attempted one highly interesting service; he tried, with temporary
success, to obtain the French critic Sainte-Beuve as a literary
correspondent. He was in Europe from the last days of 1858 until the
late spring of 1860. In his unpublished journal for Jan. 24, 1860, when
he was staying in Paris, he records that he went at one o’clock to
see Sainte-Beuve “and to conclude an agreement partially negotiated”
on behalf of the newspaper. The great Frenchman, fifty-six years old,
was at the height of his fame, having just been made commander of the
Legion of Honor. If the rate of pay he was willing to consider from
the _Evening Post_ seems small, we must remember that he was busy with
his “Causeries du Lundi” for the _Moniteur_, and that he probably
thought he could re-use this material for the American journal. Bigelow
offered him 125 francs, or about $25, for each letter, stipulating
that Sainte-Beuve should pay the translator, who, Bigelow thought,
ought to accept $5. Sainte-Beuve had already written and mailed his
first letter, and he made no immediate demur to these terms. Next day,
however, he wrote that his inquiries had convinced him that no good
translator would do the work for less than $10, and that he could
not go on. Bigelow at once increased his offer to $30 a letter, of
which $20 was to go to Sainte-Beuve, but the critic persisted in his
refusal. The compensation, he said, was adequate, but he was too old
for such a burden as this would impose. Sainte-Beuve’s letter, filling
two and a half columns with its 5,500 words, had meanwhile appeared in
the _Evening Post_, under the heading “Literary Matters in France.” The
greater part was devoted to a beautifully written and fine critical
disquisition upon the recently published correspondence of Béranger,
but prefixed to this were several paragraphs of general comment.
“French literature for some years past has produced nothing very new or
brilliant,” he wrote, “especially in the department of poetry.... But
in the department of history, political and literary, and in that of
erudition, good books and meritorious monographs have been written.”
Political events since 1848, he explained, had thrown many men into a
retirement favorable to literary pursuits--Villemain, Guizot, Remusat,
and Victor Cousin. In closing he alluded to the loss the Institut
de France had suffered in Macaulay, and added: “The death of the
illustrious Prescott had already deprived the same learned body of a
corresponding member. It is thought that America will also provide the
member to be named as Prescott’s successor (_primo avulso non deficit
alter_), and we are informed that some influential members of that
academy have thought of Mr. Motley, whose admirable historical work has
been recently introduced here by M. Guizot.”
The article was not signed, and was not appreciated by a public which
cared nothing about Béranger. Bryant grasped this general indifference.
He wrote Bigelow that the letter was too long, and that Americans were
not sufficiently familiar with French authors to have that craving for
anecdotes of their lives, conversation, and correspondence which they
had in the case of the distinguished names of English literature. He
always distrusted an article his wife would not read, he said, and she
would not read this. Probably short letters of not more than 2,000
words, sent not oftener than monthly, and dealing with topics of
wide interest, would--especially if signed by Sainte-Beuve--have been
highly successful; it was unfortunate that Bigelow, when Sainte-Beuve
indicated his reluctance to accept the heavy burden of long essays,
did not suggest this solution. But the Civil War was at hand, and the
columns of the paper were soon crowded to bursting.
Bigelow was appointed consul at Paris by President Lincoln soon after
leaving the _Evening Post_, and in 1864 became Minister to France.
From Paris during the war he wrote assiduously to Bryant, and was able
to supply much information of editorial value regarding the French
and British attitude toward the North. After returning to the United
States, until Bryant’s death, he not infrequently contributed to the
editorial page, and twice refused an active connection with it. In 1880
he wrote Parke Godwin, then editor, making inquiries regarding the
purchase of a share in the paper, with a view to becoming its head, but
did not push them. His loss at a time of national crisis was keenly
felt by the _Evening Post_, but his place was ably supplied by Parke
Godwin and a newcomer, Charles Nordhoff.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HEATED POLITICS BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
The history of the _Evening Post_ for the decade following the
Compromise of 1850 is summarized in the names of its greater political
correspondents. Thomas Hart Benton, besides contributing much of his
“Thirty Years’ View,” sent Bryant occasional memoranda for editorial
use. Gideon Welles began contributing in 1848, when he was a bureau
chief in the Navy Department, and Salmon P. Chase sent occasional
unsigned contributions, and more frequent comments or suggestions.
Both Benton and Welles had been as ardent Jacksonian Democrats as
Bryant, and both were free-soilers; while Welles and Chase became
founders of the Republican Party in Connecticut and Ohio respectively.
The _Evening Post_, in other words, remained Democratic till early in
Pierce’s administration it found that Democracy was simply dancing to
the pipings of the slavery nabobs, when it gave all its support to
the rising Republican movement. It is evidence of its zeal in the new
cause that Sumner, more an abolitionist than a free-soiler, became an
ardent admirer of the paper. He wrote Bigelow expressing his “sincere
delight” in it, saying that its political arguments “fascinate as well
as convince.” It was upon his recommendation that William S. Thayer,
a brilliant young Harvard man, was employed, and became in the years
1856–60 the Washington correspondent whom the anti-slavery statesmen
liked and trusted most.
In the sultry, ominous decade before the Civil War storm, there is a
long list of events upon which the opinions of any great journal are
of interest. What did the _Evening Post_ think in 1850 of Webster’s
Seventh of March speech? How in 1852 did it regard the dismal contest
between Pierce and Winfield Scott? What estimate did it place upon
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”? What in 1856 did it say of Brooks’s assault upon
Sumner, and of the fierce Buchanan-Fremont contest; and what the next
year of the Dred Scott decision? How did Bryant express himself upon
the crimes and martyrdom of “Osawatomie” Brown? Readers of an old file
of newspapers for those tense years have a sense of sitting at a drama,
waiting the approach of a catastrophe which they perfectly foresee, but
which the players hope to the last will be avoided.
Bryant in the campaign of 1848 had bolted from the regular Democratic
ticket along with the other “Barnburners” of New York. The nickname
referred to the Dutchman who burned his barn to exterminate the rats,
for they were accused of trying to destroy the party to get rid of
slavery in the territories. It was impossible for the _Evening Post_
to support the regulars’ nominee, Lewis Cass, who had expressed
pro-slavery views, or the Whig nominee, Gen. Zachary Taylor, who
owned four hundred slaves. It predicted in June that Taylor would be
elected by an enormous majority, and bitterly taunted Polk and the
other pro-slavery Democrats because their Texan policy had given the
Whigs, headed by the hero of Buena Vista, the Presidency. Its attitude
was hostile to both the parties, but particularly to that which had
betrayed the ideals of Jackson and Benton. The Barnburners nominated
their candidate for the Presidency, Van Buren, at an enthusiastic
August convention on the shores of Lake Erie, in Buffalo. The leaders
were Bryant, Chase, Charles Francis Adams, Joshua R. Giddings, Preston
King--an intimate friend of Bigelow’s--and David Dudley Field. All
these men knew they had no chance of victory, and Bryant frankly said
as much. But the trumpet-blast of the convention, “We inscribe on our
banner Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” was echoed
and reëchoed by the _Evening Post_ till the day of election. The final
appeal, on the day that 300,000 voters cast their ballots for Van
Buren, shows how militant its position was:
Shall the great republic of the western hemisphere, the greatest
which has yet blessed the anxious hope of nations, to which
the eyes of millions, now engaged in a desperate struggle for
emancipation in Europe, turn as their only encouragement and
solace, the republic which was founded by Washington and nourished
into vigor by Jefferson and Jackson--shall this republic make
itself a byword and a reproach wherever its name is heard? Shall
the United States no longer be known as the home of the free and
the asylum of the oppressed, but as the hope of the slave and the
oppressor of the poor?
All good men have an interest in answering these questions.
But above all others, the laboring man has a deeper interest.
The greatest disgrace inflicted upon labor is inflicted by
the institution of slavery. Those who support it--we mean the
negro-owners, or the negro-drivers of the South--openly declare
that he who works with his hands is on the level with the slave.
They cannot think otherwise, so long as they are educated under
the influence of this dreadful injustice. It perverts all the
true relations of society, and corrupts every humane and generous
sentiment.
Welles published in the _Evening Post_ after the election an unsigned
article denouncing the tyranny of party allegiance, but Bryant’s
journal did not yet forsake Democracy. As a Democratic organ still it
boasted that it published the party’s widest-circulated weekly paper.
As a Democratic organ it remarked of Polk, when he went out of office
in 1849, that “such Presidents as he are only accidents, and two such
accidents are not at all likely to be visited upon a single miserable
generation”--an assertion which Pierce and Buchanan soon confuted.
Bennett’s _Herald_, with its instinct for the winning side, having
climbed on the Taylor bandwagon, the _Evening Post_ was for some years
the only Democratic newspaper in this great Democratic city.
As a free-soil Democratic organ it opposed the Compromise of 1850,
finding a peculiar relish in attacking any proposal originated by
Clay, and supported by the equally distasteful Whig and protectionist,
Webster. Like Chase and Welles, Bryant and Bigelow saw the plain
objections to any compromise. The crisis had been precipitated by the
demand for the admission of California, and the question was whether
this admission should be purchased by large concessions to the South,
or--as the _Evening Post_ maintained--demanded as a right. The chief
proposals of Clay were that California should be admitted as free
territory, that Territorial Governments be erected in the rest of the
Mexican cession without any restriction upon slavery, that the slave
trade be prohibited in the District of Columbia, and that a new and
atrociously-framed law for the return of fugitive slaves be enacted.
Clay’s action was courageous. Bryant wrote that he could not refuse
admiration for his boldness in grappling thus frankly with a subject so
full of difficulties, and that his statesmanlike directness contrasted
refreshingly with the timidity of the Administration. But he called
the Compromise a blanket poultice, to heal five wounds at once, when
the common sense method was to dress each sore separately; and he
opposed any effort to coax the free States into abandonment of a single
principle. Besides Bryant’s and Bigelow’s editorials, the _Evening
Post_ published a 5,000 word argument by William Jay, son of John
Jay, and called upon its readers to sign petitions. It specifically
objected to the provision that Utah and New Mexico should be organized
without any restriction against slavery, for this meant an abandonment
of the Wilmot Proviso, which it had always supported. Some Northern
advocates of the Compromise argued that the region was not adapted to
plantations and that slavery would not be transferred thither anyway;
but this view the _Post_ derided, quoting Southern members of Congress
to the contrary. It was equally opposed to the Fugitive Slave Act. When
Calhoun argued that the South was being “suffocated,” it showed that
the occupied land in the slave States was about 280 million acres, and
the unoccupied land about 395 million, while the whole area of the free
States was only about 291 million acres.
Webster’s Seventh of March speech in behalf of the Compromise aroused
savage indignation among his Boston admirers, but it did not surprise
the _Evening Post_. The Washington correspondent wrote of the stir of
satisfaction among the listening Southern Senators, of the gleam of
exultation that played over the quizzical visage of Foote of Virginia.
But Bryant had expected Webster’s volte-face:
It was as natural to suppose that he would do this, as that he
would abandon, in the manner he has done, the doctrines of free
trade, once maintained by him in their fullest extent, and, taking
the money of the Eastern mill-owners, enrol himself as the champion
of protection for the rest of his life....
Mr. Webster stands before the public as a man who has deserted the
cause which he lately defended, deserted it under circumstances
which force upon him the imputation of a sordid motive, deserted
it when his apostasy was desired by the Administration, and
immediately after an office had been conferred upon his son, to say
nothing of what has been done by the Administration for his other
relatives. It is but little more than two years since he declared
himself the firmest of friends to the Wilmot Proviso, professing
himself its original and invariable champion, and claiming its
principles as Whig doctrine.
Such aspersions upon Webster’s motives were as unfair as Whittier’s
bitter lament and denunciation in the poem “Ichabod,” but the same
righteous anger dictated both. As a hoax, the _Evening Post_ published
in its issue of May 21 glaring headlines, proclaiming: “GREAT MEETING
IN BOSTON!!--Tremendous Excitement--DANIEL WEBSTER--Out in Favor
of--Applying the Proviso to All the Territories!!--No Compromise in
Massachusetts!!!” The news story below was an account from _Niles’s
Register_ of Dec. 11, 1819, when the Missouri Compromise was pending,
of Webster’s speech at an anti-slavery meeting in Boston, in which he
asserted that it was the constitutional duty of Congress to prohibit
slavery in all territory not included in the thirteen original States.
It strikingly exhibited the orator’s inconsistency. The pro-slavery
_Commercial_ was angry, declaring that many New Yorkers had not noted
the date 1819 and had been deceived. Clay’s measures, following the
death of President Taylor, were passed by Congress, but to the end the
_Evening Post_ protested that no permanent compromise was possible. The
issue was whether a slave-holding minority should have a share of the
new territories equal to that of the anti-slavery majority. The answer
was yes or no, for there could be no middle ground. “If an association
is composed of twenty members and five insist upon having an equal
voice in its affairs with the other fifteen, what compromise can there
be? You must either grant what they ask or deny it.”
It was not until the ambitious Douglas, in 1854, introduced the
Kansas-Nebraska bill, and Pierce brought his Administration behind the
measure, that the _Evening Post_ found it impossible to continue its
connection with the Democratic Party. The horror with which Bryant
and Bigelow looked upon this enactment is easily understood. They had
expected the great valley of the Platte as a matter of course to be
settled as free soil, since it lay north of the Missouri Compromise
line, 36′ 30″. It had been taken for granted, when proposals had been
made to erect territories there, that slavery had once for all been
excluded. But now Douglas, maintaining that the people in such regions
should exercise their own choice for or against slavery, proposed to
nullify the Missouri Compromise, and to create two territories, in
which there should be no restrictions as to slavery, and in which
the people should be perfectly free to regulate their “domestic
institutions” as they saw fit. It was a body-blow to the North.
Franklin Pierce, a handsome, dashing young man of whose views no one
knew very much, had been supported by the _Evening Post_ in 1852,
against Winfield Scott. James Ford Rhodes remarks that “The argument of
the _Post_, that the Democratic candidate and platform were really more
favorable to liberty than the Whig, was somewhat strained; the editor
failed to look the situation squarely in the face.” He was, however,
acting in perfect harmony with the prominent New York Democrats who
had, four years previously, bolted the regular nomination. Van Buren
and his son, Preston King, Benton, Cambreleng, and most of the
paper’s other free-soil friends were willing to take a chance upon
Pierce. But he had not been in office four months before the _Evening
Post_ suspected his pro-slavery tendencies, and began to eye him with
disfavor and alarm. Its utterances moved the Washington _Union_ on July
5, 1853, and the Richmond _Enquirer_ nine days later, to read it out of
the Democratic party. “The _Evening Post_ and the Buffalo _Republic_
belong to that class of hangers-on to the Democratic party who sail
under Democratic colors, but who are in reality the worst enemies of
the party. They are abolitionists in fact,” said the first-named sheet.
The _Enquirer_ wanted such newspapers to begone. “It is time that
they should be spurned with indignation and scorn as the instruments
and echoes of the worst factions of the day.” Now, in February, 1854,
when Pierce made it clear that he was supporting Douglas’s plan
for repudiating the Missouri Compromise, the _Evening Post_ turned
short and became the enemy of Democracy. An occasional Washington
correspondent wrote with scorn of the renegade son of New Hampshire:
It was reception day. We walked in unheralded, and soon found
ourselves in the reception room, where Mr. Pierce was talking with
a bevy of ladies. Immediately on seeing us he approached, received
us very politely, and introduced us to Mrs. Pierce. The President
impressed me better than I had expected, and better than most of
his pictures. He had whitened out to the true complexion of a
parlor knight--pale and soft looking. Though not what I should
call elegant, his manners are easy and agreeable. He is more meek
in appearance than he is usually represented, as might be expected
of a man who has submitted to be drawn into the position of tail
to Senator Douglas’s kite.... The President evidently feels the
Presidency thrilling every nerve and coursing every vein. He is so
delighted with it that he is palpably falling into the delusion
of supposing himself a possible successor to himself! Could fond
self-conceit go further? Setting aside the inherent impossibility
of the thing, on account of the inevitable discoveries which his
elevation has involved; his mad and wicked adhesion to the Nebraska
perfidy will settle his chances (Feb. 13).
The columns of the paper show that a great popular uprising was
occurring in New York. It had recently contrasted the crowded,
applauding houses, witnessing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” at the Chatham
Street Theater, with the mob gathered at the Chatham Street Chapel
in 1834 to attack negroes and abolitionists. In January, 1854, a
great mass-meeting was held at the Tabernacle to protest against the
Douglas bill. Bryant pointed out that it was composed of merchants,
bankers, and professional men who had hitherto stubbornly opposed the
abolitionist movement and had supported the Compromise of 1850. He
noted also that the 80,000 Germans of the city were unanimous, like
most other immigrant groups, for keeping the West open to free labor.
The _Staats Zeitung_ had supported Lewis Cass in 1848, the Compromise
in 1850, and Pierce in 1852, yet now it was decidedly against the
Pierce Administration, as were the three other German dailies.
Early on a March morning the Kansas-Nebraska Bill passed the Senate,
amid the boom of cannon fired by Southern enthusiasts. When Chase
walked down the Capitol steps he said to Sumner: “They celebrate a
present victory, but the echoes they awake shall never rest until
slavery itself shall die.” From that moment the _Evening Post_ treated
slavery as a serpent upon which the nation must set its heel, and
Democracy as its ally:
The President has taken a course by which the greater part of
this dishonor is concentrated upon the Democratic Party. Upon
him and his Administration, and upon all the northern friends
of the Nebraska Bill in Congress, and upon the Democratic Party
who gave the present executive his power of mischief, the people
will visit this great political sin of the day.... The result is
inevitable; Seward is in the ascendancy in this State and the North
generally; the Democratic Party has lost its moral strength in
the free States; it is stripped of the respect of the people by
the misconduct of those who claim to be its leaders, and whatever
boast we may make of our excellent maxims of legislation and policy
in regard to other questions, the deed of yesterday puts us in a
minority for years to come....
The admission of slavery into Nebraska is the preparation for yet
other measures having in view the aggrandizement of the slave
power--the wresting of Cuba from Spain to make several additional
slave States; the creation of yet other slave States, in the
territory acquired from Mexico, and the renewal of the African
slave trade. These things are contemplated; the Southern journals
already speak of them as familiarly and flippantly as they do of an
ordinary appropriation bill, and who shall say they are not already
at our door?
The bitterness and militancy of the _Evening Post_ thenceforth
increased day by day. The recapture of the slave Burns in Boston during
the summer of 1854, the slave whom Thomas Wentworth Higginson tried
at the head of a mob to rescue, and who was marched to the wharf by
platoons of soldiers and police through a crowd of fifty thousand
hissing people, moved the _Evening Post_ to call the Fugitive Slave law
“the most ruffianly act ever authorized by a deliberative assembly.”
Month after month it exhorted the North to send emigrants to Kansas and
Nebraska to uphold the free-soil cause. It invited Southerners to stay
at their own watering-places in summer. It taunted the South with its
lack of literature and culture, declaring that the only Southern book
yet written which would not perish was Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View,”
a free-soiler’s work. In the State election of 1855 it supported the
Republican ticket, and when “Prince” John Van Buren attacked it for
doing so, it assailed him in turn as the “degenerate son” of a great
father. As 1855 closed with fresh news every day of bloodshed in the
territories, the paper cried its encouragement to those who fought for
free soil:
Every liberal sentiment--the love of freedom, the hatred of
oppression, the detestation of fraud, the abhorrence of wrong
cloaked under the guise of law--every feeling of the human heart
which does not counsel cowardly submission and the purchase of
present safety as the price of future evils, takes part with the
residents of Kansas. They may commit imprudent acts, they may be
rash ... but their cause is a great and righteous cause, and we
must stand by it to the last.
It was a foregone conclusion at the beginning of 1856 that the _Evening
Post_ would lend energetic assistance to the half-organized Republican
party. During the previous summer and autumn it had devoted several
editorials to the disintegration of the Whig party in both sections,
and to that of the Democratic party at the North. The time had come,
it said, when the old party names meant nothing upon the principal
issues, and it welcomed the formation of a new party of definite
tenets. Bigelow, more impetuous than Bryant, made the _Evening Post_ an
energetic champion of Fremont more than a month before the Republicans
nominated him for the Presidency. Even the _Tribune_ was held back
until later by the doubts of Greeley’s lieutenant, Pike, so that the
_Post_ was one of the first powerful Northern sheets for him.
To Bigelow it was that Nathaniel P. Banks, just elected Speaker of
the House and the foremost advocate of Fremont, addressed himself
when he came to New York city in February, 1856. Banks sensibly held
that some one was needed to typify free-soil principles, and that the
people would never join a party en masse until a man stood at the head
of it; while he believed that Fremont was the ideal chieftain. It
happened that Fremont was then at the Metropolitan Hotel, on the site
of Niblo’s Garden, and Banks took Bigelow to call. The sub-editor was
favorably impressed. He gathered a conference of free-soil leaders at
his home, including the venerable Frank P. Blair, well remembered as a
member of Jackson’s kitchen cabinet; Samuel J. Tilden; Edwin P. Morgan,
later Governor and Senator; and Edward Miller. All save Tilden favored
Fremont, and Blair, at Bigelow’s instance, undertook to obtain Senator
Benton’s endorsement of his son-in-law. As early as April 10, 1856, the
_Evening Post’s_ editorials showed a marked leaning toward him, and on
May 18 (he was nominated on June 19) it began publishing his biography.
Throughout that campaign the _Evening Post_, the _Tribune_, _Times_,
_Courier_, and the German press of the city battled against the
“Buchaneers,” represented by the _Journal of Commerce_, _Commercial_,
_Express_, and _Daily News_. Bigelow offered two prizes of $100 each
for the best campaign songs in English and German, and the _Post_ made
special low subscription rates. When Fremont was defeated that fall,
it consoled itself not only by the startling strength the Republicans
displayed, polling 1,341,264 votes, against 1,838,169 for Buchanan, but
by the stinging defeat which Pierce, Cass, and Douglas, so subservient
to the South, saw their friends suffer in New Hampshire, Michigan, and
Illinois. Bryant exulted: