were $30,000 a year, he overestimated them; its gross receipts were
only that much. But Bryant’s share in the newspaper, which was at first
one-eighth, which in 1830 became one-fourth, in 1832 was one-third
of seven-eighths, and in 1833 was a full third, sufficed to free him
from all money cares at once, and within a short time to make him
prosperous. The journal’s books were balanced each year on Nov. 16,
the anniversary of its founding. On that date in 1829, it was found
that the net profits were $10,544, of which Bryant’s one-eighth made
$1,318.04. The next year the net profits had risen to $13,466, and
Bryant’s quarter share was $3,366.51. In 1831 there was a further
increase to $14,429, making Bryant’s income $3,507.24. A heavy slump
occurred the following twelvemonth, cutting the net profits to $10,220,
and the poet’s share to $2,980.99, but this was only temporary. For the
half-year alone ending May 16, 1833--the figures for the full year are
lost--the profits were $6,000.35, making Bryant’s income for six months
exactly $2,000; and for the full year which closed Nov. 16, 1834, his
one-third share yielded no less than $4,646.20. In those days an income
of $4,000 or above was handsome, and Bryant was able to sail in the
summer of 1834 with a full purse.
The literary world, however, looked with cold disapproval upon Bryant’s
entrance into the newspaper field, which it believed was occupied by
cheap political controversialists, and thought offered an atmosphere
hostile to poetry. It found confirmation for this attitude in the
marked slackening of Bryant’s productiveness as a poet. Of the whole
quantity of verse which he wrote during his long lifetime, about 13,000
lines, approximately one-third had been composed before 1829. During
1830 he wrote but thirty lines, during 1831 but sixty, in 1832 only two
hundred and twenty-two, and in 1833 apparently none at all; nor was his
verse of this period in his best vein. He was too completely occupied
in mastering his new calling to cultivate the muse.
“Would that Mr. Bryant was employed in writing poetry ... and sending
back his thoughts to the streams and mountains which his young eyes
were familiar with, and from which he drank his first inspiration!”
lamented a writer in the _New England Magazine_ for 1831. “But alas! he
is busied about far other things, and what he is writing, is as little
like poetry, as Gen. Jackson is like Apollo.” This writer had called
on the editor in his little Pine Street office. “He is a man rather
under the middle height than otherwise, with bright blue eyes and an
ample forehead, but not very distinguished either in face or person,”
we are told. “His manners are quiet and unassuming, and marked with a
slight dash of diffidence; and his conversation (when he does converse,
for he is more used to thinking than talking), is remarkably free from
pretension, and is characterized by good sense rather than genius.”
Why could he not have remained a lawyer in Great Barrington, amid his
Berkshire hills and brooks?
We cannot close this notice without again expressing our sorrow
at the nature of Mr. Bryant’s present occupation, and that a man
capable of writing poetry to make so many hearts throb, and so
many eyes glisten with delight, should be lending himself to an
employment in which the greater the success the more occasion there
is for regret, for it must arise from the exertion of those very
qualities which we are least willing a poet should possess. “’Tis
strange, ’tis passing strange, ’tis pitiful, that” he should hang
up his own cunning harp upon the willows, and take to blowing a
brazen and discordant trumpet in the ranks of faction.
An early number of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ regretted that
Bryant was to be found “dashing in the political vortex” with those
who “engage in party squabbles.” The New York _Courier and Enquirer_,
in an utterance of 1832 which is to be discounted because of editorial
jealousy, remarked that “he has embarked in a pursuit not suited to his
genius and utterly at variance with all his studies and habits of mind.
We wish him a better fate than can ever be his while doomed to follow a
business for which he has not a solitary qualification, and compelled
to give utterance to sentiments he most cordially despises.”
To a certain extent Bryant agreed with these writers. He did not
believe journalism an unworthy or undignified occupation. In the
_Evening Post_ of July 30, 1830, he gave reasons for holding the
contrary opinion, descanting upon the value of the opportunity to
guide the thinking of thousands. “In combating error in all shapes
and disguises,” he wrote, it was ample compensation for an editor’s
trials “to perceive that you are understood by the intelligent, and
appreciated by the candid, and that truth and correct principles are
gradually extending their sway through your efforts.” But he had no
attachment as yet to the editorial career, he wanted with all his
heart to have leisure for pure literature, and he meant to get out of
the newspaper office as quickly and finally as possible. He bracketed
it with the law as a “wrangling profession,” and talked of being
chained to the oar. Always fond of travel, he escaped from his desk
after 1830 as much as he possibly could. In January, 1832, he took a
trip to Washington, making the establishment of a regular Washington
correspondence his excuse, and had a conversation of three quarters
of an hour there with Jackson. That spring he made an excursion to
Illinois, to visit his brothers. During the summer of 1833 he went to
Montreal and Quebec. When he took passage abroad on June 24, 1834, he
hoped that the business capacity of Michael Burnham and the editorial
capacity of William Leggett would make anything but intermittent
attention by him to the _Evening Post_ thenceforth unnecessary. “I have
been employed long enough with the management of a daily newspaper, and
desire leisure for literary occupations that I love better,” he later
wrote his brother. “It was not my intention when I went to Europe to
return to the business of conducting a newspaper.” He hoped that his
third share would support him.
How these expectations were suddenly wrecked, and how Bryant was
brought back by harsh necessity to rescue the _Evening Post_ from ruin,
is a dramatic story.
CHAPTER SIX
WILLIAM LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR; DEPRESSION, RIVALRY, AND THREATENED RUIN
One of the most popular pieces of sculpture the country has ever known,
Horatio Greenough’s “Chaunting Cherubs,” was being widely discussed
in the early thirties, as was Hiram Powers’s “Greek Slave,” a little
later. In a witty moment the _Courier and Enquirer_ christened Bryant
and William Leggett, for Leggett also wrote poetry, “the chaunting
cherubs of the _Evening Post_.” The name had outward appropriateness,
but it would really have been more fitting to call Leggett a spouting
volcano.
While Bryant controlled the journal, it abstained from any harsh abuse
of other journals. His rule was to notice no personal attacks, and to
make none in retaliation. Only once in fifty years did he, passing in
the street an editorial adversary who had given him the lie direct,
lose control of himself. The diarist Philip Hone tells the story under
date of April 20, 1831:
While I was shaving this morning at eight o’clock, I witnessed
from the front window an encounter in the street nearly opposite,
between William C. Bryant and William L. Stone; the former one
of the editors of the _Evening Post_, and the latter editor of
the _Commercial Advertiser_. The former commenced the attack by
striking Stone over the head with a cowskin; after a few blows the
men closed, and the whip was wrested from Bryant and carried off by
Stone. When I saw them first, two younger persons were engaged, but
soon discontinued their fight.
The next day Bryant made a public statement of this incident, pointing
out the gross provocation that he had received, but apologizing to his
readers for having taken the law into his own hands. Particularly as
there developed some doubt whether Col. Stone was the author of the
attack, he could never hear the matter referred to without showing his
chagrin and regret.
But Bryant had no sooner left the office for Europe than it became
plain that Leggett had no such scruples. In one brief paragraph he
managed to call the editor of the _Star_ a wretch, liar, coward, and
a vile purchased tool who would do anything for money. The “venomous
drivel” of the _Commercial Advertiser_ might sometimes require notice,
he wrote a few days later, but his contempt for the editor was “so
supreme that to us, personally, he is as if he were not--a perfect
non-entity.” In the autumn Assembly campaign Leggett shotted his
guns, and on Sept. 23 and 24 let off broadsides that shook the town.
He accused the _Daily Advertiser_ of “a vile untruth”; he called the
editor of the _American_ a “detestable caitiff,” a “craven wretch,
spotted with all kinds of vices,” and “a hireling slave and public
incendiary”; while he characterized the _Courier and Enquirer_ as a
blustering, bullying sheet, reeking with falsehood, pandering to the
vulgar, profligate, impudent, inane, and inciting men to riot and
bloodshed. On Sept. 26 Leggett was able to fill a column with answers.
“The editor is deranged,” said the _American_; he should be “committed
to Bedlam,” averred the _Gazette_; “a writ _de lunatico_” is needed,
chimed in the _Courier_; this, said the _Star_, “is too true to make a
jest of”; and the Boston _Atlas_ professed horror at “the ferocious,
mad, and bloody words of this desperate print.”
Leggett was not deranged, but simply in full fighting trim, and showing
the defects of his really sterling virtues. By sheer slashing vigor
as a political writer he achieved in a half dozen years upon the
_Evening Post_ a permanent fame as a reformer and controversialist.
Whittier, in his essays, compares Leggett with Hampden and Vane, and
declares that “no one has labored more perseveringly, or, in the end,
more successfully, to bring the practice of American democracy into
conformity with its professions.” His poetical tribute to “the bold
reformer” and his “free and honest thought, the angel utterance of an
upright mind,” is better known. Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., believed that
but for Leggett’s untimely end he might have made one of the greatest
names in American history. Bryant’s memorial tribute:
The words of fire that from his pen
Were flung upon the fervid page,
Still move, still shake the hearts of men,
Amid a cold and coward age,
was no exaggeration, but true for the whole generation which followed
Leggett’s death. The editor’s political writings were perhaps the most
potent force in shaping the ideas of democracy held by Walt Whitman,
who in 1847 wrote of the necessity of following the doctrines of the
“great Jefferson and the glorious Leggett,” and who in his old age
spoke to Horace Traubel of his high admiration for him. A recent
historical writer has said that Leggett was “one of the most sincere
and brilliant apostles of democracy that America has ever known.”
When Leggett became junior editor of the _Evening Post_ he was known
solely as a writer of essays, stories, and verse. He was a New Yorker
by birth, but had been educated at Georgetown, D. C., had been given
a taste of Illinois prairie life in his later youth, and had entered
the navy as a midshipman at the age of twenty, resigning six years
later because of the overbearing conduct of his commander. A volume
of his poems, “Leisure Hours at Sea,” and some tales of pioneer and
sailor life which he published in annuals and magazines, gave him a
sufficient reputation to enable him to found his weekly miscellany, the
_Critic_. He stipulated with Bryant that he should not be required to
write upon political topics, “on which he had no settled opinions, and
for which he had no taste”; but within a few months he found himself
almost wholly devoted to them. Bryant imbued him with his own ardent
free-trade doctrines, and his own warm admiration for Jackson and
Jacksonian measures. He was eight years younger than the senior editor.
His associates describe him as a man of middle stature, compact frame,
great endurance, and a constitution naturally strong, but somewhat
impaired by an attack of the yellow fever while serving with the United
States squadron in the West Indies. His naval training had given him
a dignified bearing, his address was easy, and his affability and
mildness of manner surprised those who had known him only by his fiery
writings. He was fond of study; and his ability to write fluently
in his crowded, littered back room on Pine Street, the crash of the
presses in his ear, amid a thousand distractions, amazed everybody.
Bryant and Leggett had now labored together five years, 1829–1834. The
chief local occurrence in this period was the great cholera epidemic
of 1832, causing an exodus from the city which the _Evening Post_ of
August 6 estimated at above 100,000. The two editors worked manfully,
though perhaps hardly candidly, to allay the panic. Although the first
case appeared on June 26, so late as July 13 they maintained that
there was no epidemic, in the strict sense of the word; and ten days
later they denied with vehemence the allegation of the _Courier and
Enquirer_, which was exaggerating the plague, that two _Evening Post_
employees had died of cholera.
Throughout the great war over the Bank of the United States the
_Evening Post_ had stood by the President. Jackson appealed to the
loyalty of Bryant and Leggett in equal degree, but differently. To
Leggett he was “the man of the people,” a son of the frontier, a
democrat from heel to crown. In Bryant he awakened the same admiration
that he aroused in Irving, Cooper, Bancroft, and in Landor abroad:
admiration for his adventurous heroism, his unspotted honesty, his
simplicity, his stern directness, his tenacity in pressing forward
to his goal. One had to be either the wholehearted admirer of “Old
Hickory” or his wholehearted opponent, and as early as Jackson Day in
1828 Bryant had become the former, writing for a dinner at Masonic Hall
an ode which, according to Verplanck, threw Van Buren into ecstasies.
Not a single measure of Jackson’s, not even his wholesale removals from
office under the spoils system, was censured by the _Evening Post_,
and by 1832, after the end of nullification, it was hailing him as “the
man destined to stand in history by the side of Washington, the one
bearing the proud title of the Father of his Country, the other the
scarcely less illustrious one of Preserver of the Union.”
All Jackson’s charges against the Bank--that it was a source of
political corruption, that it was monopolistic, that it was hostile
to popular interests and dangerous to the government, that it was
unsafely managed--were echoed by Bryant and Leggett. Probably only the
accusation that it had gone into politics was fully warranted, but
the _Evening Post_ pressed them all. Speaking of the Bank’s “enormous
powers” and “its barefaced bribery and corruption,” it applauded
Jackson’s veto of the bill to recharter it, and his withdrawal in 1833
of the government deposits in it. When the Bank curtailed its loans
to meet the withdrawal of these deposits, the editors thought that
it was trying to coerce the people and government, by threatening a
panic, into yielding. “The object of the Bank is to create a pressure
for money, to impair the confidence of business men in each other,
and to keep the community at large in a state of great uncertainty
and confusion, in the hope that men will at last say, ‘let us have
the Bank rechartered, rather than that ... the whole country should
be thrown into distress.’” The alliance of the chief statesmen in
Congress on behalf of the Bank drew from the journal three interesting
characterizations (March 31, 1834):
Clay:-- ... The parent and champion of the tariff and internal
improvements; of a system directly opposed to the interests and
prosperity of every merchant in the United States, and calculated
and devised for the purpose of organizing an extensive and
widespread scheme through which the different portions of the
United States might be bought up in detail.... By assuming the
power of dissipating the public revenue in local improvements,
by which one portion of the community would be benefited at the
expense of many others, Congress acquired the means of influencing
and controlling the politics of every State in the Union, and
of establishing a rigid, invincible consolidated government. By
assuming the power of protecting any class or portion of the
industry of this country, by bounties in the shape of high duties
on foreign importations, they placed the labor and industry of the
people entirely at their own disposal, and usurped the prerogative
of dispensing all the blessings of Providence at pleasure....
It is against this great system for making the rich richer, the
poor poorer, and thus creating those enormous disproportions of
wealth which are always the forerunner of the loss of freedom; it
is against this great plan of making the resources of the General
Government the means of obtaining the control of the States by
an adroit species of political bribery, that General Jackson has
arrayed himself.... He has arrested the one by his influence, the
other by his veto.
Calhoun:--Reflecting and honest men may perhaps wonder to see
this strange alliance between the man by whom the tariff was
begotten, nurtured, and brought to a monstrous maturity, and him
who carried his State to the verge of rebellion in opposition to
that very system. By his means and influence, this great Union was
all but dissolved, and in all probability would at this moment
lie shattered into fragments, had it not been for the energetic
and prompt patriotism of the stern old man who then said, “The
Union--it must be preserved.” Even at this moment Mr. Calhoun ...
still threatens to separate South Carolina from the confederacy, if
she is not suffered to remain in it with the privilege of a _veto_
on the laws of the Union.
Webster:--Without firmness, consistency, or political courage to
be a leader, except in one small section of the Union, he seems
to crow to any good purpose only on his own dunghill, and is a
much greater fowl in his own barnyard than anywhere else. He is
a good speaker at the bar and in the House; but he is a much
greater lawyer than statesman, and far more expert in detailing
old arguments than fruitful in inventing new ones. He is not what
we should call a great man, much less a great politician; and
we should go so far as to question the power of his intellect,
did it not occasionally disclose itself in a rich exuberance of
contradictory opinions. A man who can argue so well on both sides
of a question cannot be totally destitute of genius.
And here these three gentlemen, who agree in no one single
principle, who own no one single feeling in common, except that
of hatred to the old hero of New Orleans, stand battling side by
side. The author and champion of the tariff, and the man who on
every occasion denounced it as a violation of the Constitution;
the oracle of nullification and the oracle of consolidation; the
trio of antipathies; the union of contradiction; the consistency of
inconsistencies; the coalition of oil, vinegar, and mustard; the
dressing in which the great political salad is to be served up to
the people.
In this aggressive writing we see Leggett’s pen; and it was only after
Bryant left the _Evening Post_ in his sole charge that it entered upon
its hottest fighting. The first episode, its defense of abolitionists
in the right of free speech, was highly creditable to it.
The abolitionists had begun to arouse popular resentment in New York
so early as 1833; on Oct. 2 of that year, a meeting of the “friends
of immediate abolition” at Clinton Hall had been broken up by a
tumultuous crowd, which adjourned to Tammany Hall and there denounced
the agitators. Lewis Tappan, head of one of the largest silk houses
in the city, and for a short time after 1827 editor of the _Journal
of Commerce_; his brother Arthur Tappan; Joshua Leavitt, the Rev.
Dr. F. F. Cox, the Rev. Mr. Ludlow, and several other Protestant
clergymen made up a constellation only less active than that formed
in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Samuel J. May,
and John Pierpont. During the spring of 1834 these men continued
their speechmaking, and Ludlow and Cox went so far as to appeal to
all Northern negroes for support, and to defend intermarriage between
whites and blacks. Few New Yorkers then regarded Southern slavery as a
national shame, and almost none had any patience with abolition. Most
of the press denounced the movement emphatically; the _Evening Post_
refused to do this, though it called it wild and visionary.
On July 7 some negroes repaired to the Chatham Street Chapel for a
belated celebration of the Fourth, and at the same time the Sacred
Music Society met there for practice, claiming a prior right of
occupancy. Patriotism and music were forgotten in the ensuing mêlée.
The _Evening Post_ had felt that trouble was brewing, and it raised a
warning voice:
The story is told in the morning papers in very inflammatory
language, and the whole blame is cast upon the negroes; yet it
seems to us, from those very statements themselves, that, as
usual, there was fault on both sides, and especially on that of
the whites. It seems to us, also, that those who are opposed to
the absurd and mad schemes of the immediate abolitionists, use
means against that scheme which are neither just nor politic. We
have noticed a great many tirades of late, in certain prints, the
object of which appears to be to excite the public mind to strong
hostility to the negroes generally, and to the devisers of the
immediate emancipation plan, and not merely to the particular
measure represented. This community is too apt to run into
excitements; and those who are now trying to get up an excitement
against the negroes will have much to answer for, should their
efforts be successful....
Other journals, especially the _Courier and Enquirer_, continued their
provocative utterances and called for public meetings to protest
against the abolition movement. The result was that disturbances
occurred on the night of Wednesday, the ninth, and reached their climax
on Friday in scenes not equaled until the Draft Riots.
At an hour after dark on Friday, Lewis Tappan’s store was attacked and
its windows were broken. At ten o’clock the mob broke in the doors
of Dr. Cox’s church on Laight Street, and demolished its interior,
after which it made a rush for his home on Charlton Street, but found
it picketed by the police and retired. The next objective was Mr.
Ludlow’s church on Spring Street, which was half demolished, together
with the Session House next door. Thereupon the rioters made for the
principal negro quarter of the town, in the region about Five Points.
The Five Points has figured on some of the blackest pages of New York’s
history. It was here that fourteen negroes were burned in 1740 during
the so-called Negro Insurrection; here the Seventh Regiment was called
out in 1857 to quell a riot; here the “Dead Rabbits” later fought the
“Bowery Boys,” and here stood the notorious Old Brewery that the Five
Points Mission displaced. But it never saw more panic and outrage than
on that night. The St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church in Centre
Street and a negro church in Anthony Street were left mere battered
shells by the mob; a negro school-house in Orange Street was wrecked;
and twenty houses were wholly or partly destroyed, and much of the
contents stolen. Innocent negroes were beaten into unconsciousness.
The colored people by hundreds fled northward into the open fields.
Just before midnight infantry and cavalry arrived, but took no punitive
measures. The _Evening Post_ called for unremitting severity: