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 somewhat 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 citizens 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 Polk 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 reëlected. 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.”
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 “typographical
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 apprehension 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 he 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 of
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 conquest 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 his 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, 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,
being wheeled out of the closet when he dines there, and wheeled
back when he takes his departure.