The result was that Isaac Henderson, who had come to the Evening Post in May, 1839, as a clerk at $7 a week, was placed in charge of the business side of the paper; and in May, 1854, he bought one-third of it, of the building, and of the job office. He paid $17,083.33, agreeing further to give Howe six per cent. of the semi-annual dividends for the next five years. Whatever Henderson’s faults, lack of shrewdness and industry was not among them. He pushed the circulation higher and higher, and was so capable in attracting advertisers that even during the panic of 1857 the columns were crowded. In June, 1858, the combined circulation of daily, weekly, and semi-weekly was 12,334 copies and was rapidly growing. “I never before knew what it was to have more money than I wanted to spend,” Bigelow wrote his chief, who was then abroad. Cooper & Hewitt had stopped their advertising in consequence of articles about the shaky credit of the Atlantic Telegraph and the Illinois Central Railroad, in which this firm had large sums invested, but the Post could afford to laugh at that. The dividends for the year 1848 for the first time surpassed $45,000, and this golden prosperity was rapidly enhanced in 1859.
“A single circumstance will perhaps enable you to form as good an idea of how we stand as a sheet full of statistics,” Bryant wrote Bigelow on April 11, 1859. “Mr. Henderson puts on a severe look in which satisfaction is mingled with resignation, and says quietly, ‘The Evening Post is prosperous—very prosperous.’”
Indeed, Bigelow’s investment of 1848–9 proved the cornerstone of a snug fortune. In 1860, a campaign year in which the circulation boomed again, the net income was no less than $68,774.23. That is, his share of the profits—he now owned a full third—was very decidedly more than the $17,100 which his part of the newspaper had cost him. Immediately after the election he offered Parke Godwin, who was seeking a place in the customs service, his interest in the newspaper for a price, as finally agreed upon, of $111,460—a bargain; and since he was willing to take a small cash payment, Godwin eagerly accepted. Bigelow later gave three reasons for his sudden decision to leave the Evening Post. By the election of Lincoln the great free-soil cause seemed to have triumphed, and he felt that there was no public movement urgently needing his pen; he wanted leisure for deliberate literary work; and he believed that from a dozen years of journalism he had received all the intellectual nourishment it could give him. “In the twelve years that I had spent on the paper,” he wrote, “I had managed to pay out of its earnings what it had cost me; I had lived very comfortably; I had purchased a country place of considerable value; I had had two trips to the West Indies, to which I devoted five or six months, and a tour in Europe with all my family, of nineteen months; and was able to retire with a property which could not be fairly valued at less than $175,000.”
But before Bigelow severed his connection with the Evening Post he attempted one highly interesting service; he tried, with temporary success, to obtain the French critic Sainte-Beuve as a literary correspondent. He was in Europe from the last days of 1858 until the late spring of 1860. In his unpublished journal for Jan. 24, 1860, when he was staying in Paris, he records that he went at one o’clock to see Sainte-Beuve “and to conclude an agreement partially negotiated” on behalf of the newspaper. The great Frenchman, fifty-six years old, was at the height of his fame, having just been made commander of the Legion of Honor. If the rate of pay he was willing to consider from the Evening Post seems small, we must remember that he was busy with his “Causeries du Lundi” for the Moniteur, and that he probably thought he could re-use this material for the American journal. Bigelow offered him 125 francs, or about $25, for each letter, stipulating that Sainte-Beuve should pay the translator, who, Bigelow thought, ought to accept $5. Sainte-Beuve had already written and mailed his first letter, and he made no immediate demur to these terms. Next day, however, he wrote that his inquiries had convinced him that no good translator would do the work for less than $10, and that he could not go on. Bigelow at once increased his offer to $30 a letter, of which $20 was to go to Sainte-Beuve, but the critic persisted in his refusal. The compensation, he said, was adequate, but he was too old for such a burden as this would impose. Sainte-Beuve’s letter, filling two and a half columns with its 5,500 words, had meanwhile appeared in the Evening Post, under the heading “Literary Matters in France.” The greater part was devoted to a beautifully written and fine critical disquisition upon the recently published correspondence of Béranger, but prefixed to this were several paragraphs of general comment. “French literature for some years past has produced nothing very new or brilliant,” he wrote, “especially in the department of poetry.... But in the department of history, political and literary, and in that of erudition, good books and meritorious monographs have been written.” Political events since 1848, he explained, had thrown many men into a retirement favorable to literary pursuits—Villemain, Guizot, Remusat, and Victor Cousin. In closing he alluded to the loss the Institut de France had suffered in Macaulay, and added: “The death of the illustrious Prescott had already deprived the same learned body of a corresponding member. It is thought that America will also provide the member to be named as Prescott’s successor (primo avulso non deficit alter), and we are informed that some influential members of that academy have thought of Mr. Motley, whose admirable historical work has been recently introduced here by M. Guizot.”
The article was not signed, and was not appreciated by a public which cared nothing about Béranger. Bryant grasped this general indifference. He wrote Bigelow that the letter was too long, and that Americans were not sufficiently familiar with French authors to have that craving for anecdotes of their lives, conversation, and correspondence which they had in the case of the distinguished names of English literature. He always distrusted an article his wife would not read, he said, and she would not read this. Probably short letters of not more than 2,000 words, sent not oftener than monthly, and dealing with topics of wide interest, would—especially if signed by Sainte-Beuve—have been highly successful; it was unfortunate that Bigelow, when Sainte-Beuve indicated his reluctance to accept the heavy burden of long essays, did not suggest this solution. But the Civil War was at hand, and the columns of the paper were soon crowded to bursting.
Bigelow was appointed consul at Paris by President Lincoln soon after leaving the Evening Post, and in 1864 became Minister to France. From Paris during the war he wrote assiduously to Bryant, and was able to supply much information of editorial value regarding the French and British attitude toward the North. After returning to the United States, until Bryant’s death, he not infrequently contributed to the editorial page, and twice refused an active connection with it. In 1880 he wrote Parke Godwin, then editor, making inquiries regarding the purchase of a share in the paper, with a view to becoming its head, but did not push them. His loss at a time of national crisis was keenly felt by the Evening Post, but his place was ably supplied by Parke Godwin and a newcomer, Charles Nordhoff.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HEATED POLITICS BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
The history of the Evening Post for the decade following the Compromise of 1850 is summarized in the names of its greater political correspondents. Thomas Hart Benton, besides contributing much of his “Thirty Years’ View,” sent Bryant occasional memoranda for editorial use. Gideon Welles began contributing in 1848, when he was a bureau chief in the Navy Department, and Salmon P. Chase sent occasional unsigned contributions, and more frequent comments or suggestions. Both Benton and Welles had been as ardent Jacksonian Democrats as Bryant, and both were free-soilers; while Welles and Chase became founders of the Republican Party in Connecticut and Ohio respectively. The Evening Post, in other words, remained Democratic till early in Pierce’s administration it found that Democracy was simply dancing to the pipings of the slavery nabobs, when it gave all its support to the rising Republican movement. It is evidence of its zeal in the new cause that Sumner, more an abolitionist than a free-soiler, became an ardent admirer of the paper. He wrote Bigelow expressing his “sincere delight” in it, saying that its political arguments “fascinate as well as convince.” It was upon his recommendation that William S. Thayer, a brilliant young Harvard man, was employed, and became in the years 1856–60 the Washington correspondent whom the anti-slavery statesmen liked and trusted most.
In the sultry, ominous decade before the Civil War storm, there is a long list of events upon which the opinions of any great journal are of interest. What did the Evening Post think in 1850 of Webster’s Seventh of March speech? How in 1852 did it regard the dismal contest between Pierce and Winfield Scott? What estimate did it place upon “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”? What in 1856 did it say of Brooks’s assault upon Sumner, and of the fierce Buchanan-Fremont contest; and what the next year of the Dred Scott decision? How did Bryant express himself upon the crimes and martyrdom of “Osawatomie” Brown? Readers of an old file of newspapers for those tense years have a sense of sitting at a drama, waiting the approach of a catastrophe which they perfectly foresee, but which the players hope to the last will be avoided.