William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[4] served even at the ordination of clergymen in parts of New England, and Zaccheus Greeley was never behind his neighbors in acts of hospitality. He was, his son has testified, “a bad manager,” and always in debt, and his farm did not enable him to gain on his indebtedness. In the hope of improving matters, he let his own farm to a younger brother and rented a larger one near by. But the brother could not meet his engagements, and the family moved back in 1819. Sickness ensued, a speculation in lumber proved disastrous, and the end came in the summer of 1820, when the home farm was seized by the sheriff at the instance of several creditors, the father took his departure to escape arrest for debt, and the farm and crops, when sold, left nothing for the wife and children. “When night fell,” wrote the son in later years, “we were as bankrupt a family as well could be.” Horace then had a brother, eight years old, and two sisters of six and four years; another sister was born in 1822.

In the following January the Greeleys, with their effects packed in a two-horse sleigh, joined the father in Westhaven, Vt., where he had hired a house at a rental of $16 a year. There for two years the elder Greeley worked by the day at such jobs as he could secure,