402 



GREELEY 



GREEN 



on tow tied to arrows. The invention of this 

 material has usually been ascribed to Callinicus of 

 Heliopolis, and to the year 668 A. D. At Constantin- 

 ople the process of making Greek-fire was kept a 

 profound secret for several centuries. The know- 

 ledge, however, of its composition gradually 

 spread ; and the use of it spread to the West. 

 Subsisting for some time concurrently with gun- 

 powder, it gradually died out before the advances 

 of that still more effective competitor. Combust- 

 ibles with a similar aim were used at the siege of 

 Charleston in 1863, composed of sulphur, nitre, 

 and lampblack ; and naphtha in shells was also 

 tried. The petroleum bombs of the Paris Com- 

 mune of 1871 corresponded more nearly to Greek- 

 lire than does gunpowder. 



Greeley, HORACE, American journalist, de- 

 scribed by Whittier as ' our later Franklin,' was 

 born at Arnherst, New Hampshire, February 3, 

 1811. His father was a small farmer, always poor; 

 and Horace, the third of seven children, after 

 acquiring the rudiments of education at a common 

 school, entered a printing-office as an apprentice 

 (1826), at East Poultney, Vermont, and rose so far 

 as to assist in editorial work on the Northern 

 Spectator. Released from his apprenticeship in 

 1830 by the suspension of this paper, he worked 

 for some time as a journeyman printer in various 

 country offices, and in August 1831 made his way 

 to New York with ten dollars in his pocket, 

 and his stick and bundle over his shoulder. He 

 had difficulty in obtaining work at first owing to 

 the oddity of his appearance. For fourteen months 

 he worked as a journeyman printer, when he 

 started business along with a fellow- workman, and 

 in 1834 commenced the New Yorker, a literary 

 weekly paper, for which he wrote essays, poetry, 

 and other articles. His first marked success, how- 

 ever, was the Log Cabin, a Whig campaign paper 

 which contributed largely to bring about the elec- 

 tion of General W. H. Harrison to the presidency 

 in 1840, and which was afterwards continued for 

 some months. On April 10, 1841, he published the 

 first number of the New York Tribune, of which he 

 was the leading editor till his death. In the same 

 year he merged his weekly papers, the Log Cabin and 

 the New Yorker, in the Weekly Tribune, which rose 

 to have a large circulation in the rural districts. 

 The Tribune has been an earnest advocate of 

 temperance, co-operation, international copyright, 

 a protective tariff, the abolition of slavery and 

 capital punishment, and other reforms ; was at first 

 Whig, then anti-slavery Whig, and was finally 

 recognised as the organ of the extreme or radical 

 Republican party. Greeley advocated and adopted 

 to some extent the social theories of Fourier. 

 Among the contributors whom he gathered around 

 him were such well-known writers as G. W. Curtis, 

 W. H. Fry, C. A. Dana, Margaret Fuller, and 

 Bayard Taylor ; while he was amongst the first 

 American journalists to recognise the genius of 

 Dickens, Bret Harte, and Swinburne. His business 

 faculty was indifferent, and he was easily imposed 

 upon by impecunious people and adventurers. 



In 1848 Greeley was elected to congress by 

 one of the districts of New York, to fill a 

 vacancy, but failed in his congressional career by 

 agitating an unwelcome reform in the mileage 

 payments to members. In 1851 he visited Europe, 

 and was chairman of one of the committees of the 

 Great Exhibition. He was again in Europe in 

 1855. His aspirations to political position were 

 defeated by the more conservative party leaders, 

 and he, in turn, is supposed to have helped the 

 nomination of Lincoln instead of Seward in 1860. 

 On the secession of the southern states from the 

 union, Greeley at first advocated their right to 

 secede, as being in accordance with the principles of 



the Declaration of Independence ; but when the war 

 began he became one of its most zealous advocates, 

 rival newspapers alleging that he caused the pre- 

 mature advance that resulted in the defeat of 

 the government troops at Bull Run, July 21, 1861. 

 He published an impressive anti-slavery appeal 

 in the Tribune, entitled ' The Prayer or Twenty 

 Millions,' which, besides making a profound im- 

 pression, drew from Lincoln a remarkable letter; 

 and within a month thereafter the emancipation 

 proclamation was issued. After Lee's surrender 

 he warmly advocated a universal amnesty ; and his 

 going to Richmond and signing the bail-bond of 

 Jefferson Davis awakened a storm of public indig- 

 nation. In spite of oratorical defects Greeley was 

 a good and popular speaker. In religious faith he 

 was a Universalist. In 1872 he was an unsuc- 

 cessful candidate for the presidentship, receiving 

 2,834,079 of the popular vote, as against 3,597,070 

 for General Grant ; the strain proved too great 

 for him, and he died 29th November of the same 



Ssar. A bronze statue of Greeley, by Alexander 

 oyle, was erected in Greeley Square (23d street 

 and Broadway, New York) in 1894. Greeley's 

 works include The American Conflict (1864-66); 

 Recollections of a Busy Life ( 1868 ) ; Essays on Po- 

 litical Economy ( 1870) ; What I know of Farming 

 (1871). There are Lives by Parton, Reavis, and 

 Ingersoll, and a memorial volume (1873). 



Greely, ADOLPHUS WASHINGTON, Arctic ex- 

 plorer, was born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, 

 27th March 1844. He served as a volunteer 

 through the war of 1861-65, and shortly after its' 

 conclusion entered the regular army as lieutenant, 

 and in 1868 was placed on the signal service. In 

 1881 he was selected to conduct the American 

 expedition to the head of Smith Sound, for the 

 purpose of carrying on observations in pursuance 

 of the international scheme arranged at Hamburg 

 in 1879. He and the survivors of his party were 

 rescued in June 1883, when at the point of perishing 

 from starvation, after spending three winters in 

 the Arctic north. Their sufferings were so 

 extreme that some of the party had even been 

 reduced to eating the bodies of the dead. Lieu- 

 tenant Lockwood of this expedition travelled to 

 within 396 miles of the geographical pole, the 

 farthest point north hitherto reached. In 1887 

 Greely was appointed chief of the signal service, 

 at the same time being gazetted brigadier-general. 

 In 1886 he published Three Years of Arctic Service. 

 See also W. S. Schley, The Rescue of Greely ( 1885). 



Green, JOHN RICHARD, historian, was born at 

 Oxford in December 1837, and had his education 

 at Magdalen College School and at Jesus College 

 there. The atmosphere of his native city had 

 filled -him, while still a boy, with sympathetic 

 interest in the past, but the reading of Gibbon at 

 sixteen shaped him into a historian. His earliest 

 writing was a striking series of papers in the 

 Oxford Chronicle on 'Oxford in the last Century.' 

 He took orders, and was in succession curate 

 and vicar of two East-end London parishes, where 

 he gave himself with characteristic unselfishness 

 and enthusiasm to the pressing social problems 

 around him. Yet he snatched time from his busy 

 life to pursue his studies and to contribute histori- 

 cal articles to the Saturday Revieiv. In 1868 he 

 became librarian at Lambeth, and next year he 

 was struck clown with an attack of consumption, a 

 disease which darkened all his remaining years, and 

 made any kind of active work hereafter impossible 

 to him. Yet he toiled on with noble and uncom- 

 plaining heroism, and at last the instant popularity 

 of his Short History of the English People (1874) 

 justified the patience and endurance with which he 

 had laboured to bring his work up to his own ideal. 



