It was reception day. We walked in unheralded, and soon found ourselves in the reception room, where Mr. Pierce was talking with a bevy of ladies. Immediately on seeing us he approached, received us very politely, and introduced us to Mrs. Pierce. The President impressed me better than I had expected, and better than most of his pictures. He had whitened out to the true complexion of a parlor knight—pale and soft looking. Though not what I should call elegant, his manners are easy and agreeable. He is more meek in appearance than he is usually represented, as might be expected of a man who has submitted to be drawn into the position of tail to Senator Douglas’s kite.... The President evidently feels the Presidency thrilling every nerve and coursing every vein. He is so delighted with it that he is palpably falling into the delusion of supposing himself a possible successor to himself! Could fond self-conceit go further? Setting aside the inherent impossibility of the thing, on account of the inevitable discoveries which his elevation has involved; his mad and wicked adhesion to the Nebraska perfidy will settle his chances (Feb. 13).
The columns of the paper show that a great popular uprising was occurring in New York. It had recently contrasted the crowded, applauding houses, witnessing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” at the Chatham Street Theater, with the mob gathered at the Chatham Street Chapel in 1834 to attack negroes and abolitionists. In January, 1854, a great mass-meeting was held at the Tabernacle to protest against the Douglas bill. Bryant pointed out that it was composed of merchants, bankers, and professional men who had hitherto stubbornly opposed the abolitionist movement and had supported the Compromise of 1850. He noted also that the 80,000 Germans of the city were unanimous, like most other immigrant groups, for keeping the West open to free labor. The Staats Zeitung had supported Lewis Cass in 1848, the Compromise in 1850, and Pierce in 1852, yet now it was decidedly against the Pierce Administration, as were the three other German dailies.
Early on a March morning the Kansas-Nebraska Bill passed the Senate, amid the boom of cannon fired by Southern enthusiasts. When Chase walked down the Capitol steps he said to Sumner: “They celebrate a present victory, but the echoes they awake shall never rest until slavery itself shall die.” From that moment the Evening Post treated slavery as a serpent upon which the nation must set its heel, and Democracy as its ally:
The President has taken a course by which the greater part of this dishonor is concentrated upon the Democratic Party. Upon him and his Administration, and upon all the northern friends of the Nebraska Bill in Congress, and upon the Democratic Party who gave the present executive his power of mischief, the people will visit this great political sin of the day.... The result is inevitable; Seward is in the ascendancy in this State and the North generally; the Democratic Party has lost its moral strength in the free States; it is stripped of the respect of the people by the misconduct of those who claim to be its leaders, and whatever boast we may make of our excellent maxims of legislation and policy in regard to other questions, the deed of yesterday puts us in a minority for years to come....
The admission of slavery into Nebraska is the preparation for yet other measures having in view the aggrandizement of the slave power—the wresting of Cuba from Spain to make several additional slave States; the creation of yet other slave States, in the territory acquired from Mexico, and the renewal of the African slave trade. These things are contemplated; the Southern journals already speak of them as familiarly and flippantly as they do of an ordinary appropriation bill, and who shall say they are not already at our door?
The bitterness and militancy of the Evening Post thenceforth increased day by day. The recapture of the slave Burns in Boston during the summer of 1854, the slave whom Thomas Wentworth Higginson tried at the head of a mob to rescue, and who was marched to the wharf by platoons of soldiers and police through a crowd of fifty thousand hissing people, moved the Evening Post to call the Fugitive Slave law “the most ruffianly act ever authorized by a deliberative assembly.” Month after month it exhorted the North to send emigrants to Kansas and Nebraska to uphold the free-soil cause. It invited Southerners to stay at their own watering-places in summer. It taunted the South with its lack of literature and culture, declaring that the only Southern book yet written which would not perish was Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View,” a free-soiler’s work. In the State election of 1855 it supported the Republican ticket, and when “Prince” John Van Buren attacked it for doing so, it assailed him in turn as the “degenerate son” of a great father. As 1855 closed with fresh news every day of bloodshed in the territories, the paper cried its encouragement to those who fought for free soil:
Every liberal sentiment—the love of freedom, the hatred of oppression, the detestation of fraud, the abhorrence of wrong cloaked under the guise of law—every feeling of the human heart which does not counsel cowardly submission and the purchase of present safety as the price of future evils, takes part with the residents of Kansas. They may commit imprudent acts, they may be rash ... but their cause is a great and righteous cause, and we must stand by it to the last.
It was a foregone conclusion at the beginning of 1856 that the Evening Post would lend energetic assistance to the half-organized Republican party. During the previous summer and autumn it had devoted several editorials to the disintegration of the Whig party in both sections, and to that of the Democratic party at the North. The time had come, it said, when the old party names meant nothing upon the principal issues, and it welcomed the formation of a new party of definite tenets. Bigelow, more impetuous than Bryant, made the Evening Post an energetic champion of Fremont more than a month before the Republicans nominated him for the Presidency. Even the Tribune was held back until later by the doubts of Greeley’s lieutenant, Pike, so that the Post was one of the first powerful Northern sheets for him.
To Bigelow it was that Nathaniel P. Banks, just elected Speaker of the House and the foremost advocate of Fremont, addressed himself when he came to New York city in February, 1856. Banks sensibly held that some one was needed to typify free-soil principles, and that the people would never join a party en masse until a man stood at the head of it; while he believed that Fremont was the ideal chieftain. It happened that Fremont was then at the Metropolitan Hotel, on the site of Niblo’s Garden, and Banks took Bigelow to call. The sub-editor was favorably impressed. He gathered a conference of free-soil leaders at his home, including the venerable Frank P. Blair, well remembered as a member of Jackson’s kitchen cabinet; Samuel J. Tilden; Edwin P. Morgan, later Governor and Senator; and Edward Miller. All save Tilden favored Fremont, and Blair, at Bigelow’s instance, undertook to obtain Senator Benton’s endorsement of his son-in-law. As early as April 10, 1856, the Evening Post’s editorials showed a marked leaning toward him, and on May 18 (he was nominated on June 19) it began publishing his biography.
Throughout that campaign the Evening Post, the Tribune, Times, Courier, and the German press of the city battled against the “Buchaneers,” represented by the Journal of Commerce, Commercial, Express, and Daily News. Bigelow offered two prizes of $100 each for the best campaign songs in English and German, and the Post made special low subscription rates. When Fremont was defeated that fall, it consoled itself not only by the startling strength the Republicans displayed, polling 1,341,264 votes, against 1,838,169 for Buchanan, but by the stinging defeat which Pierce, Cass, and Douglas, so subservient to the South, saw their friends suffer in New Hampshire, Michigan, and Illinois. Bryant exulted: