CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BRYANT AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS FAME AS EDITOR
During all but the hottest months of the year, in the latter part of Grant’s second Administration, men on lower Broadway at about 8:45 every week-day morning might see a venerable figure come rapidly down toward Fulton Street. The aged pedestrian was slender and just above the middle height, but was given an impressive aspect by his heavy white beard and the long hoary hair that swept his shoulders. As he passed, it could be seen that his brow was bald; that his forehead was projecting, though not massive; that the deep-set eyes which peered from beneath his bushy brows were remarkably penetrating and observant, and that his features were rugged but benignant. He had a scholar’s stoop, but appeared wiry and vigorous far beyond his years. People glanced at him with respectful recognition—his was, as Tennyson said of Wellington, the good gray head that all men knew. On Fulton Street he turned into a tall, new building, and those who watched might see that, disdaining the elevator, he began rapidly climbing the stairs. This was William Cullen Bryant, at eighty still devoting four hours daily to the Evening Post.
Bryant had long since become the most distinguished resident of the city, referred to and honored as its first citizen. In civic, charitable, and social movements his name was given precedence over those of men like William M. Evarts or Henry Ward Beecher. On every great public occasion an effort was made to obtain his attendance as the representative of all that was choicest in literary, artistic, and professional life. When the artist Cole, and the authors Cooper, Irving, Verplanck, and Halleck died, he was chosen to deliver memorial discourses of that kind in which the French excel; he was the chief speaker at the dedication of the Morse, Shakespeare, Scott, Goethe, and Mazzini monuments in Central Park; and he presided over the testimonial benefit given Charlotte Cushman when she was about to retire from the stage, which occasioned one of the most notable assemblages ever brought into a modern theater. No New York meeting in behalf of free trade, sound money, or civil service reform was complete without his presence or a message from him. This high position was his because he was not merely a great poet, but a great publicist.
On Nov. 5, 1864, when Bryant had just attained his seventieth birthday, a celebration was held at the Century Club, of which he had been one of the earliest members. The historian Bancroft presided, and among the speakers were Emerson, Holmes, R. H. Stoddard, Julia Ward Howe, R. H. Dana, jr., and William M. Evarts; while poems were received from Whittier and Lowell. The editor as well as the poet was honored. Mrs. Howe recited:
... at his forge he wrought two-fold,
On the iron shield of freedom, and the poet’s links of gold.
while Lowell’s well-known verses, “On Board the Seventy-six,” referred to his editorial words of cheer during the gloomy early days of the Civil War. A little more than three years later (Jan. 30, 1868), a dinner was tendered Bryant at Delmonico’s as president of the American Free Trade League. Speeches were made in his honor by David Dudley Field, Parke Godwin, John D. Van Buren, and others, and letters read from Emerson and Gerrit Smith. Again, on Nov. 3, 1874, when Bryant became eighty years old, he was quietly finishing a forenoon’s work in the Evening Post office when a deputation of friends entered to congratulate him. That evening there was another celebration at the Century Club, at which a commemorative vase—now in the Metropolitan Museum—was given Bryant, while a simultaneous celebration was held in Chicago by the Literary Club of that city.
In the dozen years following Sumter, and especially in the Civil War years when it pressed its demand for energetic prosecution of the struggle, the Evening Post was at the height of its influence under Bryant. “The clear and able political leaders have been of more service to the government in this war than some of its armies,” said Littell’s Living Age in 1862. Charles Dudley Warner wrote at the same time in the Hartford Press: “The Evening Post is the most fearless and rigidly honest paper in the country, and its ability is equal to its moral worth. Some of its ordinary editorials are magnificent specimens of English.” A chorus of praise was aroused by the enlargement of the journal this year. “The Evening Post, we think, is the best newspaper in the United States,” remarked the Elmira Advertiser; the New Bedford Standard spoke of “the best paper in the United States, the Evening Post”; the Kennebec Journal said that “All things considered, it comes the nearest to our idea of what a metropolitan journal should be of any publication in the country”; and the Christian Enquirer testified that “the course of the Evening Post during the war has been above all praise—firm, bold, patriotic, and wise.”
Similar tributes were paid the newspaper by a remarkable array of public men. In 1840 James K. Paulding wrote from Washington to console it for defeat in the Presidential election: “The manner in which the Evening Post is conducted, its stern and sober dignity, and its freedom from the base fury and still baser falsehoods, with which so many newspapers are debauched and disgraced, makes me proud to remember that I have a humble claim to be associated with its honors.” Sumner was constant in his praise in the fifties. Judge William Kent, son of the great Chancellor, not merely thought it the best American daily, but in 1857 proposed that he purchase a share in it and become one of the editors, a proposal which Isaac Henderson discouraged. William Jay in 1862 wrote Bryant, paying tribute to its “powerful and beneficial influence.” Charles Eliot Norton begged the following year “to express my hearty sympathy with the principles maintained by the Evening Post at this time, and my admiration for the ability with which they are sustained.” A little later Lowell wrote Bryant that he was a subscriber. “I am particularly pleased with the course of the Evening Post on reconstruction. Firmness equally tempered with good feeling is what we want—not generosity with twitches of firmness now and then.” W. H. Furness, the noted Philadelphia minister, sent another unsolicited tribute in the heat of the war, saying that he valued the Tribune, but was particularly grateful for the sound, calm vision of the Evening Post, and that “it stands in my esteem at the head of the American press. It is cheering that there is abroad such an educator of the public mind.” Caleb Cushing wrote (1868):
You may regard it as quite superfluous for me to speak in commendation of the Evening Post; but inasmuch as, at one period, I had reason to think and to assert that its language was occasionally overharsh to me, I desire to say, for my own satisfaction, not yours, with how great instruction and pleasure at present I read it every day, and with what daily increasing estimation of its superior dignity, fairness, wisdom, and truth.
Even abroad the paper was well known. Bigelow informed Bryant in 1864 that an Englishman had told him he thought it the best newspaper in the world. John Stuart Mill wrote Parke Godwin the following year that he was a regular reader of it through the kindness of Frederick Barnard, later President of Columbia, who thought it the best American daily, and that he had formed a high opinion of it.