Bryant’s real editorial career dates from 1836, for all that had preceded was mere preparation. He quickly mastered his first discouragement, and throwing aside the idea of becoming an Illinois farmer or lawyer, devoted himself to the Evening Post as the work, poetry apart, of his life. We catch a new and determined note in his letters by 1837, when he was laboring like a born journalist at his desk from seven to four daily, and, says his assistant, was so impatient of interruption that he often seemed irascible. He was so fully occupied, he wrote Dana in February, “that if there is anything of the Pegasus in me, I am too much exhausted to use my wings.” In an unpublished note to his wife, who had returned in the fall of 1836, he declared: “I have enough to do, both with the business part of the paper and the management of it as editor, to keep me constantly busy. I must see that the Evening Post does not suffer by these hard times, and I must take that part in the great controversies now going on which is expected of it.”
He still longed for literary leisure. But he courageously stuck to his post, writing Dana in June, 1838, that his editorial labors were as heavy as he could endure with a proper regard to his health, and that he managed to maintain his strength only by the greatest simplicity of diet, renouncing tea, coffee, and animal food, and by frequent walks of a half day to two days in the country. By this date, he said, he could look back rejoicing that he had never yielded to the temptation of giving up the newspaper.
Leggett did not return. He had borrowed so much of Mrs. Coleman’s part of the dividend in the last year of his connection with the paper that she compelled him,167 by legal steps, to surrender his third share of the Evening Post to her; and Bryant would not give him that freedom for vehement writing which he wished. In December, 1836, he established the Plaindealer, a short-lived weekly to which the Evening Post made many complimentary references. But his health continued bad, and on May 29, 1839, just after President Van Buren had offered him the post of confidential agent in Central America in the belief that a sea voyage would benefit him, he died.
His place was supplied in part by chance. During the summer of 1836 Parke Godwin, a briefless barrister of only twenty, a graduate of Princeton, was compelled to remove to a cheaper boarding-house, and went to one at 316 Fourth Street, kept by a native of Great Barrington, Mass. He was introduced one evening to a newcomer, a middle-aged man of medium height, spare figure, and clean-shaven, severe face. His gentle manner, pure English, and musical voice were as distinctive as his large head and bright eyes. “A certain air of abstractedness made you set him down as a scholar whose thoughts were wandering away to his books; and yet the deep lines about his mouth told of struggle either with himself or with the world. No one would have supposed that there was any fun in him, but, when a lively turn was given to some remark, the upper part of his face, particularly the eyes, gleamed with a singular radiance, and a short, quick, staccato, but hearty laugh acknowledged the humorous perception.” On public affairs this stranger spoke with keen insight and great decision. That evening Godwin was told that he was the poet Bryant. For some months, till after Mrs. Bryant’s return, the two were thrown much together, without increasing their acquaintance. Bryant’s greeting to strangers was chilly, he never prolonged a conversation, he was fond of solitary walks, and he spent his evenings alone in his room. Godwin was therefore much surprised when one day the editor remarked: “My assistant, Mr. Ulshoeffer, is going to Cuba for his health; how would you like to take his place?” The young lawyer, after demurring that he had168 had no experience, went to try it—and stayed, with intermissions, more than forty years.
“Every editorial of Bryant’s opens with a stale joke and closes with a fresh lie,” growled a Whig in these years. It was part of the change from Leggett’s slashing directness to Bryant’s suavity that the latter prefaced most political articles with an apposite illustration drawn from his wide reading. When the Albany Journal, Thurlow Weed’s newspaper, was arguing the self-evident proposition that the State should not buy the Ithaca & Oswego Railway, he told the story of the perspiring attorney who was interrupted by the judge in a long harangue: “Brother Plowden, why do you labor so? The Court is with you.” The effrontery of a Whig politician caught in a bit of rascality inspired an editorial which opened with the grave plea of a thievish Indian at the bar: “Yes, I stole the powder horn, but it is white man’s law that you must prove it.” Again, with more dignity, Bryant began an article on the Bank with a reference to Virgil’s episode of Nisus and Euryalus.
In 1839 Webster’s friends professed great indignation because the orator had been called a “myrmidon.” The myrmidons, Bryant remarked, were soldiers who fought under Achilles at Troy, and the opprobrium of being called one was much that of being called a hussar or lancer. The wrath of Webster’s defenders seemed to him like Dame Quickly’s:
Falstaff: “Go to, you are a woman, go.”
Hostess: “Who, I? I defy thee, I was never called so in mine own house before.”
But, he added, there was one important difference between Webster and a myrmidon. He had never heard of the high-tariff friends of a myrmidon making up a purse of $65,000 for services well done. Bryant was always master of a grave humor. When another journal assailed him, he wrote: “There is an honest shoemaker living on the Mergellina, at Naples, on the right hand as you169 go towards Pozzioli, whose little dog comes out every morning and barks at Vesuvius.”
Bryant had need of this persuasive tact, for in 1836 the following of the Evening Post consisted chiefly of workmen, who could not buy it, and of the young enthusiasts who polled a city vote of only 2,712 that fall for the Loco-Foco ticket. The policy was not changed. The paper continued to attack special banking incorporations, and in 1838 had the satisfaction of seeing a general State banking law passed. It kept up its fire against the judicial doctrine that trade unions were conspiracies against trade, and saw it rapidly disintegrate and vanish. During 1837 it was able to point to the panic as an exact fulfillment of its predictions. By 1840 it was clear that it had said not a word too much when it attacked the craze for State internal improvements as not only making for political corruption and favoritism between localities, but as leading to financial ruin. Gov. Seward that year declared that New York had been misled into a number of impractical and profitless projects, Gov. Grayson of Maryland called for heavy direct taxes as the only means of averting disgraceful bankruptcy, and Gov. Porter, of Pennsylvania, said that his State had been loaded with a multitude of undertakings that it could neither prosecute, sell, nor abandon. This proved its old contention, said the Post, that “the moment we admit that the Legislature may engage in local enterprises, it is beset at once by swarms of schemers.” In 1837 Bryant asked for the repeal of the usury laws, but in this he was not years, but generations, ahead of his time.
As a personal friend of Van Buren, Bryant had been among the first to applaud the movement for his nomination, and he warmly championed him throughout the campaign of 1836. At the South the Evening Post was for some time declared to be Little Van’s chosen organ for addressing the public, much to the President’s embarrassment; for the Post’s views on the growing anti-slavery movement were not his. Van Buren’s greatest170 measure, the sub-treasury plan, was stubbornly opposed by the bankers and most other representatives of capital in New York. It ended the distribution of national moneys among the State banks, where Federal funds had been kept since 1833, and it was a terrible blow to them. The Evening Post had consistently stood for a divorce of the government and the banks, and it supported the sub-treasury scheme through all its vicissitudes. It had always opposed the division of the surplus revenue among the States, and in applauding Van Buren’s determination to stop it the paper again aroused the wrath of the business community in New York. But upon certain other issues it crossed swords with the President.
II
Bryant, like Ellery Channing, J. Q. Adams, Whittier, Wendell Phillips, and Salmon P. Chase, took up the fight for free speech and found that it rapidly led him into the battle for free soil. In January, 1836, Ex-President Adams began in the House of Representatives his heroic contest with the Southerners for the unchecked reception of abolitionist petitions there, and in May the “gag” resolution against these petitions was passed. Bryant’s indignation was scorching. He wrote upon the speech of a New York Senator (April 21):
Mr. Tallmadge has done well in vindicating the right of individuals to address Congress on any matter within its province.... This is something, at a time when the Governor of one State demands of another that free discussion on a particular subject shall be made a crime by law, and when a Senator of the Republic, and a pretended champion of liberty, rises in his place and proposes a censorship of the press more servile, more tyrannical, more arbitrary, than subsists in any other country. It is a prudent counsel also that Mr. Tallmadge gives to the South—to beware of increasing the zeal, of swelling the ranks and multiplying the friends, of the Abolitionists by attempting to exclude them from the common rights of citizens.... Yet it seems to us that Mr. Tallmadge ... might have gone a little further. It seems to us that ... he should have protested with somewhat171 more energy and zeal against the attempt to shackle the expression of opinion. It is no time to use honeyed words when the liberty of speech is endangered.... If the tyrannical doctrines and measures of Mr. Calhoun can be carried into effect, there is an end to liberty in this country; but carried into effect they cannot be. It is too late an age to copy the policy of Henry VIII; we lie too far in the occident to imitate the despotic rule of Austria. The spirit of our people has been too long accustomed to freedom to bear the restraint which is sought to be put upon it. Discussion will be like the Greek fire, which blazed the fiercer for the water thrown upon it; and if the stake be set and the faggots ready, there will be candidates for martyrdom.
When in August of this year a meeting in Cincinnati resolved to silence J. G. Birney’s abolitionist press by violence, the Evening Post used similar words. No tyranny in any part of the world was more absolute or frightful than such mob tyranny. “So far as we are concerned, we are resolved that this despotism shall neither be submitted to nor encouraged.... We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject for discussion, and argument, and declamation, as the difference between whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians and Calvinists.” This was at a time when the right of Abolitionists to continue their agitation was denied from some of the most influential New York pulpits, when the great majority of citizens had no tolerance for them, and when newspapers like Bennett’s Herald and Hallock’s Journal of Commerce, both pro-slavery, gave them nothing but contempt and denunciation. When Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Ill., by a mob, there were influential New Yorkers who believed that he had received his deserts, but Bryant cried out in horror. Without free tongues and free pens, the nation would fall into despotism or anarchy. “We approve, then, we applaud—we would consecrate, if we could, to universal honor—the conduct of those who bled in this gallant defense of the freedom of the press. Whether they erred or not in their opinions, they did not err in the conviction of their right, as citizens172 of a democratic State, to express them; nor did they err in defending their rights with an obstinacy which yielded only to death.”
Before 1840 Bryant had enrolled himself among those who held that the spread of slavery must be stopped. President Van Buren had pledged himself to veto any bill for emancipating the slaves in the District of Columbia. Although the plan of freeing the District slaves was abominated by most people in New York city, and even J. Q. Adams would not vote in favor of it in 1836, the Evening Post attacked and derided Van Buren’s pledge. When this reform was included in the Compromise of 1850, it boasted that New Yorkers had been converted to an advocacy of it as overwhelming as their opposition a dozen years earlier. During 1839 a considerable stir was produced in the city by the Armistad affair. A number of Africans sold as slaves in Cuba being transported from Havana to Principe on the schooner Armistad, rose, took possession of the craft, and compelled those of the crew whom they had not killed to steer the vessel, as they believed, to Africa. It was brought into Long Island Sound instead, and the negroes were seized as criminals. Bryant asked his friend Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., to investigate the law, and the latter came to the conclusion, which he expounded at length in the Evening Post, that the blacks could not be held. They had gained their freedom, he said, and were heroes and not malefactors. Secretary of State Forsythe and Attorney-General Grundy did all they could to vindicate the claim of the Spanish Minister to the negroes, but the courts upheld Sedgwick’s view of the issue, and they were liberated.
Every conscientious Democratic journal of the North was faced by a common embarrassment in the decade 1840–1850, when a dominance over the Democratic party was steadily established by advocates of the extension of slavery. If, like the Herald or Journal of Commerce or Express, they were friendly to the South in defiance of conscience, they felt no difficulty. But the Evening Post believed slavery a curse. What could it do when Polk173 was nominated in 1844 by its own party upon a platform favorable to this vicious institution, and when the Democratic leaders carried the nation into the Mexican War with the effect, if not the calculated purpose, of adding to the slaveowners’ domain? Bryant did not wish to abandon the great party which stood for low tariff, opposition to the squandering of public money on internal improvements, and a decisive separation between the government and banking. He could only do in 1844 what Greeley and the Tribune did in 1848, when Taylor, whom the Tribune distrusted, was nominated by the Whigs; stick to his party, reconcile his feelings as best he could with his party allegiance, and labor to improve the party from within.
The picturesque log-cabin campaign of 1840 offered no perplexities to the Evening Post. It still looked upon President Van Buren with satisfaction, and wished him re?lected. Like its opponent the Tribune, it was glad that Harrison had beaten Henry Clay for the Whig nomination, but that was in no degree because it respected Harrison. It regarded the retired farmer and Indian fighter of North Bend, Ohio, as all Democratic organs regarded him, a nonentity. What title had this feeble villager of nearly seventy, whose last public office had been the clerkship of a county court, to the Presidency? No one has ever thought Harrison a great statesman, and any undue severity on the part of the Evening Post may be attributed to the warmth of the campaign. It called him “a silly and conceited old man whose irregularities of life have enfeebled his originally feeble faculties, and who is as helpless in the hands of his party as the idols of a savage tribe we have somewhere read of, who are flogged when they do not listen to the prayers of their people for rain.” At the beginning of March it declared that Harrison might be elected, but that the most sinister figure in his party would direct his policies; “Harrison may be the nominal chief magistrate, but Clay will be the Charles Martel, the Mayor of the Palace.”
174 The hard-cider, coonskin-cap, log-cabin enthusiasm sickened the Evening Post. The plan, commented Bryant on the Harrison songs, “is to cut us to pieces with A sharp, to lay us prostrate with G flat, to hunt us down with fugues, overrun us with choruses, and bring in Harrison with a grand diapason.” “The accomplishment of drinking hard cider, possessed by one of the candidates for the Presidency,” he later wrote, was the safest the Whigs could urge. “If they were to talk now of his talents, of his opinions, of his public virtues, and of the other qualifications which are commonly supposed to fit a citizen of our republic for the office of its chief magistrate, they would find themselves much embarrassed.” The Whigs, counting upon the reflex of the panic of 1837, and the unpopularity of Van Buren, to elect Harrison, had taken care to commit themselves to no platform. The Evening Post therefore attributed to them all the evil policies they had ever espoused. Was it worth while to shoulder the burden of a high tariff and a costly internal improvement system, to restore the corrupt union of bank and state, to pay the enormous State debts out of the national treasury, and to strengthen Federal power at the expense of the States, all for the sake of having a President who quaffed hard cider?
During the campaign it was hinted by the Evening Post that if chosen, Harrison could not live to the end of his official term. It recorded the fact that when he arrived in Washington, the fatigue of receiving his friends was “so great that he was obliged to forego the usual ceremony of shaking hands with them.” A month later the paper was commenting upon the ghastly contrast between the festivities, pageants, and congratulations which attended his inauguration, and the solemnity and gloom as the plumed hearse carried his body, behind six white horses, to the Congressional burying ground. Because Bryant refused to write panegryrically of the dead President, though he did write respectfully, and because he refrained from using heavy black column rules for mourning, a practice which he called “typographical175 foppery,” he was violently assailed by the Whig press as a “vampire” and “ghoul.”
Bryant and Parke Godwin naturally hoped for the renomination of Van Buren in 1844, believing that the battle unfairly won by the Whigs in 1840 ought to be fought again on the same field, and with the same well-tried Democratic leader. Bryant told the story of the Santa Fé hunter who used to pat his rifle, carried for forty years, saying: “I believe in it. I know that whenever I fire there is meat.” In midsummer of 1843 he was confident that victory was already assured, the political reaction since 1841 being “without a parallel in the history of the peaceful conduct of affairs in this country.” The Evening Post welcomed the “black tariff” of 1842, the work of the Whig protectionists, as contributing magnificently to this reaction. It was like an overdose of poison; instead of accomplishing its purpose, it would act as an emetic and be rejected at once. But between that date and Polk’s nomination in May, 1844, there arose the questions of Texas and slavery, offering all editors of Bryant’s views the most distressing dilemma.
From a very early date the Evening Post had opposed the annexation of Texas, except under circumstances that would fully satisfy Mexico on one hand, and free soil sentiment on the other. On June 17, 1836, when Texas had just declared its freedom, Bryant asserted that if the United States, under the circumstances, even acknowledged Texan independence, “our government would lose its character for justice and magnanimity with the whole world, and would deserve to be classed with those spoilers of nations whose example we are taught as republicans to detest.” He frequently spoke with satisfaction of the growth of the little republic, noting in 1843 that it had 80,000 people. But when it became evident early the next year that President Tyler was determined to effect its annexation, the newspaper was alarmed. The first rumor that Secretary of State Calhoun had negotiated a secret treaty with Texas, reaching New York in March, threw it into a fever of indignation. Its chief apprehension176 arose from the fact that the treaty was said to permit slavery in all parts of the new territory save a small corner to which it was uncertain the United States would have any title. This led the Evening Post to call the project “unjust, impolitic, and hostile to the freedom of the human race.”
The actual treaty, sent to the Senate on April 22 by President Tyler, was assailed with a variety of arguments, but the Evening Post harped chiefly upon the anti-slavery objection. It would inevitably involve the United States in war with Mexico, and cost a huge sum in men and money. The Senate having been elected at a time when no one was thinking of the Texan question, it would be wicked to decide so important an issue affirmatively; there must be some form of national referendum. But above all, the treaty was evil because it would increase the slave population of the nation and bulwark this monstrous Southern institution. It would “keep alive a war more formidable than any to which we are exposed from Great Britain or any other foreign power—we mean the dissensions between the northern and southern regions of the union. The cause of these dissensions, if the territory of the republic be not enlarged, is gradually losing strength and visibly tending to its extinction, but by the admission of Texas it will be reinforced and perpetuated.” Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., writing under the pen-name “Veto,” was hurriedly impressed into service for a series of articles—admirable articles, too.
The treaty was defeated in the Senate; and then ensued the Presidential campaign of 1844, hinging upon it—the first campaign directly to involve the slavery question.
When the Democratic Convention met at Baltimore on May 27, 1844, it was the fervent hope of the Evening Post and whole northern wing of the party that it would nominate Van Buren. He had publicly declared against immediate annexation of Texas, asserting that it would look like territory-grabbing and intimating that, as the Post had repeatedly said, colossal jobbery by land-speculators was involved. The South was determined that he177 should not be named. The balloting for a nominee was therefore a decision whether Democracy should stand for or against the extension of slave territory; and because the Southerners were the more aggressive, they won. Van Buren was defeated by the revival of a rule requiring a two-thirds majority, his vote steadily declining, and Polk, a comparatively unknown slave-holder, was named. On May 8 Bryant had said editorially that “the party cannot be rallied, however the politicians may exert themselves,” in favor of an annexationist Southerner. He repeated this warning regarding the candidate on the eve of the convention; “if he declares himself for the annexation of Texas, he will encounter the determined opposition” of the North. It was with unconcealed dismay that the Evening Post chronicled Polk’s nomination. He was a man of handsome talents, manly character, and many sound views, it said, “but like most Southern politicians, is deplorably wrong on the Texas question.”
Should the Evening Post bolt? For a time Bryant considered doing so. But it simply could not accept Clay, the Whig candidate; and admitting that “the fiery and imperious South overrides and silences the North in matters of opinion,” Bryant prepared to make the best of a wretched situation. He explained his stand by saying that on the one hand, he could not possibly assist Clay to win the Presidency and restore the United States Bank; on the other, he did not believe annexation inevitable under Polk. The Democratic platform had declared for annexation “at the earliest practicable moment”; and by emphasizing the word “practicable,” and arguing that it involved all kinds of delays, and the establishment of national good faith precedent to the step, the newspaper tried to argue that it was at least distant.
Bryant’s position was made more tenable when, midway in the campaign, Clay wrote his famous and fatal “Raleigh letter,” in which he said that if annexation could be accomplished without dishonor, war, or injustice, he would be glad to see it. This meant, as thousands of178 Whigs felt when they stayed from the polls on election day, that there was perhaps little to choose between the candidates.
Yet the Post never quite surrendered its independence, and tried throughout the summer to lead a movement within the party for a proper solution of the Texas question. There were enemies to annexation in Texas itself, it believed; there were enemies throughout the South, even in South Carolina, and the initial enthusiasm for it was beginning to cool. If the Northern Democrats asserted themselves forcibly against it as a party measure, “the day of this scheme, we are fully assured, will soon be over.” In pursuance of this policy, Bryant, Theodore Sedgwick, David Dudley Field, and three other New Yorkers drew up a confidential circular to a number of Democrats of like views, proposing a joint manifesto in opposition to annexation, and a concerted effort to elect anti-annexationist Congressmen. This manifesto appeared in the Evening Post of Aug. 20, and made a considerable impression in New York. But such efforts were in vain. Polk’s election made the entrance of Texas into the union a certainty, and it was indeed authorized by a joint resolution of Congress the day before he took office. Bryant must have questioned that March whether his newspaper, which had so decisively lost its fight, should not have taken the side of the hated Clay.
The final protests against annexation did not commit the Post to any opposition to the Mexican War. That conflict did not begin for more than two years, until April, 1846; and the events of the interim convinced Bryant that Mexico rather than America was responsible for it. Polk acted pacifically, and the poet’s friend, Bancroft, then Secretary of the Navy, wrote him that “we were driven reluctantly to war.” Mexico had, the Evening Post believed, committed numberless aggressions upon American interests, while after severing diplomatic relations, she would not renew them except on impossible terms. The journal affirmed its belief (May 13, 1846) in “the inconsistency of a war of invasion and conquest179 with the character of our government and the ends for which Providence has manifestly raised up our republic.” It said then and when peace had come that the nation would yet hold to a fearful responsibility the Southerners who had precipitated the annexation and the war for the perpetuation of slavery. But it did not think that the weak and violent Mexican government had a right to the perpetual allegiance of Texans, or to menace our territory after the annexation. Whereas every one of sense had opposed a war with England over the Oregon question, Bryant wrote, only one or two newspapers were attacking this collision. Writing that “we approve of such demonstrations of vigor as shall convince Mexico that we are in earnest,” the editor favored a resolute prosecution of the struggle.
III
While the Evening Post was establishing a militant free-soil position, its news features were improving. The office force remained pitifully small. In addition to Bryant, his assistant, Parke Godwin, and a reporter, at the end of 1843 room was made for a commercial editor, who supplied information on the markets, wrote upon business affairs, and supervised the marine intelligence; these four made up the staff. The paper was enlarged in 1840, going from seven columns to eight and lengthening its page, while in 1842 commenced the issuance of a weekly Evening Post, in addition to the semi-weekly—a profitable innovation. It was wonderful that so few men could do so much. In the fact that they did we have the explanation of a little note Mrs. Bryant wrote to Mrs. William Ware, wife of the author of “Zenobia,” in the late thirties: “Mr. Bryant has gone to his office. You cannot think how distressed I am about his working so hard. He gets up as soon as it is light, takes a mouthful to eat,—it cannot be called a breakfast, for it is often only what the Germans call a ‘stick of bread’; occasionally the milkman comes in season for him to get some bread and milk. As yet, his health is good, but I fear that his180 constitution is not strong enough for such intense labor.” Occasionally a little help was lent by outsiders—James K. Paulding as well as Sedgwick contributed editorials early in the forties; but it was little.
Year by year the local news improved. Bryant had at first objected to reports of criminal cases on moral grounds, but he now took the sensible view that to have the light let in upon evil assisted in combating it. As early as 1836 he had the famous murder of Helen Jewett covered in detail. Another of his early prejudices was against the reporting of lectures by which many literary men of the day made part of their living, on the ground that if the report was faithful, it tended to prevent a repetition of the lecture, but even while he voiced this opinion, in 1841, he was giving a comprehensive summary of Emerson’s addresses. Beginning in 1845, the Evening Post published a daily column with the heading, “City Intelligence,” which was often a queer mélange of news and editorial comment, for it discussed urgent municipal needs—the improvement of the Tombs, the adoption of mechanical street sweepers, the substitution of a paid fire department for the volunteer system, and so on. The headings for a typical Monday in 1848 run thus:
Confusion Among the Judges (Six courts met at 10 a. m., at City Hall, with only four rooms among them).
Foul Affair at Sea (The brig Colonel Taylor arrives, and reports that its mate at sea threw a sailor overboard).
Removal of the Telegraph Offices (Albany and Buffalo Company removes to 16 Wall Street).
Case of Mme. Restel (Developments in a murder case).
Fires—A Child Burnt to Death (The week-end conflagrations totalled eleven, a modest list. At one in Leroy Street nine houses had been burnt; at one in Thirteenth Street a child and six horses had been killed).
City Statistics (The last year saw 1,823 new buildings erected; the city had 327 licensed omnibuses, 3,780 taverns and saloons, 168 junkshops, and 681 charcoal peddlers).
And so the column continued through police news,181 theater puffs, and notices of academy commencements, until it ended just above an advertisement of Sands’s Sarsaparilla and the Balsam of Wild Cherry, glowingly recommended by testimonials.
But the chief improvement in the news was wrought by special correspondence, which early in the forties attained a surprising extent and finish. By various means, including advertising for correspondents, Bryant built up a staff of contributors that covered every part of the nation. In 1841–2 each week during the sessions of Congress brought letters from two men, “Z” and “Very,” while during the legislative session there were two Albany correspondents, “L” and “Publius.” Every important State capital north of Richmond had its contributor. In the first week of 1842, for example, appeared letters from Springfield, Ill., Providence, R. I., and Detroit, Mich. A Paris correspondent wrote regularly over the initials “A. V.,” and a London correspondent signed much more frequent articles “O. P. Q.”
This London correspondence ran to great length. Into one typical article, printed on March 14, 1842, “O. P. Q.” crowded an account of the royal christening, at which the future Edward VII “was got back to the Castle without squalling”; the Dublin elections; Macready’s experiment at Drury Lane Theater, where for the first time the pit seats had been “provided with backs, and, together with the boxes, numbered, and a ticket given to the occupant, who thus keeps his seat throughout the evening”; of Adelaide Kemble’s singing at Covent Garden; of Douglas Jerrold’s new comedy, “Prisoners of War”; and of the new books, including Mrs. Trollope’s “Blue Belles of England”; the whole concluding with some gossip about a ruler in whom Americans were more interested than in President Tyler:
It is said that the Queen still continues staunch Whig; that she is civil, but laconic, to the Tories; and that pleasant old Lord Melbourne’s easy chair, in which he used to take his after-dinner nap when he dined at the palace, is still kept for his use alone, being182 wheeled out of the closet when he dines there, and wheeled back when he takes his departure.
Her majesty and her husband appear to go on as comfortably as if they lived in a cottage (ornée) untroubled with crowns and royal christenings. Prince Albert is a good deal liked for the sensible and unassuming manner in which he has heretofore conducted himself. At the Mayor’s dinner, the other day, he said he began to feel himself “quite at home.” One of the papers remarks: “Of course he does; what respectable man, living two years in the most comfortable house, with a charming young wife, a rising family, good shooting, and the general esteem, could feel otherwise than at home?”
The most striking feature in newspaper correspondence of the forties was the prominence given mere travel. Americans were more curious about their expanding and fast-filling land than now, and the expense and hardship of travel made its vicarious enjoyment greater. Two midsummer months in 1843 afford a representative view of this side of the newspaper. Bryant concluded his correspondence written during a trip to South Carolina and Florida, describing Charleston Harbor, a plantation corn-shucking, negro songs, alligators, tobacco-chewing, and the reminders of the Seminole War. From another corner of the union an unsigned letter of 3,000 words described an interesting trip through wilder Michigan. Bryant, returning north, contributed from Keene, N. H., and Addison County, Vt., a description of scenery in those two States. From Columbus, O., some one wrote of his journey thither by way of the Great Lakes. In August a correspondent at Saratoga waxed loquacious. He narrated some incidents he had observed of J. Q. Adams’s tour in upper New York; pictured Martin Van Buren sojourning at the Springs, “as round, plump, and happy as a partridge,” and said to be looking for a wife; and sketched N. P. Willis, at a ball there, “surrounded by bevies of literary loungers and dilettanti, who look up to him with equal respect for the fashionable cut of his coat and the exceeding gracefulness of his writings.”
Bryant wrote letters from all his foreign tours—those of 1834–6, 1845–6, 1849, 1852–3, and 1857–8; while183 others of the staff who traveled did the same. In 1834 the Evening Post published a series of letters from South American ports, written anonymously by a naval officer on an American warship; while for twenty years regular correspondence was furnished by a resident of Buenos Aires. When Commodore Biddle sailed into Yeddo Bay the summer of 1846 to try to establish treaty relations with Japan, an officer of his squadron sent the Post a highly interesting account of their chill reception. The vessels were surrounded with hundreds of armed boats from the day their arrival produced consternation upon land; they had been supplied with water, wood, poultry, and vegetables, free; but the authorities had peremptorily refused any further intercourse. Two years later both the Paris and Berlin correspondents wrote vivid descriptions of the revolutionary uprisings of that year, the former being in the thick of the fighting on the Boulevards. Special correspondence in the early fifties came even from Siam. But we can best give an impression of the wealth of this mailed matter by summarizing it for a single month (August, 1850):
From Washington and Albany, continuous correspondence; from Toronto, three articles, on Dominion politics and railways; from Montreal, letter on a great fire there and sentiment toward America; from London, letters by Wm. H. Maxwell and “XYZ” on Peel’s last speech, California gold fever, African trade, stock prices, corn laws, sorrow over President Taylor’s death, etc.; Paris correspondence on dinner to President Louis Napoleon and shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!”; Boston, letters on Massachusetts politics and sad case of Dr. Webster, awaiting execution after having confessed his murder; New Haven, four articles on Yale Commencement, President Woolsey’s oration, and a scientific convention; Chicago, the cholera, the Illinois canal, and crops; Rochester, the Erie Railroad and the “Rochester rappings”; Brattleboro and White Mountains, descriptions of summer excursions; Chester County, Pa., home life of Senator James Cooper, a hated traitor to free-soil principles; Berkshire Valley, charms of the Housatonic.
The world’s first war to be thoroughly and graphically184 treated in the daily newspapers was, not the Crimean War in which William H. Russell won his fame, but the Mexican War. It was George Wilkins Kendall, a Yankee from New Hampshire who had helped found the New Orleans Picayune nine years earlier, who made the chief individual reputation as a correspondent. Campaigning first with Gen. Zachary Taylor on the Rio Grande, and then joining Winfield Scott on the latter’s dangerous and triumphant march from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, always in the thick of the fighting, once wounded, organizing a wonderfully effective combination of courier and steamboat service, Kendall gave the Picayune by far the best current history of a war that journalism in any land had seen. The New Orleans Delta, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Herald, and, at a slight remove, the Evening Post, followed the fighting with admirable enterprise.
News of the war came to the East through two main channels. The greater part of it was brought from the border (i. e., from Brownsville or Matamoras) or from Vera Cruz to New Orleans or Pensacola, and thence overland northward; a smaller part came in on the long Santa Fé trail to St. Louis. Thus on Christmas Day, 1846, Col. Doniphan, at the head of a force of confident Missourians, defeated a Mexican detachment in the little skirmish of Brazitos, near El Paso. A company of traders from Santa Fé brought the news into Independence, Missouri, on Feb. 15, and the local news-writer there wrote a dispatch which was printed in the St. Louis Republic on the 26th. The Evening Post copied it on March 8, long after most of Doniphan’s seven wounded men had forgotten their injuries. El Paso had been captured from the Mexicans on Dec. 27, and the fact was known in New York on March 10.
The delay in obtaining the news of Buena Vista gave rise to disheartening rumors. The battle which made “Old Rough and Ready” a national idol and the next President of the United States was fought on Feb. 23, 1847, and for a month thereafter the gloomiest reports appeared185 in the press. After the middle of March Washington and New York were confused and alarmed by vague dispatches from the Southwest; on March 21 President Polk received a detailed account of Taylor’s perilous position, menaced by a force three times as large as his own, and New York heard of it immediately afterward. On the evening of the twenty-second the messages to Washington had “Taylor completely cut off by an overwhelming force of the enemy,” but no word of fighting. The Evening Post of March 30 carried its first news of a definite disaster. It republished from the New Orleans Delta a dispatch, brought by ship, stating “that Gen. Taylor was attacked at Agua Nueva and fell back, in good order, to the vicinity of Saltillo; here he was again attacked by Santa Anna, and a sharp engagement ensued in which Gen. Taylor was victorious, continuing his retreat in good order. Gen. Taylor fell back to Monterey, where he arrived in safety.” Read between the lines, this meant a humiliating defeat. Every one was prepared to credit it, and it was partly corroborated by more meager news carried in the New Orleans Bulletin.
Nevertheless, the Post uttered a shrewd caution against believing the reports. It was justified the following day when copies of the New Orleans Mercury arrived, dated March 23, bearing the full tidings of Taylor’s victory against crushing odds. The false rumors had filtered out through Tampico and Vera Cruz; the truth was brought by army messengers to Monterey, who had to make a detour of hundreds of miles to evade Mexican guerillas. When it reached Washington it found the politicians fiercely debating who was responsible for so weakening Taylor’s army as to enable Santa Anna to smash it; when it reached New York it found the people depressed and indignant; and when it got to Boston on April 1, many denounced it as an April Fool’s joke.
As the war continued the dispatches came more rapidly. The Baltimore Sun early established an express of sixty blooded horses overland from New Orleans, and when it was in effective operation newspapers and letters186 were carried over the route in six days. This made it possible to have newsboys on Broadway shouting the capture of Vera Cruz a fortnight after it occurred. As Scott pushed inland toward Mexico City, dispatches from him were retarded, for marauding Mexicans made his line of communications with the sea unsafe. Kendall used to start his express riders from the army at midnight, and he chose men who knew the country perfectly; but several were captured and others killed. Nevertheless, the Evening Post could publish the news of Cerro Gordo, fought on April 18, on May 7; the news of the capture of Mexico City, which occurred on Sept. 14, on Oct. 4, or less than three weeks after the event.
Three correspondents in the field furnished the Evening Post with letters—Lieut. Nathaniel Niles, an Illinois soldier with Gen. Taylor; “M. R.” with Scott, and “B” at Matamoras. The last gave a striking history of the rapid Americanization of this Mexican town, telling how the inhabitants reaped a golden fortune and how Taylor’s soldiers chafed under their enforced stay. “M. R.” contributed a picture of the taking of Vera Cruz, in which he carried a rifle. But Niles was the most active and the best writer. When the New Orleans papers, with their advantage of position, tried to give all the credit of Buena Vista to the Mississippi troops (commanded by Jefferson Davis) and to the Kentuckians, Niles flatly contradicted them. The Indiana and Illinois men, he said, deserved quite as much praise. His account of the decisive moment at Buena Vista, when the attack of the Mexicans had been finally and bloodily repulsed, is worth quoting:
At length, about three o’clock p. m., we saw the Mexican force in our rear begin to falter and retrace their steps, under the well-directed shot of our ranks of marksmen, and the artillery still pouring its iron death-bolts into their right. Their lancers, who had taken refuge behind their infantry, and there watched the progress of the fight, made one desperate charge to turn the fortunes of the day by breaking the line of Indiana and Mississippi. But the cool, steady volunteers sent them with carnage and confusion187 to Santa Ana, on the plain above, with the report that our reserve was 5,000 strong, and filled all the ravines in our rear. The retreat of their infantry, which paused for a moment, was now hastened by the repulse of the lancers, but still under a galling fire. They marched back in excellent order. While making their toilsome and bloody way back, Santa Ana practised a ruse to which any French or English officer would have scorned to resort. He exhibited a flag of truce, and sent it across the plain to our right, where stood our generals.
When the Second Indiana, under Col. Bowles, fled from the field after the first Mexican onset upon the American left, leaving the way to Taylor’s rear open, some one suggested—says Niles—a retreat. “Retreat!” exclaimed Taylor; “No; I will charge them with the bayonet.” Niles reported many human incidents of the war, and dwelt upon the barbarity of the Mexicans:
They generally killed and plundered, even of their clothes, all whom the current of battle threw into their hands. We, on the contrary, saved the lives of all who threw down their arms, and relieved the wants of the wounded, even in the midst of battle. I have seen the young American volunteer, when bullets were flying around him, kneel beside a wounded Mexican and let him drink out of his canteen. In one heap of wounded Mexicans we came upon a groaning man, whom an Illinois soldier raised and gave water. We had gone only a few steps past when the soldier thus helped twisted himself upon his elbow and shot our man through the back dead; three or four volleys instantly repaid this treachery.
The first intimation of the revolution in news-gathering which occurred in the middle forties was furnished Evening Post readers in the issue of May 27, 1844, when the Washington correspondent told of Morse’s successful experiment with the telegraph two days earlier. “What is the news in Washington?” was the question asked from Baltimore, where the Democratic National Convention was about to meet. “Van Buren stock is rising,” came the answer. On May 31 the correspondent sent another brief mention of
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MORSE’S TELEGRAPH.—This wonderful invention or discovery of a new means of transmitting intelligence, is in full and perfectly successful operation. Mr. Morse is the magician at the end of the line, and an assistant who does not spell with perfect correctness officiates.
There have arrived numerous telegraphic dispatches since the meeting of the Convention at Baltimore at nine o’clock this morning. By one we are informed of the nomination of Mr. George M. Dallas, of Philadelphia, for Vice-President.
All the New York newspapers, the Herald leading, shortly had a column of telegraphic news, and from that in the Evening Post we can trace the steady extension of the wires. In the early spring of 1846 communication was opened between New York and Philadelphia. When war was declared, April 24, the line to Washington was incomplete, not having been finished between Baltimore and Philadelphia, but the gap was soon closed. The fastest carriage of news between the capital and New York, 220 miles, had been that of Harrison’s inaugural message, weighty with its Roman consuls and Greek generals, in eleven hours; now eleven minutes sufficed. By the middle of September, when the line to Buffalo was complete, the country had 1,200 miles of telegraph, reaching above Boston towards Portland, to Washington on the south, and to Harrisburg on the west.
During 1847 the expansion of the telegraphic system amazed all who did not stop to think how much simpler and cheaper the installation of a line was than the building of a road. By March it had reached Pittsburgh on the west, and by September, Petersburg on the south. The next month saw it in Cincinnati and Louisville, and that fall the Evening Post printed telegraph news of a Cincinnati flood which made 5,000 homeless. In its New Year’s message the journal congratulated its readers upon such progress that “the moment a dispatch arrives at New Orleans from our armies in Mexico its contents are known on the borders of the northern lakes.” The next year Florida alone of the States east of the Mississippi was untouched by it. When the President’s message189 opening Congress in December, 1848, was transmitted to St. Louis, the Evening Post remarked that “the idea of a document filling twelve entire pages of the Washington union appearing in a city nearly one thousand miles from Washington, twenty-four hours after its delivery, is almost beyond belief.” Christopher Pearse Cranch contributed a poem to the Post upon the marvel:
The world of the Past was an infant;
It knew not the speech of today,
When giants sit talking from mountain to sea,
And the cities are wizards, who say:
The kingdom of magic is ours;
We touch a small clicking machine,
And the lands of the East hear the lands of the West
With never a bar between.
Ten years after the opening of the first American telegraph line Bryant made some caustic remarks in the Evening Post upon “The Slow-Coach System in Europe.” For many months, it transpired, the Allies in the Crimean War had possessed a continuous telegraph line from London to the battle front. It had been demonstrated that dispatches sufficient to fill two columns of the London Times might be sent over it in two hours; yet the French and British publics had been obliged to wait two weeks for full details of the fall of Sebastopol, simply because the Allied authorities did not organize a competent telegraphic staff.
IV
In this decade of rapid changes, 1840–1850, Bryant began to reap the fruits of his courage, persistency, tact, and industry. The hostility of the mercantile community had lessened as the Bank question receded and the correctness of the Post’s warnings against inflation and speculation was proved by the great panic. On March 30, 1840, Bryant editorially rejoiced that “the prejudices against it, with which its enemies had labored so vehemently to poison the minds of men of business, have been gradually overcome.” The pressure of advertisements190 forced the enlargement of the sheet in this year. The weekly edition which it began issuing at New Year’s, 1842, was the only Democratic weekly in New York, and at $2 a year rapidly obtained an extensive circulation. In competition with sixpenny evening papers like the Journal of Commerce and penny papers like the Daily News, the Post held its own. It took its share in all the business enterprises of the press, as when in 1849–50, at the height of the gold fever, it published a special “Evening Post for California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands” just before every important sailing for the Pacific. Bryant’s sagacity kept the expenses low, and his ability kept the editorial page easily the best, save for Greeley’s, in the city.
It was a reflection of the new Evening Post prosperity when Bryant wrote his brother early in 1843: “Congratulate me! There is a probability of my becoming a landholder in New York! I have made a bargain for about forty acres of solid earth at Hempstead Harbor, on the north shore of Long Island.” He referred to the Roslyn homestead at which thereafter he was to spend so much of his time. Between 1839 and 1840 the gross earnings of the journal rose from $28,355.29 to $44,194.93, and they never thereafter dropped to the danger point. In 1850 it was calculated that for the preceding ten years the average annual gross receipts had been $37,360, and that the average annual dividends had been $9,776.44. Of this Bryant’s share until 1848 was one-half, and thereafter two-fifths, so that he enjoyed an ample income; while towards the end of the decade the profits of the job printing office were a tidy sum.
Nor was there so much drudgery in the office as when he had first returned in 1836. Parke Godwin draws an interesting picture of the editor’s life at this period. He liked to take a week of fine summer weather from the office and spend it in excursions to the Palisades, the Delaware Water Gap, the Catskills, or the Berkshires, sometimes alone, sometimes with another good walker. Bryant’s appreciative descriptions of these scenes did191 much to raise the public esteem of them. At the office there were many entertaining visitors. Cooper always called when he was in town, and the contrast between the novelist and the poet was striking: “Cooper, burly, brusque, and boisterous, like a bluff sailor, always bringing a breeze of quarrel with him; Mr. Bryant, shy, modest, and delicate as a woman—they seemed little fitted for friendship.” Yet warm friends they were. John L. Stephens, who had won a reputation by his travels in Arabia, Nubia, and Central America, and whose books were in considerable vogue, frequently came, “a small, sharp, nervous man,” and talked of his adventures. A more magnetic personality was that of Audubon, whose tall, athletic figure, Indian-bronzed face, bright eyes, eagle nose, and long white hair attracted the eyes of every worker. He, too, loved to tell of his exploits in the wilds, and his experiences in the salons of Europe. Bancroft, who liked Bryant’s Jacksonian zeal as much as he did his poetry, and William Gilmore Simms, author of “The Yemassee,” occasionally paid a visit, while Godwin believed he remembered seeing Edgar Allan Poe “once or twice, to utter nothing, but to look his reverence out of wonderful lustrous eyes.”