The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism

by Allan Nevins

Bryant in the campaign of 1848 had bolted from the regular Democratic ticket along with the other “Barnburners” of New York. The nickname referred to the Dutchman who burned his barn to exterminate the rats, for they were accused of trying to destroy the party to get rid of slavery in the territories. It was impossible for the Evening Post to support the regulars’ nominee, Lewis Cass, who had expressed pro-slavery views, or the Whig nominee, Gen. Zachary Taylor, who owned four hundred slaves. It predicted in June that Taylor would be elected by an enormous majority, and bitterly taunted Polk and the other pro-slavery Democrats because their Texan policy had given the Whigs, headed by the hero of Buena Vista, the Presidency. Its attitude was hostile to both the parties, but particularly to that which had betrayed the ideals of Jackson and Benton. The Barnburners nominated their candidate for the Presidency, Van Buren, at an enthusiastic August convention on the shores of Lake Erie, in Buffalo. The leaders were Bryant, Chase, Charles Francis Adams, Joshua R. Giddings, Preston King—an intimate friend of Bigelow’s—and David Dudley Field. All these men knew they had no chance of victory, and Bryant frankly said as much. But the trumpet-blast of the convention, “We inscribe on our banner Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” was echoed and reëchoed by the Evening Post till the day of election. The final appeal, on the day that 300,000 voters cast their ballots for Van Buren, shows how militant its position was:

Shall the great republic of the western hemisphere, the greatest which has yet blessed the anxious hope of nations, to which the eyes of millions, now engaged in a desperate struggle for emancipation in Europe, turn as their only encouragement and solace, the republic which was founded by Washington and nourished into vigor by Jefferson and Jackson—shall this republic make itself a byword and a reproach wherever its name is heard? Shall the United States no longer be known as the home of the free and the asylum of the oppressed, but as the hope of the slave and the oppressor of the poor?

All good men have an interest in answering these questions. But above all others, the laboring man has a deeper interest. The greatest disgrace inflicted upon labor is inflicted by the institution of slavery. Those who support it—we mean the negro-owners, or the negro-drivers of the South—openly declare that he who works with his hands is on the level with the slave. They cannot think otherwise, so long as they are educated under the influence of this dreadful injustice. It perverts all the true relations of society, and corrupts every humane and generous sentiment.

Welles published in the Evening Post after the election an unsigned article denouncing the tyranny of party allegiance, but Bryant’s journal did not yet forsake Democracy. As a Democratic organ still it boasted that it published the party’s widest-circulated weekly paper. As a Democratic organ it remarked of Polk, when he went out of office in 1849, that “such Presidents as he are only accidents, and two such accidents are not at all likely to be visited upon a single miserable generation”—an assertion which Pierce and Buchanan soon confuted. Bennett’s Herald, with its instinct for the winning side, having climbed on the Taylor bandwagon, the Evening Post was for some years the only Democratic newspaper in this great Democratic city.

As a free-soil Democratic organ it opposed the Compromise of 1850, finding a peculiar relish in attacking any proposal originated by Clay, and supported by the equally distasteful Whig and protectionist, Webster. Like Chase and Welles, Bryant and Bigelow saw the plain objections to any compromise. The crisis had been precipitated by the demand for the admission of California, and the question was whether this admission should be purchased by large concessions to the South, or—as the Evening Post maintained—demanded as a right. The chief proposals of Clay were that California should be admitted as free territory, that Territorial Governments be erected in the rest of the Mexican cession without any restriction upon slavery, that the slave trade be prohibited in the District of Columbia, and that a new and atrociously-framed law for the return of fugitive slaves be enacted.

Clay’s action was courageous. Bryant wrote that he could not refuse admiration for his boldness in grappling thus frankly with a subject so full of difficulties, and that his statesmanlike directness contrasted refreshingly with the timidity of the Administration. But he called the Compromise a blanket poultice, to heal five wounds at once, when the common sense method was to dress each sore separately; and he opposed any effort to coax the free States into abandonment of a single principle. Besides Bryant’s and Bigelow’s editorials, the Evening Post published a 5,000 word argument by William Jay, son of John Jay, and called upon its readers to sign petitions. It specifically objected to the provision that Utah and New Mexico should be organized without any restriction against slavery, for this meant an abandonment of the Wilmot Proviso, which it had always supported. Some Northern advocates of the Compromise argued that the region was not adapted to plantations and that slavery would not be transferred thither anyway; but this view the Post derided, quoting Southern members of Congress to the contrary. It was equally opposed to the Fugitive Slave Act. When Calhoun argued that the South was being “suffocated,” it showed that the occupied land in the slave States was about 280 million acres, and the unoccupied land about 395 million, while the whole area of the free States was only about 291 million acres.

Webster’s Seventh of March speech in behalf of the Compromise aroused savage indignation among his Boston admirers, but it did not surprise the Evening Post. The Washington correspondent wrote of the stir of satisfaction among the listening Southern Senators, of the gleam of exultation that played over the quizzical visage of Foote of Virginia. But Bryant had expected Webster’s volte-face:

It was as natural to suppose that he would do this, as that he would abandon, in the manner he has done, the doctrines of free trade, once maintained by him in their fullest extent, and, taking the money of the Eastern mill-owners, enrol himself as the champion of protection for the rest of his life....

Mr. Webster stands before the public as a man who has deserted the cause which he lately defended, deserted it under circumstances which force upon him the imputation of a sordid motive, deserted it when his apostasy was desired by the Administration, and immediately after an office had been conferred upon his son, to say nothing of what has been done by the Administration for his other relatives. It is but little more than two years since he declared himself the firmest of friends to the Wilmot Proviso, professing himself its original and invariable champion, and claiming its principles as Whig doctrine.

Such aspersions upon Webster’s motives were as unfair as Whittier’s bitter lament and denunciation in the poem “Ichabod,” but the same righteous anger dictated both. As a hoax, the Evening Post published in its issue of May 21 glaring headlines, proclaiming: “GREAT MEETING IN BOSTON!!—Tremendous Excitement—DANIEL WEBSTER—Out in Favor of—Applying the Proviso to All the Territories!!—No Compromise in Massachusetts!!!” The news story below was an account from Niles’s Register of Dec. 11, 1819, when the Missouri Compromise was pending, of Webster’s speech at an anti-slavery meeting in Boston, in which he asserted that it was the constitutional duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all territory not included in the thirteen original States. It strikingly exhibited the orator’s inconsistency. The pro-slavery Commercial was angry, declaring that many New Yorkers had not noted the date 1819 and had been deceived. Clay’s measures, following the death of President Taylor, were passed by Congress, but to the end the Evening Post protested that no permanent compromise was possible. The issue was whether a slave-holding minority should have a share of the new territories equal to that of the anti-slavery majority. The answer was yes or no, for there could be no middle ground. “If an association is composed of twenty members and five insist upon having an equal voice in its affairs with the other fifteen, what compromise can there be? You must either grant what they ask or deny it.”

It was not until the ambitious Douglas, in 1854, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and Pierce brought his Administration behind the measure, that the Evening Post found it impossible to continue its connection with the Democratic Party. The horror with which Bryant and Bigelow looked upon this enactment is easily understood. They had expected the great valley of the Platte as a matter of course to be settled as free soil, since it lay north of the Missouri Compromise line, 36′ 30″. It had been taken for granted, when proposals had been made to erect territories there, that slavery had once for all been excluded. But now Douglas, maintaining that the people in such regions should exercise their own choice for or against slavery, proposed to nullify the Missouri Compromise, and to create two territories, in which there should be no restrictions as to slavery, and in which the people should be perfectly free to regulate their “domestic institutions” as they saw fit. It was a body-blow to the North.

Franklin Pierce, a handsome, dashing young man of whose views no one knew very much, had been supported by the Evening Post in 1852, against Winfield Scott. James Ford Rhodes remarks that “The argument of the Post, that the Democratic candidate and platform were really more favorable to liberty than the Whig, was somewhat strained; the editor failed to look the situation squarely in the face.” He was, however, acting in perfect harmony with the prominent New York Democrats who had, four years previously, bolted the regular nomination. Van Buren and his son, Preston King, Benton, Cambreleng, and most of the paper’s other free-soil friends were willing to take a chance upon Pierce. But he had not been in office four months before the Evening Post suspected his pro-slavery tendencies, and began to eye him with disfavor and alarm. Its utterances moved the Washington Union on July 5, 1853, and the Richmond Enquirer nine days later, to read it out of the Democratic party. “The Evening Post and the Buffalo Republic belong to that class of hangers-on to the Democratic party who sail under Democratic colors, but who are in reality the worst enemies of the party. They are abolitionists in fact,” said the first-named sheet. The Enquirer wanted such newspapers to begone. “It is time that they should be spurned with indignation and scorn as the instruments and echoes of the worst factions of the day.” Now, in February, 1854, when Pierce made it clear that he was supporting Douglas’s plan for repudiating the Missouri Compromise, the Evening Post turned short and became the enemy of Democracy. An occasional Washington correspondent wrote with scorn of the renegade son of New Hampshire: