The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism

by Allan Nevins

II

These were years in which much had to be said of the defects of the municipal services, and especially of the police. When the forties began there was no force for the prevention of crime, and only a small, underpaid watch for making arrests. Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., remarked in the Evening Post of September, 1841, upon “the frequency of atrocious crimes”; why was it “that brutal crimes, murders, and rapes have suddenly become so common?” The answer, he thought, was that New Yorkers elected their city administrations for their views upon national questions, not because they would furnish efficient government. It was then held shocking that in less than two years, 1838–9, there had been six murders in the city and no convictions. On the Fourth of July in 1842 a German named Rosseler, who kept a quiet beer garden on Twenty-first Street, ejected some ruffians from it; and two days later they returned, burnt his house, destroyed his property, and almost killed a neighbor whom they mistook for him. The Evening Post was moved to demand “a police which has eyes and ears for all these enormities, and hands to seize the offenders.” Just a week before Mayor Morris called upon the Legislature (May 29, 1843) in his annual message to provide an adequate police, Bryant penned another protest:

We maintain a body of watchmen, but they are of no earthly use, except here and there to put an end to a street brawl, and sometimes to pick up a drunken man and take him to the watch house. In some cases, they have been suspected of being in a league with the robbers. At present, we hear of a new case of housebreaking about as often as every other day. Within a few days past, in one neighborhood in the upper part of town, two houses have been broken into and plundered, and an attempt has been made to set fire to another.

Of course there will be no end to this evil, until there is a reform in the police regulations—until a police of better organization and more efficiency shall be introduced. Our city swarms with daring and ingenious rogues, many of whom have been driven from the Old World, and who find no difficulty in exercising their vocation here with perfect impunity.

“Our city, with its great population and vast extent, can hardly be said to have a police,” wrote the editor again in the following February. But immediately after the election of James Harper, the publisher, as Mayor, a force of 200 patrolmen was organized, a number soon increased to 800. When Mayor William V. Brady in 1847 proposed abolishing them and restoring the watch system, the newspaper was amazed. The night watchmen had never arrested any one when it was avoidable, for every arrest meant that the officer lost half of the next day from his usual work testifying at the trial. The watch had never stopped a public disturbance—the abolition and flour riots had destroyed property that would have supported a police force several years; but the police had quelled several incipient outbreaks. The Evening Post was not for abolishing, but for improving the new force. One of the reforms it sought was the clothing of the men in distinctive uniforms. As it explained again and again, a uniformed policeman could be seen from a distance and accosted for information or help; he would be obeyed by rowdies when a policeman out of uniform would lack authority; and he could not loiter in corner groggeries. This salutary improvement was finally effected in the fall of 1853.

As for the fire department, New York depended upon the volunteer system from the time the Evening Post was founded until 1865, and at no date after Bryant’s return from Europe in 1836 had his journal any patience with it. There was never any difficulty in making the force large enough; when abolished, it consisted of 125 different hose, engine, and ladder companies. The objection was to its personnel. Gangs of desperate young blackguards, said the Post at the beginning of 1840, assembled nightly near the engine-houses, devoted themselves to ribaldry, drinking, fighting, and buffoonery, and not infrequently were guilty of riots, robbery, and assaults upon women. They levied forced contributions upon storekeepers to buy liquor and pay their fines whenever they were jailed. At conflagrations they carried off whatever movables were spared by the flames. The volunteer system, collecting these ruffians in various capacities, gave them the opportunity to gratify their restless love of excitement, destroyed their fitness for regular employment, and rapidly made them confirmed drunkards. The clanship engendered by the hostility of the different companies led to bloody street fights. What should be done? The Evening Post recommended “the prohibition of the volunteer system by penal enactments”; and if the city could not support a paid force, the abandonment of the field to the insurance companies.

In September, 1841, the Evening Post was again vigorously denouncing “the desperate scoundrels nourished by the fire department.” These denunciations it had ample opportunity to keep up month by month, for the frequency of incendiarism and of street affrays among the volunteer companies was appalling. The best companies were ill-equipped, since not until 1856, after obstinate opposition, were really powerful fire engines introduced from Cincinnati. The regular firemen were accompanied by a swarm of “runners” and irregular assistants, many of them known to be guilty of arson. Whenever two rival companies wished a trial of skill, a fire was sure to break out in a convenient place. The subscriptions for funds circulated among shopkeepers and householders were little better than blackmail, for it was well known that those who withheld contributions were peculiarly liable to fires. In their deadly feuds the companies, fighting with hammers, axes, knives, and pistols, furnished the morgue and the hospitals with dozens of subjects a year. Thieves frequently started conflagrations. We read in the Evening Post just after the destruction of Metropolitan Hall (1854):

At the fire on Saturday night, about half of the goods that were thrown out of the windows of the La Farge Hotel, it has been estimated, were carried away by thieves. The inmates of the Bond Street House, who were obliged suddenly to decamp, found afterwards that their rooms had been rifled, and all the valuables which they left behind carried away....

There is no city in the world where the thefts committed at fires are so many and so considerable as with us. The rogues have an organization which brings them in an instant to the spot, the goods are passed rapidly from hand to hand, and disappear forever. A large fire is a windfall to the whole tribe.

Cincinnati the previous year, as the Post said, had substituted a paid fire department for the volunteer system. It was disgraceful for New York to depend on a violent, licentious body which was educating the city’s youth in turbulence and rowdiness and was often worse than useless when the firebell sounded. The insurance companies at this time kept eighty men, at a cost of $30,000, to guard against fires, and many merchants and families employed private watchmen. But relief did not come for more than a decade.

Similar complaints rose constantly from the Evening Post regarding the foulness of the streets. It said in the early forties that they ought to be swept daily, as they were in London and Paris, and by machinery; that with New York’s hot summer climate and the popular habit of throwing offal into the gutters, it was intolerable to have them cleaned only every two or three days. In 1846 it called the neglect “scandalous,” the dust and odors “insufferable.” The reason why horse-brooms were not employed was that the use of manual labor gave employment to gangs whose votes the ward-heelers wanted at election time; but really no men need be thrown out of work—they could be set to repairing the broken pavements. When the Crystal Palace exhibition was held in New York in 1853, the British section contained two street-sweeping machines, one of which not only gathered together but loaded the dirt. The machines, it was true, could not vote, but by their use, according to the Evening Post’s calculations, the cost of cleaning New York might be reduced from $330,000 a year to between $50,000 and $90,000. Next year Bryant gave publicity to the experiment of John W. Genin, a Broadway merchant, who collected $2,000 from his business neighbors, obtained horse-brooms, and at an expense of $450 a week, for a month, made Broadway from Bowling Green to Union Square look like “a new-scrubbed kitchen floor.”

Not until the end of the thirties did allegations of corruption in the city government become frequent in Bryant’s editorial columns. In August, 1843, we find the Evening Post beginning the complaints against the Charter which it was to maintain without interruption until the early seventies. It believed and continued to believe that the two boards of aldermen and assistant aldermen, soon nicknamed “the forty thieves,” had too much power. “They are at once our municipal legislature and our municipal executive; in part also, they are our municipal judiciary; they are the directors of the city finances; they are the fountain of patronage; they are all this for the greatest commercial city in the western world.” Their government it held to be always expensive and arbitrary, often inefficient, and sometimes dishonest.

The Post supported an abortive effort to amend the Charter in 1846, and in 1853, after Azariah Flagg as Controller had stripped some flagrant extravagance and grafting, it gave its voice to another movement which proved successful. Tweed was at this time an alderman. The newspaper charged the body of which he was a member with selling city property and valuable franchises for nominal prices, and then by its control of the courts quashing all efforts at prosecution. When by a smashing popular vote (June 7, 1853) the new Charter was carried, abolishing the Board of Assistant Aldermen, and excluding the aldermen from sitting in the courts of Oyer and Terminer and of the Sessions, the Post said that “a more significant and humiliating rebuke was never administered upon a body of public officers in this State before.” It little thought then that the corruption of the past was but a trifle to the corruption coming.

Bryant’s place as the foremost citizen of the lusty young metropolis was by 1850 becoming secure. He, Irving, and Cooper were universally regarded as the country’s greatest literary men. Irving was passing his final placid years at Sunnyside; Cooper on Otsego Lake, one of the most quarrelsome men in the country, was near the end of his stormy career. The city heard of them only occasionally. But Bryant was in the prime of life, seen almost daily on the streets, and heard upon every passing question. In the late forties he began to be known as a speaker upon public occasions. He delivered his eulogy upon the artist Cole in 1848 with much nervousness, but by 1851, when he presided over the press banquet to Kossuth, he had acquired self-confidence and ease. Thereafter he was in constant demand for addresses to all kinds of audiences—literary groups, the New York Historical Society, the Scotch when they celebrated the centenary of Burns’s birth, the Germans in their Schiller celebration, and so on. His increasing prestige in the city was naturally reflected upon the Evening Post.

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CHAPTER NINE
LITERARY ASPECTS OF BRYANT’S NEWSPAPER, 1830–1855

For reasons fairly evident Bryant seldom used the Evening Post for the publication of his poems; he was too modest, and the magazines of the day too earnestly besought him for whatever he might write. In 1832 he brought out “The Prairies” in it, and in 1841 “The Painted Cup”—that was all in early years. He had no time for literary essays, even had he felt the Post the place for them. As for the new books, no one yet thought that dailies should give them more than brief notices; moreover, Bryant disrelished book-reviewing, a task against which he had protested while a magazine editor, and he never quite trusted his judgment upon new volumes of poetry. The Evening Post had less literary distinction in his early editorship than might be supposed; but it had much literary interest.

The most interesting book comments of the thirties were upon British travels in America. England did not like it when Hawthorne, in “Our Old Home,” called the British matron beefy. The United States did not like Dickens’s portrait of Col. Jefferson Brick, praising the ennobling institution of nigger slavery; of Prof. Mullit, who at the last election had repudiated his father for voting the wrong ticket; and Gen. Fladdock, who halted his denunciation of British pride to snub Martin Chuzzlewit when he learned that Martin had come in the steerage. At that period the United States was as sensitive as a callow youth. “We people of the Universal Yankee Nation,” remarked the Evening Post in 1833, “much as we may affect to despise the strictures of such travelers as Fearon, Capt. Roos, Basil Hall, and Mrs. Trollope, are yet mightily impatient under their censure, and manifest on the appearance of each successive book about our country a great anxiety to get hold of it and devour its contents.”

Most Americans joined in indiscriminating complaints over the animadversions of the British travelers. A few were inclined to applaud the less extreme criticism in the hope that the sound portions might be taken to heart. Bryant thought that the country had been “far too sensitive” to Basil Hall, calling that naval traveler “a good sort of prejudiced English gentleman, who saw things in a pretty fair light for a prejudiced man.” He had a high opinion of parts of Miss Martineau’s travels, though he wrote his wife that she had been given a wrong impression in some particulars by Dr. Karl Follen and the narrow-minded Boston abolitionists. Twice he asked Evening Post readers (1832–3) to remember that although Mrs. Trollope might be shrewish, she was also shrewd, and that if she had exaggerated some of the national foibles, she had sketched others accurately. In her “Domestic Manners of the Americans,” he believed, “there was really a good deal to repay curiosity. That work, notwithstanding all its misrepresentations, exaggerations, and prejudices, was a very clever and spirited production, and contained a deal of truth which, however unpalatable, has at least proved of useful tendency.” He called Capt. Marryat’s “Diary in America” a “blackguard book,” more flippant than profound, and deplored the fact that Charles Augustus Murray’s “Travels in America,” which was issued at the same time (1839), and was the work of “a well-disposed, candid, gentlemanly sort of person,” would not have one-tenth the sale. An excerpt from the dramatic criticism of the Evening Post in September, 1832, shows how effective Mrs. Trollope actually was in improving our manners. At a performance by Fanny Kemble, a gentleman, between acts, assumed a sprawling position upon a box railing:

Hissings arose, and then bleatings, and then imitations of the lowing of cattle; still the unconscious disturber pursued his chat—still the offending fragment of his coat-tail hung over the side. At last there was a laugh, and cries of “Trollope! Trollope! Trollope!” with roars of laughter, still more loud and general.

But the most important visit of a foreigner after Lafayette’s was the American tour of Dickens in the early months of 1842. It is of special interest in the history of the Evening Post as marking the active beginning of a campaign in which it took the leading part among American dailies—the campaign for international copyright, lasting a full half century.

“The popularity of Mr. Dickens as a novelist throws almost all other contemporary popularity into the shade,” the Evening Post had exclaimed on March 31, 1839, when each successive installment of “Nicholas Nickleby” was being received with unprecedented enthusiasm in America. “His humor is frequently broad farce, and his horrors are often exaggerated, extravagant, and improbable; but he still has so much humor, and so much pathos, that his defects are overlooked.” His striking originality the paper also praised. In 1840–41 came the “Old Curiosity Shop,” which, as the Post noted, was issued in numbers as rapidly as the text could be brought overseas, and caught up in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia by piratical publishers. When Dickens spoke at a public dinner in Boston he recalled how from all parts of America, from cities and frontier, he had received letters about Little Nell. There were few educated Americans who were not acquainted with these books, or with the earlier “Pickwick” or “Oliver Twist”; and the news that this genius of thirty was to visit the country sent a thrill throughout it.

Before the end of January, 1842, readers of the Evening Post and other New York papers learned how Dickens had reached Halifax and been given a reception in the Parliament House. A few days after, the Post published an account of his welcome in Boston. He was at the Tremont House, the halls and environs of which were crowded; one distinguished caller followed another; whenever he went out to see the sights, or the theater, he was given an ovation; and deputations were arriving with invitations from distant cities and towns. “Mr. Dickens, we fear, is made too much a lion for his own comfort,” observed the paper, and repeated the warning next day. On Feb. 2 it gave nearly an eighth of its reading matter to an account of plans for the great Boz Ball, as laid at a public meeting at the Astor House, presided over by Mayor Robert H. Morris. The Park Theater was to be converted into a ballroom, and its alcoves fitted up into representations of the Old Curiosity Shop’s corners, in which scenes from Dickens’s novels might be illustrated. On Feb. 7 there appeared an account of the ceremonial Dickens dinner in Boston, with the happy speech of Mayor Quincy. An invitation to a public dinner in New York, signed among others by Bryant and Theodore Sedgwick, had meanwhile been dispatched to Dickens.

The Boz Ball on the fourteenth was, said the Evening Post in an account that was half news, half editorial, “one of the most magnificent that has ever been given in this city. The gorgeousness of the decorations and the splendor of the dresses, no less than the immense throng, glittering with silks and jewels, contributed to the show and impressiveness of the occasion. It is estimated that nearly 3,000 people were present, all richly dressed and sparkling with animation.” Dickens’s letters bear this out—“from the roof to the floor, the theater was decorated magnificently; and the light, glitter, glare, noise, and cheering baffle my descriptive powers.” The great crowd made dancing an ordeal, but the novelist and his wife remained until they were almost too tired to stand. Some of the newspapers drew heavily upon the imagination in their personal references to Dickens. They told how, while a charming young man, bright-eyed, sparkling with gayety and life, his freedom of manner shocked a few fashionable people; how he could never have moved in such fine society in England; and how he was “apparently thunderstruck” by the magnificence about him. The Evening Post confined its personal observations to the statement that Dickens wore black, “with a gay vest,” and that his wife appeared in a white figured Irish tabinet trimmed with mazarine blue flowers, with a wreath of the same color about her head, and pearl necklace and earrings. It described the tableaux in full—Mr. Leo Hunter’s fancy dress party, the middle-aged lady in the hotel room that Pickwick invaded, Mr. and Mrs. Mantalini in Ralph Nickleby’s office, the Stranger and Barnaby Rudge, and so on.

The Boz Dinner, at which Bryant was a leading figure, received no less than three columns, crowding out all editorial matter—pretty good evidence that Bryant himself wrote the report. Washington Irving presided, and made a few halting remarks, toasting Dickens as the guest of the nation. “There,” he said as he took his seat (Bryant of course did not mention this), “I told you I should break down, and I’ve done it.” The Evening Post gave a full transcript of Dickens’s speech, much of which was a tribute to Irving, and which concluded with a reference to the presence of Bryant and Halleck as making appropriate a toast to American literature. The dinner closed with a storm of applause for the sentiment, “The Works of Our Guest—Like Oliver Twist, We Ask for More”; and the Evening Post was soon reporting Dickens’s reception in Washington.

Some observers were puzzled by the enthusiasm of Dickens’s reception, and the Courrier des Etats Unis tried to account for it by several theories: first, because Americans were eager to refute the accusation that they cared nothing for art and everything for money; second, because they supposed Dickens was taking notes, and wished to conciliate his opinion; and third, because the austere Puritanism of America, restraining the people from many ordinary enjoyments, made them seize upon such occasions as a vent for their natural love of excitement.

Bryant admitted that there was force in the third part of this explanation, but in the Evening Post he took the simpler view that the cordiality originated in the main from a sincere admiration for the novelist’s genius. He pointed out that Dickens’s excellences were of a kind that appealed to all classes, from the stableboy to the statesman. “His intimate knowledge of character, his familiarity with the language and experience of low life, his genuine humor, his narrative power, and the cheerfulness of his philosophy, are traits that impress themselves upon minds of every description.” But his higher traits were such as particularly recommended him to Americans. “His sympathies seek out that class with whom American institutions and laws sympathize most strongly. He has found subjects of thrilling interest in the passions, sufferings, and virtues of the mass.” For itself, while regretting a certain excess of fervor in Dickens’s welcome, the Evening Post regarded it as a healthy token. “We have so long been accustomed to seeing the homage of the multitude paid to men of mere titles, or military chieftains, that we have grown tired of it. We are glad to see the mind asserting its supremacy—to find its rights generally recognized. We rejoice that a young man, without birth, wealth, title, or a sword, whose only claims to distinction are in his intellect and heart, is received with a feeling that was formerly rendered only to conquerors and kings.”

Dickens’s visit was not merely for pleasure or observation, and in his endeavors to promote the cause of international copyright legislation the Post was already keenly interested. As early as 1810 Coleman, under the heading, “Imposition,” had attacked the pirating of “Travels in the Northern Part of the United States,” by Edward A. Kendall, an Englishman whom Coleman knew, as not only “a trespass upon the rights of the author,” but a fraud upon the public, since the edition was mutilated. In 1826 he or Bryant had commented acridly upon the appearance of a Cambridge edition of Mrs. Barbauld’s poems at the same time that the New York publishers, G. and C. Carvill, brought out an authorized edition the profits of which went to the author’s heirs. Miss Martineau, sojourning in America in 1836, had taken up the question with Bryant. Upon returning home she had sent him a copy of a petition by many English writers, including Dickens and Carlyle, to Congress, together with copies of brief letters by Wordsworth, Miss Edgeworth, Lord Brougham, and others indorsing it; and it was published with hearty commendation in the Evening Post.

The question was one in which Bryant, like Cooper and Irving, had a selfish as well as altruistic interest. All American authors were trying to sell their wares to publishers and readers who could get English books without payment of royalty. Each of Dickens’s works, as it appeared, was snapped up and placed on the market for twenty-five cents or less. “Barnaby Rudge,” during his tour of this country, was advertised in the Evening Post as available, complete, in two issues of the New World, for a total cost of sixteen and one-fourth cents. The next week it was issued under one cover for twenty-five cents. The novels of Bulwer, Disraeli, and Ainsworth were presented in the same way, as was the poetry of Hood and Tennyson. Napier’s “Peninsular War” was advertised in the Post in 1844 by J. S. Redfield in nine volumes at a quarter dollar apiece, and Milman’s edition of Gibbon, with his notes copyright in England, by Harpers in fifteen parts at the same price.

In his speech at the Boston dinner “Boz” boldly set forth the injustice which he believed the lack of an American international copyright law was doing English writers. Several Boston journals were offended, while the paper-makers belonging to the “Home League” in New York met to express opposition to any new copyright legislation. Bryant at once (on Feb. 11) took Dickens’s side in the Evening Post. If the American laws allowed every foreigner to be robbed of his money and baggage the moment he landed, he wrote, and closed the courts to his claims for redress, the nation would be condemned as a den of thieves. “When we deny a stranger the same right to the profits of his own writings as we give to our citizens, we commit this very injustice; the only difference is that we limit the robbery to one kind of property.”

At the New York dinner Dickens advanced the same subject in a few words. “I claim that justice be done; and I prefer the claim as one who has a right to speak and be heard,” the Evening Post quoted him. He breakfasted with Bryant and Halleck, and was entertained at the poet’s home, where he probably spoke to him in private and received assurances of the Post’s support. On May 9 there appeared a letter from Dickens “To the Editor of the Evening Post,” dated April 30 at Niagara Falls, in which he repeated his appeal. With it he enclosed a short letter from Carlyle, wherein the Scotchman thanked him because “We learn by the newspapers that you everywhere in America stir up the question of international copyright, and thereby awaken huge dissonance where else all were triumphant unison for you.” He also enclosed a much longer address “To the American People,” signed by Bulwer, Campbell, Tennyson, Talfourd, Hood, Leigh Hunt, Hallam, Sydney Smith, Rogers, Forster, and Barry Cornwall. This eminent group pointed out that the lack of an international copyright agreement was a serious injury to American authors, who had to compete on unfair terms with the British; and it argued that the supply of standard English books in a cheap form would not really be diminished by such copyright legislation. Books were sold at a high or low price not because they were copyrighted or uncopyrighted, but in proportion as they obtained few or many readers; and the educational system of the United States guaranteed a large reading public.

Bryant reinforced these letters with an editorial, remarkable as an expression of confidence in the brilliant future of American letters. It was a mistake, he maintained, to suppose that in the absence of an international copyright agreement the United States had wholly the best of the situation:

Within the last year, the number of books written by American authors, which have been successful in Britain, is greater than that of foreign works which have been successful in this country. Robertson’s work on Palestine, Stephens’s Travels in Central America, Catlin’s book on North American Indians, Cooper’s Deerslayer, the last volume of Bancroft’s American history, several works prepared by Anthon for the schools—here is a list of American works republished in England within the year for which we should be puzzled to find an equivalent in works written in England within the same time, and republished here. Our eminent authors are still engaged in their literary labors. Cooper within a fortnight past has published a work stamped with all the vigor of his faculties, Prescott is occupied in writing the History of Peru, Bancroft is engaged in continuing the annals of his native country, Sparks is still employed in his valuable historical labors, and Stephens is pushing his researches in Central America, with a view of giving their results to the world. We were told, the other day, of a work prepared for the press by Washington Irving, which would have appeared ere this but for the difficulties in the way of securing a copyright for it in England, as well as here.

He drew an inspiring picture of the effect of the success of these authors in raising up aspirants for literary fame. Irving had just told him, he wrote, “that if American literature continued to make the same progress as it had done for twenty years past, the day was not very far distant when the greater number of books designed for readers of the English language would be produced in America.”

The editor continued his unavailing efforts for a sound copyright law year after year, decade after decade. He took pains to do justice to the opposition, recognizing that it was by no means all mercenary, and that economists like Matthew Carey advanced arguments worthy of examination. When Dickens published a letter (July 14, 1842) in the London Morning Chronicle, asserting that the barrier to the reform in America was the influence of “the editors and proprietors of newspapers almost exclusively devoted to the republication of popular English works,” and that they were “for the most part men of very low attainments, and of more than indifferent reputation,” Bryant hastened in the Evening Post to call this a misrepresentation. He knew many sincere and respectable men who condemned the international copyright proposals from the best of motives. But the crusade was always near his heart. When in 1843 a petition for the needed law was presented to Congress by ninety-seven firms and persons engaged in the book trade, he supported it, and he did the same when ten years later five New York publishers addressed Secretary of State Everett in behalf of a copyright treaty with Great Britain. At this time he believed that the chief obstacle was the simple indifference of Congressmen; that they did not comprehend the question, nor try to comprehend it, because no party advantage or disadvantage was connected with it.

In the thirties and forties book-reviewing, in the strict sense of the phrase, was almost unknown in the New York daily press. The chief exceptions to the rule were furnished by Edgar Allan Poe, who in the middle forties contributed some genuine criticism to N. P. Willis’s Mirror and other journals, and by Margaret Fuller. Miss Fuller, writing in the Tribune for more than a year and a half preceding her visit to Europe in 1846, performed a signal service to American letters by her courage and acuteness, for her criticism of Longfellow as too foreign in his themes and of Lowell as too imitative had a salutary effect upon those poets. But Poe and Margaret Fuller were passing meteors in New York journalism. Until George Ripley and John Bigelow joined the Tribune and Evening Post respectively in 1849 mere hasty notices were given most books.

The newspaper most conspicuously in a position to pronounce upon new volumes was the Evening Post, for the literary judgment of Bryant and Parke Godwin was excellent. But Bryant had no ambition to be known as a critic. Apart from his shrewd but not deeply penetrative discourses upon Irving, Cooper, Verplanck, and Halleck, he wrote only a half-dozen extensive literary essays, the best known being his really fine “Poets and Poetry of the English Language,” with its insistence upon a “luminous style.” Moreover, so straitened were the paper’s circumstances and so small in consequence was its staff, that he and Godwin had no time for reading and reviewing. “I see the outside of almost every book that is published, but I read little that is new,” runs a letter of Bryant’s to Dana in 1837. Frank avowal was frequently made that a formal review was not within the Evening Post’s powers. The notice of Cooper’s “Wyandotte” (1843) opened with the remark that “we have not had time to read it, but we are informed by the preface....” Five years later Bryant wrote of J. T. Headley’s “Cromwell”: “We have not time in the midst of the continual hurry in which those are involved who write for a daily newspaper, to examine the work with any minuteness; this will be done doubtless by professed critics.”

Slight as were the Post’s comments upon most books, a particular interest attaches to those upon current volumes of poetry, for Bryant wrote them; his associate, John Bigelow, has expressed surprise that Parke Godwin, in his biography, did not collect them. In the “Fable for Critics,” Lowell speaks of Bryant’s “iceolation,” and biographers of both Longfellow and Poe have accused him of indifference to these younger poets. There is much evidence, however, as in Bryant’s admiring letter to Longfellow in 1846, that the charge is unfair; and a study of the Evening Post files indicates that its editor carefully followed the work of his juniors in poetry, was glad to bring it to public notice, and was a good deal more prone to over-praise than to underrate it. Bryant was the dean among American poets, the first to gain fame, and regarded by Griswold, Walt Whitman, and many others as the best of them; as the Bryant Festival in 1864 showed, in which Holmes, Lowell, Emerson, and Whittier participated, they all looked up to him.

Longfellow was the next eldest of the truly great poets. In the pages of the United States Review in the twenties some of his earliest poems are found side by side with Bryant’s. In later life he acknowledged to Bryant how much he owed the latter: “When I look back upon my early years, I cannot but smile to see how much in them is really yours. It was an involuntary imitation, which I most readily confess.” Bryant was interested in his career long before he had published a volume of verse, and took care in the Evening Post to give his first two books, the prose “Outre Mer” (1835) and “Hyperion” (1839) due praise. Of the former he said that it “is very gracefully written, the style is delightful, the descriptions are graphic, and the sketches of character have often an agreeable vein of quiet humor.” The latter was treated a little less warmly. The romance is “tinged with peculiarities derived from the author’s fondness for German literature,” Bryant wrote, and its strain of deeper reflection “now and then passes into the grand dimness of German speculation.” The story was slight, and had little attraction for those who wished a narrative of crowded incident. But the verdict as a whole was favorable: “upon the slender thread of his narrative the author has hung a tissue of agreeable sketches of the different parts of Germany, supposed to be visited by the hero, delineations of character, and reflections upon morals and literature.”

The Evening Post’s review of Longfellow’s first volume of poems, “Voices of the Night” (1839; signed J. Q. D.) was short but flattering. It quoted the purest poetry of the little book:

I heard the trailing garments of the night
Sweep through her marble halls!

and its criticism emphasized the two youthful qualities which should have been most emphasized, simplicity and freshness. “These voices of the night breathe a sweet and gentle music, such as befits the time when the moon is up, and all the air is clear, and soft, and still. The original poems in the volume are characterized by the truest simplicity of thought and style; the thin veil of mysticism which is thrown over some of them adds only grace to the picture, without tantalizing the eye.” Longfellow’s second volume, the “Poems on Slavery” (1842), came as a shock to a society as yet not inured to anti-slavery doctrines. The editors of Graham’s Magazine wrote the author that the word “slavery” was never allowed to appear in a Philadelphia magazine, and that the publisher objected to have even the title of the book mentioned in his pages. Till a later date Harper’s in New York similarly objected to mention of the slavery question. But Bryant quoted “The Slave’s Dream” in full, and said of the sheaf: “They have all the characteristics of Longfellow’s later poems, adding to the grace and harmony of his earlier, a vein of deeper and stronger feeling, maturer thought, bolder imagery, and a more suggestive manner.”

Thus the successive issues of Longfellow’s verse were all hailed with kindly appreciation. When “Ballads and Other Poems” appeared, Bryant praised (Jan. 10, 1842) the “grace and melody” with which the author handled hexameters in a translation from Tegner, and the “noble and affecting simplicity” of the result, while he pronounced the miscellaneous poems beautiful. “Evangeline,” four years later, inspired the publication in the Post of an anonymous burlesque imitation, next the editorial columns, which it is almost certain is Bryant’s. He wrote such humorous trifles till his latest years, and he accompanied this with some remarks upon German hexametric verse, with which he was thoroughly familiar. Dated “in the ante-temperance period of our history,” it showed old Tom Robinson seated in his elbow chair:

Red was the old man’s nose, with frequent potations of cider,
Made still redder by walking that day in the teeth of the north wind.
Warmth from the blazing fire had heightened the tinge of its scarlet;
While at each broad red flash from the hearth it seemed to grow redder.

“Jemmy, my boy,” he said, and turned to a tow-headed urchin,
“Bring your poor uncle a mug of cider up from the cellar.”
Straightway rose from the chimney nook the obedient Jemmy ...
Took from the cupboard shelves a mug of mighty dimensions,
Opened the cellar door, and down the cellarway vanished.
Soon he came back with the mighty vessel brimming and sparkling,
Full and fresh, the old man took it and raised it with both hands,
Drained the whole at a draught, and handed it, dripping and empty,
Back to the boy, and winking hard with both eyes as he did it,
Stretched out his legs to the fire, while his nose grew redder and redder.

When “The Seaside and the Fireside” was published in 1850, Bryant gave especial praise to “The Building of the Ship,” in many ways the best poem Longfellow ever wrote. An unpoetical subject; but “the author treats it with as much grace of imagery as if it were a fairy tale, and finds in it ample matter suggestive of beautiful trains of thought.” He quoted the fervent closing apostrophe to the nation threatened by civil war, “Sail on, O Union, strong and great!”; and by accident, in the adjoining column, part of the Post’s Washington correspondence, lay a paragraph describing the sensation aroused by the secessionist manifesto of Clingman, a fire-eating North Carolina Congressman. Of “Hiawatha” in 1855 Bryant said:

A long poem, founded on the traditions of the American aborigines, and their modes of life, is a somewhat hazardous experiment. Longfellow, however, has acquitted himself quite as well as we had expected. The habits of the Indians are gracefully idealized in his verses, and we recognize the author of “Evangeline” in the tenderness of the thoughts, the richness of the imagery, and the flow of the numbers.... A love story is interwoven with the poem, and the narrative of Hiawatha’s wooing is beautifully and fancifully related. The canto of The Ghosts is wrought up with a fine supernatural effect, and the mysterious departure of Hiawatha, with which the poem closes, after the appearance of the first messenger of the Christian gospel among his countrymen, is well imagined.

Lowell’s first two volumes of poems were moderately commended. “There are fine veins of thought in Lowell’s verse, with frequently a fresh and vigorous expression,” Bryant remarked of the second (Feb. 12, 1848). For Emerson there was a more glowing word of praise. He is “a brilliant writer, both in prose and verse, though perhaps, as a poet, too reflective, too subjective, the modern metaphysician would call it, to suit the popular taste,” Bryant commented in the Post of Jan. 4, 1847, when Emerson’s first collection was issued. “His little address in verse to the humble bee is, however, one of the finest things of the sort—a better poem, in our estimation, than Anacreon’s famous ode to the cicada.” Whittier’s verse, he thought in 1843, writing of “Lays of My Home,” “grows better and better. With no abatement of poetic enthusiasm, his style becomes more manly, and his vein of thought richer and deeper.” References to Poe, anterior to the obituary of Oct. 9, 1849, which Bryant did not write, for he was then abroad, and which called him a “genius” and “an industrious, original, and brilliant writer,” are few. The Evening Post had remarked in 1845 that he was at least within a “t” of being a poet, and had followed his lectures that year at the Society Library. The Express on April 18 stated that he had discoursed at length upon the poets, and criticized his views. At this the Post professed amazement, for its reporter had distinctly heard Poe postpone the lecture; had he delivered it exclusively to the Express?

It is pleasant to record that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s genius was recognized and forcibly described. Not always promptly, but always emphatically, the Evening Post recommended “The Scarlet Letter,” “Twice-Told Tales,” “The House of Seven Gables,” and other books to its readers. It expressed the hope in 1851 that the success of the first-named “will awaken him to the consciousness of what he seems to have been writing in ignorance of, that the public is an important party, not only to the author’s fame, but to his usefulness.” It thought that much as he had accomplished, he had not yet done justice to his powers. Two years later it congratulated him upon the leisure that his appointment as consul at Liverpool should afford, and recalling that he was just at the age when Walter Scott first appeared as a novelist, said that it saw no reason why the latter half of Hawthorne’s life might not be equally brilliant. Unfortunately, the romancer had but eleven more years to live. To quote three short comments upon books by other great prose authors, one of which appeared in 1842, another in 1849, and the third in 1850, will show the general character of such notices, and illustrate how little criticism was given:

THE DEERSLAYER, or THE FIRST WAR PATH, Cooper’s last novel, is one of his finest productions. In the wild forest where the scene is laid, and in the wild life of the New York hunters of the last century and their savage neighbors, his genius finds the aliment of its finest strength. The work is, as he observes, the first act in the life of Leatherstocking, though written last, and it exhibits this singular being, one of the most strongly marked and most interesting creatures of fiction, in his early youth, fresh from his education among the Delawares, and now for the first time employing in war the weapon which had gained him a reputation as a hunter. The narrative is one of intense interest from beginning to close, and the characters of the various personages with whom the hero of the story is associated, are drawn with perhaps more skill, and a deeper knowledge of human nature, than in most of the author’s previous novels.

* * * * *

THE CALIFORNIA AND OREGON TRAIL, by Francis Parkman, is a pleasant book relating adventures and wanderings in the western wilderness, and describing the life of the western hunters and the Indian tribes. It will give those who are about to make the journey across the Rocky Mountains a good idea of the country lying between us and the regions on the Pacific Coast, and of the savage people who roam over it.

* * * * *

EMERSON’S REPRESENTATIVE MEN.—We have received from J. Wiley, of this city, Emerson’s Seven Lectures on Representative Men, just published by Phillips, Sampson, and Company, of Boston. The work is strongly marked by the characteristics of the author—brilliant coruscations of thought, instead of a quiet, steady blaze—an avoidance of everything like a coherent system of opinions—a large range of comparison and illustration, with an occasional haziness of metaphysical conception, in which the reader is apt to lose his way. These lectures are occupied with the delineation of the characters of half a dozen of the greatest men that ever lived, each of whom Mr. Emerson makes the representative and exponent of a certain class. One of these great men is Plato, on whose intellectual character the author expatiates like one who is truly in love with his subject.

It was deemed incumbent upon the Evening Post to print at least this much concerning every noteworthy American book, but it recognized no duty as regarded English works. Sometimes a volume, like Carlyle’s “Chartism,” would receive a column and a half, while sometimes important productions would get never a word. The Evening Post’s criticism of Dickens’s “American Notes” is given by Parke Godwin in his life of Bryant—a criticism praising some of the novelist’s fault-finding and taking exception chiefly to his remarks on American newspapers. “Martin Chuzzlewit” was reviewed in 1843, and the American scenes were pronounced a failure for two reasons. “In the first place, the author knows very little about us, and in the second place, the desire of being vehemently satirical seems to unfit him for what he wishes to do, and takes from him his wonted humor and invention.” But no later work by Dickens, up to the Civil War, seems to have been noticed.

Yet with all its shortcomings, the Evening Post maintained a literary tone. In part this arose from the pure English and the allusiveness of Bryant’s editorial style; in part from the unusual attention paid to magazines and book news; and in part from the fact that literary people were attracted to it because Bryant was its editor. When G. P. R. James and Martin Tupper visited America, they published original verse in it. Miss Catharine Sedgwick, the novelist, sent it travel sketches in 1841 and later. During the years 1834–41 Cooper published many letters in the Evening Post upon his various libel suits and other personal matters, and at one time had Bryant’s journal actively enlisted on his side. “Cooper, you know,” Bryant explained to Dana in a letter of Nov. 26, 1838, “has published another novel, entitled “Home as Found,” rather satirical I believe on American manners. A notice of it appeared in the Courier newspaper of this city, a very malignant notice indeed, containing some stories about Cooper’s private conversations. Cooper arrived in town about the time the article was published, and answered it by a short letter to the Evening Post, in which he gave notice that he should prosecute the publishers of the paper. It is a favorite doctrine with him just now that the newspapers tell more lies than truths, and he has undertaken to reform the practice, so far as what they say respects him personally.” Webb’s attack was said to have been occasioned by Cooper’s having cut his acquaintance. The Evening Post denounced it as proceeding from personal pique, “grossly malignant,” and “swaggering and silly”; and in the spring of 1841 Cooper sent the Post reams of controversial material.

Walt Whitman earned Bryant’s grateful notice by his journalistic activities in Brooklyn in behalf of the “Barnburner” Democracy, and was praised for his tales in the Democratic Review, one of which the Evening Post reprinted (1842). During 1851 he contributed five articles. The first, called “Something About Art and Brooklyn Artists,” eulogized the paintings of several obscure men, and the second, “A Letter From Brooklyn,” told of the changes across the East River—how Bergen Hill was nearly leveled, a huge tract had been reclaimed from the sea near the Atlantic Dock, and Fifth Avenue was still unpaved and neglected. Whitman went down to the eastern end of Long Island that summer, for, as he wrote the Post, “I ... like it far better than I could ever like Saratoga or Newport.” In two June letters from Paumanok he described the joy of bathing in the clear, cold water, derided the stiff ceremoniousness of city boarders, gave some good advice to boarding-house keepers, and depicted two old natives of Marion and Rocky Point, “Uncle Dan’l” and “Aunt Rebby.” Upon his return he sent a rather rhapsodic description of the opera at Castle Garden, with Bettini singing. It does not appear that Bryant had any personal interest in Whitman, and it was unfortunate that no effort was made to extend his brief connection.

Something should be said about the Evening Post’s miscellaneous columns, a wallet into which was thrown a wide assortment of reprinted selections. Now it was a chapter of Lord Londonderry’s Travels; now Ellery Channing’s reminiscences of his father; now an article from Fraser’s on old French poetry; now a chapter from Cooper’s “Wing and Wing”; now Tennyson’s “Godiva,” Longfellow’s “Spanish Student,” or Spence’s anecdotes of Pope. Much might be said also of its reports of literary lectures, the course by Emerson upon “The Times” in the spring of 1842 and Holmes’s course upon modern poetry in the fall of 1853 being especially well covered. Emerson was an earnest but not popular speaker, and the writer for the Post, either Bryant or Parke Godwin, was at first cold to him. But within a few days he was remarking that the addresses grew upon one’s admiration. “Emerson convinces you that he is a man accustomed to profound and original thought, and not disposed, as at the outset you are inclined to suspect, to play with and baffle the intellects of his readers. He is eminently sincere and direct, strongly convinced of his own views, and anxious to present them in an earnest and striking manner.” Parke Godwin himself early in the fifties became a lyceum star, along with Holmes, Curtis, Greeley, Horace Mann, Orville Dewey, and others.

As for drama, the most important appearances occurred, and the most important criticism was written, while Leggett was one of the editors. Leggett, as Abram C. Dayton tells us in “Last Days of Knickerbocker Life,” was regarded as the especial champion of Edwin Forrest, who had made his début in 1826, and who was a warm favorite with the “Bowery Boys” and all other lovers of florid, stentorian acting. Certainly Leggett praised him highly and constantly in the Evening Post. In 1834 a gold medal was presented Forrest by a committee including Bryant and Leggett, who recalled in the newspaper how he had come to the city quite unknown, and had given the first electrifying demonstration of his powers when he consented, as an act of kindness to a poor actor, to appear at a benefit as Othello.

When on Sept. 18, 1832, Charles Kemble made his first American appearance as Hamlet, he was honored with the longest dramatic criticism in the journal’s history, almost three and a half columns. His towering, manly form, his Roman face, and his histrionic ability impressed Leggett, who thought that while he did not have the flashes of dazzling brilliance that Kean had, his grace, ease, and elegance almost atoned for the lack, and would have a good effect upon American acting. Fanny Kemble made her bow the following night, and was at once hailed as displaying “an intensity and truth never, we believe, yet exhibited by an actress in America, certainly never by one so young.” Later, after seeing the two in more performances, Leggett concluded that they were admirable in comedy, but uneven in tragedy.

Bryant’s interest in the theater was mainly a literary interest, yet he seems to have been the writer of a series of editorials in 1847, arguing for an American theater. He spoke of the new Broadway Theater, and the sailing of the manager to England to engage talent. Why supply the new stage from abroad? protested the Evening Post. “Is it to be merely a house of call for such foreign artists as may find it agreeable or profitable to visit us, at such times as they may chance to select? Or is it to be an American establishment of the highest class, with a well-selected and thoroughly trained company permanently employed, varied by star engagements as a brilliant relief to the sober background, and enlivened, from time to time, by ability from abroad? Does it, in a word, propose to go on the old beaten track so often condemned, or to draw a line for a new period ...?” Bryant had no use for provincialism in any form.

But when the sentiment of Forrest’s supporters for an “American” theater led them in May, 1849, while their hero was playing at the Broadway House, to attack the English tragedian Macready at the Astor Place Opera House in a bloody riot, the Evening Post had to condemn their conduct. Its liking for Forrest himself was much cooled a year after, when, following his separation from his wife, he attacked the author N. P. Willis with a whip on Washington Square. Two days later Forrest met Bryant and Parke Godwin walking down Broadway, and furiously demanded who had written the Evening Post’s report of the assault, in which Forrest was said to have struck Willis from behind. Godwin, who thoroughly sympathized with Mrs. Forrest in her quarrel with her husband, replied that he was the author. The actor then turned upon him ferociously, said that the report was a d——d lie from beginning to end, that he would hold Godwin responsible for several things, and that he had told Godwin that he meant to cane Willis. “I replied,” Godwin later testified, “that these were not just the terms that he used, and that he told me formerly that he meant to cut his damned heart out; to which Mr. Forrest muttered something in reply....” So much for the manners of the fifties.

---

CHAPTER TEN
JOHN BIGELOW AS AN EDITOR OF THE “EVENING POST”

In the closing days of 1848 John Bigelow, who like Bryant lived to be called “The First Citizen of the Republic,” became one of the proprietors and editors of the Evening Post. His official connection with it lasted eleven years, when he graduated from it into that diplomatic field in which he won his chief fame; but his real connection might be said to have been lifelong. Bigelow’s protracted career was one of great variety and interest. He lived in the lifetime of George III, Napoleon, and every President except Washington, dying in 1911. His first prominence was given him by the Evening Post, and thereafter he was always a landmark in New York life. John Jay Chapman wrote in 1910 that he “stands as a monument of old-fashioned sterling culture and accomplishment—a sort of beacon to the present age of ignorance and pretence, and to ‘a land where all things are forgotten.’” His wide culture is attested by the variety of his books—a biography of Franklin and a work on Gladstone in the Civil War; a treatise on Molinos the quietist, and another on sleep; a history of “France and the Confederate Navy” and a biography of Tilden. It has fallen to few of our ministers to France to be so useful as he. He was prominent in almost every great civic undertaking in New York during the last half century of his life. Withal, his fine presence, simple dignity, and courtesy made him a model American gentleman.

It was with good reason that Bryant requested him to become an associate. His views were just those of the Evening Post. He was an old-school Democrat, but a devoted free-soiler. He was such a confirmed hater of protection that in later years he called it “a dogma in a republic fit only for a highwayman, a fool, or a drunkard,” and that he wanted absolute free trade, not merely “revision downward.” He liked the pen; from his first admission to the bar, he tells us, there was never a time when he had not material before him for the study of some subject on which he intended to write. In 1841, at the age of twenty-three, he contributed an article to the New York Review upon Roman lawyers, and followed it with essays in the Democratic Review. His taste for the society of intellectual men early showed itself, and like Lord Clarendon, “he was never so content with himself as when he found himself the meanest man in the company.” He finished his law studies in the office of Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., where he first met Bryant; he became intimate with Professor Da Ponte, another of Bryant’s friends, and he saw much of Fitzgreene Halleck.

Bigelow had been born in Bristol, later Malden, N. Y., in 1817, where his father had a farm, a country store, and several sloops plying on the Hudson. His was a good Presbyterian family, of Connecticut stock, prosperous enough to send Bigelow first to an academy at Troy, and then successively to Washington College (later Trinity) in Hartford, and to Union College. While studying law in New York, he had the good fortune to join a club of estimable young men (1838) called The Column, many of whose members later became founders of the Century Association; to this body Wm. M. Evarts was admitted in 1840, and Parke Godwin in 1841. Another influential friend whom Bigelow made in 1837–8 was Samuel J. Tilden, then a young lawyer living with an aunt on Fifth Avenue. Tilden often wearied Bigelow by his talk on practical politics and other subjects in which the latter had no interest, but their relations soon ripened into a cordial friendship. In 1844 these two, with a veteran journalist named John L. O’Sullivan, conducted for a time a low-priced Democratic campaign sheet for the purpose of helping elect Silas Wright as Governor. Probably as a reward for this service, Gov. Wright appointed Bigelow one of the five inspectors of Sing Sing Prison, at which it had become necessary to check notorious abuses; and when Bigelow and his associates stopped the use of bludgeons they were accused of “coddling” the prisoners as all later reformers have been.

During 1845 young Bigelow wrote many editorials for the Evening Post advocating the calling of a State Constitutional Convention, and asking for changes in the judiciary which that body actually made. In the spring of 1847 Bryant, wishing to train some one to succeed him, asked the young man to enter the office, but did not make an acceptable offer. A year and a half later he renewed the proposal through Tilden, saying that he would give a liberal compensation, and that when one of the partners, William G. Boggs, who had charge of the publishing, retired, he might come into the firm. Bigelow was pleased. “But,” he told Tilden, “I might as well say to you here at once that I should not think it worth while to consider for a moment any proposition to enter the Evening Post office on a salary. Unless they want me in the firm, they don’t want me enough to withdraw me from my profession.” This was a wise refusal to give up his independence. The result was that after negotiations of several weeks, Boggs was induced to retire at once. Bigelow purchased three and one-tenth shares of the Evening Post (there were ten in all) and two shares of the job office, for $15,000, taking possession as of the date Nov. 16, 1848; later, at a cost of $2,100, he increased his holdings to a full third. He had very little money saved, and none which he could spare, but he persuaded the large-hearted lawyer, Charles O’Conor, to endorse his note for $2,500, while he became indebted to Wm. C. Bryant & Co. for the rest.

Like Bryant, Bigelow was glad to escape from law into journalism. “I have never for one instant looked back upon my former employment,” his unpublished journal runs, “but with regret for the time lost in it. I do not mean that all my time was lost; on the contrary, I am satisfied that my discipline at the bar gives me important advantages over most of my associates in the editorial calling. But I was not progressing mentally for the last two years of my practice, though I did in professional position.” Financially, the exchange was a fortunate one.

At once Bigelow showed marked journalistic aptitude. He brought a lightness of touch to his writing that was as valuable as his cultivation and good judgment. One early evidence of this was a weekly series of interviews with a “Jersey ferryman,” purporting to be snatches of political gossip which this illiterate but shrewd fellow picked up from Congressmen, Governors, and other public men whom he carried over the river. It enabled Bigelow to give readers the benefit of inside information obtained from Tilden, O’Conor, John Van Buren, Charles Sumner (a constant correspondent of Bigelow’s), and the free-soil leaders generally. His enterprise was equally marked. In 1850, nettled by the assertion of slavery men that since the British Emancipation Act the island of Jamaica had relapsed into barbarism, he spent three weeks there making observations, and wrote an admirable series of letters to the Evening Post. This refutation of the slavery arguments attracted attention in England. Early in 1854, when it was necessary to give shape to the inchoate elements of the Republican party by finding a candidate, he wrote a campaign biography of Fremont in installments for the Evening Post, the first chapter of which Jessie Benton Fremont contributed. During the winter of 1852–4 he was in Haiti, studying the capacity of the negro for self-government, and again sending the Evening Post valuable correspondence. His book upon Jamaica was for some time considered the best in print, and his life of Fremont sold about 40,000 copies.

Early in 1851 Bigelow began publishing a series of random papers called “Nuces Literariæ,” signed “Friar Lubin,” in which he commenced one of the most famous historical controversies of the time—the controversy with Jared Sparks over the latter’s methods of editing.

President Sparks of Harvard had issued in 1834–7 (redated 1842) his twelve-volume “Life and Writings of George Washington,” the fruit of years of research at home and abroad. In the fifth of the “Nuces Literariæ” (Feb. 12), Bigelow remarked that he had been greatly surprised while comparing some original letters by George Washington with the copies given by Sparks. He had heard, he said, that Hallam—Hallam had chatted with Bryant in England in 1845—had commented upon the discrepancy between Jared Spark’s version of the letters, and other versions. To test the alleged inaccuracies, Bigelow had produced the recently published correspondence of Joseph Reed, at one time Washington’s secretary, and long his intimate friend. Comparing the letters in Sparks’s set with the same letters in the two volumes by Reed’s grandson, “to my utter surprise I found every one had been altered, in what seemed to me important particulars. I found that he had not only attempted to correct the probable oversights and blunders of General Washington, but he had undertaken to improve his style and chasten his language; nay, he had in some instances gone so far as to change his meaning, and to make him the author of sentiments precisely the opposite of what he intended to write.”

Bigelow proceeded, in this paper and a longer one a few days later, to state his charges in detail, alleging scores of discrepancies. It was the sort of task he liked. Later, while Minister to France, he came into possession of the MS. of Franklin’s autobiography, and by careful examination found that more than 1,200 changes had been made in the text of the book, as published by Franklin’s grandson, and that the last eight pages, equal in value to any eight preceding, had been wholly omitted. He published the first authentic edition of the classic, and he later brought out an edition of Franklin’s complete writings which superseded Sparks’s earlier collection. Now he alleged that when Washington had written that a certain sum “will be but a fleabite to our demands,” Sparks had dressed this up into “totally inadequate.” Washington, he said, had referred to the “dirty, mercenary spirit” of the Connecticut troops, and to “our rascally privateersmen,” and Sparks had left out “dirty” and “rascally.” Washington put down, “he has wrote ... to see,” and Sparks had made it, “He has written ... to ascertain.” Washington referred to “Old Put,” and Sparks translated this into “Gen. Putnam.” “The Ministry durst not have gone on,” declared Washington, and this appeared, “would not have dared to go on.” When the commander wrote that he had “everything but the thing ready,” Sparks left out “but the thing,” by which Washington had meant powder.

President Sparks was ill, but the Cambridge Chronicle answered for him. Would not Washington have corrected his correspondence for the press, it asked, if he had known it was to be published? Bigelow answered that this was no reason why Sparks should interpose between the great man and admiring later generations. Washington did not send his letters to the press, but to friends and subordinates, and it was necessary to an accurate estimate of the man that we learn his faults of grammar and temper. “It is a great comfort for unpretending and humble men like the most of us, to know that the world’s heroes are not so perfect in all their proportions as to defy imitation, and discourage the aspirations of the less mature or less fortunate.”

The eminent president of Harvard maintained his silence, though the Evening Post recurred to the subject. In June, for example, it mentioned approvingly a project for a new edition of Washington’s writings, asserting that “The authority of Sparks as an editor and historian may be considered as entirely destroyed by the criticism” of Bigelow. Early in 1852 it reviewed the sixth volume of Lord Mahon’s History of England, the author of which censured Sparks severely upon the ground that “he has printed no part of the correspondence precisely as Washington wrote it; but has greatly altered and, as he thinks, corrected and embellished it.” At last, faced by Lord Mahon as well as Bigelow, President Sparks replied. On April 2, 3, and 6, 1852, three long letters by him, later issued in pamphlet form, were published in the Evening Post, explaining the exact principles on which he had worked as an editor. “I deny,” he said, “that any part of this charge is true in any sense, which can authorize the censures bestowed by these writers, or raise a suspicion of the editor’s fidelity and fairness.”

It was an effective, though not a complete, answer that he made. He was able to show that at least one flagrant error in reprinting a letter was not his, but that of Reed’s grandson. He showed that many of the alleged garblings were not real, but arose from the fact that Washington’s original letters as sent out, and the copies which his secretaries transcribed into his letter-books, differed. Washington himself had revised the manuscript of his correspondence during the French war, making numerous erasures, interlineations, and corrections; and which could now be called the genuine text? As Sparks explained, the omissions over which Bigelow had grumbled were unavoidable because of the necessity of compressing material for thirty or forty volumes into twelve. But he did admit taking certain editorial liberties which would now be thought improper. “It would certainly be strange,” he wrote, “if an editor should undertake to prepare for the press a collection of manuscript letters, many of them hastily written, without a thought that they would ever be published, and should not at the same time regard it as a solemn duty to correct obvious slips of the pen, occasional inaccuracies of expression, and manifest faults of grammar....”

The Evening Post was anxious to do President Sparks justice. It admitted his industry and conscientious devotion, shown in the labor he had spent at the thirteen capitals of the original States, wherever else he could find Revolutionary papers, and in the public offices of London and Paris. It recognized that the demand for absolutely literal transcriptions was a new one in the field of scholarship. But to this demand the controversy gave a decided impetus.

Bigelow scored another success when he obtained for the Post most of Thomas Hart Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View” in advance of its issue in book form. No more effective feature in the middle fifties could have been imagined. Benton had been the choice of many for the Presidency in 1852; his great contemporaries in Congress, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, were now dead, and men were eager to learn secret details of the disputes and intrigues in which they had been concerned; his peculiar uprightness, his energy, and his long public experience had given him a commanding influence. He sent the chapters of his book in advance to the Evening Post because he, like it, had been a devoted Jacksonian, a low-tariff man, and a hater of the Bank, and was now at one with it in its free-soil views. From Bigelow’s private papers we learn that the original arrangement (July, 1853) was that he should supply an installment weekly, and be paid $10 a column. So wide was the interest in the work that Appleton’s first edition of the first volume, in 1854, was 30,000 copies. It aroused much pungent editorial comment, of which a single instance will suffice. An installment of the second volume which the Evening Post published in June, 1855, asserted that Calhoun was favorable to the Missouri Compromise when it passed, and that for the first twenty years following he found no constitutional defects in it. The Richmond Enquirer denied this, entitling the recollections “Historic Calumnies,” and declaring:

Instead of devoting the few remaining years of an ill-spent life to the penitential offices of truth and charity, Col. Benton expends his almost inexhaustible energies in a paroxysm of fiendish passion; and when he should be imploring mercy for his manifold sins, in rearing upon the grave of a political opponent a monument to his own undying hate and reckless mendacity.

But the Evening Post, with the aid, among others, of former Secretary of State John M. Clayton, had no difficulty in proving Benton right.

These were years in which the business management of the newspaper began to feel markedly the hostility of the South. Its utterances against slavery were so biting and persistent that no one below Mason’s and Dixon’s line would advertise in it, and many Southern buyers boycotted New York merchants who patronized it. “Thousands of little merchants and traders in New York City,” as Bigelow later said, “jealous of the rivalry of the other more prosperous houses advertising with us, were in the habit of reporting them in the South, and in that way our advertising columns were made very barren.” New Englanders of large resources were equally offended by the paper’s low-tariff views. Bigelow’s business acumen, reinforcing Bryant’s, was very much needed.

Among his first acts was the reorganization of the job printing office. The income from this branch of the establishment, the first half year of Bigelow’s assistant-editorship, was but $1,812.52, and for the last half year of 1860 it was $7,295. This revolution was wrought by increasing the equipment, hiring a new foreman, and opening up new sources of business. When Bigelow became a partner the higher courts had adopted the rule that all cases reaching them on appeal should be printed. He had an extensive acquaintance among judges and lawyers, whom he gave to understand that the Evening Post would do legal printing more satisfactorily than most job offices, and that it would always have the work done on time. Very shortly it was in command of virtually all the legal printing, and a great deal of other business came with the current. So competent was the supervision exercised by the foreman and bookkeeper that neither Bryant nor Bigelow, after the start was made, spent a total of three days time in this office, which was earning them $10,000 a year or more.

An equally important change was the removal in 1850 from the cramped quarters on Pine Street to a larger building on the northwest corner of Nassau and Liberty Streets. The old property had afforded room for only a hand press, which was operated by a powerful negro. Since the daily circulation in 1848 was but about 2,000 copies, the black could turn off the edition without exhaustion. In the new home it was able to have a large power press. At first an effort was made to operate it with one of the “caloric” engines which Ericsson had invented in 1835 and more recently perfected, but this was found inadequate, and one of Hoe’s new “lightning” engines was installed. Inasmuch as the circulation steadily rose, as the size of the newspaper was increased, and as the weekly, following in the footsteps of Greeley’s Weekly Tribune, became an important property, the improved press facilities were an absolute necessity.

But Bigelow’s chief service to the counting room lay in his insistence upon an absolute change of business management. When the new building was purchased, the man who had succeeded Boggs as publisher, a practical printer of no education named Timothy A. Howe, was entrusted with refitting it, and his incompetence soon became plain. A belief that his general business capacity was small had been growing upon Bigelow, and he finally resolved that the existing state of affairs must end:

I sent word to Mr. Howe [Bigelow said late in life in an interview with Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard] that I wished he would meet me in Mr. Bryant’s office at such an hour the following day, and when we met there, I said to them both that the business below stairs was not conducted to my satisfaction; that I did not see any prospect of its amendment under existing arrangements, and I felt that we needed another man in that department. That, if I remained in the concern, there must be another one in that department; that I did not wish to crowd Mr. Howe out, but I did not propose to stay in with him conducting the business, and that I was ready to name the figures at which I would either buy his share or sell my own if he was ready to do the same, but that it was the only condition upon which I could stay in. Well, Mr. Bryant did not look up at all—he hung his head. Howe was as pale as a sheet, and he stammered a little and looked at Mr. Bryant to see whether there was any comfort there, but he did not find any. After a few remarks in which I repeated my story, ... Howe said, “Very well, I see that Mr. Bryant is with you in the matter, and I will go....”

The result was that Isaac Henderson, who had come to the Evening Post in May, 1839, as a clerk at $7 a week, was placed in charge of the business side of the paper; and in May, 1854, he bought one-third of it, of the building, and of the job office. He paid $17,083.33, agreeing further to give Howe six per cent. of the semi-annual dividends for the next five years. Whatever Henderson’s faults, lack of shrewdness and industry was not among them. He pushed the circulation higher and higher, and was so capable in attracting advertisers that even during the panic of 1857 the columns were crowded. In June, 1858, the combined circulation of daily, weekly, and semi-weekly was 12,334 copies and was rapidly growing. “I never before knew what it was to have more money than I wanted to spend,” Bigelow wrote his chief, who was then abroad. Cooper & Hewitt had stopped their advertising in consequence of articles about the shaky credit of the Atlantic Telegraph and the Illinois Central Railroad, in which this firm had large sums invested, but the Post could afford to laugh at that. The dividends for the year 1848 for the first time surpassed $45,000, and this golden prosperity was rapidly enhanced in 1859.

“A single circumstance will perhaps enable you to form as good an idea of how we stand as a sheet full of statistics,” Bryant wrote Bigelow on April 11, 1859. “Mr. Henderson puts on a severe look in which satisfaction is mingled with resignation, and says quietly, ‘The Evening Post is prosperous—very prosperous.’”

Indeed, Bigelow’s investment of 1848–9 proved the cornerstone of a snug fortune. In 1860, a campaign year in which the circulation boomed again, the net income was no less than $68,774.23. That is, his share of the profits—he now owned a full third—was very decidedly more than the $17,100 which his part of the newspaper had cost him. Immediately after the election he offered Parke Godwin, who was seeking a place in the customs service, his interest in the newspaper for a price, as finally agreed upon, of $111,460—a bargain; and since he was willing to take a small cash payment, Godwin eagerly accepted. Bigelow later gave three reasons for his sudden decision to leave the Evening Post. By the election of Lincoln the great free-soil cause seemed to have triumphed, and he felt that there was no public movement urgently needing his pen; he wanted leisure for deliberate literary work; and he believed that from a dozen years of journalism he had received all the intellectual nourishment it could give him. “In the twelve years that I had spent on the paper,” he wrote, “I had managed to pay out of its earnings what it had cost me; I had lived very comfortably; I had purchased a country place of considerable value; I had had two trips to the West Indies, to which I devoted five or six months, and a tour in Europe with all my family, of nineteen months; and was able to retire with a property which could not be fairly valued at less than $175,000.”

But before Bigelow severed his connection with the Evening Post he attempted one highly interesting service; he tried, with temporary success, to obtain the French critic Sainte-Beuve as a literary correspondent. He was in Europe from the last days of 1858 until the late spring of 1860. In his unpublished journal for Jan. 24, 1860, when he was staying in Paris, he records that he went at one o’clock to see Sainte-Beuve “and to conclude an agreement partially negotiated” on behalf of the newspaper. The great Frenchman, fifty-six years old, was at the height of his fame, having just been made commander of the Legion of Honor. If the rate of pay he was willing to consider from the Evening Post seems small, we must remember that he was busy with his “Causeries du Lundi” for the Moniteur, and that he probably thought he could re-use this material for the American journal. Bigelow offered him 125 francs, or about $25, for each letter, stipulating that Sainte-Beuve should pay the translator, who, Bigelow thought, ought to accept $5. Sainte-Beuve had already written and mailed his first letter, and he made no immediate demur to these terms. Next day, however, he wrote that his inquiries had convinced him that no good translator would do the work for less than $10, and that he could not go on. Bigelow at once increased his offer to $30 a letter, of which $20 was to go to Sainte-Beuve, but the critic persisted in his refusal. The compensation, he said, was adequate, but he was too old for such a burden as this would impose. Sainte-Beuve’s letter, filling two and a half columns with its 5,500 words, had meanwhile appeared in the Evening Post, under the heading “Literary Matters in France.” The greater part was devoted to a beautifully written and fine critical disquisition upon the recently published correspondence of Béranger, but prefixed to this were several paragraphs of general comment. “French literature for some years past has produced nothing very new or brilliant,” he wrote, “especially in the department of poetry.... But in the department of history, political and literary, and in that of erudition, good books and meritorious monographs have been written.” Political events since 1848, he explained, had thrown many men into a retirement favorable to literary pursuits—Villemain, Guizot, Remusat, and Victor Cousin. In closing he alluded to the loss the Institut de France had suffered in Macaulay, and added: “The death of the illustrious Prescott had already deprived the same learned body of a corresponding member. It is thought that America will also provide the member to be named as Prescott’s successor (primo avulso non deficit alter), and we are informed that some influential members of that academy have thought of Mr. Motley, whose admirable historical work has been recently introduced here by M. Guizot.”

The article was not signed, and was not appreciated by a public which cared nothing about Béranger. Bryant grasped this general indifference. He wrote Bigelow that the letter was too long, and that Americans were not sufficiently familiar with French authors to have that craving for anecdotes of their lives, conversation, and correspondence which they had in the case of the distinguished names of English literature. He always distrusted an article his wife would not read, he said, and she would not read this. Probably short letters of not more than 2,000 words, sent not oftener than monthly, and dealing with topics of wide interest, would—especially if signed by Sainte-Beuve—have been highly successful; it was unfortunate that Bigelow, when Sainte-Beuve indicated his reluctance to accept the heavy burden of long essays, did not suggest this solution. But the Civil War was at hand, and the columns of the paper were soon crowded to bursting.

Bigelow was appointed consul at Paris by President Lincoln soon after leaving the Evening Post, and in 1864 became Minister to France. From Paris during the war he wrote assiduously to Bryant, and was able to supply much information of editorial value regarding the French and British attitude toward the North. After returning to the United States, until Bryant’s death, he not infrequently contributed to the editorial page, and twice refused an active connection with it. In 1880 he wrote Parke Godwin, then editor, making inquiries regarding the purchase of a share in the paper, with a view to becoming its head, but did not push them. His loss at a time of national crisis was keenly felt by the Evening Post, but his place was ably supplied by Parke Godwin and a newcomer, Charles Nordhoff.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN
HEATED POLITICS BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

The history of the Evening Post for the decade following the Compromise of 1850 is summarized in the names of its greater political correspondents. Thomas Hart Benton, besides contributing much of his “Thirty Years’ View,” sent Bryant occasional memoranda for editorial use. Gideon Welles began contributing in 1848, when he was a bureau chief in the Navy Department, and Salmon P. Chase sent occasional unsigned contributions, and more frequent comments or suggestions. Both Benton and Welles had been as ardent Jacksonian Democrats as Bryant, and both were free-soilers; while Welles and Chase became founders of the Republican Party in Connecticut and Ohio respectively. The Evening Post, in other words, remained Democratic till early in Pierce’s administration it found that Democracy was simply dancing to the pipings of the slavery nabobs, when it gave all its support to the rising Republican movement. It is evidence of its zeal in the new cause that Sumner, more an abolitionist than a free-soiler, became an ardent admirer of the paper. He wrote Bigelow expressing his “sincere delight” in it, saying that its political arguments “fascinate as well as convince.” It was upon his recommendation that William S. Thayer, a brilliant young Harvard man, was employed, and became in the years 1856–60 the Washington correspondent whom the anti-slavery statesmen liked and trusted most.

In the sultry, ominous decade before the Civil War storm, there is a long list of events upon which the opinions of any great journal are of interest. What did the Evening Post think in 1850 of Webster’s Seventh of March speech? How in 1852 did it regard the dismal contest between Pierce and Winfield Scott? What estimate did it place upon “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”? What in 1856 did it say of Brooks’s assault upon Sumner, and of the fierce Buchanan-Fremont contest; and what the next year of the Dred Scott decision? How did Bryant express himself upon the crimes and martyrdom of “Osawatomie” Brown? Readers of an old file of newspapers for those tense years have a sense of sitting at a drama, waiting the approach of a catastrophe which they perfectly foresee, but which the players hope to the last will be avoided.

Bryant in the campaign of 1848 had bolted from the regular Democratic ticket along with the other “Barnburners” of New York. The nickname referred to the Dutchman who burned his barn to exterminate the rats, for they were accused of trying to destroy the party to get rid of slavery in the territories. It was impossible for the Evening Post to support the regulars’ nominee, Lewis Cass, who had expressed pro-slavery views, or the Whig nominee, Gen. Zachary Taylor, who owned four hundred slaves. It predicted in June that Taylor would be elected by an enormous majority, and bitterly taunted Polk and the other pro-slavery Democrats because their Texan policy had given the Whigs, headed by the hero of Buena Vista, the Presidency. Its attitude was hostile to both the parties, but particularly to that which had betrayed the ideals of Jackson and Benton. The Barnburners nominated their candidate for the Presidency, Van Buren, at an enthusiastic August convention on the shores of Lake Erie, in Buffalo. The leaders were Bryant, Chase, Charles Francis Adams, Joshua R. Giddings, Preston King—an intimate friend of Bigelow’s—and David Dudley Field. All these men knew they had no chance of victory, and Bryant frankly said as much. But the trumpet-blast of the convention, “We inscribe on our banner Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” was echoed and reëchoed by the Evening Post till the day of election. The final appeal, on the day that 300,000 voters cast their ballots for Van Buren, shows how militant its position was:

Shall the great republic of the western hemisphere, the greatest which has yet blessed the anxious hope of nations, to which the eyes of millions, now engaged in a desperate struggle for emancipation in Europe, turn as their only encouragement and solace, the republic which was founded by Washington and nourished into vigor by Jefferson and Jackson—shall this republic make itself a byword and a reproach wherever its name is heard? Shall the United States no longer be known as the home of the free and the asylum of the oppressed, but as the hope of the slave and the oppressor of the poor?

All good men have an interest in answering these questions. But above all others, the laboring man has a deeper interest. The greatest disgrace inflicted upon labor is inflicted by the institution of slavery. Those who support it—we mean the negro-owners, or the negro-drivers of the South—openly declare that he who works with his hands is on the level with the slave. They cannot think otherwise, so long as they are educated under the influence of this dreadful injustice. It perverts all the true relations of society, and corrupts every humane and generous sentiment.

Welles published in the Evening Post after the election an unsigned article denouncing the tyranny of party allegiance, but Bryant’s journal did not yet forsake Democracy. As a Democratic organ still it boasted that it published the party’s widest-circulated weekly paper. As a Democratic organ it remarked of Polk, when he went out of office in 1849, that “such Presidents as he are only accidents, and two such accidents are not at all likely to be visited upon a single miserable generation”—an assertion which Pierce and Buchanan soon confuted. Bennett’s Herald, with its instinct for the winning side, having climbed on the Taylor bandwagon, the Evening Post was for some years the only Democratic newspaper in this great Democratic city.

As a free-soil Democratic organ it opposed the Compromise of 1850, finding a peculiar relish in attacking any proposal originated by Clay, and supported by the equally distasteful Whig and protectionist, Webster. Like Chase and Welles, Bryant and Bigelow saw the plain objections to any compromise. The crisis had been precipitated by the demand for the admission of California, and the question was whether this admission should be purchased by large concessions to the South, or—as the Evening Post maintained—demanded as a right. The chief proposals of Clay were that California should be admitted as free territory, that Territorial Governments be erected in the rest of the Mexican cession without any restriction upon slavery, that the slave trade be prohibited in the District of Columbia, and that a new and atrociously-framed law for the return of fugitive slaves be enacted.

Clay’s action was courageous. Bryant wrote that he could not refuse admiration for his boldness in grappling thus frankly with a subject so full of difficulties, and that his statesmanlike directness contrasted refreshingly with the timidity of the Administration. But he called the Compromise a blanket poultice, to heal five wounds at once, when the common sense method was to dress each sore separately; and he opposed any effort to coax the free States into abandonment of a single principle. Besides Bryant’s and Bigelow’s editorials, the Evening Post published a 5,000 word argument by William Jay, son of John Jay, and called upon its readers to sign petitions. It specifically objected to the provision that Utah and New Mexico should be organized without any restriction against slavery, for this meant an abandonment of the Wilmot Proviso, which it had always supported. Some Northern advocates of the Compromise argued that the region was not adapted to plantations and that slavery would not be transferred thither anyway; but this view the Post derided, quoting Southern members of Congress to the contrary. It was equally opposed to the Fugitive Slave Act. When Calhoun argued that the South was being “suffocated,” it showed that the occupied land in the slave States was about 280 million acres, and the unoccupied land about 395 million, while the whole area of the free States was only about 291 million acres.

Webster’s Seventh of March speech in behalf of the Compromise aroused savage indignation among his Boston admirers, but it did not surprise the Evening Post. The Washington correspondent wrote of the stir of satisfaction among the listening Southern Senators, of the gleam of exultation that played over the quizzical visage of Foote of Virginia. But Bryant had expected Webster’s volte-face:

It was as natural to suppose that he would do this, as that he would abandon, in the manner he has done, the doctrines of free trade, once maintained by him in their fullest extent, and, taking the money of the Eastern mill-owners, enrol himself as the champion of protection for the rest of his life....

Mr. Webster stands before the public as a man who has deserted the cause which he lately defended, deserted it under circumstances which force upon him the imputation of a sordid motive, deserted it when his apostasy was desired by the Administration, and immediately after an office had been conferred upon his son, to say nothing of what has been done by the Administration for his other relatives. It is but little more than two years since he declared himself the firmest of friends to the Wilmot Proviso, professing himself its original and invariable champion, and claiming its principles as Whig doctrine.

Such aspersions upon Webster’s motives were as unfair as Whittier’s bitter lament and denunciation in the poem “Ichabod,” but the same righteous anger dictated both. As a hoax, the Evening Post published in its issue of May 21 glaring headlines, proclaiming: “GREAT MEETING IN BOSTON!!—Tremendous Excitement—DANIEL WEBSTER—Out in Favor of—Applying the Proviso to All the Territories!!—No Compromise in Massachusetts!!!” The news story below was an account from Niles’s Register of Dec. 11, 1819, when the Missouri Compromise was pending, of Webster’s speech at an anti-slavery meeting in Boston, in which he asserted that it was the constitutional duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all territory not included in the thirteen original States. It strikingly exhibited the orator’s inconsistency. The pro-slavery Commercial was angry, declaring that many New Yorkers had not noted the date 1819 and had been deceived. Clay’s measures, following the death of President Taylor, were passed by Congress, but to the end the Evening Post protested that no permanent compromise was possible. The issue was whether a slave-holding minority should have a share of the new territories equal to that of the anti-slavery majority. The answer was yes or no, for there could be no middle ground. “If an association is composed of twenty members and five insist upon having an equal voice in its affairs with the other fifteen, what compromise can there be? You must either grant what they ask or deny it.”

It was not until the ambitious Douglas, in 1854, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and Pierce brought his Administration behind the measure, that the Evening Post found it impossible to continue its connection with the Democratic Party. The horror with which Bryant and Bigelow looked upon this enactment is easily understood. They had expected the great valley of the Platte as a matter of course to be settled as free soil, since it lay north of the Missouri Compromise line, 36′ 30″. It had been taken for granted, when proposals had been made to erect territories there, that slavery had once for all been excluded. But now Douglas, maintaining that the people in such regions should exercise their own choice for or against slavery, proposed to nullify the Missouri Compromise, and to create two territories, in which there should be no restrictions as to slavery, and in which the people should be perfectly free to regulate their “domestic institutions” as they saw fit. It was a body-blow to the North.

Franklin Pierce, a handsome, dashing young man of whose views no one knew very much, had been supported by the Evening Post in 1852, against Winfield Scott. James Ford Rhodes remarks that “The argument of the Post, that the Democratic candidate and platform were really more favorable to liberty than the Whig, was somewhat strained; the editor failed to look the situation squarely in the face.” He was, however, acting in perfect harmony with the prominent New York Democrats who had, four years previously, bolted the regular nomination. Van Buren and his son, Preston King, Benton, Cambreleng, and most of the paper’s other free-soil friends were willing to take a chance upon Pierce. But he had not been in office four months before the Evening Post suspected his pro-slavery tendencies, and began to eye him with disfavor and alarm. Its utterances moved the Washington Union on July 5, 1853, and the Richmond Enquirer nine days later, to read it out of the Democratic party. “The Evening Post and the Buffalo Republic belong to that class of hangers-on to the Democratic party who sail under Democratic colors, but who are in reality the worst enemies of the party. They are abolitionists in fact,” said the first-named sheet. The Enquirer wanted such newspapers to begone. “It is time that they should be spurned with indignation and scorn as the instruments and echoes of the worst factions of the day.” Now, in February, 1854, when Pierce made it clear that he was supporting Douglas’s plan for repudiating the Missouri Compromise, the Evening Post turned short and became the enemy of Democracy. An occasional Washington correspondent wrote with scorn of the renegade son of New Hampshire:

It was reception day. We walked in unheralded, and soon found ourselves in the reception room, where Mr. Pierce was talking with a bevy of ladies. Immediately on seeing us he approached, received us very politely, and introduced us to Mrs. Pierce. The President impressed me better than I had expected, and better than most of his pictures. He had whitened out to the true complexion of a parlor knight—pale and soft looking. Though not what I should call elegant, his manners are easy and agreeable. He is more meek in appearance than he is usually represented, as might be expected of a man who has submitted to be drawn into the position of tail to Senator Douglas’s kite.... The President evidently feels the Presidency thrilling every nerve and coursing every vein. He is so delighted with it that he is palpably falling into the delusion of supposing himself a possible successor to himself! Could fond self-conceit go further? Setting aside the inherent impossibility of the thing, on account of the inevitable discoveries which his elevation has involved; his mad and wicked adhesion to the Nebraska perfidy will settle his chances (Feb. 13).

The columns of the paper show that a great popular uprising was occurring in New York. It had recently contrasted the crowded, applauding houses, witnessing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” at the Chatham Street Theater, with the mob gathered at the Chatham Street Chapel in 1834 to attack negroes and abolitionists. In January, 1854, a great mass-meeting was held at the Tabernacle to protest against the Douglas bill. Bryant pointed out that it was composed of merchants, bankers, and professional men who had hitherto stubbornly opposed the abolitionist movement and had supported the Compromise of 1850. He noted also that the 80,000 Germans of the city were unanimous, like most other immigrant groups, for keeping the West open to free labor. The Staats Zeitung had supported Lewis Cass in 1848, the Compromise in 1850, and Pierce in 1852, yet now it was decidedly against the Pierce Administration, as were the three other German dailies.

Early on a March morning the Kansas-Nebraska Bill passed the Senate, amid the boom of cannon fired by Southern enthusiasts. When Chase walked down the Capitol steps he said to Sumner: “They celebrate a present victory, but the echoes they awake shall never rest until slavery itself shall die.” From that moment the Evening Post treated slavery as a serpent upon which the nation must set its heel, and Democracy as its ally:

The President has taken a course by which the greater part of this dishonor is concentrated upon the Democratic Party. Upon him and his Administration, and upon all the northern friends of the Nebraska Bill in Congress, and upon the Democratic Party who gave the present executive his power of mischief, the people will visit this great political sin of the day.... The result is inevitable; Seward is in the ascendancy in this State and the North generally; the Democratic Party has lost its moral strength in the free States; it is stripped of the respect of the people by the misconduct of those who claim to be its leaders, and whatever boast we may make of our excellent maxims of legislation and policy in regard to other questions, the deed of yesterday puts us in a minority for years to come....

The admission of slavery into Nebraska is the preparation for yet other measures having in view the aggrandizement of the slave power—the wresting of Cuba from Spain to make several additional slave States; the creation of yet other slave States, in the territory acquired from Mexico, and the renewal of the African slave trade. These things are contemplated; the Southern journals already speak of them as familiarly and flippantly as they do of an ordinary appropriation bill, and who shall say they are not already at our door?

The bitterness and militancy of the Evening Post thenceforth increased day by day. The recapture of the slave Burns in Boston during the summer of 1854, the slave whom Thomas Wentworth Higginson tried at the head of a mob to rescue, and who was marched to the wharf by platoons of soldiers and police through a crowd of fifty thousand hissing people, moved the Evening Post to call the Fugitive Slave law “the most ruffianly act ever authorized by a deliberative assembly.” Month after month it exhorted the North to send emigrants to Kansas and Nebraska to uphold the free-soil cause. It invited Southerners to stay at their own watering-places in summer. It taunted the South with its lack of literature and culture, declaring that the only Southern book yet written which would not perish was Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View,” a free-soiler’s work. In the State election of 1855 it supported the Republican ticket, and when “Prince” John Van Buren attacked it for doing so, it assailed him in turn as the “degenerate son” of a great father. As 1855 closed with fresh news every day of bloodshed in the territories, the paper cried its encouragement to those who fought for free soil:

Every liberal sentiment—the love of freedom, the hatred of oppression, the detestation of fraud, the abhorrence of wrong cloaked under the guise of law—every feeling of the human heart which does not counsel cowardly submission and the purchase of present safety as the price of future evils, takes part with the residents of Kansas. They may commit imprudent acts, they may be rash ... but their cause is a great and righteous cause, and we must stand by it to the last.

It was a foregone conclusion at the beginning of 1856 that the Evening Post would lend energetic assistance to the half-organized Republican party. During the previous summer and autumn it had devoted several editorials to the disintegration of the Whig party in both sections, and to that of the Democratic party at the North. The time had come, it said, when the old party names meant nothing upon the principal issues, and it welcomed the formation of a new party of definite tenets. Bigelow, more impetuous than Bryant, made the Evening Post an energetic champion of Fremont more than a month before the Republicans nominated him for the Presidency. Even the Tribune was held back until later by the doubts of Greeley’s lieutenant, Pike, so that the Post was one of the first powerful Northern sheets for him.

To Bigelow it was that Nathaniel P. Banks, just elected Speaker of the House and the foremost advocate of Fremont, addressed himself when he came to New York city in February, 1856. Banks sensibly held that some one was needed to typify free-soil principles, and that the people would never join a party en masse until a man stood at the head of it; while he believed that Fremont was the ideal chieftain. It happened that Fremont was then at the Metropolitan Hotel, on the site of Niblo’s Garden, and Banks took Bigelow to call. The sub-editor was favorably impressed. He gathered a conference of free-soil leaders at his home, including the venerable Frank P. Blair, well remembered as a member of Jackson’s kitchen cabinet; Samuel J. Tilden; Edwin P. Morgan, later Governor and Senator; and Edward Miller. All save Tilden favored Fremont, and Blair, at Bigelow’s instance, undertook to obtain Senator Benton’s endorsement of his son-in-law. As early as April 10, 1856, the Evening Post’s editorials showed a marked leaning toward him, and on May 18 (he was nominated on June 19) it began publishing his biography.

Throughout that campaign the Evening Post, the Tribune, Times, Courier, and the German press of the city battled against the “Buchaneers,” represented by the Journal of Commerce, Commercial, Express, and Daily News. Bigelow offered two prizes of $100 each for the best campaign songs in English and German, and the Post made special low subscription rates. When Fremont was defeated that fall, it consoled itself not only by the startling strength the Republicans displayed, polling 1,341,264 votes, against 1,838,169 for Buchanan, but by the stinging defeat which Pierce, Cass, and Douglas, so subservient to the South, saw their friends suffer in New Hampshire, Michigan, and Illinois. Bryant exulted:

We have at least laid the basis of a formidable and well-organized party, in opposition to the spread of slavery—that scheme which is the scandal of the country and the age. In those States of the Union which have now given such large majorities for Fremont, public opinion, which till lately has been shuffling and undecided in regard to the slavery question, is now clear, fixed, and resolute. If we look back to 1848, when we conducted a Presidential election on this very ground of opposition to the spread of slavery, we shall see that we have made immense strides towards the ascendancy which, if there be any grounds to hope for the perpetuity of free institutions, is yet to be ours. We were then comparatively weak, we are now strong; we then counted our thousands, we now count our millions; we could then point to our respectable minorities in a few States, we now point to State after State.... The cause is not going back—it is going rapidly forward; the free-soil party of 1848 is the nucleus of the Republican party of 1856; but with what accessions of numbers, of moral power, of influence, not merely in public assemblies, but at the domestic fireside!

The Evening Post was now as firmly a “black Republican” organ as the Tribune, and far more radical in tone than Henry J. Raymond’s Times. When in May, 1856, Brooks of South Carolina beat Sumner into insensibility at his desk in the Senate Chamber, it saw in the episode no mere flash of Southern hotheadedness, but evidence of a deep and consistent menace. It was a “base assault,” a bit of “cowardly brutality.” “Are we, too, slaves—slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?” But Bryant looked below the symptom to its cause:

Violence reigns in the streets of Washington ... violence has now found its way into the Senate chamber. Violence lies in wait on all the navigable rivers and all the railways of Missouri, to obstruct those who pass from the free States into Kansas. Violence overhangs the frontiers of that territory like a storm-cloud charged with hail and lightning. Violence has carried election after election in that territory.... In short, violence is the order of the day; the North is to be pushed to the wall by it, and this plot will succeed if the people of the free States are as apathetic as the slaveholders are insolent.

Already the Evening Post had fitful glimpses of the furnace into which this violence was leading. Under the heading, “A Short Method with Disunionists,” Bryant (Sept. 26, 1855) had said that secession must be throttled as Jackson throttled it in South Carolina. The newspaper already regarded slavery as an evil to be stamped out altogether, though it did not quite say so. Gov. Wise of Virginia deplored the failure to open up California as a slave market. Bryant explained this by pointing out that the natural increase of Virginia’s black population exceeded 23,000 souls a year, which at $1,000 each came to more than $23,000,000. The annual production of wheat in Virginia had by the last census been worth only $11,000,000. Since the extension of the slave market to Texas had doubled the price of negroes, it was no wonder that Virginia wished it pushed to the Pacific. “Such a state of things may be very proper if the duty and destiny of this great country are to breed slaves and hunt runaway human cattle. But how incompatible with a genuine Christian civilization! How it moves the pride and curls the lip of European despotism! How it strikes down the power and crushes the hopes of the struggling friends of freedom all over the world!”

The excitement produced by the Dred Scott decision in March, 1857, is evinced by the fact that upon eight successive days the Evening Post devoted a leading or an important editorial to Chief Justice Taney’s opinion. It was not unexpected: the paper had uttered angry words in 1855 over a decision by a lower court foreshadowing it. But, opening all Territories North and South to slavery, it seemed intolerable. Bryant, on the point of sailing for Europe, took the view that in fact it was so intolerable the American people would never accept its practical implications. He believed the opinion of the court so superficial and shallow that it would be respected nowhere, and compared Chief Justice Taney’s legal knowledge disparagingly with that shown by a colored keeper of an oyster cellar in Baltimore who had corrected some of his historical misinformation. Northerners regarded the situation with the greater alarm because Buchanan’s Administration, just entering office, was entirely committed to the slavery party, the President accepting Southern Cabinet members like Howell Cobb of Georgia and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi as his chief advisers. Bryant hinted his suspicion of a treasonable conspiracy between Chief Justice Taney and these Southern leaders. A new eloquence was animating the words in which he wrote of slavery:

Hereafter, if this decision shall stand for law, slavery, instead of being what the people of the slave States have hitherto called it, their peculiar institution, is a Federal institution, the common patrimony and shame of all the States, those which flaunt the title of free, as well as those which accept the stigma of being the Land of Bondage; hereafter, wherever our jurisdiction extends, it carries with it the chain and the scourge—wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery. If so, that flag should have the light of the stars and the streaks of running red erased from it; it should be dyed black, and its device should be the whip and the fetter.

Are we to accept, without question, these new readings of the Constitution—to sit down contentedly under this disgrace—to admit that the Constitution was never before rightly understood, even by those who framed it—to consent that hereafter it shall be the slaveholders’ instead of the freemen’s Constitution? Never! Never! We hold that the provisions of the Constitution, so far as they regard slavery, are now just what they were when it was framed, and that no trick of interpretation can change them. The people of the free States will insist on the old impartial construction of the Constitution, adopted in calmer times—the construction given it by Washington and his contemporaries, instead of that invented by modern politicians in Congress and adopted by modern politicians on the bench.

But in the territory of Kansas the decision for freedom was already being made by force of arms. Bryant and Bigelow had never ceased urging the dispatch of Northern settlers and breech-loading rifles to the Western plains. The poet had written his brother (Feb. 15, 1856) that the city was alive with the excitement of the Kansas news, and subscribing liberally to the Emigrants’ Aid Society. “The companies of emigrants will be sent forward as soon as the rivers and lakes are opened—in March, if possible—and by the first of May there will be several thousand more free-state settlers in Kansas than there now are. Of course they will go well armed.” After election day that fall he had proposed that the Republican campaign organization be kept functioning to speed the flow of settlers. The Tribune was simultaneously declaring that “The duty of the people of the free States is to send more true men, more Sharpe’s rifles, and more howitzers to Kansas.” Henry Ward Beecher, attending a meeting at which a deacon asked arms for seventy-nine men, declared that a Sharpe’s rifle was a greater moral agency than the Bible, and that Plymouth Church would furnish half the guns required; whence the familiar nickname, “Beecher’s Bibles.” Even Henry J. Raymond and the Times, in spite of their policy of not hurting Southern sensibilities, saw that the issue on the Platte must be fought out.

A letter from Osawatomie, Kansas, gave a vivid picture in the Evening Post of July 14, 1856, of the perils of the free-soil settlement there, and asked for funds sufficient to keep thirty or forty horsemen in the field, well mounted and armed with breechloading rifles, Colt’s revolvers, and sabers. Other pleas were backed by editorials. A month after the Dred Scott decision a correspondent writing from Leavenworth told how the North had rallied to meet the crisis. “Emigration to Kansas and Nebraska has now set in with wonderful vigor, and such force as none have anticipated. Every train from Boston and New York to St. Louis is crowded to excess. More boats are running on the Missouri River than ever before, yet all are crowded. I have been nearly a week on the river and have slept on the cabin floor every night, with some hundred of other bed- or rather floor-fellows, being unable to get a stateroom. It is estimated that 7,000 Kansas emigrants have landed at Kansas City since the opening of navigation, and thousands more have gone on to Wyandotte, Quindaro, Leavenworth, etc.... And still they come. A single party of a thousand persons was expected in St. Louis last Tuesday.” The later correspondence had an equally confident note, which was justified when in October the free-soilers swept the Territorial election.

When the pro-slavery legislators that autumn, faced with the loss of their control, hastily drew up the Lecompton Constitution, providing for the establishment and perpetuation of slavery, the Evening Post attacked them angrily. Its fear was that the Buchanan Administration would induce Congress, which was Democratic in both branches, to admit Kansas under this illegal instrument. Thayer, its Washington correspondent, wrote that the Administration leaders were employing bribery to that end. The protests of the Evening Post day in and day out contributed to the overwhelming Northern sentiment which made this fraud impossible.

While the Herald, Journal of Commerce, and Express were filled with horror by John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in the closing days of 1859, the Evening Post pointed to it as a just retribution upon the South for its own crimes. Douglas believed and said that the raid was the natural result of the teachings of the Republican party; Bryant believed it the natural result of that Southern violence which he had excoriated after Brooks’s assault upon Sumner. His editorials almost recall John Brown’s own favorite text: “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins.” Of course, he condemned the lawlessness of the act, but he did not believe Brown solely responsible:

Passion does not reason; but if Brown reasoned and desired to give a public motive to his personal rancors, he probably said to himself that “the slave drivers had tried to put down freedom in Kansas by force of arms, and he would try to put down slavery by the same means.” Thus the bloody instructions which they taught return to plague the inventors. They gave, for the first time in the history of the United States, an example of the resort to arms to carry out political schemes, and, dreadful as the retaliation is which Brown has initiated, must take their share of the responsibility. They must remember that they accustomed men, in their Kansas forays, to the idea of using arms against their political opponents, that by their crimes and outrages they drove hundreds to madness, and that the feelings of bitterness and revenge thus generated have since rankled in the heart. Brown has made himself an organ of these in a fearfully significant way.

The evident terror many Southerners had of a slave insurrection filled Bryant with scorn. Buchanan wished to acquire Cuba and northern Mexico, and Southern newspapers wished Africa opened and new millions of blacks poured in; slavery was a blessed institution, and we could not have too much of it! “But while they speak the tocsin sounds, the blacks are in arms, their houses are in flames, their wives and children driven into exile or killed, and a furious servile war stretches its horrors over years. That is the blessed institution you ask us to foster, and spread, and worship, and for the sake of which you even spout your impotent threats against the grand edifice of the Union!” Pending the trial there was much interest in Brown’s carpet-bag. The Evening Post said that its incendiary contents were probably Washington’s will, emancipating his slaves; his letter of 1786 to Lafayette expressing hope that slavery would be abolished; Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, deploring slavery; his project of 1785 for emancipating the slaves; and similar documents by Patrick Henry, John Randolph, and Monroe. Bryant’s utterance when John Brown was hanged recalls that of our other great men of letters. Emerson spoke of Brown as “that new saint awaiting his martyrdom”; Thoreau called him “an angel of light”; Longfellow jotted in his diary, “The date of a new revolution, quite as much needed as the old one.” Bryant wrote:

... History, forgetting the errors of his judgment in the contemplation of his unfaltering courage, of his dignified and manly deportment in the face of death, and of the nobleness of his aims, will record his name among those of its martyrs and heroes.

Meanwhile, a new figure had arisen in the West. Like most other New York journals the Evening Post had instantly perceived the significance of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. When they began it remarked that Illinois was the theater of the most momentous contest, whether one considered the eminence of the contestants or the consequences which might result from it, that had occurred in any State canvass since Silas Wright’s defeat for Governor in 1846. When they closed it remarked (Oct. 18): “No man of this generation has grown more rapidly before the country than Mr. Lincoln in this canvass.”

At first the paper’s reports of the Lincoln-Douglas addresses were taken from the Chicago press, but it soon had its own correspondent, Chester P. Dewey, following the debaters. This writer knew Lincoln’s capacity. “Poor, unfriended, uneducated, a day laborer, he has distanced all these disadvantages, and in the profession of the law has risen steadily to a competence, and to the position of an intelligent, shrewd, and well-balanced man,” ran his characterization. “Familiarly known as ‘Long Abe,’ he is a popular speaker, and a cautious, thoughtful politician, capable of taking a high position as a statesman and legislator.” He described the enthusiasm with which Lincoln’s supporters at Ottawa carried him from the grounds on their shoulders. He related how at Jonesboro, in the southern extremity of the State, where the crowd was overwhelmingly Democratic, Douglas came to the grounds escorted by a band and a cheering crowd, amid the discharges of a brass cannon, while Lincoln arrived with only a few friends; how when Lincoln arose “a faint cheer was elicited, followed by derisive laughter from the Douglas men”; but how he quite won his audience.

It is interesting to note that this correspondent grasped the full importance of the Freeport debate, where Lincoln asked Douglas whether the people of a territory could themselves exclude slavery from it. To answer “no” meant that Douglas repudiated his doctrine of squatter sovereignty, and to answer “yes” meant that he alienated the South. On Sept. 5 the Evening Post had published a long editorial in which it concluded that Douglas was likely to be the Southern candidate in 1860. Just two days later its correspondent foretold the effect of Douglas’s fatal “yes” at Freeport:

It was very evident that Mr. Douglas was cornered by the questions put to him by Mr. Lincoln. He claimed to be the upholder of the Dred Scott decision, and also of popular sovereignty. He was asked to reconcile the two....

When the Freeport speech of Mr. Douglas shall go forth to all the land, and be read by the men of Georgia and South Carolina, their eyes will doubtless open. Can they ... abet a man who avows these revolutionary sentiments and endorses the right to self-government of the people of a territory?... How would he appear uttering this treason of popular sovereignty at a South Carolina barbecue?

Lincoln had been anxious to visit New York, and on Feb. 27, 1860, through the invitation of the Young Men’s Central Republican Union, he made his great speech at Cooper Institute. Bryant presided. The poet had met Lincoln nearly thirty years before, when, on his first visit to Illinois, he had encountered a company of volunteers going forward to the Black Hawk War, and had been attracted by the racy, original conversation of the uncouth young captain; but this meeting he had forgotten. James A. Briggs, who made all the business arrangements for Lincoln’s speech, later told in the Evening Post (Aug. 16, 1867) some interesting facts concerning the occasion. It was Briggs who personally asked Bryant to preside. The fame of the Westerner had, although the jealous Times, a Seward organ, spoke of him as merely “a lawyer who had some local reputation in Illinois,” impressed every one. In its two issues preceding the 27th the Evening Post published prominent announcements of Lincoln’s arrival and of the meeting, and promised “a powerful assault upon the policy and principles of the pro-slavery party, and an able vindication of the Republican creed.” The hall was well filled. According to Briggs, the tickets were twenty-five cents each, and the receipts, in spite of many free admissions, $367, or just $17 in excess of the expenses, of which the fee to Lincoln represented $200. As the Tribune said, since the days of Clay and Webster no man had spoken to a larger body of the city’s culture and intellect.

Bryant, in his brief introductory speech, said that it was a grateful office to present such an eminent Western citizen; that “these children of the West form a living bulwark against the advance of slavery, and from them is recruited the vanguard of the mighty armies of liberty” (loud applause); and that he had only to pronounce the name of the great champion of Republicanism in Illinois, who would have won the victory two years before but for an unjust apportionment law, to secure the profoundest attention. The Evening Post reported that at the end of Lincoln’s speech the audience arose almost to a man, and expressed its approbation by the most enthusiastic applause, the waving of handkerchiefs and hats, and repeated cheers. It reproduced the address in full, saying editorially that when it had such a speech it was tempted to wish its columns indefinitely elastic, emphasizing Lincoln’s principal points, and praising highly the logic of the argument, its mastery of clear and impressive statement, and the originality of the closing passages. Briggs tells us that Lincoln read this eulogistic editorial:

After the return of Mr. Lincoln to New York from the East, where he had made several speeches, he said to me: “I have seen what all the New York papers said about that thing of mine in the Cooper Institute, with the exception of the New York Evening Post, and I would like to know what Mr. Bryant thought of it”; and he then added: “It is worth a visit from Springfield, Illinois, to New York to make the acquaintance of such a man as William Cullen Bryant.” At Mr. Lincoln’s request I sent him a copy of the Evening Post, with a notice of his lecture.

Raymond and the Times, when the Republican national convention met in Chicago on May 16, 1860, were ardently for Seward—indeed, Thurlow Weed and Raymond were Seward’s chief lieutenants there. Greeley, had he been able to make the nomination himself, would have chosen Bates of Missouri first, and anybody to beat Seward second. Bryant, up to the time of the Cooper Union speech, had supported Chase for the nomination, but he knew that his chances were slight and he now leaned toward Lincoln—for he also was anxious to see Seward beaten. The Evening Post’s dislike of Seward dated from 1853, when it had declared (Nov. 2) that his friends in the Whig Party and a Democratic faction had formed a corrupt combination to plunder the State treasury through contracts. Its bitterness against him had steadily increased during the years of his close association with the political boss, Thurlow Weed. No one believed that Seward was dishonest, but thousands thought that Weed’s methods were detestable, and that Seward’s intimacy with men who schemed for public grants was altogether too close. References to the connection between “Seward’s chances” and “New York street railroads” had become common in 1859. Bryant wrote his associate Bigelow on Dec. 14 that, much as Seward had been hurt by the misconstruction of his phrase “the irrepressible conflict,” he had been damaged more in New York by something else. “I mean the project of Thurlow Weed to give charters for a set of city railways, for which those who receive them are to furnish a fund of from four to six hundred thousand dollars, to be expended for the Republican cause in the next Presidential election.” He added on Feb. 20:

Mr. Seward is not without his chance of a nomination, though some of your friends here affirm that he has none. He is himself, I hear, very confident of getting it. While the John Brown excitement continued, his prospects improved, for he was the best-abused man of his party—now that he is let alone, his stock declines again and people talk of other men. For my part I do not see that he is more of a representative man than a score of others in our party. The great difficulty which I have in regard to him is this, that by the election of a Republican President the slavery question is settled, and that with Seward for President, it will be the greatest good luck, a special and undeserved favor of Providence, if every honest Democrat of the Republican party be not driven into the opposition within a twelvemonths after he enters the White House. There are bitter execrations of Weed and his friends passing from mouth to mouth among the old radical Democrats of the Republican party here.

Bigelow, writing home from London (March 20), saw in Lincoln the only hope of the party. He had no use for Seward; he had even less for Bates—“an old Clay Whig from Missouri ... who has been for two years or more the candidate of Erastus Brooks and Gov. Hunt, who is not only not a Republican but who is put forward because he is not a Republican, and whom the Tribune recommends because he can get some votes that a straight-out Republican cannot get.” Moreover, Bigelow saw “no possibility of nominating Fessenden, or Chase, or Banks, or any such man”; and he knew that unless the right kind of Republican was elected the fight was lost.

Lincoln’s nomination was therefore hailed with more real gratification by the Post than by any other great Eastern newspaper. It saw in him one who would call forth the enthusiasm of his party, and the attachment of independent voters. The popular approval had already been surprising in its volume and gusto. “The Convention could have made no choice, we think, which, along with so many demonstrations of ardent approval, would have been met with so few expressions of dissent.” It paused to point out the two reasons for Seward’s defeat. The first was the convention’s opinion, with which it was inclined to agree, that he could not be elected, because he could not have carried Pennsylvania, Douglas would have beaten him in Illinois, and he was weak in Ohio, Indiana, and Vermont; the second lay in the distrust of his warmest political friends excited by the corruption of the two last New York legislatures. At this time there was much talk about “representative men,” and the Post, after naming a few, remarked that Lincoln surpassed them all as a personification of the distinctive genius of our country and its institutions. “Whatever is peculiar in the history and development of America, whatever is foremost in its civilization, whatever is good in its social and political structure, finds its best expression in the career of such men as Abraham Lincoln.”

A vignette of Lincoln by one of Bryant’s friends then traveling in the West, George Opdyke, was immediately printed to disprove the current story that he dwelt in “the lowest hoosier style”:

I found Mr. Lincoln living in a handsome, but not pretentious, double two-story frame house, having a wide hall running through the center, with parlors on both sides, neatly but not ostentatiously furnished. It was just such a dwelling as a majority of the well-to-do residents of these fine western towns occupy. Everything about it had a look of comfort and independence. The library I remarked in passing, particularly, and I was pleased to see long rows of books, which told of the scholarly tastes and culture of the family.

Lincoln received us with great, and to me surprising, urbanity. I had seen him before in New York, and brought with me an impression of his awkward and ungainly manner; but in his own house, where he doubtless feels himself freer than in the strange New York circles, Lincoln had thrown this off, and appeared easy, if not graceful. He is, as you know, a tall lank man, with a long neck, and his ordinary movements are unusually angular, even out west. As soon, however, as he gets interested in conversation, his face lights up, and his attitudes and gestures assume a certain dignity and impressiveness. His conversation is fluent, agreeable, and polite. You see at once from it that he is a man of decided and original character. His views are all his own; such as he has worked out from a patient and varied scrutiny of life, and not such as he has obtained from others. Yet he cannot be called opinionated. He listens to others like one eager to learn. And his replies evince at the same time both modesty and self-reliance. I should say that sound common sense was the principal quality of his mind, although at times a striking phrase or word reveals a peculiar vein of thought.

At first, it is interesting to note, the Evening Post was not only all confidence in Lincoln’s election, but all contempt for the Southern threats of secession if he won. Until that fall it held to a short-sighted view that the secession talk was a mere repetition of the old Southern attempt, made so often since nullification days, to bully the North as a spoiled child bullies its nurse. This confidence, which the Times and Tribune fully shared, was not assumed for campaign reasons. The stock market sustained it, and Bryant pointed to the midsummer advance in security prices as showing that business was not alarmed. A correspondent wrote from Newport on Aug. 23 that visitors from all parts of the South were there, but no fire-eating disunionists among them; “they deplore the election of Lincoln, while they regard it as almost a certainty, but scout the idea of secession or rebellion as a necessary consequence of it.” For years the North had listened to bullying, blustering, and threats from the South, and it had grown too much used to menaces.

But in the final fortnight of the campaign the newspaper began to perceive that there was a sullen reality behind these fulminations. On Oct. 20 we find the first editorial to treat secession earnestly, one declaring that no government could parley with men in arms against its authority, and that like Napoleon dealing with the insurrectionaries of Paris, the United States “must fire cannon balls and not blank cartridges.” On Oct. 29 it charged the existence of a definite secession conspiracy. Its authors were Howell Cobb and other officers high in the Administration; moreover, it declared, “the eggs of the conspiracy now hatching were laid four years ago, in the Cincinnati Convention.” Bigelow at that time, a close observer at Cincinnati of the scenes amid which Buchanan was nominated, had declared (June 13, 1856) that the nomination was purchased from the South by a promise from one of Buchanan’s lieutenants, Col. Samuel Black, that if a radical Republican should be elected his successor in 1860, then Buchanan would do nothing to interfere with the secession of the Southern States.

John Bigelow

Associate Editor 1849–1860.

A few days before election, Samuel J. Tilden, who was supporting Douglas, came into the office of the Evening Post in high excitement. In Bigelow’s room were seated the Collector of the Port, Hiram Barney; the president of the Illinois Central, William H. Osborn, and one of the commissioners of Central Park. They were all confident of Lincoln’s election, and Tilden’s excitement rose as he saw them rejoicing in the certainty. With a repressed anger and dignity that sobered them, he cut short their chaffing by saying: “I would not have the responsibility of William Cullen Bryant and John Bigelow for all the wealth in the sub-treasury. If you have your way, civil war will divide this country, and you will see blood running like water in the streets of this city.” With these words, he left. On Oct. 30 the Evening Post devoted more than six columns to a letter by Tilden, in which he explained why, though long a free-soiler, he had not supported Lincoln. He declared that the Republican Party was a sectional party, that if it ruled at Washington the South would be virtually under foreign domination, and that the Southerners would never yield to its “impracticable and intolerable” policy. The Post replied to but one of his arguments. The Republican Party, it said, was sectional only because it had never been given a fair hearing at the South. But, it added, “We do not propose to review Mr. Tilden’s paper at length to-day; a logical and conclusive answer to all its positions is in the course of preparation, and will appear in the Evening Post just one week from to-morrow afternoon.”

On the day announced, the day after election, the Evening Post published a table of the electoral votes, by which it appeared that Lincoln had a certain majority of thirty-five and a possible majority of forty-two; heading it, “Reply to the Letter of Samuel J. Tilden, Continued and Concluded.” But Tilden’s prophecy was to be realized in a fashion the editors little expected.

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CHAPTER TWELVE
THE NEW YORK PRESS AND SOUTHERN SECESSION

No other five months in our history under the Constitution have been so critical as the five between the election of Lincoln and the capture of Sumter. The anger of the South at the Republican triumph; the secession of South Carolina before Christmas, followed by the rest of the lower South; the erection of a Southern Confederacy in February, with the choice of Davis as provisional President; the complete paralysis of Buchanan’s government—all this made the months anxious and uncertain beyond any others in the century. Until New Year’s, many people in the North believed that the Southern threats were not to be taken seriously; until February, many believed that the outlook for a peaceful preservation of the Union was bright. Thereafter a large part of the population held that, in Gen. Winfield Scott’s phrase, the erring sisters should be let depart in peace. In this anomalous period a thousand currents of opinion possessed the land, and no one could predict what the next day would bring forth. The time tried the judgment and patriotism of the nation’s newspapers as by fire.

The New York press had at this time asserted a national ascendancy which it slowly lost after the war as the great West increased in population. During December, 1860, the Herald averaged a week-day circulation of 77,107, and a Sunday circulation of 82,656, which it boasted was the largest in the world. The daily circulation of the London Times was 25,000 less. The Tribune boasted on April 10, 1861, that while its daily circulation was 55,000, its weekly circulation was enormous, making the total number of its buyers 287,750. Two-fifths of these were in New York, but it had 26,091 subscribers in Pennsylvania; 24,900 in Ohio; 16,477 in Illinois; 11,968 in Iowa; 11,081 in Indiana, and even in California 5,535. In the South, on the other hand, there was a mere handful of buyers—21 in Mississippi, 23 in South Carolina, 35 in Georgia, and 10 in Florida, against 10,589 in Maine. The Sun had a daily circulation of about 60,000, and the Times of about 35,000. That of the Evening Post was approaching 20,000, while its weekly and semi-weekly issues were widely read in the West. It was in reference to the influence of the Tribune, Times, and Evening Post that the Herald said, “Without New York journalism there would have been no Republican party.” It had some excuse for its boast regarding the city’s journals (Nov. 8):

Several of them, possessing revenues equal in amount to those of some of the sovereign States, are unapproachable by influences except those of a national policy, and they constitute a congress of intellect in permanent session assembled. The telegraph and the locomotive carry their influences to the remotest corners of the land in a constantly increasing ratio. These, then, are to be the leading powers which are to range parties, and conduct the discussions of the great questions of the generation that is before us. They, and they only, can do it in a catholic and cosmopolitan spirit.... These affect the affairs and hopes of men everywhere.

Lincoln’s election was accepted with unmixed pleasure by the Evening Post and Tribune, the Times and the World, which saw in it a long-deferred assurance that the popular majority in favor of freedom had at last found a dependable leader. It was accepted with resignation by the three chief opposition newspapers. Bennett’s Herald, with a snort of chagrin, reminded good citizens that they should “settle down to their occupations and to discharge the duty which they owe to their families.” The Journal of Commerce remarked that “we have nothing to do but submit,” adding that the conservative majority in both Houses “will check any wayward fancies that may seize the executive, under the influence of his abolition advisers.” The Express deplored, deeply deplored, the result, but formally acquiesced in it, “as under the forms if not in the spirit and intent of the Constitution.” But as the news of the secession movement increased, the differences of opinion grew marked.

Bryant in the Evening Post was anxious that Lincoln should not talk of concessions, nor seem to be frightened by the Southern bluster. He must refuse to parley with disunionists:

If there are any States disposed to question the supremacy of the Constitution, or to assert the incompatibility of our climatic influences and social institutions with the form of government under which we have been hitherto united, now is the time to meet the question and settle it....

Mr. Lincoln cannot say one word or take one step toward concession of any kind without in so far striking at the very foundations upon which our government is based, violating the confidence of his supporters, and converting our victory into a practical defeat.

When the idea of resisting the will of the majority is abandoned in responsible quarters; when every sovereign State shows itself content to abide the issue of a constitutional election, it will be time enough for Mr. Lincoln to enlighten those who need light as to what he will do and what he will not do; and we greatly mistake the man if he will give ear to any proposition designed to convert him into a President not of the whole Union, nor of those who voted for him, but of those who did not.

The Herald was equally insistent that Lincoln should promise concessions; “he should at once give to the world the programme of the policy he will pursue as President, and that policy should be one of conciliation,” it said on Nov. 9. But a special correspondent of the Post, interviewing Lincoln in Springfield on Nov. 14, and finding him reading the history of the nullification movement, obtained an assurance that he would make no such sign of weakness. “I know,” he quoted Lincoln as saying, “the justness of my intentions, and the utter groundlessness of the pretended fears of the men who are filling the country with their clamor. If I go into the Presidency, they will find me as I am on record—nothing less, nothing more. My declarations have been made to the world without reservation. They have been repeated; and now, self-respect demands of me and the party that has elected me, that when threatened I should be silent.” The correspondent assured Lincoln’s Eastern friends that nature had endowed him “with that sagacity, honesty, and firmness which made Old Hickory’s the most eminently successful and honorable Administration known to the public.”

When South Carolina carried her threat of secession into execution on Dec. 20, every New York newspaper had already indicated its attitude toward that act. Bryant had done so Nov. 12, in an editorial called “Peaceable Secession an Absurdity.” No government could have a day of assured existence, he wrote, if it tolerated the doctrine of peaceable secession, for it could have no credit or future. “No, if a State secedes it is in rebellion, and the seceders are traitors. Those who are charged with the executive branch of the government are recreant to their oaths if they fail to use all lawful means to put down such rebellion.” The next day he added that “We look to Abraham Lincoln to restore American unity, and make it perpetual.” No one expected Buchanan to do anything, and not a week passed without Bryant or Bigelow calling him a traitor. This insistence that the seceding States be coerced into returning was shared by the World, which was on the point of absorbing Webb’s Courier and Enquirer, and by the Times.

A far less sound view was taken by the Tribune, so long the most influential Republican newspaper of the nation. Horace Greeley is often represented as declaring flatly that the South should be allowed to depart in peace. His opinion, while not much more defensible, was decidedly different. Greeley wished to make sure that it was the will of the Southern majority to secede, and not the mere whim of fire-eating leaders. “I have said repeatedly, and here repeat,” he wrote in the Tribune of Jan. 14, “that, if the people of the Slave States, or of the Cotton States alone, really wish to get out of the Union, I am in favor of letting them out so soon as that result can be peacefully and constitutionally attained.... If they will ... take first deliberately by fair vote a ballot of their own citizens, none being coerced nor intimidated, and that vote shall indicate a settled resolve to get out of the Union, I will do all I can to help them out at an early day. I want no States kept in the Union by coercion; but I insist that none shall be coerced out of it....”

But James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, James Brooks’s Express, Gerard Hallock’s Journal of Commerce, and several minor journals, as the Daily News and Day Book, were frankly in favor of letting the secessionists proceed without any restraint from the Federal Government. The Herald was much the most important, although the World sneeringly said that every new subscriber meant two cents and a little more contempt for Bennett. It was read everywhere about New York for its full news and its smartness; the caustic observations of Dickens and William H. Russell upon New York journalism were founded principally upon it; and Administration leaders at Washington found its comprehensive dispatches invaluable throughout the war. Maintaining its old levity of tone, the Herald used at this period to speak of the World, Tribune, and Times as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. It remarked that Lincoln had once split rails and now he was splitting the Union. It called Greeley “the Hon. Massa Greeley,” and it probably refrained only by a supreme effort from nicknaming Bryant. One of its cardinal tenets was that slavery was really unobjectionable. As the two sections drew near war, it printed a description of slum life in Liverpool, remarking that compared with the English laborer, “the slave lives like a prince.” He had his cabin, neat, clean, and weatherproof; he had his own garden patch, over which he was lord paramount; he was well-fed, well-lodged, well-clothed, and rarely overworked; sleek, happy, contented, enjoying his many holidays with gusto, he lived to a great age. Before the New Year, the Herald had spoken out plainly against coercion. It would bring on “a fratricidal conflict, which will destroy the industrial interests of all sections, and put us back at least a hundred years in the estimation of the civilized world.”

As one State after another passed out of the Union, therefore, a half dozen newspapers, the Herald, Daily News, Journal of Commerce, Day Book, Staats Zeitung, and Courrier des États Unis were taking an attitude friendly to the South; one, the Tribune, simply wrung its hands; and the Evening Post, Times, and World alone urged severe measures. Jefferson Davis, wrote the Evening Post, “knows that secession is a forcible rupture of an established government; he knows that it must, if persisted in, lead to war.” “If our Southern brethren think they can better themselves by going out,” declared Bennett’s Herald on Jan. 17, “in heaven’s name let them go in peace. We cannot keep them by force.”

During January nearly all eyes were fastened upon the various plans for keeping the Union intact by arranging a compromise, and preposterous some of these plans were. The Crittenden Compromise, which proposed making the Missouri line of 36′ 30″ the constitutional boundary between slavery and freedom in the Territories, was brusquely condemned by the Evening Post. “In every respect the ... scheme is objectionable, and no Republican who understands the principles of his party, or who is faithful to what he believes the fundamental objects of the Federal Constitution, can assent to it for one moment,” the journal said on Jan. 26. The Republican Party had been established and had just won its great victory upon the principle that slavery should not be extended into any Territory whatever; how could it give it up without committing suicide? In the same issue the Evening Post said that the violent acts of the South, the seizure of forts and arsenals, the drilling of men to prevent arrests, “are treasonable acts, and amount to levying war upon the United States,” while it called Senator Toombs “a blustering and cowardly traitor.” The Tribune, which believed that secession was a mere threatening gesture, and that Northern firmness might overawe the rebels and bring them back into the Union, was also against the Crittenden plan. “No compromise, then! No delusive and deluding concessions! No surrender of principle!” exclaimed Greeley on Jan. 18. The next day the Tribune evinced its failure to grasp the situation by remarking that if Major Anderson at Fort Sumter had fired on the rebels when the Star of the West was turned back from his relief, “treason would have been stayed. That act alone would have saved Virginia from plunging into the fatal gulf of rebellion.”

The Times was as firmly against a compromise as the Evening Post. Stand by the Union and the Constitution first, wrote Raymond; when their safety is assured, then only can we talk of guarantees for the South. “We would yield nothing whatever to exactions pressed by threats of disunion....” So was the World, which said that “It is of no use to mince matters; this rampant cotton rebellion will haul in its horns or we shall have civil war.” The World had its own plan of restoring harmony by extinguishing sectional spirit. It proposed, first, to divest the Federal executive of its overgrown patronage—the office-seekers were always pandering to sectional prejudice; second, to improve the navigation of the Mississippi; third, to construct levees to prevent Mississippi floods; and fourth, to build a Southern Pacific railway. It naïvely said that if these public works “could be adopted as a preventive instead of a remedy, their cost would probably be less than the cost of a civil war.” The Tribune also had a pacification scheme. It suggested that the Federal Government begin the purchase of all the slaves of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, about 600,000 in all; to pay not more than $100,000,000, or less than $200 each, for them; and to complete the transaction in, say, 1876.

A petition for the Crittenden compromise circulated by William B. Astor found 140 signatures at the Herald office. By now, indeed, Bennett’s Herald was expressing opinions which seem madness.

After appealing to Lincoln to beg the South to return; after appealing to the Republican Party to repudiate its Chicago platform; after appealing to Congress to pass the Crittenden resolution or submit it to the States, the Herald appealed to the South. On Jan. 4, railing at the imbecility of Congress and the indifference of President-elect Lincoln, it proposed that the Southern States arrange a Constitutional Convention for their own section alone. Let this body adopt amendments to the Constitution embodying guarantees of the return of fugitive slaves, of the validity of the Dred Scott decision, and of universal tolerance of opinion respecting slavery as a social institution. “Let them submit these different amendments to the different Northern States, earnestly inviting their acceptance of them, and assigning a period, similar to that which was appointed for the ratification of the Constitution of 1787, when all States which should have agreed to their proposition should be considered as thenceforth forming the future United States of America.” The whole nation, said the Herald, would join such a Union, save New England. Probably the Yankee States would stay out. Good riddance to them. The rest of the country is sick and tired of New England. It has had too much “of the provincial meanness, bigotry, self-conceit, love for ‘isms,’ hypercritical opposition to anything and everything, universal fault-finding, hard bargaining, and systematic home lawlessness ... which are covering their section of the country with odium.”

This was not a shabby offer to the South—to take any conditions it made and kick the Yankees out. But the Herald waxed more generous still. On March 20, a month after the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, it had found the solution of the great problem: let the new Congress, when it met at Lincoln’s call, adopt the Confederate Constitution, and submit it to the nation for ratification by three-fourths of the States. “This would settle the question and restore peace and harmony to a troubled nation, while at the same time every statesman and every man of common sense must admit that the new Constitution is a decided improvement on the old.” The Herald enumerated its merits: the restriction of the President to one six-year term, the budget system of appropriations, the interdiction of internal improvements at the expense of the national treasury, and so on. “Let Mr. Lincoln call Congress together for the purpose, and he will have taken the first step of a statesman since he came to power.” The Herald did not say who it believed should be President under the new constitution, but it could hardly avoid concluding that Jefferson Davis ought to be accepted along with the Confederate system of government. All the while, the Journal of Commerce, Express, and News were imperturbably declaring that the South should be allowed to depart amicably.

A surprising number of New Yorkers, indeed, sympathized with this hostility to coercion. A meeting of disciples of Mayor Fernando Wood held at Brooke’s Hall on Dec. 15 gives us the key to much of this sentiment. Its chairman said that the city had lost $20,000,000 a month in Southern orders, an estimate which merchants applauded; while the rougher element that later engaged in the Draft Riots adopted with a roar the resolution that, “believing our Southern brethren to be now engaged in the holy cause of American liberty, and trying to roll back the avalanche of Britishism, we extend to them our heartfelt sympathy.” The Herald the same day computed the loss of the North from the “national convulsion” at $478,620,000, explaining that flour had fallen a dollar a barrel, wheat twenty cents a bushel, and many manufactories had suspended, since Lincoln’s election. Mayor Fernando Wood, in his message published Jan. 8, proposed that if disunion took place, New York should declare itself a free city, clinging to its commerce with both sections. Wood was a Philadelphia Quaker by birth, who began life as a cigar-maker, and made his way in politics by a physique so handsome, a personality so fascinating, and a character so unscrupulous that he has been well called the successor of Aaron Burr. The Evening Post remarked that it had always known he was a knave, but it had not before suspected him of being so egregious a fool, and asked whether the city in seceding would take the Hudson River, Long Island Sound, New York Central, and Erie Canal with it—it couldn’t do without them. Even the Herald sneered at his proposal. But William H. Russell, visiting the city, as late as March was shocked by the indifference which prominent citizens showed to the impending catastrophe.

This indifference the Evening Post, Times, and Tribune were loyally trying to dispel. On Feb. 2, when five States had seceded, the Evening Post warned them that the act meant war. “No one doubts that if the people of those States should transfer them back to Spain or France, the United States would be prepared to recover them at all the hazards of war; and, for the same reason, she will recover them from the hands of any other ‘foreign powers’ under any other names.” A fortnight later Bryant reiterated:

... Our government means no war, and will not, if it can be avoided, shed a drop of blood; if war comes, it must be made by the South; but let the South understand, when it does come, that eighty years of enterprise, of accumulation, and of progress in all the arts of warfare have not been lost upon the North. Cool in temperament, peaceful in its pursuits, loving industry and trade more than fighting, it has yet the old blood of the Saxon in its veins, and will go to battle with the same ponderous and irresistible energy with which it has reared its massive civilization out of the primitive wilderness.

The Times was equally emphatic. When the Journal of Commerce argued that two American nations, one free and one slave, might live as cordially together as the Protestant and Catholic parts of Switzerland, the Tribune reminded it that in 1846–7 the Catholic cantons had tried to secede, and the Swiss government had instantly crushed the movement.

Bryant was keenly interested all the while in the formation of Lincoln’s Cabinet. Immediately after Lincoln’s nomination he had written him saying that “I was not without apprehensions that the nomination might fall upon some person encumbered with bad associates, and it was with a sense of relief and infinite satisfaction that I, with thousands of others, heard the news of your nomination.” He was desirous of having Cabinet places given his friends Chase and Gideon Welles, and Parke Godwin prints in his biography the three letters in which he urged the claims of these men and protested against Cameron. He also wrote Lincoln in behalf of a low tariff. But the biography does not contain the letter which Hiram Barney, Collector of the Port, wrote Bryant from Chicago immediately (Jan. 17, 1861) after seeing Lincoln regarding his Cabinet:

I went with Mapes, Opdyke, and Hageboom from Washington to Columbus and Springfield. We saw and conversed freely and fully with Gov. Chase and Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln received your letter announcing our mission the night previous to our arrival. I thank you for writing it. It was influential, I have no doubt, in procuring for us the favorable reception and hearing which was accorded to us. Mr. Lincoln has invited to his Cabinet only three persons, to wit—Mr. Bates, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Cameron. All these have accepted. In regard to the latter-named, however, Mr. Lincoln became satisfied that he had made a mistake, and wrote him requesting him to withdraw his acceptancy or decline. Mr. Cameron refused to answer the letter and was greatly offended by it. He, however, authorized a mutual friend to telegraph and he did so—that Mr. Cameron would not on any account accept a seat in his Cabinet. Mr. Lincoln has thus a quarrel on his hands which he is anxious to adjust satisfactorily before he proceeds further in his formation of his Cabinet. He is advised from Washington not to conclude further upon the members of his Cabinet until he reaches Washington, which will be probably about the middle of February—and he has concluded to act according to this advice. We tried to change this purpose, but I fear in vain. He has not offered a place to Mr. Chase. He wants and expects to invite him to the Treasury Department. But he fears this will offend Pennsylvania, and he wants to reconcile the Republicans of that State to it before it is settled. He thinks Mr. Chase would be willing to let the matter stand so and leave the option with him (Mr. Lincoln) of taking him when he can do so without embarrassment. He knows that Gov. Chase does not desire to go into the Cabinet and prefers the Senate—but he relies upon Gov. Chase’s patriotism to overcome the objections which arise from this unpleasant state of things.

He wants to take Judd, but this selection will offend some of his friends and he does not decide upon it. Welles of Connecticut is his preference for New England. Blair of Maryland is favorably considered. Dayton will either go into his Cabinet or will have the mission to England or France. One of these missions he intends to give to Cassius M. Clay. Caleb B. Smith of Indiana is urged upon him and he may have to take him instead of Judd. Caleb is almost as objectionable as Cameron, and for similar reasons. He received good naturedly and with some compliments my Cabinet which I gave him in pencil on a slip of paper, rather in joke—as follows:

Lincoln and Judd
Seward and Chase
Bates and Blair
Dayton and Welles

He considers Chase the ablest and best man in America. He is determined that Justice shall be done to all his friends, especially to the Republicans of Democratic antecedents, and Mr. Seward understands that he will not allow the Democratic ... Republicans of New York to be deprived of their full share of influence and patronage under his Administration. He is opposed to all offers of compromise by Republicans which can in the least affect the integrity of the principles as set forth in the Chicago platform.

If he would act now on his own judgment and preferences he would make a good Cabinet not much different from that I have above mentioned. What he will ultimately do after reaching Washington no one, not even himself, can tell. He wants to please and satisfy all his friends.

As this letter indicates, the Evening Post office was one of the chief Eastern centers from which the “Democratic Republicans” in these dark months tried to make their influence felt upon the incoming Administration.

Lincoln’s inaugural address was warmly applauded by the Evening Post. Bryant had seen the President-elect at the Astor House as he passed through New York, and taken new faith in him. “Admirable as the inaugural address is in all its parts—convincing in argument, concise and pithy in manner and simple in style—the generous and conciliatory tone is the most admirable,” the poet wrote. “Mr. Lincoln thoroughly refutes the theory of secession. He points out its follies and warns the disaffected districts against its consequences, but he does so in the kindly, pitying manner of a father who reasons with an erring child.” On inauguration day the Evening Post had again predicted war with the rebels, and again declared that “the Unionists of our States will arise and deal them the destruction they deserve.” The Tribune regarded the message in the same way. It especially praised “the tone of almost tenderness,” below which Lincoln’s iron determination was evident. The message would carry to twenty millions the tidings that the Federal Government still lived, “with a Man at the head of it.” The World and Times spoke in similar terms.

But the secessionist press abused this noble state paper roundly. The Herald, which had been praising Buchanan as a wise and just statesman, and attacking Lincoln as an incompetent, said that the new President might almost as well have told his audience a funny story and let it go. His speech was a body of vague generalities artfully designed to allow its readers to make whatever interpretations they pleased. “It is neither candid nor statesmanlike; nor does it possess any essential of dignity or patriotism. It would have caused a Washington to mourn, and would have inspired Jefferson, Madison, or Jackson with contempt.” Gerard Hallock in the Journal of Commerce involved himself in a neat contradiction, writing: “The President puts forth earnest professions of love for the Union, and places justly and properly much stress upon his duty to preserve it and execute the laws. But he commits the practical error of setting up the theory of an unbroken Union, against the stubborn fact of a divided and dissevered one.” Why, asked Bryant, was it “just” for the President to dwell upon his duty to preserve the Union, and yet “a practical error” to do so?

Thus the nation moved rapidly toward civil war. While the Herald, Journal of Commerce, Express, and Daily News still talked of compromise, actually they had given up hope of it and spent their chief energies in decrying coercion; the first-named having admitted as much in an editorial of Feb. 3 headed “No Compromise Now Except That of a Peaceable Separation.” In fact, all these journals found in the idea of a division much to commend. At the end of January, Bennett’s writers began preaching imperialistic doctrines. “North America is too large for one government,” the Herald reflected on the 24th, “but establish two and they in good time will cover the continent.” The next day, under the title, “Manifest Destiny of the North and South,” it drew an alluring picture of the American conquests that would follow the dissolution of the Union. Inevitably, the Confederacy would subdue Mexico, Cuba, and other Caribbean lands. The United States would conquer Canada. The two great nations would be the most friendly of allies. “Northern troops may yet have to repel invaders of the possessions of slave-holders in Mexico and Venezuela, and our fleet will joyfully aid in dispersing new Spanish armadas on the coast of Cuba. Nor do we doubt that ... under the walls of Quebec, and on the banks of the St. Lawrence, legions from Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina will aid us.” This glorious vision of unlimited booty was repeatedly dwelt upon.

The Herald had less Northern influence than its large circulation would seem to imply, and was hearkened to chiefly at the South. Many secessionists, remembering the business and social connections of the South with the metropolis, and the large Democratic majority New York generally gave, believed that the city would assist to divide the North and aid the rebellion. “The New York Herald and New York Evening Express have done much toward disseminating this false theory,” said the New Orleans Picayune later. The Chicago Tribune that summer quoted a Southern visitor as saying “that we of the North can have little or no idea of the pestilent influence which the New York News and other journals of that sort have exerted upon the popular mind of that section.” Probably less harm was done the Union by Bennett’s erratic ideas than by Greeley’s influential opinion that if the South was determined to go, go she ought. Bryant’s editorials in the Evening Post, above those of any other New York journal, expressed an elevated, unwavering, and steadying demand for loyalty to the Constitution. He had no patience with Greeley’s acquiescence in a popular-sovereignty doctrine of secession. He was a far abler writer than any man on the staff of the Times or World, even Raymond. His superior steadfastness and shrewdness of judgment was strikingly illustrated just before the war began.

On April 3, as if by concert, the Tribune and Times published long and emphatic editorials attacking Lincoln for his alleged indecision and inactivity. The Tribune headed its editorial “Come to the Point!” and demanded that a programme be laid down. Greeley apparently cared little what this programme should be. “If the Union is to be maintained at all hazards, let the word be passed along the line that the laws are to be enforced.... If the secession of the Gulf States—and of any more that choose to follow—is to be regarded as a fixed fact, let that be proclaimed, and let the line of revenue collection be established and maintained this side of them.” The Times devoted two columns to “Wanted—A Policy.” The Administration, it said, had fallen so far short of public expectations that the Union was weaker than a month before. Indeed, the Administration had exhibited “a blindness and a stolidity without a parallel in the history of intelligent statesmanship.” Lincoln had “spent time and strength in feeding rapacious and selfish politicians, which should have been bestowed upon saving the Union”; and “we tell him ... that he must go up to a higher level than he has yet reached, before he can see and realize the high duties to which he has been called.” Such utterances lent too much support to the Herald’s constant statements that “the Lincoln Administration is cowardly, mean, and vicious,” its constant references to “the incompetent, ignorant, and desperate ‘Honest Abe.’”

In a crushing editorial next day, Bryant demolished these peevish outbursts. First, he pointed out, it was hard within thirty days to decide what course was best as regarded the seceding States and the wavering border States. The Cabinet was said to be divided, and the most careful reflection, investigation, and debate was necessary for a question so big with the fate of the republic. Second, how could the facile critics know that Lincoln had not fixed upon his policy, but concluded to make it known by execution, not by a windy proclamation? “If Fort Sumter is to be reinforced, should we give the rebels previous notice?” There existed other considerations, as the fact that every day officers in the army and navy were going over to the rebels, and if Lincoln decided upon an energetic course it would be indispensable to be able to count on an energetic execution in every contingency. This answer displayed an admirable patience—a patience of which Bryant might well have had a larger stock in the four years to come.

The first edition of the Evening Post on April 13 carried the news that the bombardment of Fort Sumter had begun, and carried also an editorial written with all Bryant’s high fervor:

This is a day which will be ever memorable in our annals. To-day treason has risen from blustering words to cowardly deeds. Men made reckless by a long life of political gambling—for years cherishing treason next their hearts while swearing fealty to the government—have at last goaded themselves on to murder a small band of faithful soldiers. They have deliberately chosen the issue of battle. To-day, who hesitates in his allegiance is a traitor with them....

To-day the nation looks to the government to put down treason forever.... It will not grudge the men or the money which are needed. We have enjoyed for eighty years the blessings of liberty and constitutional government. It is a small sacrifice we are now to lay upon the altar. In the name of constitutional liberty, in the name of law and order, in the name of all that is dear to freemen, we shall put down treason and restore the supremacy of the Constitution.

The day was one of intense excitement. The Evening Post of Monday, April 15, reported that thousands of eager inquirers had thronged the streets in the neighborhood of the office and packed the counting-room downstairs until there was no room for a single additional person. The successive editions were seized upon madly. At five the first rumor of Sumter’s surrender came over the wires, and at five-thirty it was confirmed. Within a space of seconds rather than minutes the fourth edition, containing the complete news, was being cried on the streets. The Herald next morning sold 135,000 copies, a world’s record. That Monday Bryant’s leading editorial, “The Union, Now and Forever,” took its text in the President’s call for volunteers. “If he calls for only 75,000,” said the Evening Post, “it is because he knows that he can have a million if he needs them.” George Cary Eggleston has said that he and Bryant’s other associates were often amazed to see how calmly he would write an editorial that proved full of intense eloquence, every line blazing. This was such an editorial, ending in a ringing peroration: “‘God speed the President!’ is the voice of millions of determined freemen to-day.”

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE CRITICAL DAYS OF THE CIVIL WAR

When Sumter brought the North to its feet as one man, as Lowell wrote, the press and general public believed the war would be brief. The best editorial judgment in New York had been that the rebellion could be strangled by a blockade alone. “A half dozen ships of war stationed at the proper points is all that is wanted,” said the Times on Feb. 11, 1861. “In a few months’ time the Southern Confederacy would be completely starved out.” The Tribune, arguing Jan. 22 for closing the Southern ports, had predicted that as a consequence “the South will decline, and finally collapse, in utter humiliation. And this will not result from bloody wars, but from the peaceful operation of the laws of trade.” On the same date the Evening Post remarked that the secession disease required not cautery or the knife, but a little judicious regimen. Uncle Sam might crush the seceding States with ease. “He could devastate every cotton field, and level every seaboard city in less than a year, if he were so foolhardy and malignant as they have shown themselves to be.” It must be remembered that at the time of all these utterances Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had not yet joined the South. But in his call to arms just after Sumter Bryant allowed himself to boast that every loyal arm was a match for ten traitors. A pathetic Evening Post editorial of June 15, “The Beginning of the End,” following the Confederate evacuation of Harper’s Ferry, predicted that Jefferson Davis meant to make a desperate effort at Manassas, for “his cause is on its last legs, and unless he puts forth a bold stroke now, it is gone.”

It was because the Tribune was so confident of an easy victory that it raised the cry, “On to Richmond!” in June and early July. Simply because it shared the same confidence, the Evening Post, with greater wisdom, pleaded for deliberation and care, and carried editorials with such headings as “Patience!” (July 1). After the advance began, it thought that Jefferson Davis ought to be captured within a month (July 17).

When upon this over-confidence fell the shock of the rout at Bull Run, the Post felt it necessary to hearten the North by minimizing the defeat. There was no need to labor the moral that the war was going to be long and hard, and Bryant was worried lest the public should be depressed. Frederic Law Olmsted wrote him that “although it is not best to say it publicly, you should know, at least, that the retreat was generally of the worst character, and is already in its results most disastrous.” The Post harped for some time upon the lesson of the need for better discipline and officers. But it also tried to maintain that Manassas was the Sebastopol of the rebels, a powerful natural position; that “in any fair, open, hand-to-hand fight, the Union troops are too much for the seceders”; and even that the moral effect of the battle would be in the North’s favor. Greeley felt the same impulse when, under the reaction from his “On to Richmond!” mischief, he promised that the Tribune would cease nagging the army, and devote itself to inspiriting the public.

As soon as they perceived that the war would be bitter, the editors of the Post took their stand with what the historian Rhodes calls the radical party of the North; the party of Secretary Chase, Senators Trumbull and Sumner, and Gen. Carl Schurz. The paper’s Washington correspondent early (May 3) divided the Cabinet into radicals—Welles, Chase, Blair—and conservatives—Seward, Bates, and Smith. The radicals wanted the war prosecuted with intense energy, no thought of compromise, and no particular regard for the feelings of the border States and Northern Democrats. Always ardent, sometimes precipitate, they disliked the cautious Seward, and sometimes lost patience with Lincoln himself. In the end their policies were usually adopted, but Lincoln’s wisdom lay in not adopting them prematurely; as Schurz admitted in 1864, when he wrote a schoolmate that he had often thought Lincoln wrong, but in the end had always found him right.

Much of the radicalism of Bryant and Parke Godwin was quite sound. In the first month the Evening Post published no fewer than four editorials asking for a hurried and strict blockade of the South, and prophesying that it would “put an end to the rebellion more quickly than any other plan of action.” On July 20 it anticipated Ericsson by asking for ironclads, recalling that Robert L. Stevens had begun building a floating armored battery under an act of Congress passed in 1842, but had never finished it. The paper thought that “half a dozen thoroughly shot-proof gunboats, of light draft,” could silence Forts Sumter, Pulaski, and Jackson, or better still, run past them and dominate Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. It asked for a national draft on July 9, 1862, nine months before Congress passed a law for one. Lincoln’s early policy was to free and protect all Southern negroes who, having been employed in the military service of the Confederacy, came within the lines of the Northern commands, but this did not satisfy Bryant. On Dec. 6, 1861, he asked Congress to confiscate the property of the rebels, appoint State commissioners of forfeiture to take charge of it, and as fast as negroes came within Northern reach, make them freemen.

Bryant was in direct communication with radical officials in Washington and radical commanders in the field. He corresponded with Secretary Chase; Gen. James Wadsworth and Gen. E. A. Hitchcock wrote him startlingly frank letters; and he heard regularly from Consul-General Bigelow in Paris. The slowness with which the war dragged on was deplored by the Evening Post even as it was deplored by Chase, Schurz, and Sumner. The paper did not criticize Lincoln with the signal lack of judgment Greeley often showed, much less with the rancorous hostility of Bennett’s Herald or the now Democratic World. But by the middle of September, 1861, it was censuring him for the reluctance with which he signed the Confiscation Act, and reminding him that “his official position is in the lead, and not in the rear.” On Oct. 11 it published an editorial, “Playing With War,” in which it criticized the Administration for lukewarmness and declared that the public wanted active measures; “the more energetic, the more effective these measures, the more telling the blow, the more they will applaud.”

These complaints, the complaints of a large party all over the North and of an able Congressional group, redoubled as the first half of 1862 passed with almost no news from Virginia but that of disasters. On July 8 the Post asked three sharp questions. Why had enlistments been stopped three or four months earlier—for Stanton, believing success at hand, had foolishly halted the recruiting on April 3? Why had the militia of the loyal States never, since the war began, been reorganized, drilled, and armed? And why had no great arsenals of munitions been collected? “We have been sluggish in our preparations and timid in our execution,” the paper admonished Washington. “Let us change all this.” Such complaints were natural and useful in the dark hour when McClellan’s army recoiled after bloody fighting from its first advance on Richmond. Bryant also did well to press his attacks upon corruption in government contracts, and political favoritism in military appointments. When this month Congress authorized the use of negroes in camp service and trench digging, he reasonably found fault with the Administration for its slowness in acting upon the authorization.

But Bryant’s “radicalism” was not commendable when he complained of the delay in emancipating the slaves; of the prominence of Northern Democrats, not hostile to slavery, in the army and at Washington; and of the consideration given border State sentiment. Had Lincoln acted rashly in the early months of the war, he would have forced Kentucky and Missouri into the arms of the South, and he thought (Sept. 22, 1861) that “to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” Had he made haste to emancipate the slaves, he would irretrievably have offended powerful elements in the North and the Border States which were willing to fight for the Union, but not to fight against slavery. Military historians have generally condemned Lincoln’s interference with McClellan’s plans in the early spring of 1862, an interference into which he was forced by such pressure as Bryant was exerting. The Evening Post was unjust to Lincoln when it explained (July 7, 1862) why the people suspected him of indecision. “He has trusted too much to his subordinates; he has not been sufficiently peremptory with them, either with his generals or his Secretaries; and his whole Administration has been marked by a certain tone of languor and want of earnestness which has not corresponded with the wishes of the people.” It was unjust when it spoke again (July 23) of Lincoln’s “slumbers,” and of the “drowsy influence of border State opiates.”

In condemning the military incapacity of the Union generals in the East the newspaper was upon firmer ground. McClellan became commander of the Army of the Potomac immediately after Bull Run, and was made commander-in-chief of all the armies on Nov. 1, 1861. As the new year arrived without any movement, Bryant began grumbling over the idea held by many officers “that the wisest way of conducting the war is to weary out the South with delays.” He argued that if the North did not show more energy, France or England might eventually interfere. “If we understand the case,” he wrote caustically on Feb. 6, “Gen. McClellan has infinite claims upon our gratitude for the discipline which he has given to the army, but that discipline is still too imperfect to warrant any movement.” He pointed out that the enemy was relying upon this inefficiency, and was so confident of the situation in Virginia that Beauregard had just been dispatched to reinforce the Confederate army in the West. A few days later Bryant received a letter which Gen. Wadsworth wrote him from camp, denouncing McClellan roundly:

I repeat the conclusion intimated in my last letter. The commander-in-chief is almost inconceivably incompetent, or he has his own plans—widely different from those entertained by the people of the North—of putting down this Rebellion. I have just read the gloomy reports from Europe, threatening intervention, etc. In my despair, I write in the faint hope of arousing our Press to speak out what is in the hearts of ninety-nine one hundredths of the army, and nine-tenths of the country—the commander-in-chief is incompetent or disloyal. I have come slowly to this conclusion. No man greeted his appointment more cordially than I did. There is not the shadow of any personal feeling in my conviction. I have nothing personal to complain of. I must again caution you, that all this is strictly confidential.

Wadsworth reiterated this opinion all spring, while Bryant heard from Gen. John Pope and Gen. Hitchcock in the same vein. It was not until May 5 that McClellan fought his first battle, though he had held command since the preceding July. The Evening Post was full of hope in the Peninsular campaign that followed, warning McClellan not to overestimate the enemy’s forces, and that “hitherto our great fault has been that we have not followed up our successes.” Its dejection was proportionately great when in the first days of July the campaign ended in failure, and McClellan withdrew his army from the position he had reached immediately in front of Richmond. The disgust of the radicals with McClellan was now complete, and the Post was as eloquent as the Tribune or Times in attacking him. On July 3 it mournfully remarked that “while the cause cannot perhaps be defeated even by incompetence,” it could be gravely imperilled. “We have suffered long enough from inaction and overcaution. Henceforth we must have action.... If it be asked who is the best man, we can only say that it is Mr. Lincoln’s business to know, but bitter experience has taught us that Gen. McClellan is not.” Lincoln was admonished that he must open his eyes without a moment’s delay to the exigency, dismiss every slothful or imbecile leader, infuse energy and unity into his Cabinet, and recruit new armies. It was now that the Post began asking for conscription, while it gave a ringing endorsement to Lincoln’s call for “three hundred thousand more.”

The Herald, incapable of blaming a Democrat like McClellan, in July attacked Stanton for the army’s failure, but the Evening Post showed that McClellan himself had said that he had more than enough troops to take Richmond. The Chicago Tribune later accused it of injustice to Lincoln in saying that McClellan should have been dismissed earlier, since Lincoln could not do so without offending loyal Democrats. That, rejoined the Post, is precisely the ground for our objection to McClellan; he was retained for political, not military, reasons.

These July days were the days in which Lincoln grew thin and haggard, Seward was sent upon a circuit of the North to arouse public men in support of the new enlistment programme, and Lowell wrote, “I don’t see how we are to be saved but by a miracle.” Who should succeed McClellan? Chase and Welles believed that the best general in view for the eastern command was John Pope, whose victory at Island No. 10 had given him national fame; and Bryant and Godwin, who had had some personal contact with Pope, agreed. He was called east and given the Army of Virginia. The chief command, however, went to Halleck, whom the Evening Post distrusted as much as Welles did, and had already (July 23) described as slower and less enterprising than McClellan.

To Halleck the Evening Post said that his motto must be that of the Athenian orator, action—action—action. The country wanted a Marshal Vorwarts; should its historians have none to record but General Trenches, General Strategy, or General Let-Escape? A few days later (Aug. 19) it published an editorial headed “Onward! Onward!” “The one essential element in our military movements now is celerity,” it urged. “Promptness in filling up the ranks already thinned by the war, promptness in organizing and sending forward new regiments, promptness in moving on the enemy.” Bryant had written Lincoln protesting against the sluggishness of military operations, and under pressure from other radicals, early in August the editor visited Washington to remonstrate. Mayor Opdyke, President Charles King of Columbia, and many other influential New Yorkers went at about the same time for the same purpose. Bryant tells us that he had a long talk with Lincoln, “in which I expressed myself plainly and without reserve, though courteously. He bore it well, and I must say that I left him with a perfect conviction of the excellence of his intentions and the singleness of his purposes, though with sorrow for his indecision.” A movement immediately began in New York to organize the radicals under a local committee.

In their editorials on military policy Bryant, Parke Godwin, and Charles Nordhoff were guided by officers who wrote from the field or whom they met in the city; and their comments were remarkably sound. At this moment, for example, the Evening Post sensibly ridiculed the talk of a rebel army 200,000 strong. It repeatedly expressed a conviction that never, neither at Manassas, Yorktown, of Richmond, had the enemy been superior. “There is excellent reason to believe that the rebels never had more than 40,000 men at Manassas; it is a notorious fact that when McClellan arrived on the Peninsula, there were not 10,000 men at Yorktown. At Fair Oaks Sumner’s corps and Casey’s division repulsed the whole rebel army.... A close examination of the battles before Richmond proves that the rebels never fought more than 15,000 to 25,000 men there on any one day.” McClellan, it thought, had been frightened by idle fears. But when Pope failed more ignominiously than McClellan, and was soundly drubbed at the second battle of Bull Run (Aug. 30, 1862), the Evening Post did not confine itself to military topics. It fell again into its unjustifiable censure of Lincoln. The President was honest, devoted, and determined—

and yet the effect of his management has been such that, with all his personal popularity, in spite of the general confidence in his good intentions, and in spite of the ability and energy of several of his advisers, a large part of the nation is utterly discouraged and despondent. Many intelligent and even wise persons, indeed, do not scruple to express their suspicions that treachery lurks in the highest quarters, and that either in the army or in the Cabinet purposes are entertained which are equivalent to treason.

All this has grown out of the weakness and vacillation of the Administration, which itself has grown out of Mr. Lincoln’s own want of decision and purpose. We pretend to no state secrets, but we have been told, upon what we deem good authority, that no such thing as a continued, unitary, deliberate Administration exists; that the President’s brave willingness to take all responsibility has quite neutralized the idea of a conjoint responsibility; and that orders of the highest importance are issued and movements commanded, which Cabinet officers learn of as other people do, or, what is worse, which the Cabinet officers disapprove and protest against. Each Cabinet officer, again, controls his own department pretty much as he pleases, without consultation with the President or with his coadjutors. (Sept. 15, 1862.)

At this juncture the Times and World were vehemently demanding a drastic change of Cabinet officers; and in Washington Congressional sentiment was shaping itself toward the crisis of December, when a Senatorial caucus demanded the resignation of the conservative Seward. The Herald, panic-stricken, was telling McClellan that he was “master of the situation”—that is, he might be dictator; and calling upon him “to insist upon the modification and reconstruction of the Cabinet.” It was not unnatural for Bryant to give way to his old fear that the Administration would “fight battles to produce a compromise instead of a victory.”

As befitted such a warlike journal, the Evening Post had its own strategic plan, which it first outlined Oct. 5, 1861, and thenceforth expounded every few weeks until the closing campaigns. Briefly, it held that there was no important object in the capture of Richmond; that the indispensable aim was to destroy the Confederate armies, not to take cities. The Southern capital could be easily removed to Knoxville, Petersburg, or Montgomery. Except in so far as was involved in opening the Mississippi and applying the blockade, it opposed the “anaconda plan” of Scott and McClellan, the plan of attacking with a half dozen armies from a half dozen sides. The rebels, it pointed out, had the advantage of inside lines and could rapidly shift their forces to defeat one Federal onslaught after another. The true strategy was for the Union itself to seize the inside lines. This could be done by concentrating its heaviest forces in those great Appalachian valleys which ran south through Virginia and Tennessee into the heart of the Confederacy. The population was in large part friendly; the Ohio River offered a base of supplies; the flanks could be secured by guarding the passes or gaps; and as the Union armies moved southward in the Tennessee and Shenandoah Valleys, they could force the evacuation of the border States. From the valleys they could fall at will upon Virginia, upon North Carolina, upon Georgia, upon Mississippi, and could rend the Confederacy in twain.

But the good and bad sides of the Evening Post’s radicalism were best exhibited in its eagerness for emancipation. It was a noble object for which to contend, yet no one doubts that Lincoln was right in his long hesitation, and in declaring to Greeley so late as the summer of 1862 that his paramount object was to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery.

Even in the month of Bull Run the Evening Post, while rebuking a New England minister who asked for a national declaration in favor of emancipation, believed that the conflict, “though not a war directly aimed at the release of the slave, must indirectly work out the result in many ways.” When Fremont issued his hasty proclamation of September, 1861, liberating all slaves in Missouri, which Lincoln sensibly revoked, the Post called it “the most popular act of the war,” and was much offended by the President. By October it was dropping the uncertainty of tone in which it had spoken of the subject. Early that month it said that if it became necessary to extinguish slavery in order to put down the rebellion, it must be given no mercy; a few days later it demanded the release of all captured slaves and their enlistment as cooks, trench-diggers, and other auxiliaries; while on Sept. 25 it virtually called for emancipation. The paper believed that it “would change the whole aspect of the war, bring to our side a host of new allies, call off the attention of the rebels from their present plan, and hasten the period of their subjugation.” Bryant wrote just before Thanksgiving upon the probable great result of the war; and “that the extinction of slavery will form a part of it,” he declared, “we have not the shadow of a doubt.”

During the first half of 1862 a considerable part of the Post’s criticism of Lincoln sprang from its impatience over his reluctance to free the slaves. This was the attitude of Sumner, of Thaddeus Stevens, of Carl Schurz, of Greeley in the Tribune and nearly all the Tribune’s great constituency; most of Bryant’s friends took it, and many, as Lydia Maria Child, wrote requesting editorial pleas for emancipation. It is an interesting coincidence, that on the very day, July 22, 1862, that Lincoln read his emancipation proclamation to the Cabinet, and upon Seward’s suggestion put it aside, the Evening Post’s leading editorial was an impassioned plea for such a document. Lincoln was only waiting for a victory, that his proclamation might seem to be supported by a military success. Possibly Bryant learned this from his friend Chase. At any rate, although the Evening Post was bitterly grieved by McClellan’s failure to win a decisive victory at Antietam in September, and wrote angrily that such drawn battles were “not war but murder; butchery which fills all right-minded men with horror,” it knew that emancipation might follow Lee’s retreat from Maryland soil. Just after the battle Bryant wrote an editorial (Sept. 17) called, “While the Iron is Hot.” There are crucial junctures, he said, when great blows must be struck at great evils. Such a juncture had arrived; “a proclamation of freedom by martial law would be hailed, we believe, by an almost universal shout of joy in all the loyal States, as the death knell of the rebellion.” Just a week later the Evening Post was rejoicing over the President’s announcement of his forthcoming proclamation:

It puts us right before Europe; it brings us back to our traditions; it animates our soldiers with the same spirit which led our forefathers to victory under Washington; they are fighting today, as the Revolutionary patriots fought, in the interests of the human race, for human rights....

There was a lesson for all radicals in the resentment which, at even that late date, many Northern newspapers showed over the President’s act. The Journal of Commerce had “only anticipations of evil from it,” and believed that an immense majority of Northerners would view it with profound regret. The Herald predicted that it would ruin the white laborers of the West by bringing the negroes north to compete with them. The World held that it was nugatory—the South would have to be whipped before it could be given any effect. The Courrier des Etats Unis had deplored many errors since the republic “began rolling down the slope which promises to land it in the abyss,” but it thought this blunder the most wanton and complete. What would such papers and the great body of citizens they represented have said six months earlier?

Another and highly praiseworthy evidence of the “radicalism” of the Evening Post was its eagerness for a far-reaching system of taxation, and for having the financial conduct of the war kept as strictly as possible upon a sound-money basis. Having been active in obtaining Chase’s appointment to the Treasury, Bryant felt a special solicitude for that department. During the latter half of 1861 he repeatedly urged Congress to tax to the limit. He believed that the government should be able to pay for the war by heavy taxes, supplemented by the sale of long-term bonds, and only as a final resource should issue Treasury notes payable on demand. It was a disappointment to the paper that Chase took no early steps for the development of an appropriate tax system. A remarkable editorial of Feb. 1, 1862, pictured the wealth of the nation: the universal possession of property, the high per capita prosperity, the bursting granaries, the rich output of precious metals. It recalled the fact that three times the national debt contracted in great wars had been wiped out, while in the thirties the treasury overflowed until men racked their brains with plans for spending the superfluity. Never was a nation more cheerfully inclined to accept high taxes; “the general feeling is one of impatience that Congress is so slow in performing this necessary duty.”

As early as Jan. 15 the Evening Post had uttered its first warning against a reliance upon paper money. Naturally, the passage of the greenback legislation of Feb. 25, 1862, for the issue of $150,000,000 in legal-tender notes, dismayed it. It believed the law grossly unconstitutional, and was certain that it would be disastrous in effect. Secretary Chase wrote to Bryant, on Feb. 4, arguing for the bill, but in vain. “Your feelings of repugnance to the legal-tender clause can hardly be greater than my own,” said Chase; “but I am convinced that, as a temporary measure, it is indispensably necessary.” He thought that a minority of the people would not sustain the notes unless they were made a tender for debt, and that this minority could control the majority to all practical intents. But the Evening Post, like all the other New York journals save two, opposed the bill to the last. Bryant did not believe that the measure could be temporary, as Chase put it. In an editorial called “A Deluge at Hand,” he compared the law to the first breach made in one of the Holland dikes:

In all the examples which the world has seen, the evil of an irredeemable paper currency runs its course as certainly as the smallpox or any other disease. The first effects are of such a nature that the remedy is never applied; there is no disposition to apply it. The inflation of the currency pleases a large class of persons by a rise of prices and an extraordinary activity in business. People buy to sell at higher prices; property passes rapidly from hand to hand; fortunes are made; the community is delirious with speculation. At such a time suppose Mr. Chase to step in and say: “My friends, this fun has been going on long enough; you must be tired by this time of speculation. Let us repeal the legal-tender clause in the Treasury-note bill and return to specie payments.” What sort of reception would this proposal meet?

His prophecy was fulfilled. Successive issues of legal-tender notes followed, until the total reached $450,000,000; prices soared, and the cost of the war was immensely enhanced; and at one time $39 in gold would buy $100 in currency. The Evening Post, it may be added, was the first newspaper to suggest the issue of interest-bearing banknotes as an expedient for the gradual contraction of the currency, a measure Congress adopted in March, 1863.

Meanwhile, the Northern armies failed to make progress. When in December, 1862, the criminally incompetent Burnside attacked Lee’s entrenched army at Fredericksburg, and was flung back with the loss of nearly 13,000 men, an outburst of anger came from the whole New York press. “The Late Massacre” was the heading the Evening Post gave its editorial of Dec. 18, in which, three days after Burnside fell back, it could not understand why he was not already removed. “How long is such intolerable and wicked blundering to continue? What does the President wait for? We hear that a great, a horrible crime has been committed; we do not hear that those guilty of it are under arrest; we do not hear even that they are to be removed from the places of trust which they have shown themselves so incapable to fill.” The Democratic press, led by the Herald, demanded the reinstatement of McClellan, while the radical press wanted an entirely new general. Once more, like the Tribune, Herald, and World, the Evening Post blamed Lincoln for his generals’ mistakes. “The President has required too little from his agents; his good nature has led him to be less strict toward them than he ought to be, while at the same time his confidence in himself and his advisers has led him, unfortunately, to deny himself that general counsel of the nation by which he might have benefited had he kept up confidential relations between himself and the people.” Yet it had praised the choice of Burnside, calling him an energetic, calm, and judicious leader, who had the prestige of success in his favor.

As the spring campaign of 1863 opened, the Post reflected the renewed hopefulness of the North. It was not pleased by the selection of Hooker to be the new commander, but it was encouraged by his rapid reorganization of the army and restoration of fighting discipline. The new advance had the old result—disaster. On May 7, lamenting Hooker’s ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville, the Evening Post condemned his strategy as incomprehensible. It was quite right in its general verdict, and in a number of specific criticisms, as when it said that the disposition of the forces under Sedgwick had been insane. But we can hardly say as much of its censure of Hooker and the Administration for an alleged failure to use the needed reserves. There were 60,000 men among the Washington defenses, it declared, who might have been replaced by militia and thrown into the battle. As a matter of fact, Hooker had failed to employ 35,000 fresh troops right at hand; his army was large enough, and much too large for his capacity to handle it. It fell back across the Rappahannock, and the stage was set for Lee’s descent upon Pennsylvania.

Rhodes states that “by the middle of June (1863) the movements of Lee in Virginia warned the North of the approaching invasion” that culminated at Gettysburg. But the readers of the Evening Post were warned of it by a column editorial on May 21, two weeks before Lee took his first preliminary steps. That such a prophecy could be made shows how conversant with the military situation the great New York journals were kept by their war correspondents, their files of Southern newspapers, and their high official advisers. Bryant wrote that he believed Jefferson Davis was preparing his last desperate stroke, in the knowledge that Grant might soon wrest the whole Mississippi from him, that there would be more Union cavalry raids like Stoneman’s and Grierson’s, and that even if the Confederacy beat off another attack like Hooker’s, it would prove a Pyrrhic victory:

There are unmistakable indications that Davis is quietly withdrawing troops from the outlying camps along the seacoasts to reinforce Lee, which movement will be continued, we think, until that general has a command of 150,000 to 200,000 men. As soon as it is ready Lee will move, we conjecture, not in the direction of Washington, but of the Shenandoah Valley, with a view to crossing the Potomac somewhere between Martinsburg and Cumberland. It will be easy for him ... to defend his flanks ... and to maintain also uninterrupted communications with Staunton and the Central Virginia railway. The valley itself is filled with rapidly ripening harvests, and once upon the river supplies may be got from Pennsylvania.

The editorial proposed either the occupation of the Shenandoah in force, or a new attack on Lee, and advised the Maryland and Pennsylvania authorities to fortify their towns and raise fresh bodies of troops.

When the invasion actually began, parts of the North were frightened, but the Evening Post was almost gleeful. On June 17, when news came that the first Confederates were across the Potomac, it expressed the hope that Lee would push on so that he might be cut off and destroyed. Ten days later, when the rebels had reached Carlisle, Pa., it was jubilant: “It is time for the nation to rise; the great occasion has come, and now, if we had prepared ourselves for it, and had collected and drilled reserve forces, we might end the rebellion in a month.” On June 29, two days before the battle began, it congratulated Meade on an unsurpassed military opportunity, and urged three considerations upon him. He should insist that Washington help and not embarrass him, he should ask for all the reserves available, “and then, having given battle in due time, let him avoid the mistake of McClellan at Antietam, by pursuing the enemy until he is completely overthrown.” That the chance for pursuit would come the Post never doubted.

The close of the three days’ struggle at Gettysburg left Bryant confident that the turning point of the war had been passed. “There is every reason to hope that the rebel army of Virginia will never recross the Potomac as an army,” he said on July 6; but whether Lee crossed it or not, “the rebellion has received a staggering blow, from which it would scarcely seem possible for it to recover.” The next day he insisted that the rebels be followed at once and destroyed, but in his exultation he accepted philosophically Meade’s failure to advance.