appeared when on Sept. 5 it translated from the _Revue Encyclopedique_
of Paris a flattering notice of “the exquisite and finished beauty of
the little poems from the pen of W. C. Bryant.” The French magazine
credited “the poet of the Green River” with having destroyed “the
too commonly received opinion that the moral and physical features
of the New World are too cold and serene for the glorious visions of
poetry.” In October Coleman spoke of the editors of the _United States
Review_ as “men whose labors heretofore have contributed so much to the
elevation of the American character in the republic of letters”; and he
reprinted Bryant’s “Mary Magdalene.” The poet returned from Boston via
Cummington, and brought his wife with him to live.
It was made clear to readers that fall that there was a new and
vigorous hand in the management of the journal. Coleman’s steady loss
of health had been accompanied by a decline in the strength of his
editorial utterances. Moreover, he was an editor of the old school that
had passed away with the era of good feeling, and that was now out of
place. He liked to fight over old battles--he debated the Hartford
Convention with Theodore Dwight, and the Florida Purchase with the
_National Advocate_. His newspaper was neither Whig nor Democrat, but
might best be described as a Federalist sheet qualified by a mild
attachment to Andrew Jackson. In the Presidential election of 1824 it
had supported Crawford simply because Coleman hated John Quincy Adams
as a traitor to Federalism. It was prosperous, for Michael Burnham,
still an active man, saw to that. It had improved in many respects. In
1816 it had been enlarged to offer six columns to the page, instead of
five, or twenty-four in all, and the amount of miscellaneous matter
had increased; a short time earlier it had begun printing two editions,
one at two and the other at four p. m.; in May, 1819, it had used
its first news illustration, a rough drawing of “the velocipede, or
swift-walker”; and in January, 1817, it had begun to make a very rare
use of the first page for news. But the journal tended too much to look
backward, not forward.
Bryant’s son-in-law and biographer, Parke Godwin, states that in
the years 1826–29 we can trace his labors in the _Evening Post_
in longer and better book reviews, more attention to art, clearer
characterizations of public men, and frequent suggestions of reform
in city affairs. This is in part misleading. The frequent suggestions
for local improvements were an old feature of the journal, and did not
become more numerous. Characterizations of public men were not often
written nor were they important. More books were noticed, especially
those of Bliss & White and the young firm of Harpers, because there
were more books--the _Post_ remarked that in the last three months
of 1825 no less than 233 volumes had come from the American press,
apart from periodicals, of which 137 were original American works; but
mere notices were furnished, not reviews. More than once Bryant, who
unmistakably penned these notices, apologizes for their brevity and
sketchiness by saying that he had not had time to do more than glance
through the book in hand. However, the frequency of these notices, and
the inclusion of much literary gossip and book announcements, gave the
newspaper an increased literary flavor.
There was, as Godwin says, more news of art, for Bryant was interested
in painting, and supplied long critical descriptions of new canvases by
Dunlap and Washington Allston, both his friends. There was an increased
amount of news about Columbia College and those professors, Anthon,
Da Ponte, and Henry J. Anderson, whom Bryant knew well. The English
magazines and newspapers were read more diligently, and interesting
items from them grew in number. Bryant took in charge the filling of
the upper left-hand corner of the news page with poetry, and we see
fresher and better verse there--verse by Thomas Hood, Bishop Heber,
Hartley Coleridge, and other Englishmen who preceded Tennyson and
Browning. The poet wrote some fresh little essays; as editor of the
_United States Review_, for example, he had compiled a curious article
from an old colonial file of the New York _Gazette_, and he made
another on the same topic equally curious, for the _Evening Post_. A
few of the essays were satirical--e.g., one of April 23, 1828, dealing
with the fashion of indiscriminate puffery that had grown up in
dramatic criticism.
Between 1826 and his departure upon a trip to Europe in June, 1834,
Bryant--with one exception to be noted later--wrote no signed verse for
the _Evening Post_, reserving his few productions, since he was too
busy for much poetical composition, for the magazines and annuals. But
several effusions from his pen can nevertheless be identified. In the
first two months of 1829 the town was much interested by the courageous
woman lecturer, one of the first of the long line which has struggled
to enlarge woman’s sphere, Miss Fanny Wright. Bryant, as his letters
show, wrote the rather scornful ode to this free-thinking disciple of
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, which appeared in the issue of Jan. 29:
Thou wonder of the age, from whom
Religion waits her final doom,
Her quiet death, her euthanasia,
Thou in whose eloquence and bloom
The age beholds a new Aspasia!
* * * * *
O ’tis a glorious sight for us,
The gaping throng, to see thee thus
The light of dawning truth dispense,
While Col. Stone, the learn’d and brave,
The press’s Atlas, mild but grave,
Hangs on the words that leave thy mouth,
Slaking his intellectual drouth,
In that rich stream of eloquence,
And notes thy teachings, to repeat
Their wisdom in his classic sheet ...
Another bit of verse, a short political satire (March 25, 1831), is
identifiable by the fact that it is signed “Q,” the initial Bryant
used for dramatic criticism, and that it is marked as his in the files
presented by the _Evening Post_ to the Lenox Collection. Called “The
Bee in the Tar Barrel,” it represents the buzzings of the _National
Gazette_--Henry Clay’s organ in New York--over the tariff, the removal
of the Cherokees, and other current topics:
I heard a bee, on a summer day,
Brisk, and busy, and ripe for quarrel--
Bustling, and buzzing, and bouncing away,
In the fragrant depths of an old tar-barrel.
Do you ask what his buzzing was all about?
Oh, he was wondrous shrewd and critical.
’Twas sport to hear him scold and flout,
And the topics he chose were all political ...
Bryant also is probably to be credited with several of the last New
Year’s addresses of the carriers, long rhymed reviews of the year’s
events which were then expected annually. He could have tossed off more
easily than any one else in the office such hexameters as the following
(Jan. 2, 1829):
Since New Year’s day came last about,
The Emperor Nicholas sent out
A potent army, full of fight,
Cossack, and Pole, and Muscovite,
To give the Turks a castigation,
Such as they ne’er had since creation.
They passed the Pruth in fine condition,
And meeting no great opposition,
They thought to make their winter quarters
By Hellespont’s resounding waters ...
There are frequently unsigned poems of a serious character in the
_Evening Post_ during these years, but nine in ten are so poor that it
is impossible to believe that Bryant wrote them. Now and then occurs
one which might be his; such, for example, are the translations of
lyrics from the German of Gleim which appeared on Nov. 13, 1827, and
Dec. 2, 1828. Bryant did not claim all of his poems in even the _United
States Review_; it has been assumed of these, and it may be assumed of
any lost in the _Evening Post_ files, that they were not worth claiming.
As a young man, Bryant took his journalistic duties light-heartedly,
and one of his distinctive contributions lay in his literary hoaxes.
He and his close friend Robert C. Sands, a talented young assistant of
Col. Stone in editing the _Commercial Advertiser_, delighted in them.
“Did you see a learned article in the _Evening Post_ the other day
about Pope Alexander VI and Cæsar Borgia?” he wrote Gulian Verplanck,
then a Congressman in Washington. “Matt. Patterson undertook to be
saucy in the _Commercial_ as to a Latin quotation in it, so we--i. e.,
Sands and myself--sent him on a fool’s errand.” The editor of the
_Commercial_ had corrected the _Evening Post’s_ Latin, and Bryant had
replied as follows, inventing the authority he cited:
As to the Latin of the phrase, “_Vides, mi fili, quam parva
sapientia gubernatur mundus_,” he affirms that it is not good.
He says that it should be, “_Vides, mi fili, quantilla sapientia
regitur mundus_.” He adds, however, that it was not said by any
of the Popes, but by some great statesman, whose name he does not
give, probably because he does not know it. As to the correctness
of the Latin, that is no business of ours.... If any of the Popes
spoke bad Latin, two or three hundred years before we were born, it
should be recollected that it was not in our power to help it. As
to the fact of the phrase being made use of by one of the Popes, we
will only say to the writer in the _Commercial_, that if he will
consult the work entitled _Virorum Illustrium Reliquiæ_, collected
by the learned Reisch and published at the Hague, by John and
Daniel Steucker, in 1650, a work well known to scholars, he will
find that the words, as we have quoted them, were addressed by Pope
Alexander VI to his son Cæsar Borgia.
Upon a more elaborate hoax Bryant and Sands were assisted by Professors
Anderson and Da Ponte--“a very learned jeu d’esprit,” he called it.
It was a long letter to the _Evening Post_ signed John Smith, in
which they took a familiar couplet and translated it through all
the principal tongues, ancient and modern, even into several Indian
languages. It is hard to believe that these erudite quips had a large
audience; but Bryant’s ode to Fanny Wright was much admired, and was
generally attributed to Halleck, until that gentleman disclaimed it. In
these high-spirited productions we see a side of Bryant that largely
disappeared under his growing cares and the dignity that increased with
his celebrity. We see the Bryant who used to meet with Verplanck and
Sands at the house of the latter’s father in the hamlet of Hoboken,
and make it ring with declamation and uproarious laughter. We see the
poet-editor who used to throw off all anxieties and go for long walks,
studying nature or chatting with companions, and who once at an evening
party apologized for his fatigue by explaining that he had covered
the road from Haverstraw to New York, nearly forty miles, that day.
Bryant had his fun-loving side, and the few men whom he found closely
congenial had no reason to complain of his coldness, as others often
did.
But the new editor’s most effective impress upon the _Evening Post_
was in its political and economic utterances. The journal had already
inclined toward a low-tariff policy, for the commercial community of
New York opposed protection; but its editorials upon this subject, as
upon many others, were feeble. Bryant in the years 1822–24 had been
led by his friends the Sedgwicks to study the British economists, Adam
Smith, Thornton, and Ricardo, and the debates upon tariff questions
prominent in Parliament about 1820. Theodore Sedgwick was a pronounced
advocate of free trade, and completely converted Bryant. From the young
man’s convictions upon this subject flowed his attachment to Jackson
as an opponent of protection and monopoly, and his intense dislike of
Clay, the leading advocate of the so-called American tariff system. He
had once been a Federalist, and as a boy had written a hot Federalist
poem, “The Embargo,” but his free-trade views now fast made him an
ardent Democrat. His sympathies in commercial legislation were not with
his native New England, but with the South.
Martin Van Buren writes in his Autobiography regarding the “American”
or protective tariff theories that “To the very exposition of the
system and the persistent assaults upon its injustice, and impolicy
by the New York _Evening Post_, the country is more indebted for its
final overthrow, in this State [New York] at least, than to any other
single influence.” This was true. Bryant, who was to oppose protection
till his death in 1878, lost no time in 1826 in aligning the journal
against the legislation then proposed for higher duties upon woolens.
He characterized the act of 1824 as “our last and worst” tariff, and
that autumn supported his friend Verplanck, with C. C. Cambreleng and
Jeromus Johnson, for city seats in Congress as “the avowed opponents of
restrictive and prohibitory laws.” On Nov. 16 he wrote concerning the
woolens bill:
From 1815 to the present day the demands of our manufacturers
have been incessant; and the more bounty they receive, the more
exorbitant their claims. It is time that they should be taught to
wait, as other branches of industry do, for that revival of trade
which can alone give them relief.... If the woolen manufactures
have grown with unnatural rapidity during the last ten years,
no legislative remedy can be applied; it is an evil which in
every branch of industry periodically finds its own remedy. All
acquainted with the subject know that our manufacturing is our most
profitable branch of industry, and we trust Congress will no longer
continue to pamper capitalists so highly favored by circumstances.
Almost alone among the Northern newspapers--the Providence _Journal_
was its most important ally--the _Evening Post_ unsuccessfully combated
the tariff of 1828. The newspaper ascribed to it the Paterson textile
strike of 1828, and predicted that these industrial outbreaks would
yet equal the Manchester and Birmingham riots. In 1830 it asked where
were the busy thousands who had once been employed in the city’s
shipyards, along the docks, or in establishments for fitting out
vessels. A few half-idle men were left; the rest, thanks to the tariff,
were “in the miserable abodes of poverty, or in the poorhouse.” John
Jacob Astor early in 1831 asked for a higher duty upon furs, declaring
that he was undersold in the Eastern market by British traders who
possessed an advantage in dealing with the Indians. The blankets,
strouds, and garments which the savages liked were not made in the
United States, but had to be imported from England and to pay a heavy
duty, so that the Canadian fur agents could offer much more than
the Americans for pelts. The _Evening Post_ pounced upon this as an
argument not for a tariff upon furs, but for abating the tariff on
blankets and clothing.
Naturally, in 1828 the _Post_ supported Jackson against J. Q. Adams
for the Presidency, Bryant adding new reasons to those Coleman had
used against Adams four years earlier. He represented the section
that clamored for protection, while Jackson was for a lower tariff.
Under the urgings of Senator Rufus King a decade before, the _Post_
had said hard things about Jackson, but now it praised him for his
long public service, for his Roman strength of will, and for his
clearsighted political tenets. When he became President, it supported
his Indian policy; it urged him on, as we shall see later, in his
determination to crush the United States Bank. The tariff act of 1832,
carrying a moderate reduction of duties, it naturally applauded. It
was a compromise bill, Bryant admitted. “Yet a large majority of the
friends of free trade are satisfied with it, because although not what
they would have it, it is still a positive good, it simplifies the
collection of the revenue, it removes many of the embarrassments in
the way of the fair trader, it diminishes the temptation to smuggling,
and it is an approach, if nothing more, to a fair and equal system of
duties.”
While giving the _Evening Post_ a clear-cut, courageous tariff policy,
Bryant did much else with the editorial page. Early in 1827 he came out
with a far more ringing denunciation of lotteries than it had before
printed, and in August he induced it to announce that it would accept
no more advertisements relating directly or indirectly to tickets in
them. During the same year, following a number of business failures in
the city, he wrote in advocacy of a comprehensive national bankruptcy
act, such as was not passed till near the end of the century. To his
surprise, merchants frowned on the proposal, and the _Evening Post_
was left, in his expressive words, “like a public actor who believes
he has just said something highly to the purpose, and looks around for
applause, but meets only hisses.” Later, in 1837, Van Buren formally
recommended a general bankruptcy law to Congress, but again it met
with no favor. A number of steamboat accidents caused the journal to
press for legislation punishing criminal carelessness and manslaughter
by fitting penitentiary sentences. It took up with zeal, following
Jackson’s inaugural message, the Administration’s campaign against the
policy of national aid to internal improvements, for Bryant regarded
such gifts to special local and political interests as an evil almost
as great as protective tariff.
When the first rumblings of nullification were heard from South
Carolina in 1829, the _Evening Post_ refused to follow those newspapers
which treated the subject flippantly. “Every man of common sense must
know that if but a single stave is withdrawn from the barrel, it
inevitably tumbles to pieces,” Bryant warned his readers; “and that
whatever be the dimensions of the stave withdrawn, the catastrophe
is equally sure and fatal.” It was impossible for the journal not
to sympathize with the hot-tempered South Carolinians who wanted to
destroy the application of the tariff of 1828 to their State. It
thought that Col. Hayne was no more wrong about the Constitution
than the turncoat Webster was wrong about the tariff; but it warned
Calhoun’s and Hayne’s followers that their project was “insane”:
It is the destiny of all republics to be agitated occasionally by
the desperate plans of disappointed and ambitious men, resolved to
rule or ruin. Such might succeed with a corrupt people, but not
in our intelligent and free land. Public opinion has indignantly
rejected every proposition to dismember our confederacy, and has
pronounced a just judgment on those who prefer themselves to their
country--we have already among us more than one blasted monument of
selfish ambition. The wreck of our republic is not yet at hand--the
people’s devotion to the Union is invincible, and the same verdict
awaits every man, whether of the North, the South, the East, or the
West, who would dare to violate its integrity. (Aug. 29, 1832.)
Whether applauding Jackson as he sternly recalled South Carolina to
its senses, or attacking the protectionist doctrines, Bryant tried to
open his editorials with a flash of humor or an apposite story. When
the _American_ delayed a twelvemonth in apologizing for an insult to
Jackson, he told the anecdote of the worthy widow whose husband had
been dead for seven years and who declared that she could stand it no
longer. The opponent who sighed for the time when the Administration
would go into a state of “retiracy” reminded him of the Irishman who
had rushed for a map when he learned that Napoleon had taken Umbrage.
An exchange with a discourteous antagonist recalled the member of
the House of Commons who, having said that a colleague was not fit
to carry guts to a bear, and being required to apologize, stated: “I
retract--you _are_ fit to carry guts to a bear.” During 1831 many
Americans were boasting of having known Louis Philippe when he was an
expatriate in this country; and in rebuke to their snobbery, the editor
spoke of the man who was proud of having been noticed by a king--the
king had said, “Get out of my way, you scoundrel!” Bryant wrote
laboriously, not fluently, and made so many corrections that his copy
was often almost illegible; but he wrote with polish.
Coleman’s health after his runaway accident steadily failed. He had
wholly lost the use of his lower limbs, and Bryant tells us that his
appearance was remarkable. “He was of a full make, with a broad chest,
muscular arms, which he wielded lightly and easily, and a deep-toned
voice; but his legs dangled like strings.” The _National Journal_ of
July, 1827, commented upon his declining strength, in April and June,
1828, _Evening Post_ readers were told that he was confined to his
home, and on July 14, 1829, he died. Bryant instantly became, what he
had previously been in all but name, editor-in-chief. Some assistance
was needed, for Coleman’s son, though a man of literary tastes, did not
wish to enter the office. In 1827 a share in the newspaper had been
offered to Robert Sands, but after some hesitation he had declined
it. Now an editorial position, and the opportunity of becoming part
owner, was tendered William Leggett, a spirited young reformer who had
been connected with the _Morning Chronicle_, and more recently had
been editor of a frail weekly called the _Critic_, the final numbers
of which he had not only written but set up, printed, and delivered
himself. He gladly accepted.
Within four and a half years of coming to the city a literary
adventurer, Bryant had thus become editor of one of its oldest and most
prosperous journals. He had done this not because he had an inborn
tendency to journalism, not because he wished to make a newspaper the
sounding board for certain ideas or doctrines, but chiefly because he
could not live by pure literature, and because the bar, for which he
was in many ways well equipped, did not please him. But he did bring
to the newspaper great ability and high ideals. No American editor of
importance had made such use of the editorial page as he began to make.
He had a love of freedom, a sense of justice, and a shrewd judgment of
men and affairs, which his retiring nature debarred him from bringing
into play in any other way. As an editor, this shy, unsocial man could
work at arm’s length for the benefit of the people and nation, and
except at arm’s length he could have had no public career at all. He
was willing to toil hard in his chosen calling, and for many years to
push poetry, though upon poetry alone he relied for enduring fame, into
a secondary position. He had a keen sense of the dignity that should
belong to his profession, and by word as well as example preached
against that use of epithet and insult which was then common in it. In
one of his early essays he deplored the character of many journalists:
Yet the vocation of a newspaper editor is a useful and
indispensable, and, if rightly exercised, a noble vocation. It
possesses this essential element of dignity--that they who are
engaged in it are occupied with questions of the highest importance
to the happiness of mankind. We cannot see, for our part, why it
should not attract men of the first talents and the most exalted
virtues. Why should not the discussions of the daily press demand
as strong reasoning powers, as large and comprehensive ideas, as
profound an acquaintance with principles, eloquence as commanding,
and a style of argument as manly and elevated, as the debates of
the Senate?
Once established in full charge of the _Evening Post_, with a capable
lieutenant, he was able to make rapid, far-reaching, and profitable
improvements in the form of the journal. In 1829 it was still closely
akin to the _Evening Post_ of 1801--four pages of six columns each,
much smaller than newspaper pages of to-day, dingily printed and
ineffectively made up. When he left for Europe five years later
the four pages had seven columns each, and were much larger than
present-day pages--great blanket papers. Old John Randolph of Roanoke
wrote Bryant complaining that these expansive sheets crinkled so
badly in the mail that he had to have his housekeeper iron them out.
But the results of the enlargement were an enhanced revenue from
advertisements, and a rise of the subscription list, at $10 a year,
above 2,000. In 1834 the management boasted that the journal had never
been in a more prosperous condition, and that not three other papers in
the city were so productive. The whole number of employees, including
those in the mechanical departments, was then thirty.