The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism

by Allan Nevins

II

At this moment of rejoicing over Gettysburg and Vicksburg the city was horrified and humiliated by the Draft Riots, a sharp reminder that the home front was only less important than the battle front. Of this fact the Evening Post had never lost sight. Bryant’s editorials always held in view the necessity of sustaining the spirits of the North. For every “radical” utterance criticizing the Administration’s faults there were ten exhorting the people to support its central aims. In the first months of the war he published two martial lyrics, one addressed to European enemies who hoped for the ruin of the republic, and one a plea for enlistment:

Few, few were they whose swords of old
Won the fair land in which we dwell;
But we are many, we who hold
The grim resolve to guard it well.
Strike, for that broad and goodly land,
Blow after blow, till men shall see
That Might and Right move hand in hand,
And glorious must their triumph be!

It was natural for New York city to have a lusty anti-war press when the struggle for the Union began. It had been Democratic since Jackson’s time, and remained Democratic during the Civil War. Its social connections with the South had always been close, while till 1860 its merchants and bankers had stronger business ties with the South than with the West. After the war began many Southern sympathizers, refugees from the border States, settled in the city.

But the capture of Fort Sumter turned all that indifference to the secession movement which William H. Russell had noted a few weeks earlier into a passionate enthusiasm of the majority for the Federal cause. At 3 p. m. on April 18, the day the first troops passed through New York southward, an excited crowd gathered before the Express office and demanded a display of the American flag. It surged up Park Row and made the same demand of the Day Book and Daily News (the latter Fernando Wood’s organ), and thence poured down Nassau Street and Broadway to the Journal of Commerce building, which also hurried out a flag. Already the Herald had decorated its windows with bunting. The Monday after Sumter, Bennett had braved popular feeling with another demand for peace, but now he hurried to Washington, pledged his support of the Union to President Lincoln, and saw that beginning with the Herald for April 17, that policy was adopted.

Unfortunately, the tone of the pro-slavery press continued so objectionable that on Aug. 22, 1861, the postoffice forbade mail transportation to the Journal of Commerce, Day Book, Daily News, Freeman’s Journal, and Brooklyn Eagle, all five of which had been presented by a Federal Grand Jury. The Daily News was suppressed in New Jersey by the Federal Marshal. Gerard Hallock of the Journal of Commerce, complaining of threats of violence and an organized movement to cut off his subscribers and advertising, sold his interest to David Stone and Wm. C. Prime, and the paper became less offensive. The Day Book permanently and the Daily News temporarily ceased publication. The foreign-language press also failed to show due patriotism, many French citizens in August signing a petition for the suppression of the Courrier des États Unis as disloyal, and the Westchester grand jury presenting the Staats-Zeitung and National-Zeitung as disseminators of treason. The World, changing hands, became under the able Manton Marble, who had recently been an employee of the Post, a leader of the “copperhead” press.

There is no need to quote from the World, Daily News, and Journal of Commerce to show how, boldly when they dared, covertly when they did not, they continued to attack the Union cause. Their methods were defined by the Evening Post of May 20, 1863, in a “Recipe for a Democratic Paper,” which may be briefly summarized:

(1) Magnify all rebel successes and minimize all Federal victories; if the South loses 18,000 men say 8,000 men, and if the North loses 11,000 say 21,000.

(2) Calumniate all energetic generals like Sherman, Grant, and Rosecrans; call worthless leaders like Halleck and Pope the master generals of the age.

(3) Whenever the Union suffers a reverse, declare that the nation is weary of this slow war; and ask how long this fratricidal conflict will be allowed to continue.

(4) Expatiate upon the bankruptcies, high prices, stock jobbers, gouging profiteers and “shoddy men.”

(5) Abuse Lincoln and the Cabinet in two ways: say they are weak, timid, vacillating, and incompetent; and that they are tyrannous, harsh, and despotic.

(6) Protest vehemently against “nigger” brigadiers, and the atrocity of arming the slaves against their masters.

(7) Don’t advise open resistance to the draft. But clamor against it in detail; suggest doubts of its constitutionality; denounce the $300 clause; say that it makes an odious distinction between rich and poor; and refer learnedly to the military autocracies of France and Prussia.

The copperhead politicians were as active as the copperhead press. At their head was Mayor Wood, who ran for reëlection in the fall of 1861 and was opposed by Bryant’s friend George Opdyke. Called a blackguard by the Tribune and a miscreant by the Evening Post, Wood based his campaign upon denunciation of the abolitionists and appeals to racial prejudice. In a speech reported by the Post of Nov. 29 he declared that Lincoln had brought the nation to the verge of ruin, that the negro-philes would prosecute the war as long as they could share the money spent upon it, and that “they will get Irishmen and Germans to fill up the regiments under the idea that they will themselves remain at home to divide the plunder.” Just before election day the Post gave part of its editorial page to the following bit of drama:

FERNANDO IN A PORTER HOUSE

AN OCCURRENCE UP-TOWN; NOT A FANCY SKETCH

(Scene: A porter house in the 22d ward. Proprietor behind the counter. Behind him a row of bottles, etc. Enter Fernando and a voter.)

Fernando: Good morning, my dear friend. Please let me and my friend have something to drink. (Glasses are set before them and a decanter. They help themselves. Fernando throws a double eagle upon the counter, waving away the offer to give back change.) You will support me, I suppose?

Proprietor (quietly depositing the money in the till): Yes, I shall support you for the State prison. You have been up for a place there, I believe.

Fernando (going out and coming back): By the way, you did not mean what you said just now?

Proprietor: Yes, I did mean just that. You deserve State prison and would have gone there three years ago if you had not cheated the law.

Fernando: Will you give me my change?

Proprietor: No, I will not. I want it to show my neighbors how you tried to influence my vote.

(Exit Fernando, crestfallen)

Opdyke, with the first war enthusiasm behind him, won the Mayoralty election from the egregious Wood. But the strength of the Democrats, which in large degree meant the strength of the anti-war party, was thereafter triumphant in every election till Grant took Richmond. The State and Congressional campaign of 1862, coming during the dark period after the Peninsular campaign and the drawn battle of Antietam, aroused the Evening Post, Times and Tribune to great exertions. Horatio Seymour, the “submissionist” candidate, contested the Governorship with Gen. James Wadsworth. His speeches, wrote Bryant, have a direct tendency to discourage our loyal troops and sustain the hopes of the South. The Post denied his echo of the World’s and Herald’s statements that the Administration was a failure. “It has been a grand and brilliant success. History will so account it.” Lincoln, predicted the Post, need only give rein to the Northern determination, and his name “will stand on the future annals of his country illustrated by a renown as pure and undying as that of George Washington.” But Seymour easily won, obtaining 54,283 votes in New York city against 22,523 given Wadsworth; and the Democrats swept the Congressional districts, including one in which they had nominated Fernando Wood.

One factor in this result, said the Evening Post, was the alarm many had taken at the threat of the draft. The World played upon this alarm, and both it and the Herald attacked the emancipation proclamation as a change in the objects of the war; to which Bryant replied that the Revolution had begun to assert the rights of the Colonies within the British Empire, and had shortly become a war to take them out of it. Bryant in the spring of 1863 characterized the Express as an organ “which has called repeatedly upon the mob to oust the regular government at Washington, and upon the army to proclaim McClellan its chief at all hazards”; while the Journal of Commerce, he said, “has always denounced the war, and even now argues ... that the allegiance of the citizens is due to the State, and not to the Federal Government.” Some of the most prominent men of the city—Tilden, James Brooks, S. F. B. Morse, August Belmont, David E. Wheeler, and others—met at Delmonico’s on Feb. 6, 1863, and formed a plan for circulating copperhead doctrines, or, as they put it, for “the diffusion of knowledge”; whence the Post nicknamed them “diffusionists.”

When the Draft Act was enforced throughout the North just after Gettysburg, disorders occurred in widely scattered centers; and it was inevitable that they should be gravest in New York. Not merely did the city contain many half disloyal Americans of native birth. It was full of a class of Irishmen who had proved especially responsive to the demagogues opposing the war. Clashes between the Irish and negroes had been common for a decade. In August, 1862, a mob in Brooklyn attacked a factory in which blacks were working, and tried to set it afire with the negroes inside. Similar riots, the Post remarked, had disgraced several Western cities. “In every case Irish laborers have been incited to take part in these lawless attempts; and the cunning ringleaders and originators of these mutinies, who are not Irishmen, have thus sought to kill two birds with one stone—to excite a strong popular prejudice against the Irish, while they used them to wreak their spite against the blacks.”

The copperhead press in the early July days preceding the first drawing of draft numbers was filled with abuse of conscription. The Herald, to be sure, which professed neutrality between the “niggerhead” press (the Evening Post, Times, and Tribune) and the copperhead papers, advocated the draft as a means of hastening Union victory, though it abused Lincoln as a nincompoop. But the World spoke of Lincoln’s “wanton exercise of arbitrary powers,” and predicted that if the war was carried on to enforce the emancipation proclamation a million men, not three hundred thousand, would have to be conscripted. “A measure,” it said of the Draft act, “which could not have been ventured upon in England even in those dark days when the press-gang filled the English ships of war with slaves ... was thrust into the statute books, as one might say, almost by force.” The Daily News applauded the speeches at a city peace meeting on July 9, where one orator had declared: “The Administration now feels itself in want of more men to replace those it has slaughtered, and to aid it in upholding its despotism, and for this purpose has ordered the conscription.”

On July 11, 1863, the draft began, and on the 13th, Monday, when an effort was made to renew it, the rioting commenced. The first disturbances occurred at the draft headquarters on the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, which were sacked about noon; the disorders grew much worse on Tuesday, and were not entirely suppressed until Thursday. The story of the four days of bloodshed need not be rehearsed in detail, but the Evening Post files afford certain new lights upon it. The historian Rhodes, in his account, draws upon the files of the Tribune, Times, World, Herald, and Post as sources, but only upon the issues of the week of the riot. Ten days later (July 23) an 8,000 word history of the riot appeared in the Evening Post, a close-knit, graphic narrative, apparently written by Charles Nordhoff, who had been an eye-witness of much of it.

Nordhoff makes it clear that the mob was against not merely the draft, but the war. “Seymour’s our man”; “Seymour’s for us”; “Yis, and Wood too”; “It’s Davis and Seymour and Wood,” were expressions heard at every turn. “Cheers for Jeff Davis were as common as brickbats.” Above all, Nordhoff was convinced that the mob had intelligent leaders outside of its own ranks. The nucleus of the mob was a gang of about fifty rough fellows who at nine o’clock in the morning began prowling along the East River wharves in the Grand Street neighborhood, picking up recruits. As the crowd grew in size it entered foundries and factories for more men. “It is absolutely certain that there was no planning or directing head among the acting ringleaders. No one could follow or watch them without seeing that they were instigated; though by whom it was impossible to tell. They were men themselves incapable of self-direction; men of the lowest order and of the most brutal passions—and at that doubly infuriated by rum.” Immediately the destruction of the Third Avenue draft headquarters was complete, the mob split into three parts, which at once sought three important objectives, a fact which Nordhoff regarded as proving outside leadership.

One of the three mobs destroyed the Armory on Second Avenue at Twenty-First Street—this was on Monday at four p. m.; a second simultaneously demolished the draft office at Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street; and a third, the largest, sacked and burnt the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile, small groups had begun hunting down negroes and clubbing them to death. Nordhoff describes a scene during the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum:

Opposite the Reservoir stood a knot of gentlemen, strangers to each other. Said one of them, a timid, clerical-looking man:

“What are we coming to? Is this to go on? Whose family and dwelling is safe?”

“How long is this to last?” asked another—who might have been a merchant.

“I will tell you how long,” replied a third, who looked like a Tammany alderman, but as respectably dressed as either of the others, and buttoning up his coat to his chin defiantly: “Just as long as you enact unjust laws.”

The rioting, Nordhoff believed, might have been ended the first day by determined military forces. While ruffians at the Orphan Asylum were crying, “Kill the little devils!” a steady attack by a small armed force would have routed them. “The rioters evidently expected such an attack, and at one time, frightened by a squabble on their outskirts between a few firemen and a gang abusing a bystander, actually took to their heels, but returned to their work with cries of derision.” The first charge was made by the police just after 4 p. m. at the La Farge Hotel, and the rioters ran like sheep, leaving about thirty dead or wounded. Nordhoff’s observation that the pillaging was done mainly by women and boys, who took two hours to carry 300 iron bedsteads from the Orphan Asylum, was borne out by a news item printed by the Post during the riots:

HOW A HOUSE IS SACKED

Having witnessed the proceedings of the rioters on several occasions ... we describe them for the benefit of our readers. On yesterday afternoon about six o’clock they visited the residence of a gentleman in Twenty-ninth Street. A few stragglers appeared on the scene, consisting mainly of women and children. Two or three men then demanded and gained admittance, while their number was largely increased on the outside. One elderly gentleman was found who had liberty to leave. Then commenced indiscriminate plunder. This was carried on mostly by old men, women and children, while the “men of muscle” stood guard. Every article was appropriated, the carriers often bending under their burden. Women and children, hatless and shoeless, marched off having in their possession the most costly of fabrics, some of them broken and unfit for use.

To this wanton destruction of private property the neighbors and the many visitors drawn to the spot were silent spectators. A word of remonstrance cost a life. Two gentlemen, we are informed, paid the penalty yesterday for expressing their righteous indignation....

An hour later, in another visit, we saw the crowd engaged in breaking the sashes and carrying off the fragments of woodwork.

Nordhoff gave high praise to the city police and the United States troops, but thought the State militia miserably ineffective, and the firemen often allies of the mob. He ascertained that the rioters’ casualties were much higher than the public believed, and estimated that 400 to 500 lives were lost. “A continuous stream of funerals flows across the East River, and graves are dug privately within the knowledge of the police here and there.”

Just how much basis there was for the Evening Post’s view that the mob was not spontaneous, but instigated by disloyalist leaders of brains, it is impossible to say. On the second day “a distinguished and sagacious Democrat,” Bryant wrote editorially, visited the office to warn him that the riots “had a firmer basis and a more fixed object than we imagined.” But it is certain that the copperhead press seemed to cheer on the mob even while it denounced it. Thus the World on Tuesday spoke of the rioters as possessed “with a burning sense of wrong toward the government,” and though it appealed to them to stop, asked: “Does any man wonder that poor men refuse to be forced into a war mismanaged almost into hopelessness, perverted almost into partisanship?” The Evening Post was particularly incensed by the Herald’s references to the riots as a “popular” outbreak, and that of the Daily News to “the people fired on by United States soldiers.” Not the people, it said; “a small band of cutthroats, pickpockets, and robbers.” It wanted the miscreants given an abundance of grape and canister without delay, and declared that an officer who had used blank cartridges ought to be shot. To this the Herald made its usual impudent kind of rejoinder. Aren’t the members of the mob people, it asked? They have arms, legs, and five senses; “their intelligence is low, but it is at least equal to that of the editors of the niggerhead organs.”