AN INCIDENT IN THE CARS
In a car on a railroad which runs into New York, a few mornings ago, a scene occurred which will not soon be forgotten by the witnesses of it. A person dressed as a gentleman, speaking to a friend across the car, said: “Well, I hope the war may last six months longer. In the last six months I’ve made a hundred thousand dollars—six months more and I shall have enough.”
A lady sat behind the speaker, and ... when he was done she tapped him on the shoulder and said to him: “Sir, I had two sons—one was killed at Fredericksburg; the other was killed at Murfreesboro.”
She was silent a moment and so were all around who heard her. Then, overcome by her indignation, she suddenly slapped the speculator, first on one cheek and then on the other, and before he could say a word, the passengers sitting near, who had witnessed the whole affair, seized him and pushed him hurriedly out of the car, as not fit to ride with decent people.
The Government censorship of news early became a painful and difficult question to all journals. Repeatedly during the war Northern papers allowed news to leak to the enemy which should have been kept strictly secret, and the Evening Post early recognized this danger. When Gen. McClellan in August, 1861, drew up his gentlemen’s agreement with the press, the Post hoped that all editors would acquiesce in it, and attacked the Baltimore secession newspapers for giving the South important news. Two months later it blamed the Herald and Commercial Advertiser for twice having given prominence to articles they should have suppressed. Sherman as early as the summer of 1862 raged violently at the press in his private letters for writing some generals up and others down, and the Post had already (Feb. 27) commented upon the same abuse. The Herald in March, 1862, prematurely published the news of Banks’s passage of the Potomac, to the great indignation of the Post, which had suppressed it the day before. But Nordhoff himself erred in September, when his publication of some “contraband” facts about the strength of the forces at Newbern brought a protest from Gen. Foster. No other mistake of the sort was made, and this one did not compare with the blunders of other New York journals. Early in 1863 a Herald correspondent, having foolishly printed the substance of some confidential orders, was convicted and sentenced to six months hard labor in the Quartermaster’s Department. In November, 1864, the Times brought an angry protest from Grant by stating Sherman’s exact strength and his programme in the coming march to the sea. The Tribune early the next year, informing its readers that Sherman was heading for Goldsboro, enabled Gen. Hardee on the Confederate side to fight a heavy battle which Sherman had hoped to avoid; and the hero of the great march later refused to speak to Greeley.
But the Evening Post repeatedly protested against the undue severity of the censorship, just as it protested against improper interferences with personal liberty in other spheres. It complained that the rules laid down by Stanton and the field commanders were often capricious, and that by holding up harmless news they bred harmful rumors.
Thus on Sept. 1, 1862, New York was highly excited all afternoon by a canard that Pope had been pushed back to Alexandria and was being beaten by the Confederates within sight of Washington. Why? asked the Evening Post next day. It was because Stanton wanted all the correspondents kept away from the front, and the public was at the mercy of every rogue or coward who started a false report. The terrible disaster of Fredericksburg was concealed by the censorship in the most inexcusable way. The battle was fought on Saturday, the 13th of December. On the 14th and 15th there was no news; on the 16th the Post carried the bare statement that the army had recrossed the Rappahannock, which it optimistically interpreted as meaning that the heavy rains had swollen the river and imperilled the communications. On the 17th it knew that Burnside’s forces had been flung back with terrible slaughter four days before, and it joined the chorus of the New York press in denouncing the official secrecy. The first authentic news of this battle was sent the Tribune by a future owner of the Evening Post, Henry Villard, who obtained it by an heroic all-night ride, and bringing it to Washington, evaded Stanton’s order by sending it north by railway messenger.
Similar secrecy attended the early stages of the battle of Chancellorsville, causing needless agony of mind at the North and profiting only the stock-jobbers. Just before Gettysburg rumors were afloat of a heavy blow to Hooker. C. C. Carleton, said the Post, tried to wire his Boston paper, “Do not accept sensation dispatches,” but the telegraph censor brusquely canceled this sensible message. The Philadelphia editors and correspondents long surpassed all others in the picturesqueness of their lies, and the Post called attention to some of their masterpieces—e.g., their circumstantial story of the capture of Richmond by Gen. Keyes in 1862—as made possible by the censor’s concealment of the real facts. Nordhoff complained that some of the paper’s dispatches filed in the morning at 10:30 did not reach New York till 5 p. m., simply because the censor was out of his office or negligent. The worst count in the indictment, however, was that some great bankers got news of the battles by cipher, and used it in speculation while the people remained ignorant of the actual events.
With the Civil War came the first plentiful use of headlines in the Evening Post, usually placed on page three, where the telegraphic news was used. In those days verbs in headlines were conspicuous chiefly by their absence; but the writer knew his business. When the bombardment of Sumter began he summarized the whole significance of the event in his first two words: “CIVIL WAR—BOMBARDMENT OF FORT SUMTER—A DAY’S FIGHTING.” After Bull Run he tried to save the feelings of New Yorkers by tactful phrasing: “RETROGRADE MOVEMENT OF OUR ARMY!—GEN. McDOWELL FALLING BACK ON WASHINGTON—OUR LOSS 2,500 to 3,000.” And the two most important headlines of the whole war were admirable in their simple fitness. It would be impossible to improve upon the first three words used on April 15, “AN APPALLING CALAMITY—ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT—MR. LINCOLN SHOT IN FORD’S THEATRE IN WASHINGTON”; or upon the first three of April 10, “THE GLORIOUS CONSUMMATION—THE REBELLION ENDED—SURRENDER OF LEE.”
Throughout the war the Evening Post was as distinguished for one feature—its poetry—as the Herald was for its admirable maps. Every writer of verse took inspiration from the conflict, and sent it to the only newspaper conducted by a great poet. A few days after Sumter surrendered, the editors declared that if poetry could win the war, they already had enough to do it. Four years later, on April 13, 1865, they remarked that “we have received verses in celebration of the late victories enough to fill four or five columns of our paper.”
Among the first war poems published by the Evening Post were two of genuine distinction, R. H. Stoddard’s stirring call to war, “Men of the North and West,” and Christopher Cranch’s stanzas, “The Burial of Our Flag”:
O who are they that troop along, and whither do they go?
Why move they thus with measured tread, while funeral trumpets blow?—
Why gather round that open grave in mockery of woe?
They stand together on the brink—they shovel in the clod—
But what is that they bury deep?—Why trample they the sod?
Why hurry they so fast away without a prayer to God?