Mary Young Cheney Greeley

Who was Mary Young Cheney Greeley?

Mary Young Cheney Greeley was the wife of American newspaper editor Horace Greeley.

They married in Warrenton, North Carolina, on July 5, 1836. Little is known of her early life. She was briefly a schoolteacher, and later an intermittent suffragette and spiritualist. She is reported to have been mentally unstable for much of her life. The date of her birth is uncertain; while her tombstone reads 1811, her obituary gives it as 1814.

Early in their marriage he used her $5000 in savings to fund his first private newspaper.

The marriage was not a happy one, and her oppressive relationship with her husband colored her life. He had little say in the running of the house, and avoided his wife and their house. However, he kept her almost constantly pregnant. Five of their seven children died quite young, at least some of them of neglect.

Greeley was an advocate of the Graham Diet and a Spiritualist. It's likely that she was clinically depressed and a sufferer of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She believed one of their children, a 4 or 5 year old boy, was a spirit medium and constantly demanded that he relay communications from the afterlife.