James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[30] than his father; a man who took life easily, of strict integrity, kind-hearted, gentle-mannered, not ill to do in the world, but not what is called in New England ‘fore-handed.’ He is remembered in the neighborhood where he lived chiefly for his extraordinary knowledge of the Bible. He could quote texts more readily, correctly, and profusely than any of his neighbors, laymen or clergymen. He had the reputation of knowing the whole Bible by heart. He was a Baptist; and all who knew him unite in declaring that a worthier man never lived than Zaccheus Greeley. He had a large family, and lived to the age of ninety-five.

His eldest son was named Zaccheus also, and he is the father of Horace Greeley. He is still living, and cultivates an ample domain in Erie County, Pennsylvania, acquired in part by his own arduous labors, in part by the labors of his second son, and in part by the liberality of his eldest son Horace. At this time, in the seventy-third year of his age, his form is as straight, his step as decided, his constitution nearly as firth, and his look nearly as young, as though he were in the prime of life.

All the Greeleys that I have seen or heard described, are persons of marked and peculiar characters. Many of them are ‘characters.’ The word which perhaps best describes the quality for which they are distinguished is tenacity. They are, as a race, tenacious of life, tenacious of opinions and preferences, of tenacious memory, and tenacious of their purposes. One member of the family died at the age of one hundred and twenty years; and a large proportion of the early generations lived more than three score years and ten. Few of the name have been rich, but most have been persons of substance and respectability, acquiring their property, generally, by the cultivation of the soil, and a soil, too, which does not yield its favors to the sluggard. It is the boast of those members of the family who have attended to its genealogy, that no Greeley was ever a prisoner, a pauper, or, worse than either, a tory! Two of Horace Greeley's great uncles perished at Bennington, and he was fully justified in his assertion, made in the heat of the Roman controversy a few years ago, that he was ‘born of republican parentage, of an ancestry which participated vividly in the hopes and fears, the convictions and efforts of the American Revolution.’ And he added: ‘We cannot disavow nor prove recreant ’