It would be easy, from the evidence of his enemies, to take too harsh a view of Isaac Henderson. We must remember that standards of political and business morality were low after the Civil War. The fairest judgment is that Henderson was simply an average product of the days which, while they produced Peter Cooper, produced also Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew, and Jay Gould. His constant thought was of dollars and cents. On Sundays he was a prominent member of a Brooklyn Methodist church; on weekdays he was intent upon driving the hardest bargain he legitimately could. He built up the Evening Post from a weak and struggling journal into a great property, which in one year of the war divided more than $200,000 in profits; from a $7 a week clerk he became a millionaire. His tastes were mercenary, and he had the sharpness of a Yankee horse-trader, but there is no conclusive evidence that he ever did what the business man of his time would have called a clearly dishonest act. When he undertook to acquire the site of his building, owned by the Old Dutch Church, he made an investigation, found that there was a two-inch strip fronting on Broadway that the church did not own, quietly obtained title to it, and—if we may believe the Evening Telegram of July 29, 1879—in the subsequent negotiations “profited by his discovery in the pleasant sum of $125,000, the largest price ever paid for a lot two inches wide.” At the time many thought such an exploit creditable, and Henderson fitted his time.
Henderson faced his gravest charge when in January, 1864, he was dismissed from the office of Navy Agent in New York on the ground that he had accepted commissions upon contracts let for the government. Gideon Welles’s Diary for the summer of 1864 contains many references to this affair. It states that on one occasion Welles discussed the matter with Lincoln, “who thereupon brought out a correspondence that had taken place between himself and W. C. Bryant. The latter averred that H. was innocent, and denounced Savage, the principal witness against him, because arrested and under bonds. To this the President replied that the character of Savage before his arrest was as good as Henderson’s before he was arrested. He stated that he knew nothing of H.’s alleged malfeasance until brought to his notice by me, in a letter, already written, for his removal; that he inquired of me if I was satisfied he was guilty; that I said he was; and that he then directed, or said to me, ‘Go ahead, let him be removed.’” It is a fact that Bryant never wavered in his faith in his partner. The charges had their origin in the malice of Thurlow Weed, who, angered by persistent attacks made upon him by the Evening Post, sought out the information which he believed to justify them, and laid them before Welles. In May, 1865, they came to a trial in the Federal Circuit Court under Judge Nelson. The prosecution brought forward a strong array of legal talent, while Henderson was represented by Judge Pierrepont and Wm. M. Evarts; the case against him utterly broke down, the judge said as much in his charge, and without leaving their seats the jury rendered a verdict of acquittal.
Circumstances, however, inclined many to regard the verdict as one of “Not Proved” only. It is important to note that Parke Godwin, then owner of one-third of the Post, stated in a letter to Bryant, July 31, 1865, his reasons for thinking the charges true:
I infer from a remark made by Mrs. Bryant, on Saturday evening, that she still has confidence in Mr. Henderson, and as I have not, I will tell you why. I will do so in writing, because I have found writing less liable to mistake or misconstruction than what is said by word of mouth.
I. My impressions are quite decided that Mr. H. has been guilty of the malpractices charged upon him by the government, for these reasons: (1) His own clerk (Mr. Blood) admitted the receipt of $70,000 as commissions, and that these were deposited by Mr. Henderson as his own, in his own bank; (2) the prosecuting attorneys, Mr. Noyes, Judge Bosworth, D. S. Dickinson, asserted that over $100,000, as they are able to prove positively, were paid into his office as commissions; Mr. Noyes told me that there could be no doubt of this; (3) other lawyers (Mr. Marbury, for instance) assure me that clients of theirs know of the habits of the office in this respect, and would testify if legally called upon; (4) his private bank account shows very large transactions, which are said to correspond singularly with the entries in the books of the contractors implicated with him.
II. Supposing him not guilty, the efforts he made and was Willing to make to screen himself from prosecution, were to say the least singular; but they were more than that; they were of a kind no upright citizen could resort to or sanction. He tried to tamper with the Grand Jury, he tried to buy up the District Attorney, he “secured,” as D. D. told me, the petit jury, and he was negotiating, at the time the trial came on, to purchase Fox. These are things difficult to reconcile with any supposition of the man’s integrity or honor.
III. Admitting him, however, to be wholly innocent, his position before the public has become such that it is a source of the most serious mortification and embarrassment to the conductors of the Evening Post. We cannot brand a defaulter, condemn peculation, urge official economy, or get into any sort of controversy with other journals, without having the charges against Henderson, which nine tenths of the public believe to be true, flung in our faces. Not once, but two dozen times, I have been shut up by a rejoinder of this sort. Mr. Nordhoff has felt this, in his private intercourse as well as in a public way, to such an extent that he has told me peremptorily and positively that he would not continue in the paper if Mr. Henderson retained an active part in connection with it. Now, it seems to me that if there were any feeling of delicacy in Mr. Henderson, any regard for the sensitiveness of others, any care for the reputation and independence of the paper, he would be willing to relieve us of this most injurious and unpleasant predicament.
IV. I will add, that I am not satisfied with his management of our business affairs; he gives them very little of his attention, though he pretends to do so; he is largely and constantly engaged in outside speculations, in grain, provisions, etc.; and in one instance, as our books show, he has given himself a fictitious credit of $7,000, which was irregular....
Whether commissions were actually taken none can now say; the essential fact is that the man who was to be editor of the Post had thus early made up his mind to distrust and detest the tall, florid publisher of the paper. Godwin actually proposed to Henderson at this date that the latter sell out to William Dorsheimer, a well-known lawyer, later lieutenant-governor, who was willing to buy, but Henderson naturally refused to leave under fire. Godwin ultimately consented to stay with the Post until Bryant had refreshed himself from his Civil War labors by a European trip; but in 1868 he sold his third share to Bryant and Henderson for $200,000, and gladly left the office for the time being. Nordhoff remained longer, but with unabated dislike for Henderson, and at the crisis of the Tweed fight, as we have seen, thought it necessary to resign. Most of the editorial employees of the Post disliked the publisher. He practiced a penny-pinching economy. The building superintendent was required to send up a daily statement of the coal used. Ill-paid workers, coming into his office to ask for more wages, would state their case and then note that his eyes were fixed suggestively upon the maxim, one of many framed on the walls, “Learn to Labor and to Wait.” But Bryant seems never to have lost his confidence in him. Every one agrees that one of Henderson’s best traits was an almost boyish admiration and deference for Bryant, and that he would never do anything to offend the poet.
By the middle seventies the Civil War charges against Henderson were largely forgotten. The danger to be apprehended from his activities and ambition was not that the Evening Post would be brought under dishonest management, but simply that it would be brought under a management which thought first and always of money-making, steered its course for the greatest patronage, and shrank from such self-sacrificing independence as the paper had displayed in the Bank war or the early stages of the slavery struggle. Henderson never thought of it as a sternly impartial guide of public opinion; he thought of it as a producer of revenue. His whole later record as a publisher, as Bryant aged, shows this.
The seventies were the hey-day of the “reading notice,” and in printing veiled advertisements the Post only followed nearly all other newspapers. Washington Gladden left the Independent, the leading religious weekly of the day, recently edited by Beecher and Tilton, in 1871, because no fewer than three departments—an Insurance Department, a Financial Department, and a department of “Publishers’ Notices”—were so edited and printed that, though pure advertising at $1 a line, they appeared to a majority of readers as editorial matter. These advertising items were frequently quoted in other journals as utterances of the Independent. The Times as late as 1886 was placed in an embarrassing position by divulgence of the fact that it had received $1,200 from the Bell Telephone Company for publishing an advertisement which many readers would take to be an editorial. No “reading notices” ever appeared in the editorial columns of the Post, and Whiting would instantly have resigned had an effort been made to place one in the financial columns; but they were discreditably frequent in the news pages. Occasionally a string of them would emerge under the heading, “Shopping Notes”; at Christmas they were prominently displayed on the front page as “Holiday Notices”; and sometimes the unwary reader would commence what looked like a poem and find it ending:
Ye who with languor droop and fade,
Or ye whom fiercer illness thrills;
Call the blest compound to your aid—
Trust to Brandreth’s precious pills.
But where the influence of the business office was seen in its most pernicious form was in efforts to muzzle the treatment of the news and to color editorial opinion. W. G. Boggs, now a tall, thin, white-haired old man, was the advertising manager, with a wide and intimate acquaintance among commercial men and politicians, and with an endless succession of axes to grind. “He was the most familiar representative of the publication in the editorial rooms,” says Mr. Towse, “and manifested a special interest in the suppression of any paragraph, or allusion, that might offend the dispensers of political advertising, which in those days was an important source of revenue.” Tammany gave much printing to the Post’s job office until 1871. Henderson himself almost never interfered—Mr. Sperry recalls only one harmless instance during his managing editorship. But in 1872 a dramatic incident lit up the situation as by a bolt of lightning. Arthur G. Sedgwick had just become managing editor, giving the editorial page new strength. At this time there was much talk of maladministration and graft in the Parks Department. One day Sedgwick, chatting with J. Ranken Towse upon the subject, remarked that although the rascality was clear, there appeared no indication in it of connivance by the Commissioner, Van Nort. Towse dissented, saying that the man was hand in glove with Tammany, and must be fully cognizant of all that was going on. He suggested that Van Nort had escaped suspicion because he was a social favorite, superior in manners and culture to most politicians, and because he had used his advertising patronage in a manner to please all New York papers. To enforce his argument, he directed Sedgwick’s attention to a number of highly suspicious transactions. Sedgwick, he states:
saw the points promptly, and bade me write an editorial paragraph embodying them and demanding explanations. I told him it would be as much as my place was worth to write such an article. He replied, somewhat hotly, that he, not I, was responsible for the editorial page, and peremptorily told me to write as he had directed. So I furnished the paragraph, which, to the best of my recollection, was largely an enumeration of undeniable facts for which Van Nort, as the head of his department, was officially responsible, and which he ought to be ready to explain. It was put into type and printed as an editorial in the first edition. The paper was scarcely off the press when the expected storm broke. Mr. Henderson, ordinarily cold and self-restrained, passed hurriedly through my room in a state of manifest excitement, with an early copy of the edition in his hand. Entering the adjoining room of Mr. Sedgwick, he denounced my unlucky article, and demanded its instant suppression. A brief but heated altercation followed; Henderson insisting that the article was scandalous and libelous, and must be withdrawn, and Sedgwick asserting his sole authority in the matter and declaring that, so long as he was managing editor, the article would remain as it stood. Finally Henderson withdrew, but meanwhile the press had been stopped, and the objectionable paragraph removed from the form. Before the afternoon was over Sedgwick handed in his resignation and returned to the service of the Nation.