The editorial proposed either the occupation of the Shenandoah in force, or a new attack on Lee, and advised the Maryland and Pennsylvania authorities to fortify their towns and raise fresh bodies of troops.
When the invasion actually began, parts of the North were frightened, but the Evening Post was almost gleeful. On June 17, when news came that the first Confederates were across the Potomac, it expressed the hope that Lee would push on so that he might be cut off and destroyed. Ten days later, when the rebels had reached Carlisle, Pa., it was jubilant: “It is time for the nation to rise; the great occasion has come, and now, if we had prepared ourselves for it, and had collected and drilled reserve forces, we might end the rebellion in a month.” On June 29, two days before the battle began, it congratulated Meade on an unsurpassed military opportunity, and urged three considerations upon him. He should insist that Washington help and not embarrass him, he should ask for all the reserves available, “and then, having given battle in due time, let him avoid the mistake of McClellan at Antietam, by pursuing the enemy until he is completely overthrown.” That the chance for pursuit would come the Post never doubted.
The close of the three days’ struggle at Gettysburg left Bryant confident that the turning point of the war had been passed. “There is every reason to hope that the rebel army of Virginia will never recross the Potomac as an army,” he said on July 6; but whether Lee crossed it or not, “the rebellion has received a staggering blow, from which it would scarcely seem possible for it to recover.” The next day he insisted that the rebels be followed at once and destroyed, but in his exultation he accepted philosophically Meade’s failure to advance.
II
At this moment of rejoicing over Gettysburg and Vicksburg the city was horrified and humiliated by the Draft Riots, a sharp reminder that the home front was only less important than the battle front. Of this fact the Evening Post had never lost sight. Bryant’s editorials always held in view the necessity of sustaining the spirits of the North. For every “radical” utterance criticizing the Administration’s faults there were ten exhorting the people to support its central aims. In the first months of the war he published two martial lyrics, one addressed to European enemies who hoped for the ruin of the republic, and one a plea for enlistment:
Few, few were they whose swords of old
Won the fair land in which we dwell;
But we are many, we who hold
The grim resolve to guard it well.
Strike, for that broad and goodly land,
Blow after blow, till men shall see
That Might and Right move hand in hand,
And glorious must their triumph be!
It was natural for New York city to have a lusty anti-war press when the struggle for the Union began. It had been Democratic since Jackson’s time, and remained Democratic during the Civil War. Its social connections with the South had always been close, while till 1860 its merchants and bankers had stronger business ties with the South than with the West. After the war began many Southern sympathizers, refugees from the border States, settled in the city.
But the capture of Fort Sumter turned all that indifference to the secession movement which William H. Russell had noted a few weeks earlier into a passionate enthusiasm of the majority for the Federal cause. At 3 p. m. on April 18, the day the first troops passed through New York southward, an excited crowd gathered before the Express office and demanded a display of the American flag. It surged up Park Row and made the same demand of the Day Book and Daily News (the latter Fernando Wood’s organ), and thence poured down Nassau Street and Broadway to the Journal of Commerce building, which also hurried out a flag. Already the Herald had decorated its windows with bunting. The Monday after Sumter, Bennett had braved popular feeling with another demand for peace, but now he hurried to Washington, pledged his support of the Union to President Lincoln, and saw that beginning with the Herald for April 17, that policy was adopted.
Unfortunately, the tone of the pro-slavery press continued so objectionable that on Aug. 22, 1861, the postoffice forbade mail transportation to the Journal of Commerce, Day Book, Daily News, Freeman’s Journal, and Brooklyn Eagle, all five of which had been presented by a Federal Grand Jury. The Daily News was suppressed in New Jersey by the Federal Marshal. Gerard Hallock of the Journal of Commerce, complaining of threats of violence and an organized movement to cut off his subscribers and advertising, sold his interest to David Stone and Wm. C. Prime, and the paper became less offensive. The Day Book permanently and the Daily News temporarily ceased publication. The foreign-language press also failed to show due patriotism, many French citizens in August signing a petition for the suppression of the Courrier des États Unis as disloyal, and the Westchester grand jury presenting the Staats-Zeitung and National-Zeitung as disseminators of treason. The World, changing hands, became under the able Manton Marble, who had recently been an employee of the Post, a leader of the “copperhead” press.
There is no need to quote from the World, Daily News, and Journal of Commerce to show how, boldly when they dared, covertly when they did not, they continued to attack the Union cause. Their methods were defined by the Evening Post of May 20, 1863, in a “Recipe for a Democratic Paper,” which may be briefly summarized: