party, in opposition to the spread of slavery--that scheme which
is the scandal of the country and the age. In those States
of the Union which have now given such large majorities for
Fremont, public opinion, which till lately has been shuffling
and undecided in regard to the slavery question, is now clear,
fixed, and resolute. If we look back to 1848, when we conducted
a Presidential election on this very ground of opposition to the
spread of slavery, we shall see that we have made immense strides
towards the ascendancy which, if there be any grounds to hope for
the perpetuity of free institutions, is yet to be ours. We were
then comparatively weak, we are now strong; we then counted our
thousands, we now count our millions; we could then point to our
respectable minorities in a few States, we now point to State after
State.... The cause is not going back--it is going rapidly forward;
the free-soil party of 1848 is the nucleus of the Republican party
of 1856; but with what accessions of numbers, of moral power, of
influence, not merely in public assemblies, but at the domestic
fireside!
The _Evening Post_ was now as firmly a “black Republican” organ as
the _Tribune_, and far more radical in tone than Henry J. Raymond’s
_Times_. When in May, 1856, Brooks of South Carolina beat Sumner
into insensibility at his desk in the Senate Chamber, it saw in the
episode no mere flash of Southern hotheadedness, but evidence of a deep
and consistent menace. It was a “base assault,” a bit of “cowardly
brutality.” “Are we, too, slaves--slaves for life, a target for their
brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?” But
Bryant looked below the symptom to its cause:
Violence reigns in the streets of Washington ... violence has now
found its way into the Senate chamber. Violence lies in wait on all
the navigable rivers and all the railways of Missouri, to obstruct
those who pass from the free States into Kansas. Violence overhangs
the frontiers of that territory like a storm-cloud charged with
hail and lightning. Violence has carried election after election
in that territory.... In short, violence is the order of the day;
the North is to be pushed to the wall by it, and this plot will
succeed if the people of the free States are as apathetic as the
slaveholders are insolent.
Already the _Evening Post_ had fitful glimpses of the furnace into
which this violence was leading. Under the heading, “A Short Method
with Disunionists,” Bryant (Sept. 26, 1855) had said that secession
must be throttled as Jackson throttled it in South Carolina. The
newspaper already regarded slavery as an evil to be stamped out
altogether, though it did not quite say so. Gov. Wise of Virginia
deplored the failure to open up California as a slave market.
Bryant explained this by pointing out that the natural increase of
Virginia’s black population exceeded 23,000 souls a year, which at
$1,000 each came to more than $23,000,000. The annual production of
wheat in Virginia had by the last census been worth only $11,000,000.
Since the extension of the slave market to Texas had doubled the
price of negroes, it was no wonder that Virginia wished it pushed
to the Pacific. “Such a state of things may be very proper if the
duty and destiny of this great country are to breed slaves and hunt
runaway human cattle. But how incompatible with a genuine Christian
civilization! How it moves the pride and curls the lip of European
despotism! How it strikes down the power and crushes the hopes of the
struggling friends of freedom all over the world!”
The excitement produced by the Dred Scott decision in March, 1857,
is evinced by the fact that upon eight successive days the _Evening
Post_ devoted a leading or an important editorial to Chief Justice
Taney’s opinion. It was not unexpected: the paper had uttered angry
words in 1855 over a decision by a lower court foreshadowing it.
But, opening all Territories North and South to slavery, it seemed
intolerable. Bryant, on the point of sailing for Europe, took the view
that in fact it was so intolerable the American people would never
accept its practical implications. He believed the opinion of the
court so superficial and shallow that it would be respected nowhere,
and compared Chief Justice Taney’s legal knowledge disparagingly with
that shown by a colored keeper of an oyster cellar in Baltimore who had
corrected some of his historical misinformation. Northerners regarded
the situation with the greater alarm because Buchanan’s Administration,
just entering office, was entirely committed to the slavery party,
the President accepting Southern Cabinet members like Howell Cobb of
Georgia and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi as his chief advisers. Bryant
hinted his suspicion of a treasonable conspiracy between Chief Justice
Taney and these Southern leaders. A new eloquence was animating the
words in which he wrote of slavery:
Hereafter, if this decision shall stand for law, slavery, instead
of being what the people of the slave States have hitherto called
it, their peculiar institution, is a Federal institution, the
common patrimony and shame of all the States, those which flaunt
the title of free, as well as those which accept the stigma of
being the Land of Bondage; hereafter, wherever our jurisdiction
extends, it carries with it the chain and the scourge--wherever our
flag floats, it is the flag of slavery. If so, that flag should
have the light of the stars and the streaks of running red erased
from it; it should be dyed black, and its device should be the whip
and the fetter.
Are we to accept, without question, these new readings of the
Constitution--to sit down contentedly under this disgrace--to admit
that the Constitution was never before rightly understood, even
by those who framed it--to consent that hereafter it shall be the
slaveholders’ instead of the freemen’s Constitution? Never! Never!
We hold that the provisions of the Constitution, so far as they
regard slavery, are now just what they were when it was framed,
and that no trick of interpretation can change them. The people of
the free States will insist on the old impartial construction of
the Constitution, adopted in calmer times--the construction given
it by Washington and his contemporaries, instead of that invented
by modern politicians in Congress and adopted by modern politicians
on the bench.
But in the territory of Kansas the decision for freedom was already
being made by force of arms. Bryant and Bigelow had never ceased
urging the dispatch of Northern settlers and breech-loading rifles to
the Western plains. The poet had written his brother (Feb. 15, 1856)
that the city was alive with the excitement of the Kansas news, and
subscribing liberally to the Emigrants’ Aid Society. “The companies
of emigrants will be sent forward as soon as the rivers and lakes are
opened--in March, if possible--and by the first of May there will be
several thousand more free-state settlers in Kansas than there now are.
Of course they will go well armed.” After election day that fall he had
proposed that the Republican campaign organization be kept functioning
to speed the flow of settlers. The _Tribune_ was simultaneously
declaring that “The duty of the people of the free States is to send
more true men, more Sharpe’s rifles, and more howitzers to Kansas.”
Henry Ward Beecher, attending a meeting at which a deacon asked arms
for seventy-nine men, declared that a Sharpe’s rifle was a greater
moral agency than the Bible, and that Plymouth Church would furnish
half the guns required; whence the familiar nickname, “Beecher’s
Bibles.” Even Henry J. Raymond and the _Times_, in spite of their
policy of not hurting Southern sensibilities, saw that the issue on the
Platte must be fought out.
A letter from Osawatomie, Kansas, gave a vivid picture in the _Evening
Post_ of July 14, 1856, of the perils of the free-soil settlement
there, and asked for funds sufficient to keep thirty or forty horsemen
in the field, well mounted and armed with breechloading rifles, Colt’s
revolvers, and sabers. Other pleas were backed by editorials. A month
after the Dred Scott decision a correspondent writing from Leavenworth
told how the North had rallied to meet the crisis. “Emigration to
Kansas and Nebraska has now set in with wonderful vigor, and such force
as none have anticipated. Every train from Boston and New York to St.
Louis is crowded to excess. More boats are running on the Missouri
River than ever before, yet all are crowded. I have been nearly a week
on the river and have slept on the cabin floor every night, with some
hundred of other bed- or rather floor-fellows, being unable to get a
stateroom. It is estimated that 7,000 Kansas emigrants have landed
at Kansas City since the opening of navigation, and thousands more
have gone on to Wyandotte, Quindaro, Leavenworth, etc.... And still
they come. A single party of a thousand persons was expected in St.
Louis last Tuesday.” The later correspondence had an equally confident
note, which was justified when in October the free-soilers swept the
Territorial election.
When the pro-slavery legislators that autumn, faced with the loss of
their control, hastily drew up the Lecompton Constitution, providing
for the establishment and perpetuation of slavery, the _Evening Post_
attacked them angrily. Its fear was that the Buchanan Administration
would induce Congress, which was Democratic in both branches, to
admit Kansas under this illegal instrument. Thayer, its Washington
correspondent, wrote that the Administration leaders were employing
bribery to that end. The protests of the _Evening Post_ day in and day
out contributed to the overwhelming Northern sentiment which made this
fraud impossible.
While the _Herald_, _Journal of Commerce_, and _Express_ were filled
with horror by John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in the closing days
of 1859, the _Evening Post_ pointed to it as a just retribution upon
the South for its own crimes. Douglas believed and said that the raid
was the natural result of the teachings of the Republican party; Bryant
believed it the natural result of that Southern violence which he had
excoriated after Brooks’s assault upon Sumner. His editorials almost
recall John Brown’s own favorite text: “Without the shedding of blood,
there is no remission of sins.” Of course, he condemned the lawlessness
of the act, but he did not believe Brown solely responsible:
Passion does not reason; but if Brown reasoned and desired to
give a public motive to his personal rancors, he probably said to
himself that “the slave drivers had tried to put down freedom in
Kansas by force of arms, and he would try to put down slavery by
the same means.” Thus the bloody instructions which they taught
return to plague the inventors. They gave, for the first time
in the history of the United States, an example of the resort
to arms to carry out political schemes, and, dreadful as the
retaliation is which Brown has initiated, must take their share
of the responsibility. They must remember that they accustomed
men, in their Kansas forays, to the idea of using arms against
their political opponents, that by their crimes and outrages they
drove hundreds to madness, and that the feelings of bitterness and
revenge thus generated have since rankled in the heart. Brown has
made himself an organ of these in a fearfully significant way.
The evident terror many Southerners had of a slave insurrection filled
Bryant with scorn. Buchanan wished to acquire Cuba and northern Mexico,
and Southern newspapers wished Africa opened and new millions of blacks
poured in; slavery was a blessed institution, and we could not have too
much of it! “But while they speak the tocsin sounds, the blacks are
in arms, their houses are in flames, their wives and children driven
into exile or killed, and a furious servile war stretches its horrors
over years. That is the blessed institution you ask us to foster, and
spread, and worship, and for the sake of which you even spout your
impotent threats against the grand edifice of the Union!” Pending the
trial there was much interest in Brown’s carpet-bag. The _Evening Post_
said that its incendiary contents were probably Washington’s will,
emancipating his slaves; his letter of 1786 to Lafayette expressing
hope that slavery would be abolished; Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia,
deploring slavery; his project of 1785 for emancipating the slaves;
and similar documents by Patrick Henry, John Randolph, and Monroe.
Bryant’s utterance when John Brown was hanged recalls that of our
other great men of letters. Emerson spoke of Brown as “that new saint
awaiting his martyrdom”; Thoreau called him “an angel of light”;
Longfellow jotted in his diary, “The date of a new revolution, quite as
much needed as the old one.” Bryant wrote:
... History, forgetting the errors of his judgment in the
contemplation of his unfaltering courage, of his dignified and
manly deportment in the face of death, and of the nobleness of his
aims, will record his name among those of its martyrs and heroes.
Meanwhile, a new figure had arisen in the West. Like most other
New York journals the _Evening Post_ had instantly perceived the
significance of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. When they began
it remarked that Illinois was the theater of the most momentous
contest, whether one considered the eminence of the contestants or the
consequences which might result from it, that had occurred in any State
canvass since Silas Wright’s defeat for Governor in 1846. When they
closed it remarked (Oct. 18): “No man of this generation has grown more
rapidly before the country than Mr. Lincoln in this canvass.”
At first the paper’s reports of the Lincoln-Douglas addresses were
taken from the Chicago press, but it soon had its own correspondent,
Chester P. Dewey, following the debaters. This writer knew Lincoln’s
capacity. “Poor, unfriended, uneducated, a day laborer, he has
distanced all these disadvantages, and in the profession of the law has
risen steadily to a competence, and to the position of an intelligent,
shrewd, and well-balanced man,” ran his characterization. “Familiarly
known as ‘Long Abe,’ he is a popular speaker, and a cautious,
thoughtful politician, capable of taking a high position as a statesman
and legislator.” He described the enthusiasm with which Lincoln’s
supporters at Ottawa carried him from the grounds on their shoulders.
He related how at Jonesboro, in the southern extremity of the State,
where the crowd was overwhelmingly Democratic, Douglas came to the
grounds escorted by a band and a cheering crowd, amid the discharges
of a brass cannon, while Lincoln arrived with only a few friends; how
when Lincoln arose “a faint cheer was elicited, followed by derisive
laughter from the Douglas men”; but how he quite won his audience.
It is interesting to note that this correspondent grasped the full
importance of the Freeport debate, where Lincoln asked Douglas whether
the people of a territory could themselves exclude slavery from it.
To answer “no” meant that Douglas repudiated his doctrine of squatter
sovereignty, and to answer “yes” meant that he alienated the South. On
Sept. 5 the _Evening Post_ had published a long editorial in which it
concluded that Douglas was likely to be the Southern candidate in 1860.
Just two days later its correspondent foretold the effect of Douglas’s
fatal “yes” at Freeport:
It was very evident that Mr. Douglas was cornered by the questions
put to him by Mr. Lincoln. He claimed to be the upholder of the
Dred Scott decision, and also of popular sovereignty. He was asked
to reconcile the two....
When the Freeport speech of Mr. Douglas shall go forth to all the
land, and be read by the men of Georgia and South Carolina, their
eyes will doubtless open. Can they ... abet a man who avows these
revolutionary sentiments and endorses the right to self-government
of the people of a territory?... How would he appear uttering this
treason of popular sovereignty at a South Carolina barbecue?
Lincoln had been anxious to visit New York, and on Feb. 27, 1860,
through the invitation of the Young Men’s Central Republican Union, he
made his great speech at Cooper Institute. Bryant presided. The poet
had met Lincoln nearly thirty years before, when, on his first visit
to Illinois, he had encountered a company of volunteers going forward
to the Black Hawk War, and had been attracted by the racy, original
conversation of the uncouth young captain; but this meeting he had
forgotten. James A. Briggs, who made all the business arrangements for
Lincoln’s speech, later told in the _Evening Post_ (Aug. 16, 1867) some
interesting facts concerning the occasion. It was Briggs who personally
asked Bryant to preside. The fame of the Westerner had, although the
jealous _Times_, a Seward organ, spoke of him as merely “a lawyer who
had some local reputation in Illinois,” impressed every one. In its
two issues preceding the 27th the _Evening Post_ published prominent
announcements of Lincoln’s arrival and of the meeting, and promised
“a powerful assault upon the policy and principles of the pro-slavery
party, and an able vindication of the Republican creed.” The hall was
well filled. According to Briggs, the tickets were twenty-five cents
each, and the receipts, in spite of many free admissions, $367, or just
$17 in excess of the expenses, of which the fee to Lincoln represented
$200. As the _Tribune_ said, since the days of Clay and Webster no man
had spoken to a larger body of the city’s culture and intellect.
Bryant, in his brief introductory speech, said that it was a grateful
office to present such an eminent Western citizen; that “these children
of the West form a living bulwark against the advance of slavery, and
from them is recruited the vanguard of the mighty armies of liberty”
(loud applause); and that he had only to pronounce the name of the
great champion of Republicanism in Illinois, who would have won the
victory two years before but for an unjust apportionment law, to secure
the profoundest attention. The _Evening Post_ reported that at the end
of Lincoln’s speech the audience arose almost to a man, and expressed
its approbation by the most enthusiastic applause, the waving of
handkerchiefs and hats, and repeated cheers. It reproduced the address
in full, saying editorially that when it had such a speech it was
tempted to wish its columns indefinitely elastic, emphasizing Lincoln’s
principal points, and praising highly the logic of the argument, its
mastery of clear and impressive statement, and the originality of the
closing passages. Briggs tells us that Lincoln read this eulogistic
editorial:
After the return of Mr. Lincoln to New York from the East, where
he had made several speeches, he said to me: “I have seen what all
the New York papers said about that thing of mine in the Cooper
Institute, with the exception of the New York _Evening Post_, and
I would like to know what Mr. Bryant thought of it”; and he then
added: “It is worth a visit from Springfield, Illinois, to New York
to make the acquaintance of such a man as William Cullen Bryant.”
At Mr. Lincoln’s request I sent him a copy of the _Evening Post_,
with a notice of his lecture.
Raymond and the _Times_, when the Republican national convention met
in Chicago on May 16, 1860, were ardently for Seward--indeed, Thurlow
Weed and Raymond were Seward’s chief lieutenants there. Greeley,
had he been able to make the nomination himself, would have chosen
Bates of Missouri first, and anybody to beat Seward second. Bryant,
up to the time of the Cooper Union speech, had supported Chase for
the nomination, but he knew that his chances were slight and he now
leaned toward Lincoln--for he also was anxious to see Seward beaten.
The _Evening Post’s_ dislike of Seward dated from 1853, when it had
declared (Nov. 2) that his friends in the Whig Party and a Democratic
faction had formed a corrupt combination to plunder the State treasury
through contracts. Its bitterness against him had steadily increased
during the years of his close association with the political boss,
Thurlow Weed. No one believed that Seward was dishonest, but thousands
thought that Weed’s methods were detestable, and that Seward’s intimacy
with men who schemed for public grants was altogether too close.
References to the connection between “Seward’s chances” and “New
York street railroads” had become common in 1859. Bryant wrote his
associate Bigelow on Dec. 14 that, much as Seward had been hurt by the
misconstruction of his phrase “the irrepressible conflict,” he had
been damaged more in New York by something else. “I mean the project
of Thurlow Weed to give charters for a set of city railways, for which
those who receive them are to furnish a fund of from four to six
hundred thousand dollars, to be expended for the Republican cause in
the next Presidential election.” He added on Feb. 20:
Mr. Seward is not without his chance of a nomination, though some
of your friends here affirm that he has none. He is himself, I
hear, very confident of getting it. While the John Brown excitement
continued, his prospects improved, for he was the best-abused man
of his party--now that he is let alone, his stock declines again
and people talk of other men. For my part I do not see that he is
more of a representative man than a score of others in our party.
The great difficulty which I have in regard to him is this, that
by the election of a Republican President the slavery question
is settled, and that with Seward for President, it will be the
greatest good luck, a special and undeserved favor of Providence,
if every honest Democrat of the Republican party be not driven
into the opposition within a twelvemonths after he enters the
White House. There are bitter execrations of Weed and his friends
passing from mouth to mouth among the old radical Democrats of the
Republican party here.
Bigelow, writing home from London (March 20), saw in Lincoln the only
hope of the party. He had no use for Seward; he had even less for
Bates--“an old Clay Whig from Missouri ... who has been for two years
or more the candidate of Erastus Brooks and Gov. Hunt, who is not only
not a Republican but who is put forward because he is not a Republican,
and whom the _Tribune_ recommends because he can get some votes that
a straight-out Republican cannot get.” Moreover, Bigelow saw “no
possibility of nominating Fessenden, or Chase, or Banks, or any such
man”; and he knew that unless the right kind of Republican was elected
the fight was lost.
Lincoln’s nomination was therefore hailed with more real gratification
by the _Post_ than by any other great Eastern newspaper. It saw in
him one who would call forth the enthusiasm of his party, and the
attachment of independent voters. The popular approval had already been
surprising in its volume and gusto. “The Convention could have made no
choice, we think, which, along with so many demonstrations of ardent
approval, would have been met with so few expressions of dissent.” It
paused to point out the two reasons for Seward’s defeat. The first was
the convention’s opinion, with which it was inclined to agree, that he
could not be elected, because he could not have carried Pennsylvania,
Douglas would have beaten him in Illinois, and he was weak in Ohio,
Indiana, and Vermont; the second lay in the distrust of his warmest
political friends excited by the corruption of the two last New York
legislatures. At this time there was much talk about “representative
men,” and the _Post_, after naming a few, remarked that Lincoln
surpassed them all as a personification of the distinctive genius of
our country and its institutions. “Whatever is peculiar in the history
and development of America, whatever is foremost in its civilization,
whatever is good in its social and political structure, finds its best
expression in the career of such men as Abraham Lincoln.”
A vignette of Lincoln by one of Bryant’s friends then traveling in the
West, George Opdyke, was immediately printed to disprove the current
story that he dwelt in “the lowest hoosier style”: