When on June 29 the Post printed its warm but noncommittal praise of Tilden’s nomination, Henderson, who knew that commercial sentiment in New York was in favor of the Republicans, came upstairs and was closeted with Bryant in a long discussion of editorial policy. The next important editorial utterance, July 5, was an angry attack upon the Democratic platform. The Democratic Party was condemned for its “knavish” indifference to sound currency, and was represented as an unsafe organization to be given charge of Southern affairs while they remained so unsettled. On July 6 the Post remarked that the hard-money Tilden, running in 1876 upon a soft-money platform, presented an exact parallel to the high-tariff Greeley running in 1872 upon a low-tariff platform; that “the two canvasses are alike in their treachery, their evasiveness, their shameless surrender of principle.” On July 10 it declared fully for Hayes.
Bigelow and Parke Godwin have published a number of Bryant’s letters relating to this stand by the Evening Post. One is his refusal of Tilden’s request that he let his name head the ticket of Democratic electors. Another is his letter to J. C. Derby explaining that, while he believed Tilden a truer statesman than Hayes, he thought the Republican principles, especially with regard to sound money and the merit system, so much superior that it was impossible to detach the Evening Post from the party that had won the Civil War. He implied that his control of the paper was complete, and said that its utterances had suited him in everything except some details; while Henderson explicitly stated to the somewhat incredulous Derby that this was true. But Bigelow’s and Godwin’s own letters of the time have not been printed, and they show a strong belief that Bryant did not make the Post’s decision. It is sufficient to quote one by Bigelow, dated Albany, July 14:
The principal result of my talk with Henderson was to satisfy me that—[Bigelow simply made a long, wavy line]. The rest I will tell you when I see you.
I can hardly trust myself to talk about the Post. I hope to be spared the necessity of writing about it. But the Evening Post that you and I have known and honored, which educated us and through which we have educated others in political science, I fear no longer exists. The paper which bears its name is no more our Evening Post than the present Commercial Advertiser is the sheet once edited under that name by Col. Stone. I only wish Mr. Bryant had his name stricken out of it.
Allowance must be made for Bigelow’s chagrin. The probability is that Bryant at the end of June was wavering; that Henderson advanced his arguments respectfully but firmly; and that Bryant of his own free will placed the Evening Post behind Hayes. After all, his old associates in attacking Grant, the Liberal Republican leaders, flocked back to the G. O. P. He had the resumption of specie payments close to his heart, and was alarmed by the soft-money convictions of western Democrats; he feared the shock to hopes of civil service reform if a horde of office-hungry Democrats poured into Washington; and the recent conduct of the Democratic House gave him reason to think they would do little for tariff reduction. It was perfectly logical for the journal to stand with the party which it had helped found and had ever since supported, while it would have been hard to find a logical justification for leaving it. Throughout the campaign it stood by Hayes, though with very moderate zeal, and it rejoiced when the Electoral Commission gave him the Presidency. Bryant later wrote that he had never before felt so little interest in a contest for the Presidency. No one ever knew for whom he voted on election day, for, saying with a smile that the ballot was a secret institution, he always refused to tell; Bigelow believed that he voted for neither candidate.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TWO REBEL LITERARY EDITORS
Amid the eulogies which followed Bryant’s death in 1878, a dissenting note was struck by that short-lived illustrated newspaper, the Daily Graphic. After a disparaging estimate of his poetry, it remarked that he, as one of our most celebrated literary men, should have made the Evening Post the country’s leading critical authority. “It utterly failed to become such an authority. Indeed, it would be hard to say what benefits the existence of the Evening Post has conferred upon literature. We say this in all kindness, and with a full knowledge that there were difficulties in the way of creating a literary journal....”
There was force in this statement of an opportunity missed, though the Graphic exaggerated the Post’s deficiencies, and failed to consider whether they might not be due to lack of public appreciation of anything better. The truth is that till 1881 there was no American newspaper whose literary criticism would now be considered of high standards. This is said with due respect to George Ripley, who after years at Harvard, at Brook farm, and in the ministry which made him personally intimate with most of the New England authors, joined the Tribune in 1849 and remained in its harness until his death. He gave himself up to literary criticism with an industry equaled in our journalistic history by that of W. P. Garrison alone. He began as a man of wide culture; he was so devoted to study and research that in time there were few subjects upon which he could not supply facts and ideas of his own; he was conscientious, unprejudiced, and accustomed to refer to first principles. Tyndall wrote that he had “the grasp of a philosopher and the good taste of a gentleman.” His reviews were easily the best in any American journal, and he had some assistance from Bayard Taylor, John Hay, and other able men. But he was too mild, while he had no thought of sending each new book to a specialist.
Through simple inattention, no regular chair was established for a literary editor by the Post till after the Civil War. In August, 1860, young William Dean Howells applied for such a place, bearing a letter from James T. Fields of the Atlantic, who said: “He chooses the Post of all papers in the Union, and if you get him for your literary work, etc., you will get a lad who will be worth his weight, etc., etc., etc.” Bigelow’s sagacity for once failed him, and Howells was turned away. Later an application from Park Benjamin was rejected. There was little room for reviews during the war, and little inclination on the part of the public to think of pure literature. But when Bryant returned from his last trip to Europe and settled down to translate Homer he finally saw the need for such an editor.
In April, 1867, there reached New York from the South a slight, gaunt man of forty-three, the emaciation of whose face was partly concealed by his heavy beard, but who was as clearly in bad health as in reduced circumstances. He was received with honor by the city’s growing colony of former Confederates. This was John R. Thompson, who had edited the Southern Literary Messenger for thirteen years previous to the war. He was employed by Albion, a weekly devoted to English interests, and then by its feeble successor, Every Afternoon. Meanwhile, E. C. Stedman had introduced him to Bryant, while Bryant’s old friend, William Gilmore Simms, wrote recommending him to notice and assistance. In May, 1868, he was appointed literary editor of the Evening Post, a position which he held five years.