When twenty-year-old Horace Greeley arrived in New York City to start a printing business in 1831, he did not suspect that his faith in hard work and frugality would soon be tested by the worst financial depression in U.S. history to that date. Although Greeley survived and prospered, his concern for the urban unemployed prompted him to search for a universal solution—the safety valve of land in the West.
For the rest of his life, Greeley used his position as editor of the New York Tribune and occasional politician to promote his agrarian utopian ideology. Cross examines here Greeley's efforts in favor of four important factors in westward expansion: the promotion of agriculture and the establishment of Land Grant colleges, the struggle to pass the land reform and homestead acts, the restriction of slavery from the western territories, and the building of the transcontinental railroads. A final chapter examines Greeley's role in the utopian Union Colony that later became Greeley, Colorado. This is an important study of the leading proponent of one of the most enduring American cultural myths.
