The Herald, incapable of blaming a Democrat like McClellan, in July attacked Stanton for the army’s failure, but the Evening Post showed that McClellan himself had said that he had more than enough troops to take Richmond. The Chicago Tribune later accused it of injustice to Lincoln in saying that McClellan should have been dismissed earlier, since Lincoln could not do so without offending loyal Democrats. That, rejoined the Post, is precisely the ground for our objection to McClellan; he was retained for political, not military, reasons.
These July days were the days in which Lincoln grew thin and haggard, Seward was sent upon a circuit of the North to arouse public men in support of the new enlistment programme, and Lowell wrote, “I don’t see how we are to be saved but by a miracle.” Who should succeed McClellan? Chase and Welles believed that the best general in view for the eastern command was John Pope, whose victory at Island No. 10 had given him national fame; and Bryant and Godwin, who had had some personal contact with Pope, agreed. He was called east and given the Army of Virginia. The chief command, however, went to Halleck, whom the Evening Post distrusted as much as Welles did, and had already (July 23) described as slower and less enterprising than McClellan.
To Halleck the Evening Post said that his motto must be that of the Athenian orator, action—action—action. The country wanted a Marshal Vorwarts; should its historians have none to record but General Trenches, General Strategy, or General Let-Escape? A few days later (Aug. 19) it published an editorial headed “Onward! Onward!” “The one essential element in our military movements now is celerity,” it urged. “Promptness in filling up the ranks already thinned by the war, promptness in organizing and sending forward new regiments, promptness in moving on the enemy.” Bryant had written Lincoln protesting against the sluggishness of military operations, and under pressure from other radicals, early in August the editor visited Washington to remonstrate. Mayor Opdyke, President Charles King of Columbia, and many other influential New Yorkers went at about the same time for the same purpose. Bryant tells us that he had a long talk with Lincoln, “in which I expressed myself plainly and without reserve, though courteously. He bore it well, and I must say that I left him with a perfect conviction of the excellence of his intentions and the singleness of his purposes, though with sorrow for his indecision.” A movement immediately began in New York to organize the radicals under a local committee.
In their editorials on military policy Bryant, Parke Godwin, and Charles Nordhoff were guided by officers who wrote from the field or whom they met in the city; and their comments were remarkably sound. At this moment, for example, the Evening Post sensibly ridiculed the talk of a rebel army 200,000 strong. It repeatedly expressed a conviction that never, neither at Manassas, Yorktown, of Richmond, had the enemy been superior. “There is excellent reason to believe that the rebels never had more than 40,000 men at Manassas; it is a notorious fact that when McClellan arrived on the Peninsula, there were not 10,000 men at Yorktown. At Fair Oaks Sumner’s corps and Casey’s division repulsed the whole rebel army.... A close examination of the battles before Richmond proves that the rebels never fought more than 15,000 to 25,000 men there on any one day.” McClellan, it thought, had been frightened by idle fears. But when Pope failed more ignominiously than McClellan, and was soundly drubbed at the second battle of Bull Run (Aug. 30, 1862), the Evening Post did not confine itself to military topics. It fell again into its unjustifiable censure of Lincoln. The President was honest, devoted, and determined—
and yet the effect of his management has been such that, with all his personal popularity, in spite of the general confidence in his good intentions, and in spite of the ability and energy of several of his advisers, a large part of the nation is utterly discouraged and despondent. Many intelligent and even wise persons, indeed, do not scruple to express their suspicions that treachery lurks in the highest quarters, and that either in the army or in the Cabinet purposes are entertained which are equivalent to treason.
All this has grown out of the weakness and vacillation of the Administration, which itself has grown out of Mr. Lincoln’s own want of decision and purpose. We pretend to no state secrets, but we have been told, upon what we deem good authority, that no such thing as a continued, unitary, deliberate Administration exists; that the President’s brave willingness to take all responsibility has quite neutralized the idea of a conjoint responsibility; and that orders of the highest importance are issued and movements commanded, which Cabinet officers learn of as other people do, or, what is worse, which the Cabinet officers disapprove and protest against. Each Cabinet officer, again, controls his own department pretty much as he pleases, without consultation with the President or with his coadjutors. (Sept. 15, 1862.)
At this juncture the Times and World were vehemently demanding a drastic change of Cabinet officers; and in Washington Congressional sentiment was shaping itself toward the crisis of December, when a Senatorial caucus demanded the resignation of the conservative Seward. The Herald, panic-stricken, was telling McClellan that he was “master of the situation”—that is, he might be dictator; and calling upon him “to insist upon the modification and reconstruction of the Cabinet.” It was not unnatural for Bryant to give way to his old fear that the Administration would “fight battles to produce a compromise instead of a victory.”
As befitted such a warlike journal, the Evening Post had its own strategic plan, which it first outlined Oct. 5, 1861, and thenceforth expounded every few weeks until the closing campaigns. Briefly, it held that there was no important object in the capture of Richmond; that the indispensable aim was to destroy the Confederate armies, not to take cities. The Southern capital could be easily removed to Knoxville, Petersburg, or Montgomery. Except in so far as was involved in opening the Mississippi and applying the blockade, it opposed the “anaconda plan” of Scott and McClellan, the plan of attacking with a half dozen armies from a half dozen sides. The rebels, it pointed out, had the advantage of inside lines and could rapidly shift their forces to defeat one Federal onslaught after another. The true strategy was for the Union itself to seize the inside lines. This could be done by concentrating its heaviest forces in those great Appalachian valleys which ran south through Virginia and Tennessee into the heart of the Confederacy. The population was in large part friendly; the Ohio River offered a base of supplies; the flanks could be secured by guarding the passes or gaps; and as the Union armies moved southward in the Tennessee and Shenandoah Valleys, they could force the evacuation of the border States. From the valleys they could fall at will upon Virginia, upon North Carolina, upon Georgia, upon Mississippi, and could rend the Confederacy in twain.
But the good and bad sides of the Evening Post’s radicalism were best exhibited in its eagerness for emancipation. It was a noble object for which to contend, yet no one doubts that Lincoln was right in his long hesitation, and in declaring to Greeley so late as the summer of 1862 that his paramount object was to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery.
Even in the month of Bull Run the Evening Post, while rebuking a New England minister who asked for a national declaration in favor of emancipation, believed that the conflict, “though not a war directly aimed at the release of the slave, must indirectly work out the result in many ways.” When Fremont issued his hasty proclamation of September, 1861, liberating all slaves in Missouri, which Lincoln sensibly revoked, the Post called it “the most popular act of the war,” and was much offended by the President. By October it was dropping the uncertainty of tone in which it had spoken of the subject. Early that month it said that if it became necessary to extinguish slavery in order to put down the rebellion, it must be given no mercy; a few days later it demanded the release of all captured slaves and their enlistment as cooks, trench-diggers, and other auxiliaries; while on Sept. 25 it virtually called for emancipation. The paper believed that it “would change the whole aspect of the war, bring to our side a host of new allies, call off the attention of the rebels from their present plan, and hasten the period of their subjugation.” Bryant wrote just before Thanksgiving upon the probable great result of the war; and “that the extinction of slavery will form a part of it,” he declared, “we have not the shadow of a doubt.”
During the first half of 1862 a considerable part of the Post’s criticism of Lincoln sprang from its impatience over his reluctance to free the slaves. This was the attitude of Sumner, of Thaddeus Stevens, of Carl Schurz, of Greeley in the Tribune and nearly all the Tribune’s great constituency; most of Bryant’s friends took it, and many, as Lydia Maria Child, wrote requesting editorial pleas for emancipation. It is an interesting coincidence, that on the very day, July 22, 1862, that Lincoln read his emancipation proclamation to the Cabinet, and upon Seward’s suggestion put it aside, the Evening Post’s leading editorial was an impassioned plea for such a document. Lincoln was only waiting for a victory, that his proclamation might seem to be supported by a military success. Possibly Bryant learned this from his friend Chase. At any rate, although the Evening Post was bitterly grieved by McClellan’s failure to win a decisive victory at Antietam in September, and wrote angrily that such drawn battles were “not war but murder; butchery which fills all right-minded men with horror,” it knew that emancipation might follow Lee’s retreat from Maryland soil. Just after the battle Bryant wrote an editorial (Sept. 17) called, “While the Iron is Hot.” There are crucial junctures, he said, when great blows must be struck at great evils. Such a juncture had arrived; “a proclamation of freedom by martial law would be hailed, we believe, by an almost universal shout of joy in all the loyal States, as the death knell of the rebellion.” Just a week later the Evening Post was rejoicing over the President’s announcement of his forthcoming proclamation: