III
While the Evening Post was establishing a militant free-soil position, its news features were improving. The office force remained pitifully small. In addition to Bryant, his assistant, Parke Godwin, and a reporter, at the end of 1843 room was made for a commercial editor, who supplied information on the markets, wrote upon business affairs, and supervised the marine intelligence; these four made up the staff. The paper was enlarged in 1840, going from seven columns to eight and lengthening its page, while in 1842 commenced the issuance of a weekly Evening Post, in addition to the semi-weekly—a profitable innovation. It was wonderful that so few men could do so much. In the fact that they did we have the explanation of a little note Mrs. Bryant wrote to Mrs. William Ware, wife of the author of “Zenobia,” in the late thirties: “Mr. Bryant has gone to his office. You cannot think how distressed I am about his working so hard. He gets up as soon as it is light, takes a mouthful to eat,—it cannot be called a breakfast, for it is often only what the Germans call a ‘stick of bread’; occasionally the milkman comes in season for him to get some bread and milk. As yet, his health is good, but I fear that his constitution is not strong enough for such intense labor.” Occasionally a little help was lent by outsiders—James K. Paulding as well as Sedgwick contributed editorials early in the forties; but it was little.
Year by year the local news improved. Bryant had at first objected to reports of criminal cases on moral grounds, but he now took the sensible view that to have the light let in upon evil assisted in combating it. As early as 1836 he had the famous murder of Helen Jewett covered in detail. Another of his early prejudices was against the reporting of lectures by which many literary men of the day made part of their living, on the ground that if the report was faithful, it tended to prevent a repetition of the lecture, but even while he voiced this opinion, in 1841, he was giving a comprehensive summary of Emerson’s addresses. Beginning in 1845, the Evening Post published a daily column with the heading, “City Intelligence,” which was often a queer mélange of news and editorial comment, for it discussed urgent municipal needs—the improvement of the Tombs, the adoption of mechanical street sweepers, the substitution of a paid fire department for the volunteer system, and so on. The headings for a typical Monday in 1848 run thus:
Confusion Among the Judges (Six courts met at 10 a. m., at City Hall, with only four rooms among them).
Foul Affair at Sea (The brig Colonel Taylor arrives, and reports that its mate at sea threw a sailor overboard).
Removal of the Telegraph Offices (Albany and Buffalo Company removes to 16 Wall Street).
Case of Mme. Restel (Developments in a murder case).
Fires—A Child Burnt to Death (The week-end conflagrations totalled eleven, a modest list. At one in Leroy Street nine houses had been burnt; at one in Thirteenth Street a child and six horses had been killed).
City Statistics (The last year saw 1,823 new buildings erected; the city had 327 licensed omnibuses, 3,780 taverns and saloons, 168 junkshops, and 681 charcoal peddlers).
And so the column continued through police news, theater puffs, and notices of academy commencements, until it ended just above an advertisement of Sands’s Sarsaparilla and the Balsam of Wild Cherry, glowingly recommended by testimonials.
But the chief improvement in the news was wrought by special correspondence, which early in the forties attained a surprising extent and finish. By various means, including advertising for correspondents, Bryant built up a staff of contributors that covered every part of the nation. In 1841–2 each week during the sessions of Congress brought letters from two men, “Z” and “Very,” while during the legislative session there were two Albany correspondents, “L” and “Publius.” Every important State capital north of Richmond had its contributor. In the first week of 1842, for example, appeared letters from Springfield, Ill., Providence, R. I., and Detroit, Mich. A Paris correspondent wrote regularly over the initials “A. V.,” and a London correspondent signed much more frequent articles “O. P. Q.”
This London correspondence ran to great length. Into one typical article, printed on March 14, 1842, “O. P. Q.” crowded an account of the royal christening, at which the future Edward VII “was got back to the Castle without squalling”; the Dublin elections; Macready’s experiment at Drury Lane Theater, where for the first time the pit seats had been “provided with backs, and, together with the boxes, numbered, and a ticket given to the occupant, who thus keeps his seat throughout the evening”; of Adelaide Kemble’s singing at Covent Garden; of Douglas Jerrold’s new comedy, “Prisoners of War”; and of the new books, including Mrs. Trollope’s “Blue Belles of England”; the whole concluding with some gossip about a ruler in whom Americans were more interested than in President Tyler:
It is said that the Queen still continues staunch Whig; that she is civil, but laconic, to the Tories; and that pleasant old Lord Melbourne’s easy chair, in which he used to take his after-dinner nap when he dined at the palace, is still kept for his use alone, being wheeled out of the closet when he dines there, and wheeled back when he takes his departure.
Her majesty and her husband appear to go on as comfortably as if they lived in a cottage (ornée) untroubled with crowns and royal christenings. Prince Albert is a good deal liked for the sensible and unassuming manner in which he has heretofore conducted himself. At the Mayor’s dinner, the other day, he said he began to feel himself “quite at home.” One of the papers remarks: “Of course he does; what respectable man, living two years in the most comfortable house, with a charming young wife, a rising family, good shooting, and the general esteem, could feel otherwise than at home?”
The most striking feature in newspaper correspondence of the forties was the prominence given mere travel. Americans were more curious about their expanding and fast-filling land than now, and the expense and hardship of travel made its vicarious enjoyment greater. Two midsummer months in 1843 afford a representative view of this side of the newspaper. Bryant concluded his correspondence written during a trip to South Carolina and Florida, describing Charleston Harbor, a plantation corn-shucking, negro songs, alligators, tobacco-chewing, and the reminders of the Seminole War. From another corner of the Union an unsigned letter of 3,000 words described an interesting trip through wilder Michigan. Bryant, returning north, contributed from Keene, N. H., and Addison County, Vt., a description of scenery in those two States. From Columbus, O., some one wrote of his journey thither by way of the Great Lakes. In August a correspondent at Saratoga waxed loquacious. He narrated some incidents he had observed of J. Q. Adams’s tour in upper New York; pictured Martin Van Buren sojourning at the Springs, “as round, plump, and happy as a partridge,” and said to be looking for a wife; and sketched N. P. Willis, at a ball there, “surrounded by bevies of literary loungers and dilettanti, who look up to him with equal respect for the fashionable cut of his coat and the exceeding gracefulness of his writings.”
Bryant wrote letters from all his foreign tours—those of 1834–6, 1845–6, 1849, 1852–3, and 1857–8; while others of the staff who traveled did the same. In 1834 the Evening Post published a series of letters from South American ports, written anonymously by a naval officer on an American warship; while for twenty years regular correspondence was furnished by a resident of Buenos Aires. When Commodore Biddle sailed into Yeddo Bay the summer of 1846 to try to establish treaty relations with Japan, an officer of his squadron sent the Post a highly interesting account of their chill reception. The vessels were surrounded with hundreds of armed boats from the day their arrival produced consternation upon land; they had been supplied with water, wood, poultry, and vegetables, free; but the authorities had peremptorily refused any further intercourse. Two years later both the Paris and Berlin correspondents wrote vivid descriptions of the revolutionary uprisings of that year, the former being in the thick of the fighting on the Boulevards. Special correspondence in the early fifties came even from Siam. But we can best give an impression of the wealth of this mailed matter by summarizing it for a single month (August, 1850):
From Washington and Albany, continuous correspondence; from Toronto, three articles, on Dominion politics and railways; from Montreal, letter on a great fire there and sentiment toward America; from London, letters by Wm. H. Maxwell and “XYZ” on Peel’s last speech, California gold fever, African trade, stock prices, corn laws, sorrow over President Taylor’s death, etc.; Paris correspondence on dinner to President Louis Napoleon and shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!”; Boston, letters on Massachusetts politics and sad case of Dr. Webster, awaiting execution after having confessed his murder; New Haven, four articles on Yale Commencement, President Woolsey’s oration, and a scientific convention; Chicago, the cholera, the Illinois canal, and crops; Rochester, the Erie Railroad and the “Rochester rappings”; Brattleboro and White Mountains, descriptions of summer excursions; Chester County, Pa., home life of Senator James Cooper, a hated traitor to free-soil principles; Berkshire Valley, charms of the Housatonic.
The world’s first war to be thoroughly and graphically treated in the daily newspapers was, not the Crimean War in which William H. Russell won his fame, but the Mexican War. It was George Wilkins Kendall, a Yankee from New Hampshire who had helped found the New Orleans Picayune nine years earlier, who made the chief individual reputation as a correspondent. Campaigning first with Gen. Zachary Taylor on the Rio Grande, and then joining Winfield Scott on the latter’s dangerous and triumphant march from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, always in the thick of the fighting, once wounded, organizing a wonderfully effective combination of courier and steamboat service, Kendall gave the Picayune by far the best current history of a war that journalism in any land had seen. The New Orleans Delta, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Herald, and, at a slight remove, the Evening Post, followed the fighting with admirable enterprise.
News of the war came to the East through two main channels. The greater part of it was brought from the border (i. e., from Brownsville or Matamoras) or from Vera Cruz to New Orleans or Pensacola, and thence overland northward; a smaller part came in on the long Santa Fé trail to St. Louis. Thus on Christmas Day, 1846, Col. Doniphan, at the head of a force of confident Missourians, defeated a Mexican detachment in the little skirmish of Brazitos, near El Paso. A company of traders from Santa Fé brought the news into Independence, Missouri, on Feb. 15, and the local news-writer there wrote a dispatch which was printed in the St. Louis Republic on the 26th. The Evening Post copied it on March 8, long after most of Doniphan’s seven wounded men had forgotten their injuries. El Paso had been captured from the Mexicans on Dec. 27, and the fact was known in New York on March 10.
The delay in obtaining the news of Buena Vista gave rise to disheartening rumors. The battle which made “Old Rough and Ready” a national idol and the next President of the United States was fought on Feb. 23, 1847, and for a month thereafter the gloomiest reports appeared in the press. After the middle of March Washington and New York were confused and alarmed by vague dispatches from the Southwest; on March 21 President Polk received a detailed account of Taylor’s perilous position, menaced by a force three times as large as his own, and New York heard of it immediately afterward. On the evening of the twenty-second the messages to Washington had “Taylor completely cut off by an overwhelming force of the enemy,” but no word of fighting. The Evening Post of March 30 carried its first news of a definite disaster. It republished from the New Orleans Delta a dispatch, brought by ship, stating “that Gen. Taylor was attacked at Agua Nueva and fell back, in good order, to the vicinity of Saltillo; here he was again attacked by Santa Anna, and a sharp engagement ensued in which Gen. Taylor was victorious, continuing his retreat in good order. Gen. Taylor fell back to Monterey, where he arrived in safety.” Read between the lines, this meant a humiliating defeat. Every one was prepared to credit it, and it was partly corroborated by more meager news carried in the New Orleans Bulletin.
Nevertheless, the Post uttered a shrewd caution against believing the reports. It was justified the following day when copies of the New Orleans Mercury arrived, dated March 23, bearing the full tidings of Taylor’s victory against crushing odds. The false rumors had filtered out through Tampico and Vera Cruz; the truth was brought by army messengers to Monterey, who had to make a detour of hundreds of miles to evade Mexican guerillas. When it reached Washington it found the politicians fiercely debating who was responsible for so weakening Taylor’s army as to enable Santa Anna to smash it; when it reached New York it found the people depressed and indignant; and when it got to Boston on April 1, many denounced it as an April Fool’s joke.
As the war continued the dispatches came more rapidly. The Baltimore Sun early established an express of sixty blooded horses overland from New Orleans, and when it was in effective operation newspapers and letters were carried over the route in six days. This made it possible to have newsboys on Broadway shouting the capture of Vera Cruz a fortnight after it occurred. As Scott pushed inland toward Mexico City, dispatches from him were retarded, for marauding Mexicans made his line of communications with the sea unsafe. Kendall used to start his express riders from the army at midnight, and he chose men who knew the country perfectly; but several were captured and others killed. Nevertheless, the Evening Post could publish the news of Cerro Gordo, fought on April 18, on May 7; the news of the capture of Mexico City, which occurred on Sept. 14, on Oct. 4, or less than three weeks after the event.
Three correspondents in the field furnished the Evening Post with letters—Lieut. Nathaniel Niles, an Illinois soldier with Gen. Taylor; “M. R.” with Scott, and “B” at Matamoras. The last gave a striking history of the rapid Americanization of this Mexican town, telling how the inhabitants reaped a golden fortune and how Taylor’s soldiers chafed under their enforced stay. “M. R.” contributed a picture of the taking of Vera Cruz, in which he carried a rifle. But Niles was the most active and the best writer. When the New Orleans papers, with their advantage of position, tried to give all the credit of Buena Vista to the Mississippi troops (commanded by Jefferson Davis) and to the Kentuckians, Niles flatly contradicted them. The Indiana and Illinois men, he said, deserved quite as much praise. His account of the decisive moment at Buena Vista, when the attack of the Mexicans had been finally and bloodily repulsed, is worth quoting:
At length, about three o’clock p. m., we saw the Mexican force in our rear begin to falter and retrace their steps, under the well-directed shot of our ranks of marksmen, and the artillery still pouring its iron death-bolts into their right. Their lancers, who had taken refuge behind their infantry, and there watched the progress of the fight, made one desperate charge to turn the fortunes of the day by breaking the line of Indiana and Mississippi. But the cool, steady volunteers sent them with carnage and confusion to Santa Ana, on the plain above, with the report that our reserve was 5,000 strong, and filled all the ravines in our rear. The retreat of their infantry, which paused for a moment, was now hastened by the repulse of the lancers, but still under a galling fire. They marched back in excellent order. While making their toilsome and bloody way back, Santa Ana practised a ruse to which any French or English officer would have scorned to resort. He exhibited a flag of truce, and sent it across the plain to our right, where stood our generals.
When the Second Indiana, under Col. Bowles, fled from the field after the first Mexican onset upon the American left, leaving the way to Taylor’s rear open, some one suggested—says Niles—a retreat. “Retreat!” exclaimed Taylor; “No; I will charge them with the bayonet.” Niles reported many human incidents of the war, and dwelt upon the barbarity of the Mexicans:
They generally killed and plundered, even of their clothes, all whom the current of battle threw into their hands. We, on the contrary, saved the lives of all who threw down their arms, and relieved the wants of the wounded, even in the midst of battle. I have seen the young American volunteer, when bullets were flying around him, kneel beside a wounded Mexican and let him drink out of his canteen. In one heap of wounded Mexicans we came upon a groaning man, whom an Illinois soldier raised and gave water. We had gone only a few steps past when the soldier thus helped twisted himself upon his elbow and shot our man through the back dead; three or four volleys instantly repaid this treachery.
The first intimation of the revolution in news-gathering which occurred in the middle forties was furnished Evening Post readers in the issue of May 27, 1844, when the Washington correspondent told of Morse’s successful experiment with the telegraph two days earlier. “What is the news in Washington?” was the question asked from Baltimore, where the Democratic National Convention was about to meet. “Van Buren stock is rising,” came the answer. On May 31 the correspondent sent another brief mention of
MORSE’S TELEGRAPH.—This wonderful invention or discovery of a new means of transmitting intelligence, is in full and perfectly successful operation. Mr. Morse is the magician at the end of the line, and an assistant who does not spell with perfect correctness officiates.
There have arrived numerous telegraphic dispatches since the meeting of the Convention at Baltimore at nine o’clock this morning. By one we are informed of the nomination of Mr. George M. Dallas, of Philadelphia, for Vice-President.
All the New York newspapers, the Herald leading, shortly had a column of telegraphic news, and from that in the Evening Post we can trace the steady extension of the wires. In the early spring of 1846 communication was opened between New York and Philadelphia. When war was declared, April 24, the line to Washington was incomplete, not having been finished between Baltimore and Philadelphia, but the gap was soon closed. The fastest carriage of news between the capital and New York, 220 miles, had been that of Harrison’s inaugural message, weighty with its Roman consuls and Greek generals, in eleven hours; now eleven minutes sufficed. By the middle of September, when the line to Buffalo was complete, the country had 1,200 miles of telegraph, reaching above Boston towards Portland, to Washington on the south, and to Harrisburg on the west.
During 1847 the expansion of the telegraphic system amazed all who did not stop to think how much simpler and cheaper the installation of a line was than the building of a road. By March it had reached Pittsburgh on the west, and by September, Petersburg on the south. The next month saw it in Cincinnati and Louisville, and that fall the Evening Post printed telegraph news of a Cincinnati flood which made 5,000 homeless. In its New Year’s message the journal congratulated its readers upon such progress that “the moment a dispatch arrives at New Orleans from our armies in Mexico its contents are known on the borders of the northern lakes.” The next year Florida alone of the States east of the Mississippi was untouched by it. When the President’s message opening Congress in December, 1848, was transmitted to St. Louis, the Evening Post remarked that “the idea of a document filling twelve entire pages of the Washington Union appearing in a city nearly one thousand miles from Washington, twenty-four hours after its delivery, is almost beyond belief.” Christopher Pearse Cranch contributed a poem to the Post upon the marvel:
The world of the Past was an infant;
It knew not the speech of today,
When giants sit talking from mountain to sea,
And the cities are wizards, who say:
The kingdom of magic is ours;
We touch a small clicking machine,
And the lands of the East hear the lands of the West
With never a bar between.
Ten years after the opening of the first American telegraph line Bryant made some caustic remarks in the Evening Post upon “The Slow-Coach System in Europe.” For many months, it transpired, the Allies in the Crimean War had possessed a continuous telegraph line from London to the battle front. It had been demonstrated that dispatches sufficient to fill two columns of the London Times might be sent over it in two hours; yet the French and British publics had been obliged to wait two weeks for full details of the fall of Sebastopol, simply because the Allied authorities did not organize a competent telegraphic staff.