CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
INDEPENDENCE IN POLITICS: THE ELECTIONS OF ’72 AND ’76
If any one had told Bryant and Godwin in 1865 that within a half dozen years the party which led the crusade against slavery to victory, and which had carried the nation through the furnace of the war, would seem intolerable to many for its moral laxity and inefficiency, he would not have been believed. It was then the party of youthful idealism, of enthusiasm in a great moral cause, of vigorous achievement. Yet in 1872 the Evening Post all but abandoned the Republican banner—it would have done so had the reform elements found a fit leader; and in 1876 the temptation to secede was presented in a new and equally strong form. Though it stayed with the party, in neither campaign did the paper surrender a jot of its independence, and in neither did it give the Republicans enthusiastic support.
There was but one tenable position in the election of 1868 for a journal which had supported Lincoln and the Union throughout the war—to follow Grant; for the Democrats could not be trusted with Reconstruction, while they offended all believers in sound finance by proposing to pay the war bonds in greenbacks. The Evening Post declared itself for Grant on Dec. 2, 1867, and published frequent editorials advocating his nomination until it took place six months later. It expressed a wholehearted faith in his courage, patient good temper, administrative energy, and judgment of subordinates. This belief was shared by others as discerning as Bryant. Lowell informed Leslie Stephen that Grant had always chosen able lieutenants, that he was not pliable, and that he would make good use of his opportunity to be an independent President.
The cordiality of the Evening Post for Grant was increased by its distaste for his Democratic rival. Bryant wrote to his friend Salmon P. Chase before the Democratic Convention, urging him to take a receptive attitude, and Chase replied hopefully; but it was Horatio Seymour who obtained the nomination, and for Seymour the Post had only contempt. A mere local politician, it termed him; it recalled how as the “copperhead” Governor of New York he had displayed a plentiful lack of both dignity and sagacity, and it believed him a weak creature, who would be controlled by dangerous men like George H. Pendleton and Francis Blair.
The Times was heartily for Grant, and so was the Sun, Charles A. Dana helping write the campaign biography of him. The Tribune was of course loyally Republican. It had to forget a good many rash—though, as it proved, too nearly true—words of the previous year, when, irritated by Grant’s loyalty to President Johnson, it had said that his prominence in politics was due merely to “the dazzling and seductive splendor of military fame,” and that he would make “a timid, hesitating, unsympathetic President.” But the Tribune was used to retracting impolitic judgments, and was soon fighting with the World in that hammer and tongs style of which Greeley and Manton Marble were masters.
The disillusionment that followed so rapidly upon Grant’s inauguration was bitter to the whole of the decent Republican press. It is one of the most creditable chapters in American journalism that so many newspapers—Greeley’s Tribune, Horace White’s Chicago Tribune, Samuel Bowles’s Springfield Republican, Murat Halstead’s Cincinnati Commercial, and the Evening Post—had the courage to assert their independence of the Republican party when it fell into unworthy hands. Grant’s failure was more bitter to the Evening Post, the Springfield Republican, and other low-tariff journals than it was to the high-tariff New York Tribune; it was more painful to the Evening Post and other organs which advocated a mild Southern policy than to the Nation, which advocated a fairly severe one. But they all took a protestant attitude which was far in advance of that of the general public.
All administrations begin with a sort of political honeymoon, in which every one gives the new President a fair field, and criticism is temporarily reserved. For some months the Post tried hard to believe that Grant was destined to solve satisfactorily all the problems bequeathed him by Andrew Johnson. It praised his inaugural speech highly. The principal task before him, it declared, was to get rid of the bummers, camp-followers, and contractors:
The first and especial work which Gen. Grant undertakes is to clear the government of those who take its money without giving an equivalent; lobbyists, railway projectors, speculators in grants of every form, whisky thieves, revenue swindlers, gold sharks, and the whole train of useless and costly hangers-on. These men are no longer an outside band of robbers who are unimportant enough to be disregarded. They have grown to be a great power; if united, perhaps they would be the greatest political power in the land. It is a work scarcely second to that of destroying Lee’s army itself, to destroy the system of plunder which now threatens our institutions. (Feb. 9, 1869.)
The task second in importance, the Evening Post believed, was a sharp reduction in the wartime tariff, which David A. Wells, Special Commissioner of Revenue, had just shown to be miraculously effective in making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Under it, said Bryant, the pig-iron manufacturers doubled their capital annually, while the workmen lived worse than before; one of the two companies which enjoyed a monopoly of salt had earned $4,600,000 on a capital of $600,000 in seven years; and the lumber companies, Canadian competition being shut out, were piling up enormous fortunes while housing grew ever costlier. The Post demanded also a revision of the uneconomic wartime revenue system, under which 16,000 different articles were taxed; they might advantageously be reduced to fewer than 200. It asked for measures paving the way to a resumption of specie payments, such as the accumulation of a large gold reserve in the Treasury, and the passage of legislation authorizing contracts to pay in gold. Railway jobbery, involving the wasteful distribution of the national domain, should be stopped, while civil service reform was prominent in the Evening Post programme. Of course, it wished military rule in the South brought to an end as speedily as possible, and the States placed upon their old footing.