They generally killed and plundered, even of their clothes, all whom the current of battle threw into their hands. We, on the contrary, saved the lives of all who threw down their arms, and relieved the wants of the wounded, even in the midst of battle. I have seen the young American volunteer, when bullets were flying around him, kneel beside a wounded Mexican and let him drink out of his canteen. In one heap of wounded Mexicans we came upon a groaning man, whom an Illinois soldier raised and gave water. We had gone only a few steps past when the soldier thus helped twisted himself upon his elbow and shot our man through the back dead; three or four volleys instantly repaid this treachery.
The first intimation of the revolution in news-gathering which occurred in the middle forties was furnished Evening Post readers in the issue of May 27, 1844, when the Washington correspondent told of Morse’s successful experiment with the telegraph two days earlier. “What is the news in Washington?” was the question asked from Baltimore, where the Democratic National Convention was about to meet. “Van Buren stock is rising,” came the answer. On May 31 the correspondent sent another brief mention of
MORSE’S TELEGRAPH.—This wonderful invention or discovery of a new means of transmitting intelligence, is in full and perfectly successful operation. Mr. Morse is the magician at the end of the line, and an assistant who does not spell with perfect correctness officiates.
There have arrived numerous telegraphic dispatches since the meeting of the Convention at Baltimore at nine o’clock this morning. By one we are informed of the nomination of Mr. George M. Dallas, of Philadelphia, for Vice-President.
All the New York newspapers, the Herald leading, shortly had a column of telegraphic news, and from that in the Evening Post we can trace the steady extension of the wires. In the early spring of 1846 communication was opened between New York and Philadelphia. When war was declared, April 24, the line to Washington was incomplete, not having been finished between Baltimore and Philadelphia, but the gap was soon closed. The fastest carriage of news between the capital and New York, 220 miles, had been that of Harrison’s inaugural message, weighty with its Roman consuls and Greek generals, in eleven hours; now eleven minutes sufficed. By the middle of September, when the line to Buffalo was complete, the country had 1,200 miles of telegraph, reaching above Boston towards Portland, to Washington on the south, and to Harrisburg on the west.
During 1847 the expansion of the telegraphic system amazed all who did not stop to think how much simpler and cheaper the installation of a line was than the building of a road. By March it had reached Pittsburgh on the west, and by September, Petersburg on the south. The next month saw it in Cincinnati and Louisville, and that fall the Evening Post printed telegraph news of a Cincinnati flood which made 5,000 homeless. In its New Year’s message the journal congratulated its readers upon such progress that “the moment a dispatch arrives at New Orleans from our armies in Mexico its contents are known on the borders of the northern lakes.” The next year Florida alone of the States east of the Mississippi was untouched by it. When the President’s message opening Congress in December, 1848, was transmitted to St. Louis, the Evening Post remarked that “the idea of a document filling twelve entire pages of the Washington Union appearing in a city nearly one thousand miles from Washington, twenty-four hours after its delivery, is almost beyond belief.” Christopher Pearse Cranch contributed a poem to the Post upon the marvel:
The world of the Past was an infant;
It knew not the speech of today,
When giants sit talking from mountain to sea,
And the cities are wizards, who say:
The kingdom of magic is ours;
We touch a small clicking machine,
And the lands of the East hear the lands of the West
With never a bar between.
Ten years after the opening of the first American telegraph line Bryant made some caustic remarks in the Evening Post upon “The Slow-Coach System in Europe.” For many months, it transpired, the Allies in the Crimean War had possessed a continuous telegraph line from London to the battle front. It had been demonstrated that dispatches sufficient to fill two columns of the London Times might be sent over it in two hours; yet the French and British publics had been obliged to wait two weeks for full details of the fall of Sebastopol, simply because the Allied authorities did not organize a competent telegraphic staff.
IV
In this decade of rapid changes, 1840–1850, Bryant began to reap the fruits of his courage, persistency, tact, and industry. The hostility of the mercantile community had lessened as the Bank question receded and the correctness of the Post’s warnings against inflation and speculation was proved by the great panic. On March 30, 1840, Bryant editorially rejoiced that “the prejudices against it, with which its enemies had labored so vehemently to poison the minds of men of business, have been gradually overcome.” The pressure of advertisements forced the enlargement of the sheet in this year. The weekly edition which it began issuing at New Year’s, 1842, was the only Democratic weekly in New York, and at $2 a year rapidly obtained an extensive circulation. In competition with sixpenny evening papers like the Journal of Commerce and penny papers like the Daily News, the Post held its own. It took its share in all the business enterprises of the press, as when in 1849–50, at the height of the gold fever, it published a special “Evening Post for California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands” just before every important sailing for the Pacific. Bryant’s sagacity kept the expenses low, and his ability kept the editorial page easily the best, save for Greeley’s, in the city.
It was a reflection of the new Evening Post prosperity when Bryant wrote his brother early in 1843: “Congratulate me! There is a probability of my becoming a landholder in New York! I have made a bargain for about forty acres of solid earth at Hempstead Harbor, on the north shore of Long Island.” He referred to the Roslyn homestead at which thereafter he was to spend so much of his time. Between 1839 and 1840 the gross earnings of the journal rose from $28,355.29 to $44,194.93, and they never thereafter dropped to the danger point. In 1850 it was calculated that for the preceding ten years the average annual gross receipts had been $37,360, and that the average annual dividends had been $9,776.44. Of this Bryant’s share until 1848 was one-half, and thereafter two-fifths, so that he enjoyed an ample income; while towards the end of the decade the profits of the job printing office were a tidy sum.