comprehensiveness, promptness, and accuracy till then undreamed of.
At first, compelled by poverty to do all the work himself, and unable
to hire his first reporter for more than three months, he found the
task hard. But within five weeks (June 13) he began publishing a daily
financial article, something that Bryant, Col. Stone, Webb, and Hallock
had not thought of, although thousands were just as keenly interested
in the exchange then as now. From one to four every business afternoon,
having labored in his cellar since five in the morning, Bennett was
making the rounds of the business offices, collecting stock-tables
and gossip. Local intelligence began to be thoroughly gathered.
Incomparably the best reports of the great fire of December, 1835,
are to be found in the _Herald_. He was the first editor to open a
bureau of foreign correspondence in Europe, something that Bryant might
well have done. He soon went the _Courier_ and _Journal of Commerce_
one better by keeping his clipper off Montauk Point, and running a
special train the length of Long Island with the European newspapers.
A _Herald_ reporter, notebook in hand, began to be seen in precincts
which had never known a journalist. In 1839 Bennett made bold to report
the proceedings of church sects at their annual meetings, and though
the denominational officers were at first indignant, they became
mollified when they saw their names in print. Important trials were
for the first time followed in detail, and important public speeches
reproduced in their entirety. The interview was invented.
This “picture of the world” was served up with a sauce. Bennett
had no reverence and no taste. He announced his own forthcoming
marriage in 1840 in appalling headlines: “To the Readers of the
_Herald_--Declaration of Love--Caught at Last--Going to be Married--New
Movement in Civilization.” The _Herald_ was not a year old before it
was ridiculing republican institutions, and in shocking terms assailing
the Catholic Church, the Pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation.
When the Erie Railroad began its infamous early career, Bryant attacked
the schemes of the speculators with great effect, and helped stop
the first effort of the promoters to sack the State treasury. The
_Herald’s_ comment was brief and characteristic: “The New York and Erie
Railroad is to break ground in a few days. We hope they will break
nothing else.” James Parton quotes one of Bennett’s impudent paragraphs
as representative. “Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now. The
question in dispute is, whether or not a man can do anything toward
saving his own soul.” In even the few and brief book-notices this tone
was maintained. Reviewing an Annual Register which told him that there
were 1,492 rogues in the State Prison, Bennett added: “And God only
knows how many out of prison, preying upon the community, in the shape
of gamblers, blacklegs, speculators, and politicians.”
By the prominence it gave to crimes of violence, divorces, and
seduction, and by its bold personal gossip, the _Herald_ fully earned
the name of a “sensation journal.” Most of the other newspapers, the
magazines, and the Catholic and Protestant pulpits, denounced it
roundly. The _Evening Post_ did not mention it by name, but in 1839
condemned “the nauseous practice which some of our journals have
imitated from the London press of adopting a light and profligate
tone in the daily reports of instances of crime, depravity, and
intemperance which fall under the eye of our municipal police, making
them the subject of elaborate witticisms, and spicing them with gross
allusions.” The _Herald’s_ cynical contempt for consistent principles
increased the dislike with which it was viewed. In general it was
Hunker Democratic, and built up a large Southern following, but it
supported Harrison in 1840 and Taylor in 1848. The English traveler,
Edward Dicey, said that it had but two standing rules, one to support
the existing Administration, the other to attack the land of Bennett’s
birth. Dicey found that as late as Civil War times Bennett was barred
from society, and that when he went to stay at a watering place near
New York, the other guests at the hotel told the landlord that he must
choose between the editor’s patronage and their own--and Bennett left.
But upon Bennett’s success was largely founded that of other great
morning newspapers of the next decades. “It would be worth my while,
sir, to give a million dollars,” said Henry J. Raymond, “if the devil
would come and tell me every evening, as he does Bennett, what the
people of New York would like to read about next morning.” The _Sun_
was given new life when it passed into the hands of Moses Y. Beach
in 1838. Greeley, with a capital of $1,000, founded the _Tribune_ in
April, 1841, to meet the need for a penny paper of Whig allegiance.
The sixpenny journals, the _Evening Post_, _Commercial Advertiser_,
_Courier_, _Journal of Commerce_, and _Express_, perforce learned much
from the _Herald_ about news-gathering. Years later the _Evening Post_
described the new spirit of enterprise which had seized upon journalism
by the early forties:
In those days expresses were run on election nights, and in times
of great excitement the _Herald_ and _Tribune_ raced locomotive
engines against each other in order to get the earliest news; on
one occasion, we remember, the sharp reporter engaged for the
_Tribune_ “appropriating” an engine which was waiting, under steam,
for the use of the opposition agent, and so beating the _Herald_ at
its own game.... Nor was the competition confined to enterprises
like these. For want of the boundless facilities now afforded by
the organized enterprises of the newspaper offices, there were
curious experiments in unexpected directions; type was set on
board of North River steamboats by corps of printers, who had a
speech ready for the press in New York soon after its delivery in
Albany; carrier pigeons, carefully trained, flew from Halifax or
Boston with the latest news from Europe tucked under their wings,
and delivered their charge to their trainer in his room near Wall
Street; an adventurous person, known at the time by the mysterious
title of “the man in the glazed cap,” made a voyage across the
Atlantic in a common pilot boat twenty years ago, secretly and
with only three or four companions, in the interest of two or
three journals which determined to “beat” the others in their
arrangements for obtaining early news from abroad.
Charles H. Levermore twenty years ago expressed regret in the _American
Historical Review_ that the revolution in journalism had been wrought
by the unprincipled Bennett, and not by a man of such education, taste,
and high-mindedness as Bryant, whose name would assure the standards
of his newspaper. The best journalist and worst editor in the country,
Parton called Bennett, deploring the fact that during the Civil War
neither the _Times_, _Tribune_ nor _World_ could reduce the “bad,
good _Herald_,” which Lincoln read, to a second rank. Parke Godwin,
writing upon Bennett’s death in 1872 in the _Evening Post_, refused
him the title of a great journalist even, stating that he was a great
news-vender. “What he said from day to day was said merely to produce a
sensation, to raise a laugh, or to confirm a vulgar prejudice; and so
far as he had any influence at all as a writer, it was one that debased
and corrupted the community in which his paper was read. He did more
to vulgarize the tone of the press in this country than any man ever
before connected with it; and the worst caricatures that the genius of
Balzac, Dickens, and Thackeray has given us of the low, slang-whanging,
dissolute, and unprincipled Bohemian, of the Lousteaus, Jefferson
Bricks, and Capt. Shandons of the journalistic profession, fail to
depict what Bennett actually was.” But his journal was read as no other
had been. Men concealed it when they saw a friend approaching it, but
they bought it and examined every column.
Bryant had neither the necessary inclinations nor aptitudes to
accomplish such a revolution. When he started home from Germany he left
his family there, meaning soon to return. Upon learning how straitened
was the condition of the _Evening Post_, he became temporarily
disheartened. Within two months he wrote Dana that he earnestly hoped
that “the day will come when I may retire without danger of starving,
and give myself to occupations that I like better.” Near the end of
the year he informed his brother John in Illinois that he thought of
removing thither with $3,000-$5,000 for a new home. The best journalist
is not made from a man who is thus lukewarm in his work. Moreover,
even had Bryant thrown himself heart and soul into his calling, his
literary tastes, his retiring temper, his keen sense of dignity, his
fame as a poet, would have prevented his breaking new ground as Bennett
did. He had no equal before Greeley, and no superior later, in writing
editorials, and he made the intellectual influence of the _Evening
Post_ one of the strongest in the nation. He was a great editor. But
he could not have gone down into the busy ‘Change with his pencil as
Bennett did; he could not have attended meetings, visited theaters,
and mingled with common men in offices and on street corners, with
Bennett’s constancy of purpose.
The _Evening Post_ had as much news as some sixpenny rivals, but it
sadly needed the _Herald’s_ stimulus. Its reports of the great fire
of 1835 were partly original, partly taken from the _Express_. When
the Astor House was opened the following summer, an exciting event, it
clipped its report from the _Daily Advertiser_--and even the latter
had but one meager paragraph. Probably the most striking instance of
its deficiency occurred in December, 1829, the month that Chancellor
Lansing disappeared from the city streets--the greatest mystery of the
kind in New York political history. The _Post’s_ only account was left
by Lansing’s friends:
_Notice._--On Saturday evening, the 12th instant, Chancellor
Lansing, of Albany, arrived in this city, and put up at the City
Hotel; he breakfasted and dined there. Shortly after dinner he
retired to his room and wrote for a short time, and about the hour
that the persons intending to go to Albany usually leave the Hotel,
he was observed to leave his room. He has not been seen or heard of
since that time. He left his trunk, cane, etc., in his room. His
friends in this city have heard this morning from Albany that he
has not returned home.
It is supposed that he had written a letter to Albany and that
he had intended to put it on board the steamboat that left here
for that place at five o’clock that afternoon. He had made an
engagement to take tea at six o’clock that evening with Mr. Robert
Ray, of this city, who resides at No. 29 Marketfield Street.
He was dressed in black, and wore powder in his hair. He was a man
of a large and muscular frame of body, and about five feet nine
inches in height. He was upwards of seventy-six years of age. He
was in good health, and has never been known to have been affected
by any mental aberration. Any intelligence concerning him will be
most gratefully acknowledged by his afflicted friends and family,
if left for them, at the bar of the City Hotel.
No effort whatever was made to push an inquiry into this mystery, which
a generation later would have made the press ring for weeks.
III
Bryant resumed his editorial chair in the Pine Street office on Feb.
16, 1836, and set heroically to work to restore the _Evening Post_.
The net profits that year fell to $5,671.15, and in the panic year
following to $3,242.76. Leggett was only slowly convalescing at his
New Rochelle home, and the editor was assisted by Mason till the end
of May, when he obtained the services of Henry J. Anderson, professor
of mathematics at Columbia. He took a large furnished room on Fourth
Street, and was accustomed to be in his office at seven o’clock in
the morning. There was no money to hire many helpers, and until 1840
three men did practically all the writing. Bryant wrote the editorials
and literary notices; his chief assistant, first Anderson and then
Parke Godwin, clipped exchanges, furnished dramatic criticism, and
contributed short editorial paragraphs; and another man acted as
general reporter. Ship news was gathered by pilots in the common employ
of the evening papers.
Yet in this moment of adversity occurred one of those displays of
liberalism and enlightened judgment which are the special glory of the
_Evening Post_. After Leggett’s illness, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., had
written an editorial (Nov. 14, 1835) arguing against the attitude of
condemnation which nearly all employers then took toward labor unions,
which were just beginning to find imperfect shape. He affirmed that
the whole body social was interested in promoting the objects of these
unions--in diminishing the hours of labor and increasing the wages of
the mechanics. The laboring masses, under the principle of universal
suffrage, held the government in their hands, and would exercise their
power wisely only if they had education and prosperity. This was
not the case: “compelled to labor the extremest amount that nature
can endure, and receiving for that excessive labor a compensation
which makes year after year of excessive toil necessary to obtain
independence, what leisure have they to devote to the acquisition of
... knowledge ...?” Bryant felt precisely as Leggett and Sedgwick
did on this subject. At the end of May, 1836, twenty-one journeymen
tailors who had formed a union were indicted for a conspiracy injurious
to trade and commerce, and after a three days’ trial in the court of
Oyer and Terminer, Judge Edwards charged the jury to find them guilty.
Bryant immediately (May 31) attacked him:
We do not admit, until we have further examined the question, that
the law is as laid down by the Judge; but if it be, the sooner such
a tyrannical and wicked law is abrogated the better. His doctrine
has, it is true, a decision of the Supreme Court in its favor;
but the reasoning by which he attempts to show the propriety of
that decision is of the weakest possible texture. The idea that
arrangements and combinations for certain rates of wages are
injurious to trade and commerce, is as absurd as the idea that
the current prices of the markets, which are always the result of
understandings and combinations, are injurious.
The next day the tailors were heavily fined. The _Evening Post_,
declaring this monstrous, showed its wicked absurdity in a series of
clear expositions. It had been made criminal for the working classes to
settle among themselves the price of their own property! According to
Judge Edwards, the owners of the packets, who had agreed upon $140 as
the standard fare to Liverpool, were criminals; so were the editors,
who had agreed upon $10 for a yearly subscription; so were the butchers
and bakers. The very price current was evidence of conspiracy. Bryant
recalled the fact that in England the Tories themselves had expunged
the laws against labor unions from the statute books twelve years
before. “Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of
generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal
right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery,
we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for
the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well
bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.”
Other newspapers, of which the _Journal of Commerce_ and the _American_
were the most prominent, took the side of Judge Edwards. For a time the
excitement was intense. A mass-meeting of mechanics, which the _Evening
Post_ declared the largest ever seen in the city, was held in City Hall
Park on the evening of June 13; and Bryant continued his editorials at
intervals for a month.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE RISE OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION; THE MEXICAN WAR
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, 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 had 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 you 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
greatest 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):