As early as December, 1862, and January, 1863, Greeley had begun in the Tribune a movement for ending the war by foreign mediation between North and South. The following month Napoleon III actually made an offer of mediation, which Lincoln immediately refused. Advance news of it had been sent Bryant by Bigelow, and the Post was ready to speak vigorously against it. Greeley in July, 1864, again tried to initiate peace negotiations, and asked Lincoln to arrange a conference at Niagara with two Confederate “ambassadors” who were reported to be there, telling him that “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peace, shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” The attitude of the Evening Post was contemptuous. “No,” wrote Bryant as Greeley bought his ticket to Niagara, “the most effective peace meetings yet held are those which Grant assembled in front of Vicksburg, which Meade conducted on the Pennsylvania plains, which Rosecrans now presides over near Tullahoma; their thundering cannons are the most eloquent orators, and the bullet which wings its way to the enemy ranks the true olive branch.”
There was some fear for the moment that the Times would join the Tribune in its readiness for peace without victory. Bryant wrote his wife on Sept. 7, 1864, that he had a good deal of political news which he could not put in his letter. “I wrote a protest against treating with the Rebel Government, which you will have seen in the paper.... I was told from the best authority that Mr. Lincoln was considering whether he should not appoint commissioners for the purpose, and I afterwards heard that Raymond of the Times had been in Washington to persuade Mr. Lincoln to take the step, and was willing himself to be one of the commissioners.” Bryant’s 1,500 word editorial, “No Negotiations With the Rebel Government,” anticipated the arguments of Lincoln’s message to Congress in December opposing any parley.
At this moment the Democratic party was carrying on its campaign for the Presidency upon a platform which declared the war a failure, and asserted that an armistice should be sought at the first practicable opportunity. It is true that McClellan, the party’s candidate, had repudiated these planks. But when he did so, Fernando Wood had wanted at once to repudiate McClellan, saying that the platform was sound, and that the Democrats should call their Chicago Convention together again to seek a man who would stand upon it. The Daily News, edited by his brother Benjamin Wood, similarly upheld the platform. So did the World, which went to shocking lengths in attacking Lincoln; not content with calling his Administration ignorant and incompetent, it cast imputations upon his personal honesty, while in a phrase that became temporarily famous it remarked that the White House was “full of infamy.” According to the World, the war could and should be stopped instantly. The South was ready to reënter the Union if only Lincoln would cancel his outrageous emancipation proclamation. “Are unknown thousands of wives yet to become widows, and unknown tens of thousands of children to become orphans, that Mr. Lincoln’s positive violations of solemn pledges may be assumed by the people as their own?” Manton Marble argued throughout the campaign for an armistice, a convention of all the States, and an effort to conclude peace upon the basis of union and slavery. Emancipation, he asserted, meant “industrial disorganization, social chaos, negro equality, and the nameless horrors of a civil war.”
In this election the Evening Post maintained a straight course. Early in the year Bryant had inclined to doubt, as did Beecher, Greeley, Thaddeus Stevens, George W. Julian, and a majority of Congress, whether Lincoln’s renomination would be wise. This was a reflection in part of his impatient “radicalism,” in part of his attachment to Chase; and on March 25, 1864, he made one of many prominent Union men who wrote the Republican Executive Committee suggesting a postponement of the Convention until September. But no hint of this doubt entered the columns of the Evening Post. It never spoke of any other possible nomination than Lincoln’s. Indeed, every one soon saw that the choice was inevitable, and Bryant cast whatever hesitation he felt, which was not much, behind him. “It was done in obedience to the public voice,” he wrote Bigelow June 15, “a powerful vis a tergo pushed on the politicians whether willing or unwilling. I do not, for my part, doubt of his reëlection.” By this time the Evening Post was ready to admit that the President had made fewer errors and seen more clearly than it had supposed. It wrote (Sept. 20):
He has gained wisdom by experience. Every year has seen our cause more successful; every year has seen abler generals, more skillful leaders, called to the head; every year has seen fewer errors, greater ability, greater energy, in the administration of affairs. The timid McClellan has been superseded by Grant, the do-nothing Buell by Sherman; wherever a man has shown conspicuous merit he has been called forward; political and military rivalries have been as far as possible banished from the field and from the national councils.... While Mr. Lincoln stays in power, this healthy and beneficial state of things will continue....
Throughout the campaign Parke Godwin did much public speaking. During October the Post published a weekly campaign newspaper addressed particularly to laboring men, which had an enormous circulation at one cent a copy; the edition the first week was 50,000. In its local result the election justified the labors of the copperhead press, for McClellan carried New York city by a vote double Lincoln’s—78,746 to 36,673. But the national result showed how totally unrepresentative this anti-war press was of any extensive Northern sentiment. It proved that Bryant had been right in declaring in the Post of March 16, 1863, when Greeley and the Tribune actually said the nation should give up if the campaign then beginning failed:
It certainly is remarkable how unable the newspapers of the country, even those of the largest circulation, have been to divert the public mind from a fixed determination to put down the rebellion by every possible means, and to allow no pause in the war until the integrity of the Union is assured. One class of journals has labored to show that the war for the Union is hopeless; the people have never believed them. One class has called for a revolutionary leader; the call has only excited a little astonishment, the people being satisfied to prosecute the war under the legal and constitutional authorities.
The last effort at a premature armistice, that made by the venerable Francis P. Blair, culminating in the Hampton Roads conference between Lincoln and Vice-President A. H. Stephens, was treated by the Evening Post like previous efforts. Blair was an old friend, but under the caption, “Fools’ Errands,” Bryant wrote (Jan. 10, 1865) that his gratuitous diplomacy might do much harm. “No, our best peacemakers yet are Grant, Sheridan, Thomas, Sherman, and Farragut, and the black-mouthed bulldogs by which they enforce their pretensions over more than half of what was once an ‘impregnable’ part of rebeldom.” The final peace, the peace made by the black-mouthed bulldogs, was greeted by the Post three months later in fervent terms:
GLORY TO THE LORD OF HOSTS
The great day, so long and anxiously awaited, for which we have struggled through four years of bloody war, which has so often ... dawned only to go down in clouds of gloom; the day of the virtual overthrow of the rebellion, of the triumph of constitutional order and of universal liberty,—of the success of the nation against its parts, and of a humane and beneficent civilization over a relic of barbarism that had been blindly allowed to remain as a blot on its scutcheon—the day of PEACE has finally come....
Glory, then to the Lord of Hosts, who hath given us this final victory! Thanks, heartfelt and eternal, to the brave and noble men by land and sea, officers and soldiers, who by their labors, their courage and sufferings, their blood and their lives, have won it for us. And a gratitude no less deep and earnest to that majestic, devoted, and glorious American people, who through all these years of trial have kept true to their faith in themselves and their institutions....