II
Bryant, like Ellery Channing, J. Q. Adams, Whittier, Wendell Phillips, and Salmon P. Chase, took up the fight for free speech and found that it rapidly led him into the battle for free soil. In January, 1836, Ex-President Adams began in the House of Representatives his heroic contest with the Southerners for the unchecked reception of abolitionist petitions there, and in May the “gag” resolution against these petitions was passed. Bryant’s indignation was scorching. He wrote upon the speech of a New York Senator (April 21):
Mr. Tallmadge has done well in vindicating the right of individuals to address Congress on any matter within its province.... This is something, at a time when the Governor of one State demands of another that free discussion on a particular subject shall be made a crime by law, and when a Senator of the Republic, and a pretended champion of liberty, rises in his place and proposes a censorship of the press more servile, more tyrannical, more arbitrary, than subsists in any other country. It is a prudent counsel also that Mr. Tallmadge gives to the South—to beware of increasing the zeal, of swelling the ranks and multiplying the friends, of the Abolitionists by attempting to exclude them from the common rights of citizens.... Yet it seems to us that Mr. Tallmadge ... might have gone a little further. It seems to us that ... he should have protested with somewhat more energy and zeal against the attempt to shackle the expression of opinion. It is no time to use honeyed words when the liberty of speech is endangered.... If the tyrannical doctrines and measures of Mr. Calhoun can be carried into effect, there is an end to liberty in this country; but carried into effect they cannot be. It is too late an age to copy the policy of Henry VIII; we lie too far in the occident to imitate the despotic rule of Austria. The spirit of our people has been too long accustomed to freedom to bear the restraint which is sought to be put upon it. Discussion will be like the Greek fire, which blazed the fiercer for the water thrown upon it; and if the stake be set and the faggots ready, there will be candidates for martyrdom.
When in August of this year a meeting in Cincinnati resolved to silence J. G. Birney’s abolitionist press by violence, the Evening Post used similar words. No tyranny in any part of the world was more absolute or frightful than such mob tyranny. “So far as we are concerned, we are resolved that this despotism shall neither be submitted to nor encouraged.... We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject for discussion, and argument, and declamation, as the difference between whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians and Calvinists.” This was at a time when the right of Abolitionists to continue their agitation was denied from some of the most influential New York pulpits, when the great majority of citizens had no tolerance for them, and when newspapers like Bennett’s Herald and Hallock’s Journal of Commerce, both pro-slavery, gave them nothing but contempt and denunciation. When Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Ill., by a mob, there were influential New Yorkers who believed that he had received his deserts, but Bryant cried out in horror. Without free tongues and free pens, the nation would fall into despotism or anarchy. “We approve, then, we applaud—we would consecrate, if we could, to universal honor—the conduct of those who bled in this gallant defense of the freedom of the press. Whether they erred or not in their opinions, they did not err in the conviction of their right, as citizens of a democratic State, to express them; nor did they err in defending their rights with an obstinacy which yielded only to death.”
Before 1840 Bryant had enrolled himself among those who held that the spread of slavery must be stopped. President Van Buren had pledged himself to veto any bill for emancipating the slaves in the District of Columbia. Although the plan of freeing the District slaves was abominated by most people in New York city, and even J. Q. Adams would not vote in favor of it in 1836, the Evening Post attacked and derided Van Buren’s pledge. When this reform was included in the Compromise of 1850, it boasted that New Yorkers had been converted to an advocacy of it as overwhelming as their opposition a dozen years earlier. During 1839 a considerable stir was produced in the city by the Armistad affair. A number of Africans sold as slaves in Cuba being transported from Havana to Principe on the schooner Armistad, rose, took possession of the craft, and compelled those of the crew whom they had not killed to steer the vessel, as they believed, to Africa. It was brought into Long Island Sound instead, and the negroes were seized as criminals. Bryant asked his friend Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., to investigate the law, and the latter came to the conclusion, which he expounded at length in the Evening Post, that the blacks could not be held. They had gained their freedom, he said, and were heroes and not malefactors. Secretary of State Forsythe and Attorney-General Grundy did all they could to vindicate the claim of the Spanish Minister to the negroes, but the courts upheld Sedgwick’s view of the issue, and they were liberated.
Every conscientious Democratic journal of the North was faced by a common embarrassment in the decade 1840–1850, when a dominance over the Democratic party was steadily established by advocates of the extension of slavery. If, like the Herald or Journal of Commerce or Express, they were friendly to the South in defiance of conscience, they felt no difficulty. But the Evening Post believed slavery a curse. What could it do when Polk was nominated in 1844 by its own party upon a platform favorable to this vicious institution, and when the Democratic leaders carried the nation into the Mexican War with the effect, if not the calculated purpose, of adding to the slaveowners’ domain? Bryant did not wish to abandon the great party which stood for low tariff, opposition to the squandering of public money on internal improvements, and a decisive separation between the government and banking. He could only do in 1844 what Greeley and the Tribune did in 1848, when Taylor, whom the Tribune distrusted, was nominated by the Whigs; stick to his party, reconcile his feelings as best he could with his party allegiance, and labor to improve the party from within.
The picturesque log-cabin campaign of 1840 offered no perplexities to the Evening Post. It still looked upon President Van Buren with satisfaction, and wished him reëlected. Like its opponent the Tribune, it was glad that Harrison had beaten Henry Clay for the Whig nomination, but that was in no degree because it respected Harrison. It regarded the retired farmer and Indian fighter of North Bend, Ohio, as all Democratic organs regarded him, a nonentity. What title had this feeble villager of nearly seventy, whose last public office had been the clerkship of a county court, to the Presidency? No one has ever thought Harrison a great statesman, and any undue severity on the part of the Evening Post may be attributed to the warmth of the campaign. It called him “a silly and conceited old man whose irregularities of life have enfeebled his originally feeble faculties, and who is as helpless in the hands of his party as the idols of a savage tribe we have somewhere read of, who are flogged when they do not listen to the prayers of their people for rain.” At the beginning of March it declared that Harrison might be elected, but that the most sinister figure in his party would direct his policies; “Harrison may be the nominal chief magistrate, but Clay will be the Charles Martel, the Mayor of the Palace.”
The hard-cider, coonskin-cap, log-cabin enthusiasm sickened the Evening Post. The plan, commented Bryant on the Harrison songs, “is to cut us to pieces with A sharp, to lay us prostrate with G flat, to hunt us down with fugues, overrun us with choruses, and bring in Harrison with a grand diapason.” “The accomplishment of drinking hard cider, possessed by one of the candidates for the Presidency,” he later wrote, was the safest the Whigs could urge. “If they were to talk now of his talents, of his opinions, of his public virtues, and of the other qualifications which are commonly supposed to fit a citizen of our republic for the office of its chief magistrate, they would find themselves much embarrassed.” The Whigs, counting upon the reflex of the panic of 1837, and the unpopularity of Van Buren, to elect Harrison, had taken care to commit themselves to no platform. The Evening Post therefore attributed to them all the evil policies they had ever espoused. Was it worth while to shoulder the burden of a high tariff and a costly internal improvement system, to restore the corrupt union of bank and state, to pay the enormous State debts out of the national treasury, and to strengthen Federal power at the expense of the States, all for the sake of having a President who quaffed hard cider?
During the campaign it was hinted by the Evening Post that if chosen, Harrison could not live to the end of his official term. It recorded the fact that when he arrived in Washington, the fatigue of receiving his friends was “so great that he was obliged to forego the usual ceremony of shaking hands with them.” A month later the paper was commenting upon the ghastly contrast between the festivities, pageants, and congratulations which attended his inauguration, and the solemnity and gloom as the plumed hearse carried his body, behind six white horses, to the Congressional burying ground. Because Bryant refused to write panegryrically of the dead President, though he did write respectfully, and because he refrained from using heavy black column rules for mourning, a practice which he called “typographical foppery,” he was violently assailed by the Whig press as a “vampire” and “ghoul.”
Bryant and Parke Godwin naturally hoped for the renomination of Van Buren in 1844, believing that the battle unfairly won by the Whigs in 1840 ought to be fought again on the same field, and with the same well-tried Democratic leader. Bryant told the story of the Santa Fé hunter who used to pat his rifle, carried for forty years, saying: “I believe in it. I know that whenever I fire there is meat.” In midsummer of 1843 he was confident that victory was already assured, the political reaction since 1841 being “without a parallel in the history of the peaceful conduct of affairs in this country.” The Evening Post welcomed the “black tariff” of 1842, the work of the Whig protectionists, as contributing magnificently to this reaction. It was like an overdose of poison; instead of accomplishing its purpose, it would act as an emetic and be rejected at once. But between that date and Polk’s nomination in May, 1844, there arose the questions of Texas and slavery, offering all editors of Bryant’s views the most distressing dilemma.
From a very early date the Evening Post had opposed the annexation of Texas, except under circumstances that would fully satisfy Mexico on one hand, and free soil sentiment on the other. On June 17, 1836, when Texas had just declared its freedom, Bryant asserted that if the United States, under the circumstances, even acknowledged Texan independence, “our government would lose its character for justice and magnanimity with the whole world, and would deserve to be classed with those spoilers of nations whose example we are taught as republicans to detest.” He frequently spoke with satisfaction of the growth of the little republic, noting in 1843 that it had 80,000 people. But when it became evident early the next year that President Tyler was determined to effect its annexation, the newspaper was alarmed. The first rumor that Secretary of State Calhoun had negotiated a secret treaty with Texas, reaching New York in March, threw it into a fever of indignation. Its chief apprehension arose from the fact that the treaty was said to permit slavery in all parts of the new territory save a small corner to which it was uncertain the United States would have any title. This led the Evening Post to call the project “unjust, impolitic, and hostile to the freedom of the human race.”
The actual treaty, sent to the Senate on April 22 by President Tyler, was assailed with a variety of arguments, but the Evening Post harped chiefly upon the anti-slavery objection. It would inevitably involve the United States in war with Mexico, and cost a huge sum in men and money. The Senate having been elected at a time when no one was thinking of the Texan question, it would be wicked to decide so important an issue affirmatively; there must be some form of national referendum. But above all, the treaty was evil because it would increase the slave population of the nation and bulwark this monstrous Southern institution. It would “keep alive a war more formidable than any to which we are exposed from Great Britain or any other foreign power—we mean the dissensions between the northern and southern regions of the Union. The cause of these dissensions, if the territory of the republic be not enlarged, is gradually losing strength and visibly tending to its extinction, but by the admission of Texas it will be reinforced and perpetuated.” Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., writing under the pen-name “Veto,” was hurriedly impressed into service for a series of articles—admirable articles, too.
The treaty was defeated in the Senate; and then ensued the Presidential campaign of 1844, hinging upon it—the first campaign directly to involve the slavery question.
When the Democratic Convention met at Baltimore on May 27, 1844, it was the fervent hope of the Evening Post and whole northern wing of the party that it would nominate Van Buren. He had publicly declared against immediate annexation of Texas, asserting that it would look like territory-grabbing and intimating that, as the Post had repeatedly said, colossal jobbery by land-speculators was involved. The South was determined that he should not be named. The balloting for a nominee was therefore a decision whether Democracy should stand for or against the extension of slave territory; and because the Southerners were the more aggressive, they won. Van Buren was defeated by the revival of a rule requiring a two-thirds majority, his vote steadily declining, and Polk, a comparatively unknown slave-holder, was named. On May 8 Bryant had said editorially that “the party cannot be rallied, however the politicians may exert themselves,” in favor of an annexationist Southerner. He repeated this warning regarding the candidate on the eve of the convention; “if he declares himself for the annexation of Texas, he will encounter the determined opposition” of the North. It was with unconcealed dismay that the Evening Post chronicled Polk’s nomination. He was a man of handsome talents, manly character, and many sound views, it said, “but like most Southern politicians, is deplorably wrong on the Texas question.”
Should the Evening Post bolt? For a time Bryant considered doing so. But it simply could not accept Clay, the Whig candidate; and admitting that “the fiery and imperious South overrides and silences the North in matters of opinion,” Bryant prepared to make the best of a wretched situation. He explained his stand by saying that on the one hand, he could not possibly assist Clay to win the Presidency and restore the United States Bank; on the other, he did not believe annexation inevitable under Polk. The Democratic platform had declared for annexation “at the earliest practicable moment”; and by emphasizing the word “practicable,” and arguing that it involved all kinds of delays, and the establishment of national good faith precedent to the step, the newspaper tried to argue that it was at least distant.
Bryant’s position was made more tenable when, midway in the campaign, Clay wrote his famous and fatal “Raleigh letter,” in which he said that if annexation could be accomplished without dishonor, war, or injustice, he would be glad to see it. This meant, as thousands of Whigs felt when they stayed from the polls on election day, that there was perhaps little to choose between the candidates.
Yet the Post never quite surrendered its independence, and tried throughout the summer to lead a movement within the party for a proper solution of the Texas question. There were enemies to annexation in Texas itself, it believed; there were enemies throughout the South, even in South Carolina, and the initial enthusiasm for it was beginning to cool. If the Northern Democrats asserted themselves forcibly against it as a party measure, “the day of this scheme, we are fully assured, will soon be over.” In pursuance of this policy, Bryant, Theodore Sedgwick, David Dudley Field, and three other New Yorkers drew up a confidential circular to a number of Democrats of like views, proposing a joint manifesto in opposition to annexation, and a concerted effort to elect anti-annexationist Congressmen. This manifesto appeared in the Evening Post of Aug. 20, and made a considerable impression in New York. But such efforts were in vain. Polk’s election made the entrance of Texas into the Union a certainty, and it was indeed authorized by a joint resolution of Congress the day before he took office. Bryant must have questioned that March whether his newspaper, which had so decisively lost its fight, should not have taken the side of the hated Clay.
The final protests against annexation did not commit the Post to any opposition to the Mexican War. That conflict did not begin for more than two years, until April, 1846; and the events of the interim convinced Bryant that Mexico rather than America was responsible for it. Polk acted pacifically, and the poet’s friend, Bancroft, then Secretary of the Navy, wrote him that “we were driven reluctantly to war.” Mexico had, the Evening Post believed, committed numberless aggressions upon American interests, while after severing diplomatic relations, she would not renew them except on impossible terms. The journal affirmed its belief (May 13, 1846) in “the inconsistency of a war of invasion and conquest with the character of our government and the ends for which Providence has manifestly raised up our republic.” It said then and when peace had come that the nation would yet hold to a fearful responsibility the Southerners who had precipitated the annexation and the war for the perpetuation of slavery. But it did not think that the weak and violent Mexican government had a right to the perpetual allegiance of Texans, or to menace our territory after the annexation. Whereas every one of sense had opposed a war with England over the Oregon question, Bryant wrote, only one or two newspapers were attacking this collision. Writing that “we approve of such demonstrations of vigor as shall convince Mexico that we are in earnest,” the editor favored a resolute prosecution of the struggle.