Henry Jarvis Raymond

Henry Jarvis Raymond (January 24, 1820 – June 18, 1869) was an American journalist, newspaper publisher, and politician who co-founded both the Republican Party and The New York Times. He was a member of the New York State Assembly, lieutenant governor of New York, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and a member of the United States House of Representatives. For his prominent role in the formation of the Republican Party, Raymond has sometimes been called the “godfather of the Republican Party.”

Raymond was born on January 24, 1820, on the family farm near Lima, New York. He was the eldest child of Jarvis Raymond, the son of Jonathan P. Raymond and Hannah Jarvis, and Lavinia Brockway, the daughter of Clark Brockway and Sally Wade. He was an eighth-generation direct lineal descendant of Captain Richard Raymond (1602–1692) and his wife, Judith. Captain Raymond, who arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, about 1629 or 1630 and was listed on August 6, 1629, as one of the 30 founding members of the First Church (Congregational) of Salem, became a freeman of Salem in 1634 and was later a founder of Norwalk, Connecticut, and an “honored forefather of Saybrook.” Although some family histories have claimed that Captain Raymond was born in Essex, England, there is no documentary evidence to support that assertion. From an early age, Henry Raymond displayed notable intellectual ability; it was said that he could read by the age of three and deliver speeches by the time he was five.

Raymond’s formal education began when he enrolled at age twelve in the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary at Lima, New York, an institution established by the Methodist Episcopal Church that would later become part of Syracuse University. He went on to attend the University of Vermont, from which he graduated with high honors in 1840. Soon after completing his studies, he moved into journalism, beginning a career that would make him one of the most influential newspaper editors of the nineteenth century. On October 24, 1843, in Winooski, Vermont, he married Juliette Weaver (April 12, 1822 – October 13, 1914), the daughter of John Warren Weaver and Artemisia Munson. The couple had seven children. Their son Henry Warren Raymond (1847–1925) graduated from Yale College in 1869, where he was initiated into the Skull and Bones society, and from Columbia University School of Law in 1871; he worked as a reporter for The New York Times from 1869 to 1872 while studying law and later served as private secretary to Secretary of the Navy Benjamin F. Tracy from 1889 to 1893 before entering private legal practice in 1893. Their daughter Mary Elizabeth Raymond (September 10, 1849 – June 13, 1897) was born in New York City and died in Morristown, New Jersey; she married Earl Philip Mason (August 5, 1848 – March 17, 1901) on April 18, 1872, in New York City. Another daughter, Aimee Juliette Arteniese Raymond (1857–1903), became a physician, writer, and editor; she graduated from New York Medical College in 1889 and married Henry Harmon Schroeder.

Between 1841 and 1851, Raymond worked for several leading New York newspapers, gaining experience that would shape his later editorial philosophy. He began his journalistic career on Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and subsequently served as a journalist and associate editor on James Watson Webb’s Courier and Enquirer. During his time at the Tribune he became acquainted with George Jones, and the two men often discussed founding a newspaper that would distinguish itself by its measured tone and relative political neutrality. In 1851, Raymond, with the help of friends, raised $100,000 in capital—about a hundred times what Greeley had invested in the Tribune a decade earlier—and formed Raymond, Jones & Company, Inc. On September 18, 1851, he and Jones founded The New York Times, with Raymond as editor, a position he held until his death in 1869. From the outset, he sought an editorial niche between Greeley’s open partisanship and James Gordon Bennett’s professed neutrality. In the first issue of the Times, he announced his intention to write in temperate and measured language and to avoid anger except where absolutely necessary, declaring that “there are few things in this world which it is worthwhile to get angry about; and they are just the things anger will not improve.” His editorials were generally cautious, impersonal, and polished in form. President Abraham Lincoln later remarked, “The Times, I believe, is always true to the Union, and therefore should be treated at least as well as any.”

Raymond’s political career developed alongside his journalistic work. A member of the Whig Party’s Northern radical anti-slavery wing, he was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1850 and 1851 and was chosen Speaker in 1851. His nomination over Horace Greeley for lieutenant governor of New York on the Whig ticket in 1854 contributed to the dissolution of the long-standing political partnership among William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, and Greeley. Raymond was elected lieutenant governor and served from 1855 to 1856. As the Whig Party collapsed, he became a key figure in the organization of the new Republican Party. He played a prominent part in its formation and drafted the “Address to the People” adopted by the Republican organizing convention that met in Pittsburgh on February 22, 1856, an effort that led contemporaries and later observers to refer to him as “the godfather of the Republican Party.” He returned to the New York State Assembly in 1862 and again served as Speaker.

During the secession crisis and the Civil War, Raymond used The New York Times to advocate a firm but measured Unionism. He corresponded with Southern leaders, including Alabama secessionist William L. Yancey, to urge adherence to the Constitution and to oppose disunion. He wrote that “we shall stand on the Constitution which our fathers made. We shall not make a new one, nor shall we permit any human power to destroy the one…. We seek no war—we shall wage no war except in defense of the constitution and against its foes. But we have a country and a constitutional government. We know its worth to us and to mankind, and in case of necessity we are ready to test its strength.” Through the winter between Lincoln’s election and the attack on Fort Sumter, the Times, under his direction, deprecated hasty aggression that might provoke violence while insisting that, as a last resort, the Union must be preserved by any means necessary. He favored compromise proposals so long as they did not nullify the election of 1860 or restore national control to the slave power. From the firing on Fort Sumter through Appomattox, the Times remained unwavering in its support of Lincoln and the preservation of the Federal Union.

Raymond’s national political prominence increased during and immediately after the Civil War. In 1865, he served as a delegate to the National Republican Convention and was chosen chairman of the Republican National Committee. That same year he was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1865 to 1867. In Congress, he was among the first to advocate a broad and liberal postwar policy toward the South, aligning himself with President Andrew Johnson and opposing the Radical Republicans, who favored harsher measures. On December 22, 1865, he delivered a notable speech attacking Representative Thaddeus Stevens’s “dead states” theory, which held that the seceded states had forfeited their status in the Union. Raymond argued that the ordinances of secession were null and void and that the states had never legally left the Union. In August 1866, he authored the Address and Declaration of Principles issued by the Loyalist (or National Union) Convention in Philadelphia, which sought to rally support for Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. His attack on Stevens and his leading role at the Loyalist Convention caused him to lose favor within the Republican Party. He was removed as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1866, and in 1867 the United States Senate rejected his nomination as minister to Austria, a post he had already declined.

In addition to his editorial and political work, Raymond was recognized as an able public speaker. One of his best-known addresses was delivered in December 1851 in New York City to welcome the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth, whose cause he publicly defended. He also wrote several books that reflected his political and historical interests, including A Life of Daniel Webster (1853), Political Lessons of the Revolution (1854), A History of the Administration of President Lincoln (1864), and The Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln (1865). These works contributed to contemporary understanding of American statesmanship and the Civil War era and further cemented his reputation as both journalist and historian.

Raymond retired from public political life in 1867 and devoted his remaining years primarily to his work at The New York Times. He died in New York City, New York, on June 18, 1869, from a heart attack, and the circumstances of his sudden death became a subject of some contemporary controversy. He was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. His long association with the New York press and his role in shaping nineteenth-century American journalism were later chronicled in works such as Augustus Maverick’s Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press for Thirty Years (1870) and subsequent histories of The New York Times and the American press.