Yet with all its shortcomings, the Evening Post maintained a literary tone. In part this arose from the pure English and the allusiveness of Bryant’s editorial style; in part from the unusual attention paid to magazines and book news; and in part from the fact that literary people were attracted to it because Bryant was its editor. When G. P. R. James and Martin Tupper visited America, they published original verse in it. Miss Catharine Sedgwick, the novelist, sent it travel sketches in 1841 and later. During the years 1834–41 Cooper published many letters in the Evening Post upon his various libel suits and other personal matters, and at one time had Bryant’s journal actively enlisted on his side. “Cooper, you know,” Bryant explained to Dana in a letter of Nov. 26, 1838, “has published another novel, entitled “Home as Found,” rather satirical I believe on American manners. A notice of it appeared in the Courier newspaper of this city, a very malignant notice indeed, containing some stories about Cooper’s private conversations. Cooper arrived in town about the time the article was published, and answered it by a short letter to the Evening Post, in which he gave notice that he should prosecute the publishers of the paper. It is a favorite doctrine with him just now that the newspapers tell more lies than truths, and he has undertaken to reform the practice, so far as what they say respects him personally.” Webb’s attack was said to have been occasioned by Cooper’s having cut his acquaintance. The Evening Post denounced it as proceeding from personal pique, “grossly malignant,” and “swaggering and silly”; and in the spring of 1841 Cooper sent the Post reams of controversial material.

Walt Whitman earned Bryant’s grateful notice by his journalistic activities in Brooklyn in behalf of the “Barnburner” Democracy, and was praised for his tales in the Democratic Review, one of which the Evening Post reprinted (1842). During 1851 he contributed five articles. The first, called “Something About Art and Brooklyn Artists,” eulogized the paintings of several obscure men, and the second, “A Letter From Brooklyn,” told of the changes across the East River—how Bergen Hill was nearly leveled, a huge tract had been reclaimed from the sea near the Atlantic Dock, and Fifth Avenue was still unpaved and neglected. Whitman went down to the eastern end of Long Island that summer, for, as he wrote the Post, “I ... like it far better than I could ever like Saratoga or Newport.” In two June letters from Paumanok he described the joy of bathing in the clear, cold water, derided the stiff ceremoniousness of city boarders, gave some good advice to boarding-house keepers, and depicted two old natives of Marion and Rocky Point, “Uncle Dan’l” and “Aunt Rebby.” Upon his return he sent a rather rhapsodic description of the opera at Castle Garden, with Bettini singing. It does not appear that Bryant had any personal interest in Whitman, and it was unfortunate that no effort was made to extend his brief connection.

Something should be said about the Evening Post’s miscellaneous columns, a wallet into which was thrown a wide assortment of reprinted selections. Now it was a chapter of Lord Londonderry’s Travels; now Ellery Channing’s reminiscences of his father; now an article from Fraser’s on old French poetry; now a chapter from Cooper’s “Wing and Wing”; now Tennyson’s “Godiva,” Longfellow’s “Spanish Student,” or Spence’s anecdotes of Pope. Much might be said also of its reports of literary lectures, the course by Emerson upon “The Times” in the spring of 1842 and Holmes’s course upon modern poetry in the fall of 1853 being especially well covered. Emerson was an earnest but not popular speaker, and the writer for the Post, either Bryant or Parke Godwin, was at first cold to him. But within a few days he was remarking that the addresses grew upon one’s admiration. “Emerson convinces you that he is a man accustomed to profound and original thought, and not disposed, as at the outset you are inclined to suspect, to play with and baffle the intellects of his readers. He is eminently sincere and direct, strongly convinced of his own views, and anxious to present them in an earnest and striking manner.” Parke Godwin himself early in the fifties became a lyceum star, along with Holmes, Curtis, Greeley, Horace Mann, Orville Dewey, and others.

As for drama, the most important appearances occurred, and the most important criticism was written, while Leggett was one of the editors. Leggett, as Abram C. Dayton tells us in “Last Days of Knickerbocker Life,” was regarded as the especial champion of Edwin Forrest, who had made his début in 1826, and who was a warm favorite with the “Bowery Boys” and all other lovers of florid, stentorian acting. Certainly Leggett praised him highly and constantly in the Evening Post. In 1834 a gold medal was presented Forrest by a committee including Bryant and Leggett, who recalled in the newspaper how he had come to the city quite unknown, and had given the first electrifying demonstration of his powers when he consented, as an act of kindness to a poor actor, to appear at a benefit as Othello.

When on Sept. 18, 1832, Charles Kemble made his first American appearance as Hamlet, he was honored with the longest dramatic criticism in the journal’s history, almost three and a half columns. His towering, manly form, his Roman face, and his histrionic ability impressed Leggett, who thought that while he did not have the flashes of dazzling brilliance that Kean had, his grace, ease, and elegance almost atoned for the lack, and would have a good effect upon American acting. Fanny Kemble made her bow the following night, and was at once hailed as displaying “an intensity and truth never, we believe, yet exhibited by an actress in America, certainly never by one so young.” Later, after seeing the two in more performances, Leggett concluded that they were admirable in comedy, but uneven in tragedy.

Bryant’s interest in the theater was mainly a literary interest, yet he seems to have been the writer of a series of editorials in 1847, arguing for an American theater. He spoke of the new Broadway Theater, and the sailing of the manager to England to engage talent. Why supply the new stage from abroad? protested the Evening Post. “Is it to be merely a house of call for such foreign artists as may find it agreeable or profitable to visit us, at such times as they may chance to select? Or is it to be an American establishment of the highest class, with a well-selected and thoroughly trained company permanently employed, varied by star engagements as a brilliant relief to the sober background, and enlivened, from time to time, by ability from abroad? Does it, in a word, propose to go on the old beaten track so often condemned, or to draw a line for a new period ...?” Bryant had no use for provincialism in any form.

But when the sentiment of Forrest’s supporters for an “American” theater led them in May, 1849, while their hero was playing at the Broadway House, to attack the English tragedian Macready at the Astor Place Opera House in a bloody riot, the Evening Post had to condemn their conduct. Its liking for Forrest himself was much cooled a year after, when, following his separation from his wife, he attacked the author N. P. Willis with a whip on Washington Square. Two days later Forrest met Bryant and Parke Godwin walking down Broadway, and furiously demanded who had written the Evening Post’s report of the assault, in which Forrest was said to have struck Willis from behind. Godwin, who thoroughly sympathized with Mrs. Forrest in her quarrel with her husband, replied that he was the author. The actor then turned upon him ferociously, said that the report was a d——d lie from beginning to end, that he would hold Godwin responsible for several things, and that he had told Godwin that he meant to cane Willis. “I replied,” Godwin later testified, “that these were not just the terms that he used, and that he told me formerly that he meant to cut his damned heart out; to which Mr. Forrest muttered something in reply....” So much for the manners of the fifties.

CHAPTER TEN
JOHN BIGELOW AS AN EDITOR OF THE “EVENING POST”

In the closing days of 1848 John Bigelow, who like Bryant lived to be called “The First Citizen of the Republic,” became one of the proprietors and editors of the Evening Post. His official connection with it lasted eleven years, when he graduated from it into that diplomatic field in which he won his chief fame; but his real connection might be said to have been lifelong. Bigelow’s protracted career was one of great variety and interest. He lived in the lifetime of George III, Napoleon, and every President except Washington, dying in 1911. His first prominence was given him by the Evening Post, and thereafter he was always a landmark in New York life. John Jay Chapman wrote in 1910 that he “stands as a monument of old-fashioned sterling culture and accomplishment—a sort of beacon to the present age of ignorance and pretence, and to ‘a land where all things are forgotten.’” His wide culture is attested by the variety of his books—a biography of Franklin and a work on Gladstone in the Civil War; a treatise on Molinos the quietist, and another on sleep; a history of “France and the Confederate Navy” and a biography of Tilden. It has fallen to few of our ministers to France to be so useful as he. He was prominent in almost every great civic undertaking in New York during the last half century of his life. Withal, his fine presence, simple dignity, and courtesy made him a model American gentleman.