and was a vocal supporter of women’s and workers’ rights. He opposed capital punishment, promoted the temperance movement and vegetarianism, and called for Irish independence from Great Britain. Along the way, he collected friends and foes, respect for his commitments, and occasional ridicule for having so many varied interests.

During the 1872 presidential campaign, the political cartoonist Thomas Nast, a Grant booster, turned his pen on Greeley in his regular cartoons for Harper’s Weekly. “From January 1872 through the election, [Nast] did 80-some drawings of Greeley that really roasted him,” says Gray Williams, town historian of New Castle, New York, where Greeley once lived. “Grant later said that he owed his election to the bayonets of [Union General Philip] Sheridan and the drawings of Thomas Nast.”

Nast’s August 17 cartoon, for example, lampooned Greeley’s unlikely alliance with the Democrats, depicting him kneeling before Satan, who clutches a copy of the party’s nomination. On September 14, Nast placed the editor at the grave of Abraham Lincoln, seemingly bowing and extending his hand to the ghost of the Republican president’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

One friend reported visiting Greeley just before the election and seeing Nast cartoons lying about his office. “I will be beaten in the campaign, and I am ruined for life,” Greeley predicted, as he complained about the many ways in which his views had been distorted.

In the days after his defeat, Greeley wrote to another friend, saying, “I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly knew whether I was running for president or the penitentiary. … Well, I am used up.”

As if all that weren’t enough, Greeley’s finances were in shambles as well. He had lost control of the Tribune, in large part because he had sold many of his shares to his employees and friends, often for less than their market value. Once Greeley’s debts were settled, the value of his $206,084.25 estate fell to $2,589.28 (around $67,000 today)—a modest sum even then for a prominent individual.

After the election, Greeley briefly returned to the Tribune. “It was pitiful to see how wearily, day after day, he dragged himself to his office, endeavoring to take up the threads of his busy life again,” one early biographer recounted. Greeley managed to write several articles, but he was plagued by insomnia and gave up his work on November 12. A week later, the Tribune announced that he was suffering from “nervous prostration” but was expected to return “speedily to his usual vigorous health.”

In truth, Greeley had taken a turn for the worse both physically and mentally. On November 20, he reluctantly agreed to move to a private mental health facility in Pleasantville, New York, which was run by a highly regarded physician, George S. Choate.

“[Greeley’s] removal did not ameliorate his mental condition, for the very next day, he became a raving maniac,” another early and largely sympathetic biographer wrote, using the now-outdated language of the era. “Being unable to take nourishment, his strength rapidly declined, and as he grew weaker, he became more quiet and at length sank into unconsciousness.”

On November 27, the Tribune again assured readers that while Greeley was still suffering from nervous prostration “arising from almost total loss of sleep for a month or more,” as well as a lack of appetite, he was improving.

But in the early evening of November 29, the editor-turned-politician died in his bed, by all accounts peacefully.

Greeley was the first major presidential candidate to die so soon after his defeat, before the Electoral College had even made the outcome of the election official. His death raised the unprecedented question of what to do with his electoral votes, which were ultimately divided among several minor candidates. The messiness of the process led to calls to abolish the Electoral College altogether—a divisive political issue to this day.

As the nation tried to absorb the shocking news of Greeley’s death, reporters pressed doctors who’d been involved in the case for an answer as to what had killed him. While most of the physicians were circumspect and unwilling to offer a definitive diagnosis, several attributed Greeley’s illness to an overworked brain. “We see such cases every day, and they usually spring from the same cause,” one doctor said. “The death of his wife and his herculean work during the campaign both contributed to bring about the sad result.”

Indeed, Greeley seemed to be a classic, if unusually tragic, case of what doctors of the day referred to as neurasthenia—a sort of catchall diagnosis encompassing anxiety, depression, insomnia, loss of appetite, physical exhaustion and other symptoms typically attributed to overwork.

As Nancy Tomes, a historian at Stony Brook University and co-author of Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914, says, well-to-do patients like Greeley “who weren’t a danger to themselves or others” were often treated in private sanatoriums like Choate’s. The “state-of-the-art” treatment offered at these facilities was simple: bed rest.

But neurasthenia alone wouldn’t account for Greeley’s death. “A 61-year-old man doesn’t die of neurasthenia,” Tomes says. “There had to be something else going on.”

In any case, no autopsy was ever performed. So, as biographer Williams concludes, “We will never know.”

At the time, few members of the public knew that this wasn’t Greeley’s first serious mental health episode. Williams deems it “fairly likely” that he’d “suffered a nervous breakdown, or bad depression,” at least twice before: once with the death of his young son in 1849 and later during the Civil War. He’d begun an 1861 letter to then-President Lincoln by noting that he was writing at midnight on his “seventh sleepless night” and had been reduced to a “hopelessly broken” man.

As badly as he had been treated at the end of his life, in death, Greeley was lionized for his accomplishments. Newspapers both at home and abroad hailed him as “the greatest editor America has produced,” the “most remarkable man in the United States,” the “foremost man of his time” and the “apostle of freedom.” As one New York paper observed, “No event since the death of Abraham Lincoln has so deeply touched the nation’s heart.”

On December 3, Greeley’s body lay in state at New York’s City Hall, where thousands of mourners came to pay their respects. “The millionaire walked side by side with the crossing sweeper,” the Tribune reported. “Famous lawyers kept step with ragged bootblacks. Ladies in silk and fur came behind the shopgirl in her faded worsted shawl.”

The U.S. Senate suspended deliberations so members could make the trip to New York. Grant, the victorious president, attended the funeral service, as did both the incoming and outgoing vice presidents, future President Chester A. Arthur, and numerous other politicians. After the service, a procession of 125 carriages accompanied Greeley’s coffin to a Brooklyn cemetery, where he was buried alongside his wife.

Greeley has largely faded from public memory in the decades since his death, but traces of his life remain. In 1890, New York erected a statue in his honor, which now resides in City Hall Park. Residents of Chappaqua, New York, where Greeley kept a farm, installed a separate sculpture there in 1914. The editor’s home in Chappaqua’s downtown still stands, serving as a combination museum and headquarters for the New Castle Historical Society. The local high school bears Greeley’s name.

Choate’s sanatorium, where Greeley died, is now part of Pace University’s Pleasantville campus. An enduring student legend maintains that his ghost wanders the building, which is now home to the university’s welcome center.

Greeley hoped his newspaper would live long after him, and it did, until in 1924 it was merged into the New York Herald Tribune, which continued on until the 1960s. But he had no illusions about his own immortality. “Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings,” he once wrote. “The only earthly certainty is oblivion.”