IV
Throughout the Civil War the news pages were in charge of one of the most picturesque and able men ever employed by the paper, Charles Nordhoff. It was a trying position. O. W. Holmes wrote an essay in 1861 called “Bread and Newspapers,” in which he described the state of mind in which the North lived, waiting but from one edition to another. The Civil War was the heroic age of American press enterprise, and while the Evening Post conducted a less extensive war establishment than the Herald, Tribune, or Times—the Herald spent $500,000 on its correspondence—Nordhoff saw that it maintained a creditable position. He stepped into the office just after Bigelow’s departure, in 1861. Along with Bigelow the Post had just lost William M. Thayer. This young man, after a brilliant ten years partly in New York, partly as the only correspondent with the Walker filibustering expedition in Nicaragua, and partly in Washington, had quarreled with Isaac Henderson, while at the same time his health failed; and he was glad to be appointed consul at Alexandria. Nordhoff’s chief assistant in gathering news became Augustus Maverick, a veteran newspaper man previously with the Times.
Nordhoff, though only thirty years old in 1831, had already passed through enough adventure to fill an active lifetime. He was born in Prussia, where his father was a wealthy liberal who had served in Blucher’s army and had later set up a school at Erwitte. Compelled for political reasons to leave, the elder Nordhoff gathered together all his funds, about $50,000, and reached America in 1834. The family went to the Mississippi Valley, and for a time lived an anomalous life, eating in the wilderness from rich silver and drinking imported German mineral water. The boy was left an orphan at the age of nine, and was reared by the Rev. Wilhelm Nast of the Methodist Church in Cincinnati. Revolting against the rigid ecclesiastical discipline to which he was subjected, believing that his health was suffering from indoors work, and longing for the adventures at sea of which he had read in Marryat and Cooper, in 1844 he ran away.
Hundreds of thousands of American boys in the last half century have read the three books in which Nordhoff graphically relates his experiences aboard men of war, merchant ships, a whaler, and a cod-fishing boat. The story of how he went to sea is an interesting illustration of his pluck and persistence. He had $25, two extra shirts, and an extra pair of socks when he left Cincinnati, and his money took him to Baltimore. At every vessel to which he applied he was met by the same rebuff: “Ship you, you little scamp? Not I; we won’t carry runaway boys. Clear out!” Undaunted, he went on to Philadelphia, and found a place on the Sun as printer’s devil, at $2–4 a week and his board. He confided his ambition to no one, but every Saturday afternoon he was down among the shipping, looking for a place. Finally he heard that the Frigate Columbus, 74 guns, was about to sail under Commodore Biddle for the Far East, and sought a berth—again in vain. Still undiscouraged, he induced the editor of the Sun, to whose home he daily took a bundle of proofs, to introduce him to Commodore Elliot. The editor’s note ran, “Please give him a talking to,” and the gruff officer scolded the boy roundly for wanting to ruin his life, described the dissolute, brutalizing existence of most sailors, and flatly refused him a place. But Nordhoff returned daily until the Commodore yielded.
The boy soon realized that the sailor’s life had little of the romance that Cooper gave it, but he showed both his grit and shrewdness when with a distinct literary intention he made the most of it. He went around the world in the Columbus, and was discharged at Norfolk in 1848; for several years he worked in the merchant marine, visiting Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and the South Sea islands; sailing from Sag Harbor in a whaler which cruised in the Indian Ocean, he deserted at the Seychelles, and for a time supported himself as a boatman in Mauritius; and he finished his eight years at sea by a brief period with the Cape Cod fishermen. All the while he was busy collecting material for his books, losing no opportunity to share new sights and experiences, and pumping his mates for their stories. He wrote his three volumes to give a common-sense picture of a life which he believed had been unduly romanticized; and his pictures of flogging in the navy, of dysentery and cholera aboard a frigate, of the degradation of the naval discipline, of the danger and hardship met on a merchant craft, and of the intolerable monotony of whale-hunting carry out the purpose. It was good preliminary training for a reporter and editor. In 1853 he entered journalism, first on the Philadelphia Register and later on the Indianapolis Sentinel, meanwhile writing the sea books, which gave him such a reputation that in 1853 George W. Curtis recommended him to Harper’s as an editorial worker.
Bigelow in the closing days of 1860 made an arrangement with Brantz Meyer, a Baltimore writer of some reputation, to go South for $50 a week and his expenses to do special reporting. He wrote R. B. Rhett, editor of the Charleston Mercury, asking whether it would be safe for Meyer to attend the secession convention in Charleston, and Rhett assured him that “no agent or representative of the Evening Post would be safe in coming here”; “he would certainly be tarred and feathered and made to leave the State, as the mildest possible treatment”; “he would come with his life in his hand, and would probably be hung.” Nevertheless, the Post did have unsigned correspondence from Charleston and other Southern cities during the days the secession movement was ripening. When war began, Nordhoff hurriedly whipped a corps of special writers into shape. He requested Henry M. Alden, later editor of Harper’s to go to the Virginia front, but Alden’s health was too precarious to permit him to face the hardships which other young literary men like E. C. Stedman were undertaking. William C. Church, a rising young journalist, who later established the Army and Navy Journal and the Galaxy, was obtained. Philip Ripley made another of the staff, and Walter F. Williams was soon sending admirable letters from the field.
Repeatedly during the war the Post scored notable “beats.” Church was with the joint military and naval expedition under Sherman and Dupont that captured Port Royal, and sent the Evening Post the first account published at the North. The best picture of the battle of Pittsburgh Landing in any newspaper was one contributed the Post by a member of Halleck’s staff. The most graphic running account of Sherman’s march to the sea was also that furnished the paper by Major George Nichols, who was on Sherman’s staff, and who later reworked his letters—in which it has been well said the style is photographic, with a touch of national music in the sentences—into a book. When John Wilkes Booth was killed in the burning Virginia barn by Sergeant Boston Corbett, Nordhoff obtained Corbett’s exclusive story of the event—an absorbing three-quarters column of close print. It need not be said that the Paris correspondence which E. L. Godkin, later editor, furnished in 1862, offered the shrewdest and clearest view of French opinion published in any American newspaper. There was a large group of occasional correspondents at various points along the wide fighting line. The Evening Post profited, in a way that it was quite impossible for the Herald to do, from the kindness of loyal Union men of prominence who came into contact with great events or figures, and without thought of remuneration wrote to Bryant. A long and highly interesting article embodying personal reminiscences of Lincoln, for example, was contributed a few weeks after the assassination by R. C. McCormick, then well known in New York political circles. There were frequent bits like the following from a New Yorker who had seen Grant at City Point (Aug. 5, 1864):
“General,” I remarked, “the people of New York now feel that there is one at the head of our armies in whom they can repose the fullest confidence.”
“Yes,” he interrupted, “there is a man in the West in whom they can repose the utmost confidence, General Sherman. He is an able, upright, honorable, unambitious man. We lost another one of like character a few days ago, General McPherson.”
One reporter for the Post, a young Vermonter named S. S. Boyce, became intimate with the United States Marshal in New York, and distinguished himself by important detective service against disloyalists. The Marshal once handed him a letter taken upon a captured blockade runner, mailed from New York and giving the Southern authorities the time of the sailing of the Newbern expedition. It carried no New York address, but within a fortnight Boyce had tracked down the writer of the letter, and some months later witnessed his hanging.
Many traditions long survived in the office of Nordhoff’s energy, courage, shrewdness, and impassivity in moments of excitement. He was a man of the world, and his sense for news was amazing. Expected to contribute to the editorial page as well as manage the news staff, he would seat himself at his desk and write with unresting hand, meanwhile puffing a black cigar so furiously that he could hardly see his sheet through the smoke. A bluff seamanlike quality was always distinguishable about him; he walked with a sailor’s roll, and used nautical terms with unconscious frequency. His executive ability, geniality, fearlessness, and intense hatred of anything equivocal or underhanded, made the staff love him. Mr. J. Ranken Towse, who knew him after the war, says that “he had a comprehensive grasp of essential knowledge, a great store of common sense, a rare faculty of penetrating insight, and a huge scorn for prevarication or double-dealing. A mistake due to ignorance or carelessness he could and often did overlook, but anything in the nature of a shuffling excuse roused him to flaming ire. He was impetuous and irascible, but naturally generous and tender-hearted.”
During the Draft Riots Nordhoff connected a hose with the steam-boiler in the basement and gave public notice that any assailant would meet a scalding reception. He had not only the Evening Post property to protect, but a score of wounded soldiers in a temporary hospital fitted up on an upper floor. The strain under which he lived in the war days was intense, and he used to spend the summer nights on a small sailboat which he kept on the Brooklyn waterfront, for he could sleep more soundly drifting about the bay than on shore. Yet he managed to find time to contribute to the newspaper’s atmosphere of literary sociability. Paul Du Chaillu had become his friend when, as a worker at Harper’s, he helped put some of Du Chaillu’s books into good English, and a story survives of how Du Chaillu and Nordhoff once took possession of the restaurant stove across the street from the Evening Post, and taught the cook to broil bananas—the first bananas ever eaten cooked in the city. Nordhoff’s impress was visible everywhere in the paper of those years, and its marked prosperity was in large degree traceable to his energy. The local reporting was better than ever before, and we are tempted to discern his own hand in the frequent human-interest paragraphs, of which one may be given as a specimen:
AN INCIDENT IN THE CARS
In a car on a railroad which runs into New York, a few mornings ago, a scene occurred which will not soon be forgotten by the witnesses of it. A person dressed as a gentleman, speaking to a friend across the car, said: “Well, I hope the war may last six months longer. In the last six months I’ve made a hundred thousand dollars—six months more and I shall have enough.”
A lady sat behind the speaker, and ... when he was done she tapped him on the shoulder and said to him: “Sir, I had two sons—one was killed at Fredericksburg; the other was killed at Murfreesboro.”
She was silent a moment and so were all around who heard her. Then, overcome by her indignation, she suddenly slapped the speculator, first on one cheek and then on the other, and before he could say a word, the passengers sitting near, who had witnessed the whole affair, seized him and pushed him hurriedly out of the car, as not fit to ride with decent people.
The Government censorship of news early became a painful and difficult question to all journals. Repeatedly during the war Northern papers allowed news to leak to the enemy which should have been kept strictly secret, and the Evening Post early recognized this danger. When Gen. McClellan in August, 1861, drew up his gentlemen’s agreement with the press, the Post hoped that all editors would acquiesce in it, and attacked the Baltimore secession newspapers for giving the South important news. Two months later it blamed the Herald and Commercial Advertiser for twice having given prominence to articles they should have suppressed. Sherman as early as the summer of 1862 raged violently at the press in his private letters for writing some generals up and others down, and the Post had already (Feb. 27) commented upon the same abuse. The Herald in March, 1862, prematurely published the news of Banks’s passage of the Potomac, to the great indignation of the Post, which had suppressed it the day before. But Nordhoff himself erred in September, when his publication of some “contraband” facts about the strength of the forces at Newbern brought a protest from Gen. Foster. No other mistake of the sort was made, and this one did not compare with the blunders of other New York journals. Early in 1863 a Herald correspondent, having foolishly printed the substance of some confidential orders, was convicted and sentenced to six months hard labor in the Quartermaster’s Department. In November, 1864, the Times brought an angry protest from Grant by stating Sherman’s exact strength and his programme in the coming march to the sea. The Tribune early the next year, informing its readers that Sherman was heading for Goldsboro, enabled Gen. Hardee on the Confederate side to fight a heavy battle which Sherman had hoped to avoid; and the hero of the great march later refused to speak to Greeley.
But the Evening Post repeatedly protested against the undue severity of the censorship, just as it protested against improper interferences with personal liberty in other spheres. It complained that the rules laid down by Stanton and the field commanders were often capricious, and that by holding up harmless news they bred harmful rumors.
Thus on Sept. 1, 1862, New York was highly excited all afternoon by a canard that Pope had been pushed back to Alexandria and was being beaten by the Confederates within sight of Washington. Why? asked the Evening Post next day. It was because Stanton wanted all the correspondents kept away from the front, and the public was at the mercy of every rogue or coward who started a false report. The terrible disaster of Fredericksburg was concealed by the censorship in the most inexcusable way. The battle was fought on Saturday, the 13th of December. On the 14th and 15th there was no news; on the 16th the Post carried the bare statement that the army had recrossed the Rappahannock, which it optimistically interpreted as meaning that the heavy rains had swollen the river and imperilled the communications. On the 17th it knew that Burnside’s forces had been flung back with terrible slaughter four days before, and it joined the chorus of the New York press in denouncing the official secrecy. The first authentic news of this battle was sent the Tribune by a future owner of the Evening Post, Henry Villard, who obtained it by an heroic all-night ride, and bringing it to Washington, evaded Stanton’s order by sending it north by railway messenger.
Similar secrecy attended the early stages of the battle of Chancellorsville, causing needless agony of mind at the North and profiting only the stock-jobbers. Just before Gettysburg rumors were afloat of a heavy blow to Hooker. C. C. Carleton, said the Post, tried to wire his Boston paper, “Do not accept sensation dispatches,” but the telegraph censor brusquely canceled this sensible message. The Philadelphia editors and correspondents long surpassed all others in the picturesqueness of their lies, and the Post called attention to some of their masterpieces—e.g., their circumstantial story of the capture of Richmond by Gen. Keyes in 1862—as made possible by the censor’s concealment of the real facts. Nordhoff complained that some of the paper’s dispatches filed in the morning at 10:30 did not reach New York till 5 p. m., simply because the censor was out of his office or negligent. The worst count in the indictment, however, was that some great bankers got news of the battles by cipher, and used it in speculation while the people remained ignorant of the actual events.
With the Civil War came the first plentiful use of headlines in the Evening Post, usually placed on page three, where the telegraphic news was used. In those days verbs in headlines were conspicuous chiefly by their absence; but the writer knew his business. When the bombardment of Sumter began he summarized the whole significance of the event in his first two words: “CIVIL WAR—BOMBARDMENT OF FORT SUMTER—A DAY’S FIGHTING.” After Bull Run he tried to save the feelings of New Yorkers by tactful phrasing: “RETROGRADE MOVEMENT OF OUR ARMY!—GEN. McDOWELL FALLING BACK ON WASHINGTON—OUR LOSS 2,500 to 3,000.” And the two most important headlines of the whole war were admirable in their simple fitness. It would be impossible to improve upon the first three words used on April 15, “AN APPALLING CALAMITY—ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT—MR. LINCOLN SHOT IN FORD’S THEATRE IN WASHINGTON”; or upon the first three of April 10, “THE GLORIOUS CONSUMMATION—THE REBELLION ENDED—SURRENDER OF LEE.”
Throughout the war the Evening Post was as distinguished for one feature—its poetry—as the Herald was for its admirable maps. Every writer of verse took inspiration from the conflict, and sent it to the only newspaper conducted by a great poet. A few days after Sumter surrendered, the editors declared that if poetry could win the war, they already had enough to do it. Four years later, on April 13, 1865, they remarked that “we have received verses in celebration of the late victories enough to fill four or five columns of our paper.”
Among the first war poems published by the Evening Post were two of genuine distinction, R. H. Stoddard’s stirring call to war, “Men of the North and West,” and Christopher Cranch’s stanzas, “The Burial of Our Flag”:
O who are they that troop along, and whither do they go?
Why move they thus with measured tread, while funeral trumpets blow?—
Why gather round that open grave in mockery of woe?
They stand together on the brink—they shovel in the clod—
But what is that they bury deep?—Why trample they the sod?
Why hurry they so fast away without a prayer to God?
It was no corpse of friend or foe. I saw a flag uprolled—
The golden stars, the gleaming stripes were gathered fold on fold,
And lowered into the hollow grave to rot beneath the mould.
Then up they hoisted all around, on towers, and hills, and crags,
The emblem of their traitorous schemes—their base disunion flags.
That very night there blew a wind that tore them all to rags!
And one that flaunted bravest by the storm was swept away,
And hurled upon the grave in which our country’s banner lay—
Where, soaked with rain and stained with mud, they found it the next day.
From out the North a Power comes forth—a patient power too long—
The spirit of the great free air—a tempest swift and strong;
The living burial of our flag—he will not brook that wrong.
The stars of heaven shall gild her still—her stripes like rainbows gleam;
Her billowy folds, like surging clouds, o’er North and South shall stream.
She is not dead, she lifts her head, she takes the morning’s beam!
* * * * *
Much verse came from writers of the rank of Alice and Phœbe Cary, who published nearly all their war poems in the Post. Mrs. R. H. Stoddard, still remembered as a novelist, wrote unfinished but sincere and touching poetry. Miles O’Reilly, whom Walt Whitman found the most popular writer of war verse among the troops, contributed repeatedly. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, leading his black troops in South Carolina, and recalling Bryant’s “Song of Marion’s Men,” sent his graceful “Song from the Camp.” Park Benjamin wrote much in the early years of the war, and before its close Helen Hunt Jackson began to appear in the Evening Post’s pages. One of the most stirring songs of the conflict, “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,” originally appeared in the Evening Post of July 16, 1862. Unsigned, many supposed it was the editor’s. At a large Boston meeting the next night, Josiah Quincy read it as “the latest poem written by Mr. Wm. C. Bryant.” Its actual author was John S. Gibbons, who for a time was financial editor of the Post, and wrote two volumes on banking.
Bryant himself published two hymns in the journal, “The Earth Is Full of Thy Riches” (1863) and “Thou Hast Put All Things Under His Feet” (1865). But the finest poetical contribution which he ever made to it was his “Death of Lincoln”:
O slow to smite, and swift to spare,
Gentle and merciful and just!
which first saw the light in the Evening Post of April 20, 1865.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RECONSTRUCTION AND IMPEACHMENT
Most of the metropolitan newspapers emerged from the Civil War with increased circulation, and several, like the Evening Post, with enhanced prosperity. The circulation was not high by present standards: when peace was declared the Sun was printing about 50,000 copies, the Times about 35,000, and the Evening Post about 20,000. But the influence of the New York press has never been larger, for four great journalists were then at the height of their reputation. Raymond of the Times had four more years to live, Bennett of the Herald and Greeley of the Tribune had seven, and Bryant, the oldest editor of all, thirteen. The younger generation was not quite yet needed—not until 1868 did Dana join the Sun, and Whitelaw Reid the Tribune.
When the problems of reconstruction presented themselves, everybody knew where the large group of Democratic journals would stand. The Herald, the World, the Express, and the Daily News, loyal to the grand old party of Polk and Buchanan, would urge the restoration of the Southern States to their former standing as quickly and gently as possible. The only real curiosity was as to the Evening Post, Times, and Tribune.
Having held the radical views of Chase and Sumner in the war, having constantly demanded more energy in its prosecution, the Evening Post might have been expected to advocate severity toward the South. For a time there were indications that it would do so. When Lincoln, just before his death, declared in favor of encouraging and perfecting the new State governments already set up in the South, saying “We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it,” Bryant was doubtful. “But if it should happen that these eggs are cockatrice’s eggs, what then?” he demanded. For some months after Appomattox the Post expressed its wish that “traitors” like Jefferson Davis, Hunter, Benjamin, Wigfall, and Wise could be brought to trial; it was not necessary to put them to death—they could be pardoned if condemned—but justice demanded a stern arraignment.
Yet it soon became evident that the Evening Post’s influence would be on the side of moderation and leniency. Bryant’s fine obituary editorial on Lincoln struck this note clearly. He spoke of Lincoln’s gentle policies:
How skillfully he had avoided and postponed needless troubles, the ease and tranquillity of our return from a time of passionate conflict to a time of serene repose is a proof; how wisely he had contrived to put off the suggestions of an extreme or fanatical zeal everybody has been ready to acknowledge, for Mr. Lincoln brought to his high office no prejudice of section, no personal resentments, no unkind or bitter feelings of hatred, and throughout the trying time of his Administration he has never uttered one rancorous word toward the South....
The whole nation mourns the death of its President, but no part of it ought to mourn that death more keenly than our brothers of the South, who had more to expect from his clemency and sense of justice than from any other man who could succeed to his position. The insanity of the assassination, indeed, if it was instigated by the rebels, appears in the stronger light when we reflect on the generosity and tenderness with which he was disposed to close up the war, to bury its feuds, to heal over its wounds, and to restore to all parts of the nation that good feeling which once prevailed, and which ought to prevail again. Let us pray God that those who come after him may imitate his virtues and imbibe the spirit of his goodness.
The stand taken by Bryant’s friend Chase, the poet’s natural generosity, and the reports of a desire for reconciliation sent by Southern correspondents, caused the paper to assume an unflinching advocacy of President Johnson’s mild policy, and to attack the harsh measures of Congress. In this attitude the Times was with it. The Tribune took the other side vehemently, and, in a more reasonable way, it was espoused by the city’s three great weekly organs of opinion, E. L. Godkin’s Nation, Harper’s Weekly, and the Independent, from which Henry Ward Beecher, disagreeing with Theodore Tilton’s severe views, soon resigned.
Into the Evening Post’s opinions upon the whole kaleidoscopic succession of bills and acts bearing upon reconstruction, from 1865 to 1868, it is impossible to go in detail. Its fundamental doctrine was fully outlined as early as May 2, 1865. The two great objects, it affirmed, were to depart as little as possible from the old-established principles of State government, and “to do nothing for revenge, nothing in the mere spirit of proscription.” It believed that a convention should be called in each State to annul the ordinance of secession, and, by writing a new State Constitution, to repudiate the rebel debt, guarantee the negroes equal civil rights, and regulate the elective franchise according to immutable principles of certain application, discarding all arbitrary and capricious rules. The States should also ratify the anti-slavery amendment of the Federal Constitution by popular vote. “As soon as the political power has thus been regularly reconstituted the State, as a matter of course, resumes her relations to the Union, elects members of Congress, and stands in all respects on a footing with the States” of the North.
Urging this policy, Bryant and the Evening Post wished to end military rule at the South as quickly as possible, while the Congressional radicals, led by Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, like the Tribune and Nation, regarded its indefinite continuance as necessary. The Evening Post held that the illiterate negroes were unfit to vote and should be required to pass through a probationary period; it wished the Southern ballot based upon an educational test. The Tribune and the Sun supported full negro suffrage. When the first Southern States sent Representatives to Congress the Evening Post, like the Times and World, wished them admitted. The World, indeed, bitterly assailed the “rump” Congress which barred them. The Evening Post, Times, and World supported Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, while the Tribune wrung its hands over such journalistic depravity.
There was some justification in the objection of Harper’s Weekly that the Post was too “optimistic.” Bryant appealed to the South to be magnanimous to the negro, and to set to work to educate him and make him the white man’s equal. He was sure that “with their healthy native constitution, their long training to labor, their quick imitative faculties, their new motives to enterprise, the freedmen will grow into a most useful class.” The Post underrated the enormous difficulties of the racial problem at the South. But its course was wisdom and humanity itself when compared with that of the Congressional extremists who insisted upon confiscation and disfranchisement. The Tribune, following these extremists, called the Post and Times “copperhead,” an epithet which came with ill grace from a paper with the Tribune’s war record. Greeley made an able defense of his policy in an address in Richmond in May, 1867, but the Tribune tended in the hands of his lieutenants to be more radical than Greeley himself.
In supporting Johnson, all the moderates found their chief enemy in Johnson himself. When he took the oath of office as Vice-President the authentic reports of his intoxication had caused the Evening Post to demand that he either resign or formally apologize to the nation. A year later, when he made an abusive speech saying that his opponents Sumner and Stevens had tried “to incite assassination,” the journal again called for an apology to the people. The Post supported the Civil Rights bill of 1866, guaranteeing the negro equality before the law with the whites. When Johnson vetoed it, Bryant wrote in a hitherto unpublished letter to his daughter:
The general feeling in favor of that bill is exceedingly strong, and the President probably did not know what he was doing when he returned it to Congress. He has been very silent since, as if the check of passing the bill notwithstanding his objections had stunned him. Mr. Bancroft says that he must have got some small lawyer to write his veto message, and Gen. Dix thinks that the trouble at Washington lessens the eligibility of the President for a second term of office. So you see that those who supported Johnson’s first veto fall off now. Poor Raymond seemed in great perplexity to know which way to turn. He supported the veto, but his paper commended it but faintly and admitted that something ought to be done from the standpoint of the rights of American citizenship when denied by the States.
When President Johnson removed the Governor of Louisiana that summer, the Evening Post condemned his act as unconstitutional. It was outraged by his dismissal of officeholders to influence the Congressional elections of 1866. His “swing around the circle,” the famous speaking tour to Chicago and back in the early fall of 1866, in which he lost all sense of dignity, talked of hanging Thad Stevens, and abused his opponents as “foul whelps of sin,” completely disgusted the Post. “It is a melancholy reflection,” it said, “to those who have found it their duty to support that policy [Johnson’s], that their most damaging opponent is the President, and that he makes a judicious course so hateful to the people that no argument is listened to....” It marveled at his skill “to do the wrong thing at the wrong time, to displease everybody, and to delay that which everybody would be glad to have over.” Moreover, as news arrived of widespread outrages against the negroes in the South, the Post’s attitude toward that section grew less gentle.
Ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, the Evening Post urged the South in the summer of 1866; it is the only way to hasten sane reconstruction. When the Southerners, already denying the negroes their due place at the polls and in the courts, deliberately rejected the amendment, it was ready to give them a stiffer dose. In February, 1867, it pronounced in favor of the great Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten Southern States into five military districts, and undertook to guarantee the negro’s rights by force. That is, the abuses perpetrated made it swing toward the Congressional standpoint—just as general Northern sentiment swung.
But when Congress determined to impeach President Johnson, the protest of the Evening Post was as instant as that of the Times or Sun. The principal charges were based upon the President’s alleged violations of the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited him from dismissing civil officers without the consent of the Senate. When this Act was passed in July, 1867, the Post had called it a silly and mischievous attempt to make the President as powerless as the Mayor of New York, and had regarded it as unconstitutional. The early talk of impeachment it rebuked as threatening “a Mexican madness.” Naturally, then, when Johnson defied Congress by dismissing Secretary Stanton without consulting the Senate, the editors took the view that his intention was merely to bring the act before the courts, and that he should not be impeached unless he persisted in further dismissals after the Supreme Court had decided against him. They had already written (Dec. 2) that the impeachment talk did not carry with it the public sense of justice, without which it must recoil upon the heads of its promoters, and that Congress had enough useful constructive work to do to keep it busy.
When impeachment was actually voted, the Post’s comment was sorrowful rather than angry. “It is a quarrel in which there is really no very great substance,” it said. “It is one that might easily have been avoided, and may be easily brought to an end.”
This was the view of the Sun, which had just passed under the control of Dana, and which declared the impeachment “far too serious an undertaking for the facts and evidence in the case.” It was likewise the opinion of the Times, which asked: “Must the President be punished for maintaining the authority of the Constitution against an invalid law?” The position of the World had its humorous aspects. So long as it had considered Johnson a Republican, it had found no abuse of him too violent. Even in June, 1865, it had called him “a drunken boor,” “an insolent, vulgar, low-bred brute,” and a man “not so respectable as Caligula’s horse.” Now, telling its readers that Congress was attempting to remove the President “in the personal interest of Edwin M. Stanton,” it could not be sufficiently impassioned in his defense. Mayor Hoffman voiced the same Democratic sentiment in saying that the impeachers of Johnson and the assassins of Lincoln would be equally infamous in history.
But the joy of the Tribune was unbounded, and in its references to the President it ran the gamut of denunciation, from “the Great Accidency” and “this bold, bad, malignant man” to “traitor.” Its peroration of one ringing column editorial is a gem of its kind: “He is an aching tooth in the national jaw, a screeching infant in a crowded lecture room; and there can be no peace nor comfort until he is out.” The Nation, originally opposed to impeachment, now approved it with only less gusto. Every one thought Johnson either a fool or a knave, its editor wrote, and his disappearance from the national stage would be a heartfelt relief to all. Harper’s Weekly, assailing Johnson for treachery to the party, hoped that he would sink fast and forever into oblivion.
A contribution to calmness in the first moment of excitement was made by the Evening Post in an editorial entitled “What the People Think.” There was no sustained perturbation, it believed; that sensitive barometer, the gold market, had quickly become as steady as ever. There was even a feeling of relief. Thinking of the solemnity of the constitutional process of impeachment, men were glad that the vindictive fight between the President and Congress “is now carried out of the political arena and into a higher place.” The general public, including many Democrats, held that the President had acted wrongly, even if not in a degree deserving impeachment. But every one was saying that there must be no violence, and the trial must be quick, while there was an equally universal hope that, whatever its outcome, Congress would emerge with its fury vented and in a more reasonable state of mind.
At the outset the Evening Post and the Times were irritated by two assertions of the anti-Johnson radicals. The first was that the President might and should be suspended from office pending the outcome of the trial. Not only was there no constitutional warrant for such action, wrote Bryant, but the question had been discussed in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and it had voted that Congress should have no such power of suspension. The Tribune held also that if the Senate, sitting as a High Court upon the President’s disobedience to the Tenure of Office Act, declared the act unconstitutional, then its decision became forever binding. The Supreme Court would have no authority to pass upon the constitutionality of the act, and if it presumed to do so and to differ from the High Court, Congress would be justified in impeaching or removing the judges. This was too much for the Nation as well as the Evening Post, and Godkin promptly demolished the assertion. It should be said that Greeley at this time was absent in the West, and the Tribune was under the charge of John Russell Young, whose harshness Greeley later disapproved.
On Feb. 27, three days after the impeachment, the Evening Post declared that “the general impression is that the case is essentially prejudged, and that Mr. Johnson will be removed by the Senate.” This was the opinion of all the city’s organs, from the radical Nation on the one side to the World on the other. The World, in fact, made an appeal for a fund of $10,000,000, with which to bribe those Senators who could hardly hope for reëlection anyhow; and while this was a bit of humor—the Tribune alone took it seriously—its point lay in the World’s conviction that the Republican Senators were all so prejudiced that only millions could win over a few of them. Like the Nation, the Post devoted an editorial to a scrutiny of the qualifications of Benjamin Wade, who as President pro tem. of the Senate would succeed Johnson. Bryant admitted Wade’s honesty, courage, and frankness, but regretted that in impetuosity, narrowness, and prejudice he would be too much like the man he replaced. His manners, too, must be mended, for he recalled a Scotch lady’s remark: “Our Jock sweers awfu’, but nae doot it’s a great set-off to conversation.”
As the trial progressed the Evening Post was gratified to find that the case was much less nearly prejudged than it had supposed. Disappointed by the lack of eloquence on both sides, it was pleased by the efficiency of Evarts, Stanbery, and others of the President’s counsel in displaying the strength of their case. They made it plain that Johnson’s intention in dismissing Stanton had not been to defy Congress and the law wantonly, but to obtain a judicial test of the Tenure of Office Act. They showed also that some anti-Johnson Senators had, while the Act was pending, expounded the view that it did not protect men held over from Lincoln’s Cabinet, like Stanton. The Post on April 22 credited the Senate with having dealt fairly with the accused and having admitted all the evidence in his favor.
The breakdown of the case against Johnson was gall and wormwood to the more bitter newspaper partisans of Congress. Theodore Tilton’s Independent read Chief Justice Chase, who impartially presided over the trial, out of the party. The Tribune was trembling for “the very existence of the government.” Never noted for gentleness of retort, it now accused Horatio Seymour of “gigantic, deliberate, atrocious lies”; the Herald of “falsehoods”; the World of “dodges and prevarications”; and the Times and Post again of being “copperhead.” The Times remonstrated. Pointing out that Greeley was to preside at the Dickens dinner, as the representative of the American press, it said that he should remember that it was not in the dignity of a gentleman to use the word “liar.” Greeley replied that the truth was not a question of taste, but of flat morality, and that he would never be mealy-mouthed in its defense.
The seven Republican Senators who finally determined to vote against conviction were Fessenden, Lyman Trumbull, Henderson, Fowler, Van Winkle, Grimes, and Ross. It is the belief of all later historians that their courageous and just action is one of the finest episodes of the sordid reconstruction period. But a storm of anger broke upon them in Washington. It was on May 16 that the voting began. Four days earlier the Tribune, flying into a panic, declared that a hundred men had been under pay in Washington since the trial began to cry down impeachment and bet against conviction. It accused Lyman Trumbull of being to blame, and insinuated that his motives were venal: “but a few weeks ago he was paid $5,000 for arguing the constitutionality of the Reconstruction laws.... Republicans ask to-night what the guerdon is for defending the President in the impeachment trial.” Let President Johnson, the incarnation of Treason and Slavery, be acquitted, it added, and he becomes King; as yet he could be removed by law, but “your next attempt will be a revolution.” Next day, May 13, the Tribune headed an editorial attack upon Senator Grimes, who had defended Johnson, “Judas’s Thirty Reasons,” and concluded: “We have had Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Jefferson Davis, and now we have James W. Grimes!” It categorically accused Senator Fowler of accepting a bribe, and it called Henderson and Ross suspect.
Perhaps the best retort was that of the Times, in an editorial debating the question who was the most colossal criminal of the century, and concluding that Senator Ross closely resembled Sennacherib. But a serious answer was necessary, and a dozen indignant journals, including the Nation and Harper’s Weekly, replied to this temporarily misguided oracle of a half-million readers. The Post’s editorial of May 13 was headed, “Coercing a Court”; and in it and an editorial of the next day it graphically described the pressure brought to bear upon the independent Senators, and condemned the attacks against them as undermining both the impartiality of judicial tribunals, and the principle that an accused man shall be believed innocent until proved guilty. It anticipated the verdict of history:
With whom is the sober second thought of the people most likely to agree—with the Tribune and Gen. Butler, or with such men as Trumbull, Grimes, Fessenden, and Henderson? It is plain that these gentlemen perform a duty in many ways painful to themselves; they are driven reluctantly to act in opposition to their own wishes; their verdict is given in favor of a man whom they consider unwise, and whose occupancy of the Presidential chair they believe has brought evils upon the country. Is it not honorable to them that their sense of justice and duty impels them to disappoint the demands of their party?
A scene of eager excitement and tension presented itself outside the office of every evening newspaper in New York on May 16, crowds packing the space before the bulletin boards. The vote was thirty-five for conviction and nineteen for acquittal, or one less than the number needed to depose the President. The Evening Post was outraged by the fact that the first vote was taken on the eleventh impeachment article, that being considered the strongest and the impeachment managers fearing the moral effect of a defeat on the weak early articles; and by the Senate’s immediate adjournment for ten days, which the Post believed a maneuver to permit more pressure to be brought upon the seven independent Senators. “The verdict of acquittal gives general satisfaction,” it said; “it is felt that a conviction, under the circumstances, would have had no moral force, and would only have injured the party....” Like every other decent organ, it condemned as “disgraceful” Senator Wade’s vote against Johnson and in favor of his own elevation to the Presidency, cast at a time when he and others believed that a single ballot would sway the issue. For that act the public never quite forgave Wade.
The Times, Herald, and World equally rejoiced in the acquittal, and the Sun accepted it with a milder approval. The Nation found “several reasons” for regretting it, and the Tribune was inconsolable. But the anger of the radicals was more intense than long-lived. In 1884 one of the editors of the Evening Post, Horace White, was attending the Chicago Convention which nominated Blaine. The name of ex-Senator Henderson was reported for the permanent chairmanship. “The assembled multitude,” wrote White, “knew at once the significance of the nomination, and gave cheer after cheer of applause and approval. It was the sign that all was forgiven on both sides.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BRYANT AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS FAME AS EDITOR
During all but the hottest months of the year, in the latter part of Grant’s second Administration, men on lower Broadway at about 8:45 every week-day morning might see a venerable figure come rapidly down toward Fulton Street. The aged pedestrian was slender and just above the middle height, but was given an impressive aspect by his heavy white beard and the long hoary hair that swept his shoulders. As he passed, it could be seen that his brow was bald; that his forehead was projecting, though not massive; that the deep-set eyes which peered from beneath his bushy brows were remarkably penetrating and observant, and that his features were rugged but benignant. He had a scholar’s stoop, but appeared wiry and vigorous far beyond his years. People glanced at him with respectful recognition—his was, as Tennyson said of Wellington, the good gray head that all men knew. On Fulton Street he turned into a tall, new building, and those who watched might see that, disdaining the elevator, he began rapidly climbing the stairs. This was William Cullen Bryant, at eighty still devoting four hours daily to the Evening Post.
Bryant had long since become the most distinguished resident of the city, referred to and honored as its first citizen. In civic, charitable, and social movements his name was given precedence over those of men like William M. Evarts or Henry Ward Beecher. On every great public occasion an effort was made to obtain his attendance as the representative of all that was choicest in literary, artistic, and professional life. When the artist Cole, and the authors Cooper, Irving, Verplanck, and Halleck died, he was chosen to deliver memorial discourses of that kind in which the French excel; he was the chief speaker at the dedication of the Morse, Shakespeare, Scott, Goethe, and Mazzini monuments in Central Park; and he presided over the testimonial benefit given Charlotte Cushman when she was about to retire from the stage, which occasioned one of the most notable assemblages ever brought into a modern theater. No New York meeting in behalf of free trade, sound money, or civil service reform was complete without his presence or a message from him. This high position was his because he was not merely a great poet, but a great publicist.
On Nov. 5, 1864, when Bryant had just attained his seventieth birthday, a celebration was held at the Century Club, of which he had been one of the earliest members. The historian Bancroft presided, and among the speakers were Emerson, Holmes, R. H. Stoddard, Julia Ward Howe, R. H. Dana, jr., and William M. Evarts; while poems were received from Whittier and Lowell. The editor as well as the poet was honored. Mrs. Howe recited:
... at his forge he wrought two-fold,
On the iron shield of freedom, and the poet’s links of gold.
while Lowell’s well-known verses, “On Board the Seventy-six,” referred to his editorial words of cheer during the gloomy early days of the Civil War. A little more than three years later (Jan. 30, 1868), a dinner was tendered Bryant at Delmonico’s as president of the American Free Trade League. Speeches were made in his honor by David Dudley Field, Parke Godwin, John D. Van Buren, and others, and letters read from Emerson and Gerrit Smith. Again, on Nov. 3, 1874, when Bryant became eighty years old, he was quietly finishing a forenoon’s work in the Evening Post office when a deputation of friends entered to congratulate him. That evening there was another celebration at the Century Club, at which a commemorative vase—now in the Metropolitan Museum—was given Bryant, while a simultaneous celebration was held in Chicago by the Literary Club of that city.
In the dozen years following Sumter, and especially in the Civil War years when it pressed its demand for energetic prosecution of the struggle, the Evening Post was at the height of its influence under Bryant. “The clear and able political leaders have been of more service to the government in this war than some of its armies,” said Littell’s Living Age in 1862. Charles Dudley Warner wrote at the same time in the Hartford Press: “The Evening Post is the most fearless and rigidly honest paper in the country, and its ability is equal to its moral worth. Some of its ordinary editorials are magnificent specimens of English.” A chorus of praise was aroused by the enlargement of the journal this year. “The Evening Post, we think, is the best newspaper in the United States,” remarked the Elmira Advertiser; the New Bedford Standard spoke of “the best paper in the United States, the Evening Post”; the Kennebec Journal said that “All things considered, it comes the nearest to our idea of what a metropolitan journal should be of any publication in the country”; and the Christian Enquirer testified that “the course of the Evening Post during the war has been above all praise—firm, bold, patriotic, and wise.”
Similar tributes were paid the newspaper by a remarkable array of public men. In 1840 James K. Paulding wrote from Washington to console it for defeat in the Presidential election: “The manner in which the Evening Post is conducted, its stern and sober dignity, and its freedom from the base fury and still baser falsehoods, with which so many newspapers are debauched and disgraced, makes me proud to remember that I have a humble claim to be associated with its honors.” Sumner was constant in his praise in the fifties. Judge William Kent, son of the great Chancellor, not merely thought it the best American daily, but in 1857 proposed that he purchase a share in it and become one of the editors, a proposal which Isaac Henderson discouraged. William Jay in 1862 wrote Bryant, paying tribute to its “powerful and beneficial influence.” Charles Eliot Norton begged the following year “to express my hearty sympathy with the principles maintained by the Evening Post at this time, and my admiration for the ability with which they are sustained.” A little later Lowell wrote Bryant that he was a subscriber. “I am particularly pleased with the course of the Evening Post on reconstruction. Firmness equally tempered with good feeling is what we want—not generosity with twitches of firmness now and then.” W. H. Furness, the noted Philadelphia minister, sent another unsolicited tribute in the heat of the war, saying that he valued the Tribune, but was particularly grateful for the sound, calm vision of the Evening Post, and that “it stands in my esteem at the head of the American press. It is cheering that there is abroad such an educator of the public mind.” Caleb Cushing wrote (1868):
You may regard it as quite superfluous for me to speak in commendation of the Evening Post; but inasmuch as, at one period, I had reason to think and to assert that its language was occasionally overharsh to me, I desire to say, for my own satisfaction, not yours, with how great instruction and pleasure at present I read it every day, and with what daily increasing estimation of its superior dignity, fairness, wisdom, and truth.
Even abroad the paper was well known. Bigelow informed Bryant in 1864 that an Englishman had told him he thought it the best newspaper in the world. John Stuart Mill wrote Parke Godwin the following year that he was a regular reader of it through the kindness of Frederick Barnard, later President of Columbia, who thought it the best American daily, and that he had formed a high opinion of it.
If we ask what qualities made Bryant a great editor, we must place mere industry high on the list. Within a few years after his return to the prostrate Post in 1836 he had shaken off his distaste for the profession, and acquired a zest for it. From 1836 to 1866 he labored as hard upon his journal as if he had never written a line of verse—as the hardworking Greeley and Bennett did upon theirs. Always up in summer at five, in winter at five-thirty, he was frequently at his desk at seven, and seldom later than eight. His principal concern, the editorial page, was in itself a day’s work. He took in hand during this period nearly all the leading editorials. They were consistently longer than editorials of to-day, not infrequently in the fifties and sixties reaching 1,600 words, sometimes 1,800; and Bryant, conscious of his reputation, wrote with painful care. “As Dr. Johnson said of his talk,” he once told Bigelow, “I always write my best.”
But in his first forty years as editor Bryant also attended to a multitude of business and executive details. This was of course true in the thirties and forties, when the Evening Post was a struggling journal with a staff of three or four writers; but his unpublished papers show it almost equally true later. In his late fifties we find him carefully discussing by letter with John Bigelow whether the commercial reporter should get more than $900 a year; hiring the foreign correspondents, and resentful when the Tribune stole one of the best, Signora Jesse White Mario; and taking a keen interest in the fluctuations of advertising. We find him complaining of the daily squabble between the editorial room and advertising department, with the sturdy German head of the composing room, Henry Dithmar, parrying all attempts to displace advertisements by reading matter (1860). He was laying plans as the Civil War storm arose to get out a third edition, to occupy the same ground as the third edition of the Express, and considering ways and means of putting the first edition on the street in time to beat the Commercial. He kept a watchful eye upon all employees, now meting out praise and blame to the Washington and Albany correspondents, and now deciding indulgently what should be done with an office boy who was caught carrying off a dozen review copies of new books. When it grew necessary to enlarge the Post he knew just what it would cost to alter the “turtles,” and just why the importers and wholesalers preferred a journal of four blanket-size pages to one of eight smaller pages.
He had to answer an enormous correspondence, a task conscientiously performed. A hurried message to Dithmar is preserved: “Enclosed is the lady’s communication. I have looked two hours for it. Put it in and get me out of trouble.” He received a multitude of visitors. A note to his wife in 1851 remarks, “I was run down yesterday”—arriving to write a leader, he had been interrupted by five important and several lesser visitors. Sometimes the burden upon him was excessive. It was so after 1836, just before Bigelow came in the late forties, and at intervals later, such as early in 1860, when Bigelow was in Europe, Thayer was sick, Godwin was laid up with rheumatic fever, and Bryant had a sty into the bargain.
His industry was made possible by the fact that he had an admirable constitution, which he was at pains to preserve, and by his wise insistence upon recreation. In his early manhood he was a vegetarian. A letter of 1871 describing his mode of life shows by what a careful regimen he preserved his bodily and mental vigor. He still rose between four-thirty and five-thirty, according to season. While half-dressed, he spent a half hour in calisthenics with a pair of dumbbells, a light pole, a horizontal bar, and a chair. After bathing, he breakfasted on some cereal—hominy, wheat grits, or oatmeal—and milk, with baked apples in summer, and sometimes buckwheat cakes. He never touched tea or coffee. After breakfast, when in town, he walked three miles down to the Evening Post office, and doing his morning’s work, returned, “always walking, whatever be the weather or the state of the streets.” In the country he divided his time between literary work and outdoor employments. When in the city he made but two meals a day, and in the country three, although the middle meal consisted only of a little bread and butter, with possibly some fruit; the meat or fish that he took at dinner was in very sparing quantities. In later manhood he made it a rule to avoid every kind of literary occupation in the evening, finding that it interfered with his sleep; while he went to bed in town as early as ten, and in the country still earlier. A short time before his death, when he was eighty-three, Bigelow asked him if he had not reduced his period of morning gymnastics. “Not the width of your thumb-nail,” was his reply.
Bryant found his most congenial recreation not in the theater or society, but country employments. When youth passed into middle age he still liked all-day or week-end rambles up the Hudson or in the Catskills. After the purchase of his Roslyn home in 1842 he seldom failed, from April to October, to spend two or three days a week resting, gardening, draining, planning, and writing there. His most charming letters show him visiting his pigs and chickens, picking strawberries, treating children to his cherries, superintending the pruning, and bathing in the Sound when the tide met the grass.
The editor viewed his calling as a jealous mistress, declining all suggestions of public office or any other diversion from it. In 1861 it was rumored that Lincoln wished to appoint him Minister to Spain, and the Post promptly disposed of the suggestion that he would accept. “Those who are acquainted with Mr. Bryant know,” it said, “that there is no public office from that of the Presidency of the United States downward which he would not regard it as a misfortune to take. They know that he has expected no offer of any post from the government, and would take none if offered.” Grant also would have given him an important diplomatic position had he been ready to receive it. In 1872 it was thought necessary to publish the following tactful
CARD FROM MR. BRYANT
Certain journals of this city have lately spoken of me as one ambitious of being nominated for the Presidency of the United States. The idea is absurd enough, not only on account of my advanced age, but of my unfitness in various respects for the labors of so eminent a post. I do not, however, object to the discussion of my deficiencies on any other ground than that it is altogether superfluous, since it is impossible that I should receive any formal nomination, and equally impossible, if it were offered, that I should commit the folly of accepting it.
WM. C. BRYANT.
New York, July 8, 1872.
He avoided those controversial by-ways into which Greeley, as in his debate with Henry J. Raymond upon Socialism, so eagerly rushed. In 1860 the country’s foremost economist, Henry C. Carey, challenged him to a joint discussion of the tariff, and the Post replied that Bryant never accepted such invitations. “His duties as a journalist and a commentator on the events of the day and the various interesting questions which they suggest, leave him no time for a sparring match with Mr. Carey ...; and he has no ambition to distinguish himself as a public disputant. His business is to enforce important political truths, and to refute what seem to him errors, just as the occasions arise....” A time more malapropos for a long tariff debate could hardly have been selected.
It was part of Bryant’s creed that the profession to which he devoted his life should be treated as one of elevated dignity. When he died the Associated Press declared, in the preamble to its resolutions of respect, that “he redeemed, as far as one man could do so, the journalism of his early days from the offensive practice of personal discussion, often ending in duels, and at times in death, and placed it upon the broad foundation of that tolerance for others which is inseparable from free discussion and true self-respect.” In 1837 a hare-brained fellow named Holland, connected with a short-lived journal called the Times, challenged him to a duel because he had asserted that the Times was a mere tool in the hands of Senator Nathaniel P. Tallmadge. Bryant pocketed the challenge, and told its bearer that everything must take its turn; that Holland had already been termed a scoundrel by Leggett, and he could not take up the new quarrel till the old one was settled. Year by year the Evening Post refused to be drawn into offensive personalities. In 1832, when the Courier and Enquirer assailed it, Bryant wrote that “we shall never so far lose sight of a proper sense of our own dignity, or of respect for our readers, as to make incidents in the private life of any political opponent a subject of discussion or reproach.” Ten years later he was about to reply to an article in the Plebeian, but on looking at it a second time, “we were repelled from our purpose by the personalities which it contains.” In 1863 a scurrilous attack on Bigelow and Thayer by the World drew the same curt statement.
How scrupulous Bryant was in his fifty years’ editorship two incidents will illustrate. In the spring of 1859 a bill was pending at Albany to increase the compensation paid for legal advertisements, which was unfairly low. All the newspapers urged it, and the Evening Post’s correspondent, one Wilder, proved a perfect Hercules of a lobbyist. “Yet,” Bryant wrote Bigelow, “I was uncomfortable all the while at the idea of having a bill before the Legislature from which, if it passed, I would derive a personal advantage, and I was quite relieved when I saw that it was defeated.” Some years earlier the London Examiner published a complimentary article regarding Bigelow’s book upon Jamaica, of which he had about a hundred copies that he was eager to sell. He asked Bryant if he would be guilty of an impropriety in republishing the notice. “No,” Bryant said hesitatingly, looking up from his desk, “no, not as the world goes.” “But,” persisted Bigelow, “how as the Evening Post goes?” “Why,” rejoined the poet, “I never did such a thing. I have had a good many pleasant things said about me, but I never republished one of them in the Evening Post.” It need not be said that Bigelow abandoned his plan.
Bryant brought to his editorship a culture such as American journalism had not seen before, and has not since seen surpassed. A writer in Fraser’s Magazine in 1855 made sport of the ignorance of American newspapers. He cited the Herald’s statement, in a criticism of Racine’s “Phedre,” that “the language is written in what we call blank verse”; and its translation of a tag from Virgil: “Adsum qui feci; he or me must perish.” His sweeping criticism was unjust to a profession which already enlisted men like Richard Hildreth, Richard Grant White, and George Ripley, but Bryant, with his international reputation, was the most shining exception to it. His readers thought nothing of seeing an editorial on the United States Bank begin with an allusion to the episode of Nisus and Euryalus in Virgil, some story drawn from the legal lore he had mastered at the bar, or an apt quotation from the wide range of English poetry. His allusions and illustrations were always deft. “Like the misshapen dwarf in the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’” he said of the anti-Jacksonians in 1833, “they wave their lean arms on high and run to and fro crying, ‘Lost! Lost! Lost!’” When Cass objected to any “temporary” measures regarding slavery in the territories, Bryant simply retold the story of Swift’s servant, who did not clean his master’s shoes because they would soon be dirty again; whereupon the Dean punished him by making him go without breakfast, because he would soon be hungry again.
The editor read assiduously. His wide acquaintance with the most intellectual men of New York kept him conversant with the latest ideas in every field. Above all, at a time when few journalists went abroad, his many trips to Europe supplied him with a constant fund of suggestions for civic and other improvements. These ranged from penny postage to street cleaning machines, from apartment houses to police uniforms, and from Central Park to the nickel five-cent piece, which, in imitation of a German coin, he was one of the first to advocate.
Bryant’s insistence upon purity of diction was such that John Bigelow believed that in all his writings for the Post fewer blemishes could be found than in the first ten numbers of the Spectator. His sensitiveness as to literary form was fully developed when he joined the paper. On May 11, 1827, he published in it a paragraph on affectations of expression, condemning such barbarisms in current newspapers as “consolate.” The most famous evidence of his love of precision was his index expurgatorius. This was less extensive than it was sometimes represented to be, containing but eighty-six words or phrases; and as Bryant told George Cary Eggleston, it was for the guidance only of immature staff writers, and might sometimes be overstepped. It includes inflated words like inaugurate for begin, misemployed words like mutual for common, and along with some terms now used without hesitation, others universally condemned:
Above and over (for more than); Artiste (for artist); Aspirant; Authoress; Beat (for defeat); Bagging (for capturing); Balance (for remainder); Banquet (for dinner or supper); Bogus; Casket (for coffin); Claimed (for asserted); Commence (for begin); Collided; Compete; Cortege (for procession); Cotemporary (for contemporary); Couple (for two); Darkey (for negro); Day before yesterday (for the day before yesterday); Début; Decease; Democracy (applied to a political party); Develop (for expose); Devouring element (for fire); Donate; Employee; Enacted (for acted); Endorse (for approve); En Route; “Esq.”; Graduate (for is graduated); Gents (for gentlemen); Hon. House (for House of Representatives); Humbug; Inaugurate (for begin); In our midst; Item (for particle, extract, or paragraph); Is being done, and all passives of this form; Jeopardise; Jubilant (for rejoicing); Juvenile (for boy); Lady (for wife); Last (for latest); Lengthy (for long); Leniency (for lenity); Loafer; Loan or loaned (for lend or lent); Located; Majority (relating to places or circumstances, for most); Mrs. President, Mrs. Governor, Mrs. General, and all similar titles; Mutual (for common); Official (for officer); Ovation; On yesterday; Over his signature; Pants (for pantaloons); Parties (for persons); Partially (for partly); Past two weeks (for last two weeks, and all similar expressions relating to a definite time); Poetess; Portion (for part); Posted (for informed); Progress (for advance); Quite (prefixed to good, large, etc.); Raid (for attack); Realized (for obtained); Reliable (for trustworthy); Rendition (for performance); Repudiate (for reject); Retire (as an active verb); Rev. (for the Rev.); Role (for part); Roughs; Rowdies; Secesh; Sensation (for noteworthy event); Standpoint (for point of view); Start (in the sense of setting out); State (for say); Talent (for talents or ability); Talented; Tapis; The deceased; War (for dispute).
Bryant was frequently called upon to decide nice questions of English, which he did with care; during the Civil War he took time, in answer to a query regarding the superlative, to dig up ancient instances like Milton’s “virtuousest, discreetest, best.” He has recorded his judgment that from newspaper writing a man’s style gains in clearness and fluency, but is likely to become loose, diffuse, and stuffed with bad diction. He always insisted upon simplicity as the sole foundation of a fine style. Once the Post received a letter from a servant girl so clear and precise that Bryant had her sought out to learn how she could write so well. She explained that she used no expression of whose meaning she was not certain; that if at first she did so, she later struck it out and substituted a simpler word or phrase. Bryant held this procedure to be a model for reporters.
Parke Godwin, writing Charles A. Dana in 1845 that the best all-round editor in America was Greeley, added that Bryant “is by all odds the most varied and beautiful writer.” He here touched one of Bryant’s most distinctive merits as an editor. Bryant could not argue with more force than Greeley, or with the incisiveness and point of E. L. Godkin; but when moved by a great event, he wrote with an eloquence which no other editor ever attempted. The springs that fed his poetry fed this mastery of elevated prose. Any one who will study the fine rhetorical effects of his first great poem, “Thanatopsis,” or of one of his last, “The Flood of Years,” will understand what effects he sometimes wrought in the editorial columns of the Evening Post. Opening soberly though on a high plane, his more impassioned editorials would rise to a splendid climax. He did not use his grand style too frequently, but during the Civil War he employed it again and again. Thus he wrote July 6, 1863, upon the “three glorious days” at Vicksburg and Gettysburg:
Many a gallant spirit lies silent forever on the bloody field; many peaceful homes are instantly made desolate; our hearts go forth in sorrow to the fallen and in condolence to the bereaved; but this is the eternal glory of those who have perished, as of those who mourn their deaths, that they have given their lives in the noblest cause in which man was ever called to suffer. They have died for a country which is worthy of the blood of its citizens; for the integrity and honor of a government in which the dearest rights of millions are involved; and for the great principles of human freedom and human justice, in which the world and ages to come are deeply interested. Nowhere else could they have earned a more glorious renown, for nowhere else could they have contributed a better service to humanity.
Again, we find him hailing the doom of the Confederacy (Dec. 5, 1864):
In the tone of that pristine rebel whom the great poet makes to exclaim, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” these proud and insolent spirits disdained to brook their fate, and flew to revolt. A new slave empire, a new semi-tropical nation, a grand aristocracy of white masters, was to be built around the Gulf of Mexico, our western Mediterranean, but alas for these dreams of ambition, the throne of Maximilian casts its shadow over one end of their prospective dominion, and the tread of Sherman’s soldiers shakes the other into dust.
But the foundation of Bryant’s power as an editor lay simply in his soundness of judgment, and his unwavering courage in maintaining it. The greatest peril of the profession, he wrote in 1851, “is the strong temptation which it sets before men, to betray the cause of truth to public opinion, and to fall in with what are supposed to be the views held by a contemporaneous majority, which are sometimes perfectly right and sometimes grossly wrong.” That peril was greater in Bryant’s day than now, for the comparative smallness and homogeneity of the reading public made it more dangerous to incur the general displeasure. He never yielded in the slightest degree to it; and the number of instances in which his view of public questions became the view taken by history is remarkable. The Evening Post’s defense of trade unions, and of the abolitionists’ right to free use of the mails and to free speech, are memorable illustrations. Just before the Civil War began Bryant ran over in the Post a list of its measures, at first opposed by the majority, but later accepted as sound. It was for many years the only powerful journal north of the Potomac which pleaded for a low tariff. It resisted the internal improvement system, advocated the sub-treasury system, and defended the right of petition. It successfully opposed the assumption of State debts by the national government. It was one of the earliest and most earnest advocates of cheaper postage rates, already partly realized. When the Fugitive Slave law had been proposed, it had denounced it as an infringement of the rights of the States, though most Northerners regarded it with indifference or approbation. As for the great slavery question in general, Bryant had already written just after Lincoln’s election:
We take this occasion to congratulate the old friends of the Evening Post, who have read it for the last score of years or thereabouts, on this new triumph of the principles which it maintains. The Wilmot Proviso is now consecrated as a part of the national public policy by this election; but earlier than the Wilmot Proviso was the opposition of our journal to the enlargement of slavery. It began with the first whisper of the scheme to annex Texas to the American Union, and it has been steadily maintained from that moment till now, when the right and justice of our cause is proclaimed in a general election by the mighty voice of a larger part of thirty millions of people.
Freedom, democracy—to these two principles every utterance of the Evening Post in its fifty years under Bryant was referred. Other journals might think of the day only and let the morrow take care of itself, but he was solicitous that each issue should fit into the exposition of a policy good for the year and the decade. “He looked upon the journal which he conducted,” wrote his last managing editor, Robert Burch, “as a conscientious statesman looks upon the official trust which has been committed to him, or the work which he has undertaken—not with a view to do what is to be done to-day in the easiest or most brilliant way, but so to do it that it may tell upon what is to be done to-morrow, and all other days, until the worthiest object of journalism is achieved. This is the most useful journalism; and first and last, it is the most effective and influential.”
In his method of work, combining remarkable efficiency with a remarkable amount of disorder, Bryant was a true newspaper man. His desk, a large one used after him by Parke Godwin and Carl Schurz, was kept piled with litter—books, manuscripts, pamphlets, documents, and stranded memoranda; a little square being left in the middle where he could place writing materials and do his work. Once when Bryant went to Europe, says Bigelow, “I thought, I am going to clean house, and I did, and found all sorts of old newspapers, old contributions, letters, etc., etc.” When the poet returned and saw his desk cleared, he demanded an explanation. Bigelow, giving it, perceived instantly that his little housecleaning had been an error. “I saw by his expression that I was trespassing. He did not make any remark, but his silence was a very severe rebuke. He did not like it at all that he could not have his old papers just as he had left them.” Indeed, he was attached to a large number of homely but familiar objects. Among these was a pen-knife with which he used to trim both his quill pen and his finger nails. He owned an old blue cotton umbrella that he always insisted upon carrying. When he was departing for Mexico, his daughter replaced it with a handsome new one, but he missed it and refused the exchange.
It was Bryant’s habit to write for the Post on the backs of circulars, letters received, and rejected manuscripts, for he held that it was shameful to waste the least scrap of useful material, since it represented men’s time and labor. It is curious, in looking over his papers, to find what these scraps were; a letter to Lincoln, for example, was copied off from the back of a wine merchant’s circular, offering Moët champagne at $12 the case. Yet he was really the soul of carefulness. His copy often went up to the printer a mass of interlineations and corrections; he never sent a letter away without first making a rough draft. Throughout his life he made it a rule to write everything for the Post in the office, never at home, and even when an additional task was laid upon him, as when he wrote a sketch of the journal’s history in 1851, he refused to do it elsewhere. This was a wise husbanding of his nervous energy; but his family recalls that he and Parke Godwin often discussed the paper’s affairs at night.
No head of a newspaper was ever more considerate of his subordinates than Bryant, who had but one serious quarrel with an associate, and that was soon bridged over. Bigelow tells us that “he never rebuked me; he never criticized me.” In looking over Bigelow’s proofs, he would sometimes say, “Had not this word better be changed for that or the other? Does that phrase express all or more than you mean, or as clearly as you wish it to?” Even this gentle correction was rare. Another worker tells us that it was Bryant’s habit, whenever he wished to speak to any one in the office, to go to the desk of the man rather than call him in. When John R. Thompson, the Southern poet, became literary editor just after the Civil War, Bryant knew how ardently he had sympathized with the Confederacy, and personally saw that he was given no book to review that would hurt his feelings. We have noted how he refused to say a word against the inefficient business manager of the Post early in the fifties, though recognizing his incompetence. He never wavered in his loyalty to Isaac Henderson when the latter was under fire in connection with Civil War contracts, and beyond doubt remained sincerely convinced that Henderson had done no wrong.
In the office, as outside of it, in fact, Bryant was a thorough democrat. During his travels in England, while staying at the home of a business man, he was once invited to dine with a country gentleman near by, and accepted in the belief that, as a matter of course, his host had also been invited. When he learned that this was not true, and that his host, being in trade, never thought of entering the gentleman’s house, Bryant angrily canceled his acceptance. The incident made so disagreeable an impression upon him that be shortened his stay in the country. Similarly, when Dickens first visited New York, a rich old Knickerbocker who had never theretofore taken the slightest notice of Bryant asked him to his house to meet the young novelist; and Bryant declined; telling a friend that he would never be a stool-pigeon to attract fine birds of passage. In all relations with others Bryant thought of the man, not of his rank, money, or reputation. The poverty-stricken, invalid Thompson became one of the intimates of his home soon after he joined the Post, and the editor showed a much higher regard for the rugged head of the composing-room, Dithmar, than for many a general or millionaire. When the Post moved to its new building in 1875, Bryant rarely occupied the handsome office fitted up for him there, with its fine view of the harbor, preferring a humble chair and desk in a corner of the composing room upstairs, where he was free from boresome callers.
“In his intercourse with his co-laborers and subordinates,” wrote Parke Godwin, “the impression produced by Mr. Bryant, after a certain reticence, which diffused an atmosphere of coldness about him, was broken through, was that of his extreme simplicity and sincerity of character. He was as transparent as the day, as guileless as a child, and as clear in his integrity as the crystal that has no flaw nor crack.” The coldness was but a mask, and Bryant’s own feelings often threw it off. Entering the office one day, he told in a self-accusing way how, walking down-town, he had smashed a kite that a small boy dragged across his face, without paying the urchin for it; he reproached himself deeply. George Cary Eggleston, who worked beside him three or four years, says that “I found him not only warm in his human sympathies, but even passionate.” Sometimes he would do something almost boyish. Once he was standing by a form around which the printers were gathered, hurriedly preparing it for the press. A word was spoken which suggested some stanzas from Cowley, and Bryant, locking his hands before him, repeated the verses with remarkable force and expression, while the printers paused and listened. Then he recovered himself with a start, a look of embarrassment overspread his face, and—to change the subject—he turned to the casement around the elevator, tapped it, and said: “There is very little wood there to make trouble in case of fire.”
He was wont to impress upon his associates the desirability of acting as courteously toward men and women of the outside world as possible. Bigelow says that he used to cite the example of Dr. Bartlett, editor of the Albion, whose rule was “never to write anything of any one which would make it unpleasant to meet him the following day at dinner.” When Martin F. Tupper was about to visit the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, Eggleston wrote a playful editorial about him, which the managing editor received with some apprehension, for he knew that Tupper had once entertained Bryant in England. It was decided to show Bryant the manuscript. The editor read it with evident amusement, but remarked: “I heartily wish you had printed this without saying a word to me about it, for then, when Mr. Tupper becomes my guest, as he will if he comes to America, I could have explained to him that the thing was done without my knowledge by one of the flippant young men of my staff. Now that you have brought the matter to my attention, I can make no excuse.” The article was not published.
He disliked to rebuff unwelcome visitors. “It is a positive fact,” writes the veteran dramatic editor of the Evening Post, Mr. J. Ranken Towse, “that he not infrequently preferred to escape them by passing through a back door opening into the composing room, and descending thence to the ground floor by means of the freight elevator. Sometimes he sent for me and asked me to rid him of the visitors. This I did easily and unscrupulously. Thus, in addition to my regular duties—I was then city editor—I became a sort of amateur Cerberus.” When the widow of John Hackett, a young woman of striking beauty but no stage experience, resolved to play Lady Macbeth, she visited the Post, and although Mr. Towse tried to dissuade her, she induced Bryant to make a half-promise to deliver an introductory speech at her first appearance. Bryant uneasily confessed this to Mr. Towse, who warned him plainly of the false position in which he would be left when her début proved a failure, as it was certain to do. When Mr. Towse offered to extricate him by dismissing Mrs. Hackett upon her next call, the poet eagerly assented.
It should be said that Bryant could be very blunt on occasion, and had no hesitancy in offending those he disliked. There were some men to whom he would never speak. Thurlow Weed, who for a time edited the World, was one. Once when they were together at an evening party a friend insisted that he must be allowed to introduce them; finally Bryant half arose from his chair, and then sank back, saying, “Not yet—not yet!” When he concluded that a man in public life had done wrong, he followed him to the end of his career with unbending aversion. In the warfare over the United States Bank, he conceived a fierce hatred of Nicholas Biddle; and when Biddle died, far from taking a nil nisi bonum attitude, he expressed deep regret that he had not died in jail. His judgment so angered Philip Hone that he wrote of Bryant in his famous Diary as a “black-hearted misanthrope,” saying: “This is the first instance I have known of the vampire of party spirit seizing the lifeless body of its victim before its interment, and exhibiting its bloody claws to the view of mourning relatives.” As well expect honey from the rattle-snake as poetry from such a man, he added.
It must also be remembered that Bryant was always severely dignified. If he never commanded a subordinate to do anything, but always requested it, he knew that his request was a command. He always addressed others with the prefix “Mr.,” and no one, not even Bigelow or his son-in-law Parke Godwin, omitted the word in addressing him. When Dom Pedro of Brazil visited the Evening Post, Bryant did not greet the popular Emperor in the hall, but waited to receive him at his desk; and he called a junior to show Dom Pedro the press room.
A certain testiness grew upon the editor in his later years, though it was never more than momentary. He was especially sensitive to any suggestion that he was losing his bodily vigor. Not only would he climb the stairs to his ninth-floor office, but he would now and then seize the frame of his door, and show his ability to “chin” it repeatedly. Once, when he fell in Broadway, he sharply rebuffed a gentleman who stepped up and asked, “Are you hurt, Mr. Bryant?”—and he was a little ashamed of it later. Mr. Towse once saw him consulting the city directory, his face showing plainly that the print was too fine for his eyes. Forgetting Bryant’s pride in using no spectacles, he inquired, “Cannot I help you, Mr. Bryant?” The poet instantly rejoined, “No, sir!” with the angry tone of an insulted man, flung the book on a table, and walked swiftly from the room. Mr. Towse also tells us that if you asked Bryant a question, you were wise to accept his answer as final. “I was not long in finding that out. There had been an argument over the correct spelling of the word ‘peddler.’ As he was at his desk, I referred the matter to him. ‘I shall have to write it,’ he said, ‘to make sure. It is often only by the look of it that I can decide whether a word is rightly spelled.’ He wrote the word in several ways and finally selected the form in which I have given it. I thanked him and asked him whether either of the other spellings was permissible. He turned on me like a flash and said angrily, ‘I thought you asked me how to spell it?’”
Such incidents were an evidence of Bryant’s increasing age. Though he lived to be eighty-three, he gave his strength to the Evening Post till the very day he was stricken down. The only sustained series of editorials which he wrote after his final visit to Europe in 1867 was a series upon reciprocity in trade, but he still contributed many occasional leaders upon questions of the day. He was accustomed to come down in the morning, and whether he wrote an editorial or not, to read all the proofs with care and frequently to make heavy corrections. “He would pass through the editorial rooms with a cheery good morning,” says Eggleston; “he would sit down by one’s desk and talk if there was aught to talk about; or, if asked a question while passing, would stand while answering it, and frequently would relate some anecdote suggested by the question or offer some apt quotation.” Hawthorne, who had seen him abroad, spoke of him as “at once alert and infirm,” and with “a weary look upon his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things, though with certainly enough energy still to see and do, if need were.” Yet the vigor and fire with which he treated topics of the day, if they seemed really pressing topics to him, was not a whit abated.
It is the testimony of more than one co-worker that his last day in the office, the day he delivered the address at the unveiling of the Mazzini statue, showed him worn and depressed. He went into Eggleston’s room, and asked the latter’s opinion upon two poems sent him by an acquaintance. Eggleston said they were poor stuff. “I supposed so,” Bryant said sadly; “and now I suppose I shall have to write to her on the subject. People expect too much of me—altogether too much.” He chatted also with Watson R. Sperry, the managing editor, who procured a book of reference from the Evening Post library for him. He was as tranquil and physically as strong as ever, but there was a tension in his voice. Finally, says Sperry, “he said to me that it was quite unfair to ask a man of his age to make a public address. There was a petulance and a pathos in his tone which I had never heard before.” A few hours later, after speaking bareheaded in the sun, he collapsed on the steps of Gen. James Wilson’s home.
Bryant’s work for the Post must not be thought of as consisting wholly of editorial writing and management. He filled literally hundreds of its columns with his letters of travel, which covered each of his six trips to Europe, and his tours to the South and the Northwest, and which ultimately were collected into three volumes. The letters are not literature, but good journalism. Bigelow once wrote Bryant that “they are very much liked by the class—of course, not the largest—who can appreciate them, and are of great value to the paper. I like them none the less because they are very different from the style of correspondence which ordinarily finds its way into newspapers from abroad.” By this Bigelow meant that they did not depend upon important events, adventure, or gossip. Their interest lay in a careful observation of scenery and society which often caused them to be widely copied. In the early days the poet wrote reviews and reports of important lectures. His signed poems in the Post did not aggregate a dozen, but they were supplemented by unsigned light verse, of which a good specimen is the poem on “Bully” Brooks, Sumner’s assailant, to be found in Godwin’s biography (II, 92). Brooks had been challenged to a duel in Canada by Anson Burlingame:
To Canada, Brooks was asked to go;
To waste of powder a pound or so;
He sighed as he answered, No, no, no,
They might take my life on the way, you know.
For I am afraid, afraid, afraid,
Bully Brooks is afraid....
Bryant reaped a generous material reward for his labors—the Evening Post made him by far the richest poet the country has had. He possessed a competence and more by 1860, for he had shared equally with Bigelow in profits that enabled the latter, after only twelve years with the paper, to retire worth more than $175,000. The Post’s business history in the Civil War is summarized in the statement that its dividends reached 80 per cent. upon the capital invested, and that at the close of the struggle its value was commonly estimated at $1,000,000.
It made Bryant, with Parke Godwin and Isaac Henderson, wealthy while some other New York journals were scarcely paying expenses. The Tribune in October, 1861, said that the circulation of American dailies was larger than ever, but many had been forced into bankruptcy. “We doubt that a single daily in this city has paid its expenses throughout the last four months, or that a dozen in the Union have done so.” The receipts of the Tribune in 1864 were $747,501, and its expenses were $735,751, the nominal profit not sufficing to pay for the depreciation of the plant. The chief reason for the embarrassment of the morning papers was the enormous cost of paper, especially as the war neared its close. The Tribune’s paper bill during 1864 was $426,000, whereas in 1861 it would not have been more than $200,000 for the same circulation. In the space of only four months, April to July, 1864, the combination of paper-makers in the Eastern States advanced the price from fifteen cents a pound to twenty-seven cents. The Times in 1863 imported paper from Belgium at seven and a half cents. The position of the Post was fortunate in that it used much less paper than the Herald or Tribune—it was still a four-page paper, while they had eight or twelve pages, though of course smaller—while at the beginning of the war it charged three cents a copy, and they only two. Later the prices of all the journals advanced; the Evening Post in 1862 going to four cents a copy and from $9 a year to $10, and in 1864 to five cents a copy and $12 a year.
Just how high the war-time circulation became we do not know. In April, 1861, it exceeded 20,000, and it steadily increased, the demand growing so heavy the first battle summer that whenever important news came it was necessary to issue many copies printed on one side of the sheet alone. To obviate this, in 1862 the journal installed “the largest and most efficient eight-cylinder newspaper press that has ever been constructed,” at a cost of nearly $50,000. We know that in 1864 the total revenue from sales and subscriptions of the daily reached $250,000. Advertising, moreover, had become so extensive that frequently six pages instead of four had to be printed, and they had swollen to enormous size. All of the evening papers were still “blanket sheets,” and one or two morning papers, the most prominent being the Sun, long remained so. At the close of the war the dimensions of the unfolded Evening Post were 30½ by 52 inches—it was not a journal for use in such subways as the Evening Post was already advocating. No newspaper so large, the Post boasted, had ever attained so wide a circulation. Huge as it was, and devoting from 20 to 25 of its 40 columns to advertising, it had constantly to exclude advertisements. The advertising receipts of the Herald in 1865 reached $662,192; of the Tribune, $301,841; of the Times, $284,412; and of the Evening Post, which stood high above the World or Sun, and easily led the evening papers, $222,715.
Bryant, who in the late thirties would probably have sold his interest in the Post for a few thousands clear, thus by 1866 had grown rich far beyond any wish or expectation on his part. He lived very simply; a man who would rather walk than drive, who preferred oatmeal to any procurable dainty, and whose most lavish entertainment was to have the Rev. Dr. Henry Bellows or some other well-loved friend spend a week-end at Roslyn, could not do otherwise. The chief outward signs of his wealth were that he acquired, besides his little estate at Roslyn, a town house, and the ancestral homestead at Cummington, Mass.; while he unostentatiously gave large sums in charity. President Mark Hopkins of Williams College, acknowledging a check from Bryant, wrote that it was a queer world in which poets were able to be lavish philanthropists. It was because of his large gifts that he was able to contradict with some asperity a stranger who wrote him criticizing his tariff views, and denouncing him as a plutocrat because he was said to be worth more than $500,000. Bryant replied, in a hitherto unpublished note:
I am as much for free trade as yourself. The Evening Post has been all along known as an advocate for absolute free trade between nations, and for the support of government by direct taxation. But as the state of public opinion leaves no hope of this, the Evening Post for the present coöperates with those who seek a reduction of the tariff to a simple revenue standard with no view leading to protection. That is as much as we can now get and the Evening Post is for taking it. As we cannot go by a single jump from the bottom of the stairs to the top, we take the first step.
Your estimate of the property I possess is greatly exaggerated. You intimate that I ought to be a second Zaccheus. How do you know I am not? You have no knowledge of how much of my income, such as it is, goes to public objects, and to the poor. Nor is it my business to inform you. I have for the greater part of my life been in narrow circumstances, yet never repined on that account, and although I have been prospering of late, it is not my fault, for I never made haste to be rich. You see therefore that you have administered reproof without knowing, or probably caring, whether there was any occasion for it or not. (Dec. 14, 1870.)
Bryant began his journalistic career in poverty and discouragement, his literary friends jeering at him for exchanging the dignified profession of the law for the jangling, vulgar newspaper calling. He made it pay richly in money, and above all in honor and influence. No man of his time did more, and only three, Greeley, Raymond, and the elder Bowles, did so much, to elevate the press in public esteem. “If our newspapers have risen above the level on which they stood when Dickens and Trollope held them up to the scorn of Europe,” said the Brooklyn Times when he died, “it is because they have been wise enough to profit by the lesson set by William Cullen Bryant.” He had often crossed pens with the Journal of Commerce and the World. The former spoke of him as “an editor whose example has been uniformly ennobling,” and said that “journalism will never improve so much that it may not safely pattern by Bryant.” “His long and honorable career,” said the latter, “had put into his hands that mysterious influence called weight of character.” Not a few journals, like the Philadelphia Ledger, and some individuals, like John D. Van Buren, ranked the editor above the poet.
When George W. Curtis delivered his commemorative address in New York before an audience which included President Hayes and members of his Cabinet, he paid his warmest tribute to Bryant as the journalist. “The fact is no such man ever sat before or since in the editorial chair,” a critic has just written in the Cambridge History of American Literature; “in no other has there been such culture, scholarship, wisdom, dignity, moral idealism. Was it all in Greeley? In Dana? What those fifty years may have meant as an influence on the American press ... the layman may only guess.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
APARTMENT HOUSES RISE AND TWEED FALLS
Not long before the war New York’s manners were provincial, and not long afterwards the city felt itself one of the world’s great centers. In twenty years, 1850–70, the population grew from a half million to a million. Such large groups were enriched by war contracts, the rise of real estate, and the nation-wide business expansion that the increase in luxury struck every observer. A Four Hundred was taking shape, rich shops were arising, the opera was growing more and more gilded; in 1868, said the Evening Post, the receipts of the score of theaters reached $3,165,000. The Post that year listed ten of the richest men in order—Wm. B. Astor, believed to be worth $75,000,000; A. T. Stewart, Wm. C. Rhinelander, Peter and Robert Goelet, James Lenox, Peter Lorillard, John D. Wolfe, M. M. Hendricks, Rufus M. Lord, and C. V. S. Roosevelt. Their wealth, it told them, had become so great that if they tried they could accomplish enormous benefits for New York—they could sweep away the debasing tenement house system, or shatter the Tammany Ring; and the people believed that public services were the best if not the only justification for such wealth.
The growth in population emphasized the desirability of many diverse improvements. At the beginning of 1867 the Evening Post was demanding a great art gallery, such as we now have in the Metropolitan Museum, and pointing to European collections as models, while later the same year it urged a zoological garden like London’s, there being as yet none in all America. It and the Tribune together in 1871 asked for a single large public library. There were several small ones—the Astor, the Mercantile, the Society Library, and the unfinished Lenox Library—but none was “public” in the sense that it circulated books free, while the city would obviously benefit from the union of some of the larger collections. Having been the first to propose Central Park, Bryant applauded the creation of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, for which ground was broken in 1866. Theodore Thomas, who had begun to organize his orchestra early in the war, and immediately afterwards had opened his “summer night” concerts, issued a call through the newspaper for a supporting fund of $20,000. In several editorials in the spring of 1868, the first entitled “Can a City Be Planned?”, the Evening Post suggested that a board of engineers be named to lay out a city plan, determining which areas should be used for retail trade, manufactures, and residence. It was an Age of Innocence in many ways—people wondered at the first concrete sidewalk, laid from Park Row to Murray Street in 1868; they were just learning the use of safe deposit vaults, and elevators were curiosities; but it was an age of progress.
The problem which most pressed upon New York after Appomattox, as after the World War, was housing. Building had stopped during the conflict, and its resumption was slow, but Manhattan had kept on growing at the rate of 30,000 people a year. In the winter of 1866–7 the Evening Post pronounced New York the most costly place of residence on earth. “Houses are so scarce that landlords see tenants running around, like pigs in the land of Cockaigne, with knives and forks in their backs, begging to be eaten; it is a favor to get a decent house at a preposterous rent—at almost any sum, in fact; and we know of families living comfortably in Europe from the rent of a house on one of the favorite avenues.” That spring a great open-air mass meeting was held in protest, and petitions were sent the Legislature for a law basing rents upon the assessed valuation. Those of moderate means suffered more than the rich or the poor tenement dwellers. “Bank clerks, bookkeepers, and salesmen are compelled to go to New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island, or Westchester to secure attractive and comfortable homes,” said the Post. “New York is practically losing the best part of its population.” The practice of sub-letting parts of single houses waxed common.
From this demand for housing there arose an unprecedented real estate boom. Thousands of homes were placed on the market at high prices, and land auctions took place daily. The Evening Post reported that lots in Manhattan and Brooklyn were eagerly bought at unheard-of rates. The neighborhoods of Central and Prospect Parks had become popular for residences, while merchants were purchasing sites for stores on Union Square and Fifth Avenue. Lots that fronted upon what is now Central Park West had sold in 1850 for a few hundred dollars apiece, and in 1860 for from $2,000 to $3,000, but in 1867 they were bringing from $8,000 to $15,000. High up on the East Side, at 91st Street, lots now sold at $3,000. When Bay Ridge Terrace was created in 1868 the journal commented upon the rapid growth of that fine part of Brooklyn, which it had already noted to be spreading eastward rapidly. Brownsville and East New York before the war had been quiet farming communities, but now the former had a hundred houses, and the latter had grown with a rush to 5,000 souls.
The northward march of business, causing the demolition of hundreds of old residences, increased the need for new residential construction. When Ex-Mayor Opdyke’s house on Fifth Avenue near Sixteenth Street was sold to James A. Hearn & Son in 1867 for $105,000, and a milliner established herself on the Avenue at Twenty-second Street, the Evening Post devoted an editorial to the transformation. It predicted that all Fifth Avenue to Twenty-third Street would soon be engrossed by business, the new Fifth Avenue Hotel having given the movement impetus. Higher up, residential property had reached amazing prices. A brownstone house at Thirtieth Street had just been purchased for $114,000, while P. T. Barnum had bought one at the corner of Thirty-ninth for $80,000. A fine light brownstone mansion on the corner of Fortieth, building for W. H. Vanderbilt, would cost at least $80,000, the stable and lot included. At Forty-third Street a wealthy Jewish congregation was building a synagogue at an outlay of fully $700,000, while ten blocks farther up, where St. Thomas’s was about to be erected, $100,000 had been offered and refused for a plot 100 by 125 feet. Seven houses with brownstone fronts had just been finished on the west side of the Avenue, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth, and were so finely furnished that the front doors had cost $700 each, and the staircases $4,000.
The most serious aspect of the housing shortage was that as yet respectable New Yorkers knew but two modes of residence: one must either take a full single house, or consent to a dismal boarding house. The apartment building was known only to travelers in Europe, and was mistrusted as not being adapted to American individualism.
The possibility of utilizing the multiple-unit type of housing, however, was unceasingly expounded by the Evening Post from the time peace returned, for the editors had lived in the “Continental flat” abroad. An early editorial (Feb. 6, 1866) was called “How to Gain Room.”
It has been suggested frequently that tenement houses scientifically built would be profitable in New York, and a great boon to the working people. But they would be no less an advantage to the wealthier classes, and we wonder that the attempt has not been made first in the best part of town, and with houses calculated to accommodate families of the wealthier citizens, at a somewhat more moderate rent than is attainable now.
Many a family which now occupies a whole house uptown would be content to rent a floor, suitably fitted up after the manner of the houses of Paris and other European cities. Such an arrangement would spare the women of the family the endless and often painful toil of going up and downstairs, from the kitchen to the top of a three-storied house, three or four times a day. It would be far more convenient, and the rents might well make a considerable saving.
The inertia of New Yorkers was to blame, the Post said a little later. “Such a thing as hiring a suite of rooms and having meals sent in from a restaurant at a fixed and moderate charge is, we believe, almost if not quite unknown here. As for the ‘flats’ in which thousands of families conveniently and comfortably keep house in France and Germany, they require an arrangement of house architecture not known to our builders.” In the summer of 1867, when the congestion was at its worst, the editors gave publicity to the design of an architect for an apartment house for the “middling classes.” Upon two ordinary city lots, 20 by 100 feet, he proposed erecting a four-story building, containing eight distinct suites of rooms, all as completely isolated from each other as though they were detached houses. There was to be a central stairs, each landing giving entrance to two homes; but every visitor would have to ring below for admission precisely as at the front door of any other houses. Each suite was to contain a parlor, dining room, four bedrooms, bath, and kitchen. For some time the newspaper carried on a veritable crusade.
When the first apartment house was ready, in 1870, one designed by Richard M. Hunt and erected at 142 East Eighteenth Street, the Evening Post rejoiced in it as the harbinger of a new housing era. It was said to be better than most of those in Paris, though the Post thought it lacking in light and ventilation. Each of the sixteen suites had six rooms and a bath, and rents ranged from $1,500 on the lower floors to $1,080 on the upper—G. P. Putnam, the publisher, and others of means lived in it. There was no elevator, but a dumbwaiter enabled the tenants to bring coal up from the basement. The close of 1870 saw the new movement in full swing, with eight houses built or building, and a strong demand for more.
An apartment house on Forty-eighth Street boasted a porter, who lighted the halls, removed garbage, and sent up fuel; the rents were only $40 to $75 a month. A block of flats overlooking Central Park from the east at Sixty-eighth Street gave each tenant eight rooms and a bath, elevator service, black walnut floors, and his own kitchen range and hot water heater for $75 to $150. The most pretentious house, however, was building at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. It was costing a round million, and was to be 125 feet high. “Each suite will have ten rooms, four closets, and eight washbowls,” announced the Evening Post, and rents were to run from $2,000 to $3,000 a year. The journal advised builders to install elevators, and charge as much for the upper as for lower floors.
For several years a marked prejudice against flats persisted. Most New Yorkers believed that in this land of democratic sociability it would be impossible to isolate the apartments and obtain privacy, and that they would soon sink to the level of tenements. The Post did its share in ridiculing these fears, and in pointing out the ugliness of the monotonous blocks of brownstone houses. It denied the common remark, “No house is big enough for two families.” But as it later said, one of the cardinal reasons for the rapid dissipation of the prejudice and popular success of the apartment houses was the building, in the first instance, of costly structures as pioneers in the movement.
By 1874 it thought that the new houses “may now be considered almost perfect.” The Haight Building, at Fifteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, offered thirty flats at $2,000 to $3,000 a year each, with an elevator, an internal telegraph, and a restaurant. Among the notables living here were Henry M. Field, the traveler; Col. W. C. Church, editor of the Galaxy; Prof. Youmans, founder of the Popular Science Monthly, and the Spanish Consul. But the last word in luxury was an apartment building in Fifty-sixth Street, where “the whole house is warmed by steam, and hot water is supplied to all the tenants at the expense of the owner.” The paper’s prediction that ten-story houses with elevators would be more popular than smaller buildings had been completely justified.
Even before the rise of the apartment house came the first sharp attacks upon tenement evils. New York City had no lack of this particular kind of multiple-family dwelling, for in 1864 they numbered 15,511, and housed 486,000 persons. They were far from being what we mean by tenements to-day: not until about 1879 was the first tenement house of the now familiar type, five, six, or more stories high, erected. The earlier buildings were comparatively low barracks, many of them converted mansions, shops, and stables, and others “rear houses” in the back yards of old mansions; all without airshafts, and with no complete provision for separating families. The Evening Post fitly called them “The Modern Upas,” for they breathed upon the city the poisons of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and crime. As early as April, 1860, six years before the first legislative inquiry into the housing of the poor, the editors had called shocked attention to police records showing that some 18,000 New Yorkers were veritable troglodytes, dwellers in cellars. It spoke out at the same time against the horrible congestion of the slums. One “rear house” on Mulberry Street had 222 persons huddled together; in Cow Bay, one of the colored quarters, one house held 230 persons; while the notorious Old Brewery at Five Points had sheltered 215 people before it burned. In the Sixth Ward, surrounding the Five Points, sixty-three small structures housed 4,721 persons.
An indignant editorial attack upon the deplorable tenement-house conditions appeared in the Evening Post six months after Lee’s surrender, inspired by a report of the Citizens’ Association. Half the people of New York lived in tenements, and on the East Side they were packed in at the rate of 220,000 to the square mile. The Post estimated that more than 25,000 dwelt in unfit cellars, shanties, or stable-lofts. Of the 15,000 tenements, almost 4,000 had no connection with the sewers. One in three was a perpetual “fever nest,” in which typhus was endemic, while not one in fifteen was what a tenement house ought to be. A single “fever nest” on East Seventeenth Street, almost within a stone’s throw of the Mayor’s home, had sent thirty-five typhus patients during 1864 to the municipal fever hospital, while nearly a hundred more had been treated in the building. The public, repeated the Post early in 1867, was astonished to awake from the war to the vast extent of the tenement system, the immense numbers inhabiting such places, and the horrid evils of filthiness, immorality, and sickness engendered by them. “No man has a right to establish a nest of fever and vice in the city,” it said, arguing for new laws and a government agency to regulate the construction and use of tenements.
Simultaneously, the newspaper kept up its old complaints, dating from Coleman’s day, of the lack of due sanitary regulations and activity. Slaughter-houses continued to abound, there being twenty-three in the northern half of the Twentieth Ward alone, some of them draining blood and other refuse for long distances through open sewers. In Forty-sixth Street on the East Side, a single neighborhood was blessed with one slaughter-house, six tripe, three sausage, and two bone-boiling establishments, and in the summer was almost uninhabitable (Sept. 2, 1865). A little later the Post took notice of the nastiness of the harbor. Many sewers emptied into the slips and under the piers, and there being no movement of the water, the sewage decayed until it had to be dredged out. These facts help explain an editorial of 1866 defining the typhus area block by block. It extended in irregular strips from the Battery up the West Side to Cortlandt Street, and up the East Side to Thirty-sixth. Smallpox was endemic throughout a rectangle bounded by Broadway, the Bowery, Chambers, and Bleecker, and in so many additional spots in the lower part of the city that a man could hardly get to his work downtown without crossing infected areas.
In the spring of 1867 the Legislature hesitatingly passed the first act to regulate the erection and management of tenements. Though it was, as the Evening Post said, “much less stringent and particular” than the English laws on which it was modeled, it placed important powers in the city Board of Health organized shortly before, for which the Post had also struggled. All tenants of cellars were required to vacate them unless they could obtain special permits, and within two years the Post was rejoicing over a drastic order for the cutting of 46,000 windows in interior rooms. Of course this legislation was only a beginning. In 1878–79 we find the Evening Post vigorously agitating for its extension, and publishing articles upon “The Homes of the Poor” which give a horrifying picture of Mulberry Court and other slum sections. Half of the city’s 125,000 children lived in tenements, and nine-tenths of the deaths among children occurred there. In May, 1878, the “Evening Post Fresh-Air Fund” was founded for the purpose of sending slum children to country homes for summer rest and recreation. The business office collected and disbursed the money raised by almost daily appeals in the newspaper, and the Rev. Willard Parsons took charge of the work of finding farmers to take the children, and of transporting them. Some years later the Tribune took over the Fresh-Air Fund, and still maintains it. In 1879, after a mass-meeting upon the tenement problem at Cooper Union, addressed among others by Parke Godwin, then editor of the Evening Post, new regulatory legislation was passed at Albany.
Every one saw that evils in housing could not be corrected without expanding the city’s area, and in the decade after the Civil War the city press paid little more attention to them than to the twin perplexity of transportation. The first talk of a subway had been heard in the early fifties, and was thin talk indeed, although the London underground railway dates from 1853. The Evening Post used to boast that it had been the first journal to propose a steam subway, Bryant having brought the idea home from England. But the real solution of the transit problem, for a period which had no electric traction, lay in the elevated railways which Col. Robert L. Stevens had suggested as long before as 1831. The need grew more and more urgent. When the war ended, transportation was furnished by the horse railways and by eight omnibus companies. The horse-cars were slowly driving the buses out of business, the great Consolidated Company, which operated a half-dozen lines, having gone bankrupt in 1864; but there remained 250 of the vehicles, or enough to impede other traffic seriously. The capital invested in them was $1,600,000, for each had six $200 horses, while wages and stabling costs had risen fast.
To find room for the growing population, and to ease the streets of their intolerable burden—these were the two chief arguments for rapid transit. As the Evening Post said in the closing days of 1864, the most desirable parts of the island, the sections abreast of and above Central Park, were largely given up to pigs, ducks, shanty-squatters, and filth. A railroad under Broadway, it thought, would soon change all that. “When a merchant can go to Central Park in fifteen minutes he will not hesitate to live in Seventieth or Eightieth Street; and a resident of One Hundredth Street could reach the business section of the city as quickly by the underground railway as those who live in Twentieth Street do now.” Better live in Yonkers than Harlem, it remarked later. As for the streets, it declared in 1866: “Broadway is simply intolerable to the man who is in a hurry; he must creep along with the crowd, no matter how cold it is; he crosses the street at the risk of his life; and when he journeys up and down in an omnibus, he wonders at the skill with which a wheeled vehicle is made so perfectly uncomfortable.”
A multitude of suggestions for better transit had been brought forward by this time. Some men proposed one or several subways; the Evening Post modestly thought that five were needed, several beginning at the Battery and the rest at Canal Street, and all running to the Harlem. Others favored elevated roads mounted on single pillars in the streets, and still others called for such roads running over the housetops. Sunken railways in the middle of certain streets were proposed, and one powerful intellect devised a scheme for two railways, one on each side of Broadway, running “through the cellars”! To lessen the traffic congestion in Broadway, a college professor suggested that the city buy the ground floor of all buildings for a space ten or twelve feet deep on each side, and form an arcade there for foot passengers, yielding the entire street to vehicles. Another professor thought that horses should be banished altogether, and the freight and passenger traffic in Broadway restricted to steam trains. To all the plans objections were made, and were frequently as wonderful in their way. Thus Engineer Craven of the Croton Board demonstrated at length in February, 1866, that no subway could ever be built, because it would interfere with the water supply; and even the Post called his argument “a knockdown blow.”
In the spring of 1867 the Evening Post was regarding hopefully two schemes before the Legislature, one for a “three-tier railroad” (subway, surface, and elevated), and one for a metropolitan underground line. In 1868 the Legislature actually authorized a steam subway from City Hall to Forty-second Street, the incorporators of which included such substantial men as William B. Ogden, William E. Dodge, and Henry W. Slocum, but the enterprise did nothing more than demonstrate the immediate impracticability of the plan. Three years later the Post had swung to the sensible view that an elevated would be better than a subway, for it had been shown that the latter would cost $30,000,000, and no one was ready to invest. Elevated construction had then already begun, and when Bryant died in 1878 there were four lines.
Subordinate to the two main subjects of housing and transit, a great variety of comments upon city affairs can be found in the post-bellum columns of the newspaper. One of the most frequent topics of editorial complaint in the years 1866–68 was the dirty and broken condition of the streets, which New York was paying a former Tammany Judge, James R. Whiting, $500,000 a year to neglect. Just before the war the Post had contended energetically for the introduction of sweeping machines, and now it objected to the contract system. Some city officer, it held, should be responsible. It anticipated Col. George F. Waring when it suggested that the city might well “engage an army officer used to drilling and handling a large number of men and accustomed to discipline, and put the streets in his charge, with a simple injunction to keep them clean, constantly, under all circumstances.” Early in the seventies we find the paper defending Henry Bergh, founder of the S. P. C. A., against journals which attacked his efforts to protect dumb animals as fanatical; applauding (February, 1873) the first stirrings of the movement to unite New York and Brooklyn under one government; and raising an agonized outcry over the postoffice which Mullet, the supervising architect of the Treasury, was building at City Hall Park.
That greater city toward which public-spirited men then looked was sketched in an editorial of 1867 entitled “New York in 19—.” The Evening Post hoped that before the twentieth century was far advanced Central Park would be really central, and the upper part of the island as populous as the lower. Brooklyn would have been united governmentally with New York, and physically by several bridges thrown across the East River. There should be a great railway station in the heart of the city, near the chief hotels, and freight stations only on its borders. Retail trade would be scattered, and “the Stewarts of that day will be found on broad, clean cross streets near the Central Park”; while spacious markets would have supplanted “the filthy sheds” in which provisions were then sold. “The streets of New York will be no longer rough and dirty; they will be covered with a smooth pavement like that ... now laid on a part of Nassau Street or covered with asphaltum, like some of the pavements of Paris.” Whoever wrote the editorial might to-day call this much of the prophecy fairly realized. But he went on to picture an adequate system of tenements, comfortable, sanitary, and cheap, managed by public-spirited corporations; a rapid transit system sufficient for all needs; and a shore line equipped with fine piers and basins, modern warehouses, and the best loading and unloading apparatus—all of which still belongs to a Utopian vision.