James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[55] was either ill managed or else the seasons were unfavorable. He gave up the hop-farm, poorer than ever. He removed back to his old home in Amherst. A little legal manoeuvring or rascality on the part of a creditor, gave the finishing blow to his fortunes; and, in the winter of 1821, he gave up the effort to recover himself, became a bankrupt, was sold out of house, land, and household goods by the sheriff, and fled from the State to avoid arrest, leaving his family behind. Horace was nearly ten years old. Some of the debts then left unpaid, he discharged in part thirty years after.

Mr. Greeley had to begin the world anew, and the world was all before him, where to choose, excepting only that portion of it which is included within the boundaries of New Hampshire. He made his way, after some wandering, to the town of Westhaven, in Rutland county, Vermont, about a hundred and twenty miles northwest of his former residence. There he found a large landed proprietor, who had made one fortune in Boston as a merchant, and married another in Westhaven, the latter consisting of an extensive tract of land. He had now retired from business, had set up for a country gentleman, was clearing his lands, and when they were cleared he rented them out in farms. This attempt to ‘found an estate,’ in the European style, signally failed. The ‘mansion house’ has been disseminated over the neighborhood, one wing here, another wing there; the ‘lawn’ is untrimmed; the attempt at a park-gate has lost enough of the paint that made it tawdry once, to look shabby now. But this gentleman was useful to Zaccheus Greeley in the day of his poverty. He gave him work, rented him a small house nearly opposite the park-gate just mentioned, and thus enabled him in a few weeks to transport his family to a new home.

It was in the depth of winter when they made the journey. The teamster that drove them still lives to tell how “old Zac Greeley came to him, and wanted he should take his sleigh and horses and go over with him to New Hampshire State, and bring his family back;” and how, when they had got a few miles on the way, he said to Zac, said he, that he (Zac) was a stranger to him, and he did n't feel like going so far without enough to secure him; and so Zac gave him enough to secure him, and away they drove to New Hampshire State. One sleigh was sufficient to convey all the little property the law had left the family, and the load could not have