But, he added, there was one important difference between Webster and a myrmidon. He had never heard of the high-tariff friends of a myrmidon making up a purse of $65,000 for services well done. Bryant was always master of a grave humor. When another journal assailed him, he wrote: “There is an honest shoemaker living on the Mergellina, at Naples, on the right hand as you go towards Pozzioli, whose little dog comes out every morning and barks at Vesuvius.”
Bryant had need of this persuasive tact, for in 1836 the following of the Evening Post consisted chiefly of workmen, who could not buy it, and of the young enthusiasts who polled a city vote of only 2,712 that fall for the Loco-Foco ticket. The policy was not changed. The paper continued to attack special banking incorporations, and in 1838 had the satisfaction of seeing a general State banking law passed. It kept up its fire against the judicial doctrine that trade unions were conspiracies against trade, and saw it rapidly disintegrate and vanish. During 1837 it was able to point to the panic as an exact fulfillment of its predictions. By 1840 it was clear that it had said not a word too much when it attacked the craze for State internal improvements as not only making for political corruption and favoritism between localities, but as leading to financial ruin. Gov. Seward that year declared that New York had been misled into a number of impractical and profitless projects, Gov. Grayson of Maryland called for heavy direct taxes as the only means of averting disgraceful bankruptcy, and Gov. Porter, of Pennsylvania, said that his State had been loaded with a multitude of undertakings that it could neither prosecute, sell, nor abandon. This proved its old contention, said the Post, that “the moment we admit that the Legislature may engage in local enterprises, it is beset at once by swarms of schemers.” In 1837 Bryant asked for the repeal of the usury laws, but in this he was not years, but generations, ahead of his time.
As a personal friend of Van Buren, Bryant had been among the first to applaud the movement for his nomination, and he warmly championed him throughout the campaign of 1836. At the South the Evening Post was for some time declared to be Little Van’s chosen organ for addressing the public, much to the President’s embarrassment; for the Post’s views on the growing anti-slavery movement were not his. Van Buren’s greatest measure, the sub-treasury plan, was stubbornly opposed by the bankers and most other representatives of capital in New York. It ended the distribution of national moneys among the State banks, where Federal funds had been kept since 1833, and it was a terrible blow to them. The Evening Post had consistently stood for a divorce of the government and the banks, and it supported the sub-treasury scheme through all its vicissitudes. It had always opposed the division of the surplus revenue among the States, and in applauding Van Buren’s determination to stop it the paper again aroused the wrath of the business community in New York. But upon certain other issues it crossed swords with the President.
II
Bryant, like Ellery Channing, J. Q. Adams, Whittier, Wendell Phillips, and Salmon P. Chase, took up the fight for free speech and found that it rapidly led him into the battle for free soil. In January, 1836, Ex-President Adams began in the House of Representatives his heroic contest with the Southerners for the unchecked reception of abolitionist petitions there, and in May the “gag” resolution against these petitions was passed. Bryant’s indignation was scorching. He wrote upon the speech of a New York Senator (April 21):
Mr. Tallmadge has done well in vindicating the right of individuals to address Congress on any matter within its province.... This is something, at a time when the Governor of one State demands of another that free discussion on a particular subject shall be made a crime by law, and when a Senator of the Republic, and a pretended champion of liberty, rises in his place and proposes a censorship of the press more servile, more tyrannical, more arbitrary, than subsists in any other country. It is a prudent counsel also that Mr. Tallmadge gives to the South—to beware of increasing the zeal, of swelling the ranks and multiplying the friends, of the Abolitionists by attempting to exclude them from the common rights of citizens.... Yet it seems to us that Mr. Tallmadge ... might have gone a little further. It seems to us that ... he should have protested with somewhat more energy and zeal against the attempt to shackle the expression of opinion. It is no time to use honeyed words when the liberty of speech is endangered.... If the tyrannical doctrines and measures of Mr. Calhoun can be carried into effect, there is an end to liberty in this country; but carried into effect they cannot be. It is too late an age to copy the policy of Henry VIII; we lie too far in the occident to imitate the despotic rule of Austria. The spirit of our people has been too long accustomed to freedom to bear the restraint which is sought to be put upon it. Discussion will be like the Greek fire, which blazed the fiercer for the water thrown upon it; and if the stake be set and the faggots ready, there will be candidates for martyrdom.
When in August of this year a meeting in Cincinnati resolved to silence J. G. Birney’s abolitionist press by violence, the Evening Post used similar words. No tyranny in any part of the world was more absolute or frightful than such mob tyranny. “So far as we are concerned, we are resolved that this despotism shall neither be submitted to nor encouraged.... We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject for discussion, and argument, and declamation, as the difference between whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians and Calvinists.” This was at a time when the right of Abolitionists to continue their agitation was denied from some of the most influential New York pulpits, when the great majority of citizens had no tolerance for them, and when newspapers like Bennett’s Herald and Hallock’s Journal of Commerce, both pro-slavery, gave them nothing but contempt and denunciation. When Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Ill., by a mob, there were influential New Yorkers who believed that he had received his deserts, but Bryant cried out in horror. Without free tongues and free pens, the nation would fall into despotism or anarchy. “We approve, then, we applaud—we would consecrate, if we could, to universal honor—the conduct of those who bled in this gallant defense of the freedom of the press. Whether they erred or not in their opinions, they did not err in the conviction of their right, as citizens of a democratic State, to express them; nor did they err in defending their rights with an obstinacy which yielded only to death.”
Before 1840 Bryant had enrolled himself among those who held that the spread of slavery must be stopped. President Van Buren had pledged himself to veto any bill for emancipating the slaves in the District of Columbia. Although the plan of freeing the District slaves was abominated by most people in New York city, and even J. Q. Adams would not vote in favor of it in 1836, the Evening Post attacked and derided Van Buren’s pledge. When this reform was included in the Compromise of 1850, it boasted that New Yorkers had been converted to an advocacy of it as overwhelming as their opposition a dozen years earlier. During 1839 a considerable stir was produced in the city by the Armistad affair. A number of Africans sold as slaves in Cuba being transported from Havana to Principe on the schooner Armistad, rose, took possession of the craft, and compelled those of the crew whom they had not killed to steer the vessel, as they believed, to Africa. It was brought into Long Island Sound instead, and the negroes were seized as criminals. Bryant asked his friend Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., to investigate the law, and the latter came to the conclusion, which he expounded at length in the Evening Post, that the blacks could not be held. They had gained their freedom, he said, and were heroes and not malefactors. Secretary of State Forsythe and Attorney-General Grundy did all they could to vindicate the claim of the Spanish Minister to the negroes, but the courts upheld Sedgwick’s view of the issue, and they were liberated.
Every conscientious Democratic journal of the North was faced by a common embarrassment in the decade 1840–1850, when a dominance over the Democratic party was steadily established by advocates of the extension of slavery. If, like the Herald or Journal of Commerce or Express, they were friendly to the South in defiance of conscience, they felt no difficulty. But the Evening Post believed slavery a curse. What could it do when Polk was nominated in 1844 by its own party upon a platform favorable to this vicious institution, and when the Democratic leaders carried the nation into the Mexican War with the effect, if not the calculated purpose, of adding to the slaveowners’ domain? Bryant did not wish to abandon the great party which stood for low tariff, opposition to the squandering of public money on internal improvements, and a decisive separation between the government and banking. He could only do in 1844 what Greeley and the Tribune did in 1848, when Taylor, whom the Tribune distrusted, was nominated by the Whigs; stick to his party, reconcile his feelings as best he could with his party allegiance, and labor to improve the party from within.
The picturesque log-cabin campaign of 1840 offered no perplexities to the Evening Post. It still looked upon President Van Buren with satisfaction, and wished him reëlected. Like its opponent the Tribune, it was glad that Harrison had beaten Henry Clay for the Whig nomination, but that was in no degree because it respected Harrison. It regarded the retired farmer and Indian fighter of North Bend, Ohio, as all Democratic organs regarded him, a nonentity. What title had this feeble villager of nearly seventy, whose last public office had been the clerkship of a county court, to the Presidency? No one has ever thought Harrison a great statesman, and any undue severity on the part of the Evening Post may be attributed to the warmth of the campaign. It called him “a silly and conceited old man whose irregularities of life have enfeebled his originally feeble faculties, and who is as helpless in the hands of his party as the idols of a savage tribe we have somewhere read of, who are flogged when they do not listen to the prayers of their people for rain.” At the beginning of March it declared that Harrison might be elected, but that the most sinister figure in his party would direct his policies; “Harrison may be the nominal chief magistrate, but Clay will be the Charles Martel, the Mayor of the Palace.”