if they lived in a cottage (ornée) untroubled with crowns and
royal christenings. Prince Albert is a good deal liked for the
sensible and unassuming manner in which he has heretofore conducted
himself. At the Mayor’s dinner, the other day, he said he began
to feel himself “quite at home.” One of the papers remarks: “Of
course he does; what respectable man, living two years in the most
comfortable house, with a charming young wife, a rising family,
good shooting, and the general esteem, could feel otherwise than at
home?”
The most striking feature in newspaper correspondence of the forties
was the prominence given mere travel. Americans were more curious
about their expanding and fast-filling land than now, and the expense
and hardship of travel made its vicarious enjoyment greater. Two
midsummer months in 1843 afford a representative view of this side of
the newspaper. Bryant concluded his correspondence written during a
trip to South Carolina and Florida, describing Charleston Harbor, a
plantation corn-shucking, negro songs, alligators, tobacco-chewing, and
the reminders of the Seminole War. From another corner of the Union an
unsigned letter of 3,000 words described an interesting trip through
wilder Michigan. Bryant, returning north, contributed from Keene,
N. H., and Addison County, Vt., a description of scenery in those two
States. From Columbus, O., some one wrote of his journey thither by
way of the Great Lakes. In August a correspondent at Saratoga waxed
loquacious. He narrated some incidents he had observed of J. Q. Adams’s
tour in upper New York; pictured Martin Van Buren sojourning at the
Springs, “as round, plump, and happy as a partridge,” and said to
be looking for a wife; and sketched N. P. Willis, at a ball there,
“surrounded by bevies of literary loungers and dilettanti, who look up
to him with equal respect for the fashionable cut of his coat and the
exceeding gracefulness of his writings.”
Bryant wrote letters from all his foreign tours--those of 1834–6,
1845–6, 1849, 1852–3, and 1857–8; while others of the staff who
traveled did the same. In 1834 the _Evening Post_ published a series
of letters from South American ports, written anonymously by a naval
officer on an American warship; while for twenty years regular
correspondence was furnished by a resident of Buenos Aires. When
Commodore Biddle sailed into Yeddo Bay the summer of 1846 to try to
establish treaty relations with Japan, an officer of his squadron sent
the _Post_ a highly interesting account of their chill reception. The
vessels were surrounded with hundreds of armed boats from the day their
arrival produced consternation upon land; they had been supplied with
water, wood, poultry, and vegetables, free; but the authorities had
peremptorily refused any further intercourse. Two years later both
the Paris and Berlin correspondents wrote vivid descriptions of the
revolutionary uprisings of that year, the former being in the thick of
the fighting on the Boulevards. Special correspondence in the early
fifties came even from Siam. But we can best give an impression of
the wealth of this mailed matter by summarizing it for a single month
(August, 1850):
From Washington and Albany, continuous correspondence; from
Toronto, three articles, on Dominion politics and railways; from
Montreal, letter on a great fire there and sentiment toward
America; from London, letters by Wm. H. Maxwell and “XYZ” on Peel’s
last speech, California gold fever, African trade, stock prices,
corn laws, sorrow over President Taylor’s death, etc.; Paris
correspondence on dinner to President Louis Napoleon and shouts of
“Vive l’Empereur!”; Boston, letters on Massachusetts politics and
sad case of Dr. Webster, awaiting execution after having confessed
his murder; New Haven, four articles on Yale Commencement,
President Woolsey’s oration, and a scientific convention; Chicago,
the cholera, the Illinois canal, and crops; Rochester, the Erie
Railroad and the “Rochester rappings”; Brattleboro and White
Mountains, descriptions of summer excursions; Chester County, Pa.,
home life of Senator James Cooper, a hated traitor to free-soil
principles; Berkshire Valley, charms of the Housatonic.
The world’s first war to be thoroughly and graphically treated in the
daily newspapers was, not the Crimean War in which William H. Russell
won his fame, but the Mexican War. It was George Wilkins Kendall,
a Yankee from New Hampshire who had helped found the New Orleans
_Picayune_ nine years earlier, who made the chief individual reputation
as a correspondent. Campaigning first with Gen. Zachary Taylor on
the Rio Grande, and then joining Winfield Scott on the latter’s
dangerous and triumphant march from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, always
in the thick of the fighting, once wounded, organizing a wonderfully
effective combination of courier and steamboat service, Kendall gave
the _Picayune_ by far the best current history of a war that journalism
in any land had seen. The New Orleans _Delta_, the Baltimore _Sun_,
the New York _Herald_, and, at a slight remove, the _Evening Post_,
followed the fighting with admirable enterprise.
News of the war came to the East through two main channels. The greater
part of it was brought from the border (i. e., from Brownsville or
Matamoras) or from Vera Cruz to New Orleans or Pensacola, and thence
overland northward; a smaller part came in on the long Santa Fé trail
to St. Louis. Thus on Christmas Day, 1846, Col. Doniphan, at the head
of a force of confident Missourians, defeated a Mexican detachment in
the little skirmish of Brazitos, near El Paso. A company of traders
from Santa Fé brought the news into Independence, Missouri, on Feb. 15,
and the local news-writer there wrote a dispatch which was printed in
the St. Louis _Republic_ on the 26th. The _Evening Post_ copied it on
March 8, long after most of Doniphan’s seven wounded men had forgotten
their injuries. El Paso had been captured from the Mexicans on Dec. 27,
and the fact was known in New York on March 10.
The delay in obtaining the news of Buena Vista gave rise to
disheartening rumors. The battle which made “Old Rough and Ready” a
national idol and the next President of the United States was fought
on Feb. 23, 1847, and for a month thereafter the gloomiest reports
appeared in the press. After the middle of March Washington and New
York were confused and alarmed by vague dispatches from the Southwest;
on March 21 President Polk received a detailed account of Taylor’s
perilous position, menaced by a force three times as large as his own,
and New York heard of it immediately afterward. On the evening of the
twenty-second the messages to Washington had “Taylor completely cut
off by an overwhelming force of the enemy,” but no word of fighting.
The _Evening Post_ of March 30 carried its first news of a definite
disaster. It republished from the New Orleans _Delta_ a dispatch,
brought by ship, stating “that Gen. Taylor was attacked at Agua Nueva
and fell back, in good order, to the vicinity of Saltillo; here he was
again attacked by Santa Anna, and a sharp engagement ensued in which
Gen. Taylor was victorious, continuing his retreat in good order. Gen.
Taylor fell back to Monterey, where he arrived in safety.” Read between
the lines, this meant a humiliating defeat. Every one was prepared to
credit it, and it was partly corroborated by more meager news carried
in the New Orleans _Bulletin_.
Nevertheless, the _Post_ uttered a shrewd caution against believing
the reports. It was justified the following day when copies of the New
Orleans _Mercury_ arrived, dated March 23, bearing the full tidings of
Taylor’s victory against crushing odds. The false rumors had filtered
out through Tampico and Vera Cruz; the truth was brought by army
messengers to Monterey, who had to make a detour of hundreds of miles
to evade Mexican guerillas. When it reached Washington it found the
politicians fiercely debating who was responsible for so weakening
Taylor’s army as to enable Santa Anna to smash it; when it reached New
York it found the people depressed and indignant; and when it got to
Boston on April 1, many denounced it as an April Fool’s joke.
As the war continued the dispatches came more rapidly. The Baltimore
_Sun_ early established an express of sixty blooded horses overland
from New Orleans, and when it was in effective operation newspapers
and letters were carried over the route in six days. This made it
possible to have newsboys on Broadway shouting the capture of Vera Cruz
a fortnight after it occurred. As Scott pushed inland toward Mexico
City, dispatches from him were retarded, for marauding Mexicans made
his line of communications with the sea unsafe. Kendall used to start
his express riders from the army at midnight, and he chose men who knew
the country perfectly; but several were captured and others killed.
Nevertheless, the _Evening Post_ could publish the news of Cerro Gordo,
fought on April 18, on May 7; the news of the capture of Mexico City,
which occurred on Sept. 14, on Oct. 4, or less than three weeks after
the event.
Three correspondents in the field furnished the _Evening Post_ with
letters--Lieut. Nathaniel Niles, an Illinois soldier with Gen. Taylor;
“M. R.” with Scott, and “B” at Matamoras. The last gave a striking
history of the rapid Americanization of this Mexican town, telling
how the inhabitants reaped a golden fortune and how Taylor’s soldiers
chafed under their enforced stay. “M. R.” contributed a picture of the
taking of Vera Cruz, in which he carried a rifle. But Niles was the
most active and the best writer. When the New Orleans papers, with
their advantage of position, tried to give all the credit of Buena
Vista to the Mississippi troops (commanded by Jefferson Davis) and
to the Kentuckians, Niles flatly contradicted them. The Indiana and
Illinois men, he said, deserved quite as much praise. His account of
the decisive moment at Buena Vista, when the attack of the Mexicans had
been finally and bloodily repulsed, is worth quoting:
At length, about three o’clock p. m., we saw the Mexican force
in our rear begin to falter and retrace their steps, under the
well-directed shot of our ranks of marksmen, and the artillery
still pouring its iron death-bolts into their right. Their
lancers, who had taken refuge behind their infantry, and there
watched the progress of the fight, made one desperate charge to
turn the fortunes of the day by breaking the line of Indiana and
Mississippi. But the cool, steady volunteers sent them with carnage
and confusion to Santa Ana, on the plain above, with the report
that our reserve was 5,000 strong, and filled all the ravines in
our rear. The retreat of their infantry, which paused for a moment,
was now hastened by the repulse of the lancers, but still under a
galling fire. They marched back in excellent order. While making
their toilsome and bloody way back, Santa Ana practised a ruse to
which any French or English officer would have scorned to resort.
He exhibited a flag of truce, and sent it across the plain to our
right, where stood our generals.
When the Second Indiana, under Col. Bowles, fled from the field after
the first Mexican onset upon the American left, leaving the way
to Taylor’s rear open, some one suggested--says Niles--a retreat.
“Retreat!” exclaimed Taylor; “No; I will charge them with the bayonet.”
Niles reported many human incidents of the war, and dwelt upon the
barbarity of the Mexicans:
They generally killed and plundered, even of their clothes, all
whom the current of battle threw into their hands. We, on the
contrary, saved the lives of all who threw down their arms, and
relieved the wants of the wounded, even in the midst of battle. I
have seen the young American volunteer, when bullets were flying
around him, kneel beside a wounded Mexican and let him drink out
of his canteen. In one heap of wounded Mexicans we came upon a
groaning man, whom an Illinois soldier raised and gave water. We
had gone only a few steps past when the soldier thus helped twisted
himself upon his elbow and shot our man through the back dead;
three or four volleys instantly repaid this treachery.
The first intimation of the revolution in news-gathering which occurred
in the middle forties was furnished _Evening Post_ readers in the issue
of May 27, 1844, when the Washington correspondent told of Morse’s
successful experiment with the telegraph two days earlier. “What is
the news in Washington?” was the question asked from Baltimore, where
the Democratic National Convention was about to meet. “Van Buren stock
is rising,” came the answer. On May 31 the correspondent sent another
brief mention of
MORSE’S TELEGRAPH.--This wonderful invention or discovery of a
new means of transmitting intelligence, is in full and perfectly
successful operation. Mr. Morse is the magician at the end of the
line, and an assistant who does not spell with perfect correctness
officiates.
There have arrived numerous telegraphic dispatches since the
meeting of the Convention at Baltimore at nine o’clock this
morning. By one we are informed of the nomination of Mr. George M.
Dallas, of Philadelphia, for Vice-President.
All the New York newspapers, the _Herald_ leading, shortly had a
column of telegraphic news, and from that in the _Evening Post_ we can
trace the steady extension of the wires. In the early spring of 1846
communication was opened between New York and Philadelphia. When war
was declared, April 24, the line to Washington was incomplete, not
having been finished between Baltimore and Philadelphia, but the gap
was soon closed. The fastest carriage of news between the capital and
New York, 220 miles, had been that of Harrison’s inaugural message,
weighty with its Roman consuls and Greek generals, in eleven hours;
now eleven minutes sufficed. By the middle of September, when the line
to Buffalo was complete, the country had 1,200 miles of telegraph,
reaching above Boston towards Portland, to Washington on the south, and
to Harrisburg on the west.
During 1847 the expansion of the telegraphic system amazed all who
did not stop to think how much simpler and cheaper the installation
of a line was than the building of a road. By March it had reached
Pittsburgh on the west, and by September, Petersburg on the south.
The next month saw it in Cincinnati and Louisville, and that fall the
_Evening Post_ printed telegraph news of a Cincinnati flood which made
5,000 homeless. In its New Year’s message the journal congratulated its
readers upon such progress that “the moment a dispatch arrives at New
Orleans from our armies in Mexico its contents are known on the borders
of the northern lakes.” The next year Florida alone of the States east
of the Mississippi was untouched by it. When the President’s message
opening Congress in December, 1848, was transmitted to St. Louis, the
_Evening Post_ remarked that “the idea of a document filling twelve
entire pages of the Washington _Union_ appearing in a city nearly one
thousand miles from Washington, twenty-four hours after its delivery,
is almost beyond belief.” Christopher Pearse Cranch contributed a poem
to the _Post_ upon the marvel:
The world of the Past was an infant;
It knew not the speech of today,
When giants sit talking from mountain to sea,
And the cities are wizards, who say:
The kingdom of magic is ours;
We touch a small clicking machine,
And the lands of the East hear the lands of the West
With never a bar between.
Ten years after the opening of the first American telegraph line Bryant
made some caustic remarks in the _Evening Post_ upon “The Slow-Coach
System in Europe.” For many months, it transpired, the Allies in the
Crimean War had possessed a continuous telegraph line from London to
the battle front. It had been demonstrated that dispatches sufficient
to fill two columns of the London _Times_ might be sent over it in two
hours; yet the French and British publics had been obliged to wait two
weeks for full details of the fall of Sebastopol, simply because the
Allied authorities did not organize a competent telegraphic staff.
IV
In this decade of rapid changes, 1840–1850, Bryant began to reap the
fruits of his courage, persistency, tact, and industry. The hostility
of the mercantile community had lessened as the Bank question receded
and the correctness of the _Post’s_ warnings against inflation
and speculation was proved by the great panic. On March 30, 1840,
Bryant editorially rejoiced that “the prejudices against it, with
which its enemies had labored so vehemently to poison the minds of
men of business, have been gradually overcome.” The pressure of
advertisements forced the enlargement of the sheet in this year. The
weekly edition which it began issuing at New Year’s, 1842, was the only
Democratic weekly in New York, and at $2 a year rapidly obtained an
extensive circulation. In competition with sixpenny evening papers like
the _Journal of Commerce_ and penny papers like the _Daily News_, the
_Post_ held its own. It took its share in all the business enterprises
of the press, as when in 1849–50, at the height of the gold fever, it
published a special “_Evening Post_ for California, Oregon, and the
Sandwich Islands” just before every important sailing for the Pacific.
Bryant’s sagacity kept the expenses low, and his ability kept the
editorial page easily the best, save for Greeley’s, in the city.
It was a reflection of the new _Evening Post_ prosperity when Bryant
wrote his brother early in 1843: “Congratulate me! There is a
probability of my becoming a landholder in New York! I have made a
bargain for about forty acres of solid earth at Hempstead Harbor, on
the north shore of Long Island.” He referred to the Roslyn homestead
at which thereafter he was to spend so much of his time. Between 1839
and 1840 the gross earnings of the journal rose from $28,355.29 to
$44,194.93, and they never thereafter dropped to the danger point. In
1850 it was calculated that for the preceding ten years the average
annual gross receipts had been $37,360, and that the average annual
dividends had been $9,776.44. Of this Bryant’s share until 1848 was
one-half, and thereafter two-fifths, so that he enjoyed an ample
income; while towards the end of the decade the profits of the job
printing office were a tidy sum.
Nor was there so much drudgery in the office as when he had first
returned in 1836. Parke Godwin draws an interesting picture of the
editor’s life at this period. He liked to take a week of fine summer
weather from the office and spend it in excursions to the Palisades,
the Delaware Water Gap, the Catskills, or the Berkshires, sometimes
alone, sometimes with another good walker. Bryant’s appreciative
descriptions of these scenes did much to raise the public esteem of
them. At the office there were many entertaining visitors. Cooper
always called when he was in town, and the contrast between the
novelist and the poet was striking: “Cooper, burly, brusque, and
boisterous, like a bluff sailor, always bringing a breeze of quarrel
with him; Mr. Bryant, shy, modest, and delicate as a woman--they seemed
little fitted for friendship.” Yet warm friends they were. John L.
Stephens, who had won a reputation by his travels in Arabia, Nubia,
and Central America, and whose books were in considerable vogue,
frequently came, “a small, sharp, nervous man,” and talked of his
adventures. A more magnetic personality was that of Audubon, whose
tall, athletic figure, Indian-bronzed face, bright eyes, eagle nose,
and long white hair attracted the eyes of every worker. He, too, loved
to tell of his exploits in the wilds, and his experiences in the salons
of Europe. Bancroft, who liked Bryant’s Jacksonian zeal as much as he
did his poetry, and William Gilmore Simms, author of “The Yemassee,”
occasionally paid a visit, while Godwin believed he remembered seeing
Edgar Allan Poe “once or twice, to utter nothing, but to look his
reverence out of wonderful lustrous eyes.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
NEW YORK BECOMES A METROPOLIS; CENTRAL PARK
Ten years before the Civil War, New York city had 515,000 people,
the population having risen by more than 200,000 in the forties. The
northward march of buildings had passed Twenty-third Street, and
the extreme northern boundary could now be placed at Thirty-fourth,
though there were many empty districts south of that line. Madison
Square had just been laid out. The nineteenth and twentieth wards
were added within a twelvemonth. Broadway was now more than four
miles long from the Battery to the open country, and along its course
as far as Bleecker Street old residences were being ripped apart in
clouds of dust to make way for stores. The year 1850 was that in
which the time-worn City Hotel disappeared, and in which the Astor
Place Opera House was remodeled for business uses. Canal Street was
extended, and Dey Street widened. Almost before men realized it the
old transportation facilities had become inadequate, and in 1852–3
the Third Avenue and Sixth Avenue horse railways began to carry
passengers. With the whole lower part of town engrossed by trade, with
more well-to-do New Yorkers fleeing northward year by year for light
and air, the city in 1852 undertook the grading of Fifth Avenue from
Thirty-fourth Street to Forty-fifth. The New York which thrilled to
Jenny Lind’s singing and turned out a quarter of a million people to
watch the military procession marking President Taylor’s funeral, was a
New York that had suddenly bloomed into a metropolis.
In this thriving city, larger than Buffalo to-day, there was not a
single open-air recreation ground worthy of the name. Dickens had
remarked in 1842 that New York’s summer climate was such that it would
throw a man into a fever merely to think what the streets would be but
for the daily breezes from the bay. It was a smoky city--Bryant had
written in the _Evening Post_ of 1832 a striking description of its
unwonted brightness when the cholera stopped nearly all industry--and
it was ill-cleaned. The city directories, indeed, listed nineteen
parks. But a number, as Five Points Park, Duane Park, and Abingdon
Square, were merely places where the street intersections were a
little wider than usual. Others, like Hudson Square and Gramercy Park,
were private property, and still others, like the Bowling Green, were
padlocked. The whole park area was only about one hundred and seventy
acres, and the grounds open to the public did not exceed one hundred
acres; while the largest single park, the Battery, contained only
twenty-one.
The first proposal for a large uptown park was made by Bryant in the
_Evening Post_, and that journal was the sturdiest of the fighters
for what eventually became Central Park. It was a bold proposal, for
which public sentiment could only slowly be aroused. In Edward H.
Hall’s scholarly history of Central Park, published by the American
Scenic and Historic Preservation Society in 1911, the plan is said
to have originated with Andrew J. Downing, editor of the monthly
_Horticulturist_, in a letter contributed to that magazine in 1849.
Charles H. Haswell, in his “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” also
gives Downing the credit, saying that he merits a statue from the city.
But the real originator was the poet-editor. In 1836, Parke Godwin,
taking frequent rambles with him, found him emphatically expressing
the opinion that the city should reserve as a park the finest area of
woodland remaining there, since in a few years it would be too late.
Five full years before Downing’s letter, on a hot July day in 1844,
Bryant made a walking trip over the middle of Manhattan to examine
the adaptability of a certain large tract for park purposes. Upon his
return, he wrote for the issue of July 3, 1844, his proposal, heading
it “A New Park.”