But all of Bryant’s and Parke Godwin’s high expectations failed. The Post thought Grant’s Cabinet weak, and was especially shocked by his choice of the protectionist George S. Boutwell to be Secretary of the Treasury. It was equally offended by the selection of Elihu Washburne to be Minister to France, and Gen. Daniel Sickles to Spain—Spanish relations then being highly important on account of Cuba. There was no change in the tariff until 1870, when a new act reduced the duties on only one important protected commodity, pig iron, while it increased them on a half dozen. The revenue system was left in its complex iniquity. Secretary Boutwell did nothing effective to bring the nation back to a specie basis, while the Evening Post sharply condemned his action in the “Black Friday” crisis (September, 1869) in selling $4,000,000 worth of gold without notice, and thus breaking the corner in gold which Jay Gould and James Fisk, jr., were trying to build up. This, it said, was taking sides unnecessarily in a battle between two sets of gamblers, when the Treasury had always before acted on the principle that all sales of gold should be public, with ample advance notice of the amounts to be sold, and should be ordered solely upon public grounds, without reference to speculation. Reconstruction, going from bad to worse, was by 1870 a confused mixture of grasping carpet-baggers, downtrodden whites, corrupt Legislatures, and ignorant, poverty-stricken negro voters. Grant’s one marked display of energy had been in an effort to force the annexation of Santo Domingo, a measure which the Post abominated.
Two months after Grant’s administration began, the Chicago Tribune harshly attacked him. The Post then pleaded for patience, but by midsummer of 1870 it was growing restive.
The last straw for the Evening Post was Grant’s dismissal of his two ablest Cabinet members. He asked for the resignation of Attorney-General Ebenezer Hoar in June, 1870, sacrificing him for the votes of Southern Senators promised in behalf of the Santo Domingo treaty. Four months later, Gen. Jacob Cox was forced out of the Interior Department simply because the politicians wished to raid it for spoils. Already Sumner had been deprived, by Grant’s orders, of the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, a slap in the face to the great body of liberal and intellectual Northerners who had admired Sumner ever since he had come forward as an anti-slavery leader. The dismissal of Motley from the post of Minister to England in the fall of 1870 angered Bryant, as it did all other American men of letters. When Secretary Cox resigned, the Post headed its editorial (Oct. 31, 1870): “General Grant’s Unconditional Surrender”—meaning his surrender to the politicians:
Not even Buchanan’s interference in Kansas was more gross and unblushing than President Grant’s attempt to coerce the Missouri Republicans to do his will and not their own. No President except Andrew Johnson has ever so openly tried, by wholesale removals from office and by the appointment of his favorites, to impose his “policy” upon the party.
The letters of General Cox, now published, show that in the practice of the smaller devices of politicians the President has been no less ready. The Secretary, who came into the Cabinet as the especial friend and representative of civil service reform, is forced to leave the Cabinet because the President insists, contrary to Gen. Cox’s desires, upon letting political committees levy tribute upon the poor clerks in the Interior Department.
Three days later, under the caption “The President and His Policy,” the Post joined those organs—the Chicago Tribune, Springfield Republican, and Dana’s and Greeley’s journals—which had already declared war:
He has now been twenty months in office, and if we look back over the leading and most conspicuous acts of his Administration, we find only the San Domingo treaty, defeated by those who would gladly support him in everything right or wise; the gross interference with the elections in Missouri; and the disgrace—so far as he could disgrace them—of Mr. Hoar, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Cox. That is a record of which General Grant will not be proud in those days of retirement from public life which await him.
The Liberal Republican movement in the East began to assume shape when the Free Trade League called a conference upon revenue and tariff reform in New York city for Nov. 22, 1870. It was attended by Bryant, Schurz, E. L. Godkin, Horace White, Samuel Bowles, Gen. Cox, former Commissioner Wells, and Charles Francis Adams, with some others. The first five named represented respectively the Evening Post, the St. Louis Westliche Post, the Nation, the Chicago Tribune, and the Springfield Republican, and the first four are all on the list of editors of the Evening Post. James G. Blaine, the Speaker, was so disturbed by this conference that he journeyed to Chicago to tell Horace White that he meant to give the tariff reformers a majority of the Ways and Means Committee. Meanwhile, in Missouri, Carl Schurz and B. Gratz Brown had already launched their insurgent movement, and by a coalition with the Democrats that same month swept the State. Everywhere the elements in favor of civil service reform, fiscal reform, low tariff and cleaner government began drawing together.
Just how far should the Liberal Republican movement go? Schurz by the spring of 1871 was intent upon forming a new party, while men like Sumner wished to stay within the old party and reform it. The Chicago Tribune, the Springfield Republican, and the Cincinnati Commercial were soon supporting Schurz’s plan, while the Evening Post and the Nation held back. They were sympathetic with Liberal Republicanism, but they did not commit themselves to it. Bryant was as reluctant to give up his Republican allegiance now as he had been to forsake the Democratic standard in 1844, and he assailed the Administration without assailing the party. The Post declared in March, 1871, that the Republican organization was substantially sound; that it distrusted Grant and the politicians, but knew that the rank and file had resisted such follies as the deposition of Sumner and the Santo Domingo treaty. Next month, after the Liberal gathering at Cincinnati, it defined the movement as intended only “to bring back the Republican party to sound and constitutional legislation.” It would have been a dramatic display of independence for the Post to have broken with the regulars, as it was to do in 1884, but the event showed that it was well it remained lukewarm. When the Liberal Republicans shipwrecked their reform effort by naming a candidate quite unacceptable to the Post, it could change its attitude instantly from sympathy to hostility and derision.
E. L. Godkin relates that in the spring of 1864 he was invited to a breakfast in New York at which he found Wendell Phillips, Bryant, and one or two other men. Greeley entered and approached the host, who was standing by the fire talking with Bryant, but the poet ignored his fellow-editor. “Don’t you know Mr. Greeley?” the host inquired in an audible whisper. Bryant’s whisper came back more audibly still: “No, I don’t; he’s a blackguard—he’s a blackguard!”
This prejudice upon Bryant’s part, largely identical with the prejudice which made him refuse to speak to another editor whose principles and personality were both offensive to him, Thurlow Weed, had its share in the Evening Post’s hostility to Greeley when the Liberal Republicans nominated him for President. Bryant remembered that in 1849 Greeley had commenced a reply to an editorial in the Post with the words: “You lie, villain! wilfully, wickedly, basely lie!” It must also be considered that Greeley’s high tariff views were anathema to the Post, that his readiness to haul down the Union flag at various critical moments in the Civil War had provoked the indignation of other editors, and that his extremely radical reconstruction policy had offended all moderate organs.