Vicksburg, a letter from a prominent Westerner assured the editors
that the general and his staff had once gone from Springfield to Cairo
in the car of the president of the Illinois Central, and that almost
the whole party had got drunk, Grant worst of all. By a coincidence,
while this letter was under discussion President Osborne of the
Illinois Central entered the office. He characterized it as a malignant
falsehood. “Grant and his staff did go down to Cairo in the President’s
car,” he said; “I took them down myself, and selected that car because
it had conveniences for working, eating, and sleeping on the way. We
had dinner in the car, at which wine was served to such as desired it.
I asked Grant what he would drink; he answered, a cup of tea, and this
I made for him myself. Nobody was drunk on the car, and to my certain
knowledge Grant tasted no liquid but tea and water.”
After Grant was made commander-in-chief in March, 1864, and took charge
in the East, the _Evening Post_ was confident that victory was at hand.
This faith increased during the summer. Bryant wrote Bigelow on June
15 that the North ought certainly to bring the war to an end within
the year, at least so far as concerned all great military operations.
On Sept. 3, just after Grant had asked for 100,000 additional men,
he said editorially that if he were given them, peace might be won
by Thanksgiving. The next day, when news had come that Sherman had
captured Atlanta, the paper renewed the prophecy of an early triumph,
changing the date, however, to Christmas. It no longer grumbled over
military nervousness and dilatoriness. It was disturbed by the state
of the currency, which was making the public debt twice what it should
have been; but its chief fear was that the men at the North in favor
of a premature peace would rob the Union of the fruits of its bloody
struggle.
As early as December, 1862, and January, 1863, Greeley had begun in the
_Tribune_ a movement for ending the war by foreign mediation between
North and South. The following month Napoleon III actually made an
offer of mediation, which Lincoln immediately refused. Advance news
of it had been sent Bryant by Bigelow, and the _Post_ was ready to
speak vigorously against it. Greeley in July, 1864, again tried to
initiate peace negotiations, and asked Lincoln to arrange a conference
at Niagara with two Confederate “ambassadors” who were reported to be
there, telling him that “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country
longs for peace, shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of
further devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” The attitude
of the _Evening Post_ was contemptuous. “No,” wrote Bryant as Greeley
bought his ticket to Niagara, “the most effective peace meetings yet
held are those which Grant assembled in front of Vicksburg, which Meade
conducted on the Pennsylvania plains, which Rosecrans now presides over
near Tullahoma; their thundering cannons are the most eloquent orators,
and the bullet which wings its way to the enemy ranks the true olive
branch.”
There was some fear for the moment that the _Times_ would join the
_Tribune_ in its readiness for peace without victory. Bryant wrote his
wife on Sept. 7, 1864, that he had a good deal of political news which
he could not put in his letter. “I wrote a protest against treating
with the Rebel Government, which you will have seen in the paper....
I was told from the best authority that Mr. Lincoln was considering
whether he should not appoint commissioners for the purpose, and I
afterwards heard that Raymond of the _Times_ had been in Washington
to persuade Mr. Lincoln to take the step, and was willing himself
to be one of the commissioners.” Bryant’s 1,500 word editorial, “No
Negotiations With the Rebel Government,” anticipated the arguments of
Lincoln’s message to Congress in December opposing any parley.
At this moment the Democratic party was carrying on its campaign for
the Presidency upon a platform which declared the war a failure, and
asserted that an armistice should be sought at the first practicable
opportunity. It is true that McClellan, the party’s candidate, had
repudiated these planks. But when he did so, Fernando Wood had wanted
at once to repudiate McClellan, saying that the platform was sound,
and that the Democrats should call their Chicago Convention together
again to seek a man who would stand upon it. The _Daily News_, edited
by his brother Benjamin Wood, similarly upheld the platform. So did
the _World_, which went to shocking lengths in attacking Lincoln; not
content with calling his Administration ignorant and incompetent, it
cast imputations upon his personal honesty, while in a phrase that
became temporarily famous it remarked that the White House was “full of
infamy.” According to the _World_, the war could and should be stopped
instantly. The South was ready to reënter the Union if only Lincoln
would cancel his outrageous emancipation proclamation. “Are unknown
thousands of wives yet to become widows, and unknown tens of thousands
of children to become orphans, that Mr. Lincoln’s positive violations
of solemn pledges may be assumed by the people as their own?” Manton
Marble argued throughout the campaign for an armistice, a convention
of all the States, and an effort to conclude peace upon the basis
of union and slavery. Emancipation, he asserted, meant “industrial
disorganization, social chaos, negro equality, and the nameless horrors
of a civil war.”
In this election the _Evening Post_ maintained a straight course. Early
in the year Bryant had inclined to doubt, as did Beecher, Greeley,
Thaddeus Stevens, George W. Julian, and a majority of Congress, whether
Lincoln’s renomination would be wise. This was a reflection in part
of his impatient “radicalism,” in part of his attachment to Chase;
and on March 25, 1864, he made one of many prominent Union men who
wrote the Republican Executive Committee suggesting a postponement of
the Convention until September. But no hint of this doubt entered the
columns of the _Evening Post_. It never spoke of any other possible
nomination than Lincoln’s. Indeed, every one soon saw that the choice
was inevitable, and Bryant cast whatever hesitation he felt, which was
not much, behind him. “It was done in obedience to the public voice,”
he wrote Bigelow June 15, “a powerful _vis a tergo_ pushed on the
politicians whether willing or unwilling. I do not, for my part, doubt
of his reëlection.” By this time the _Evening Post_ was ready to admit
that the President had made fewer errors and seen more clearly than it
had supposed. It wrote (Sept. 20):
He has gained wisdom by experience. Every year has seen our cause
more successful; every year has seen abler generals, more skillful
leaders, called to the head; every year has seen fewer errors,
greater ability, greater energy, in the administration of affairs.
The timid McClellan has been superseded by Grant, the do-nothing
Buell by Sherman; wherever a man has shown conspicuous merit he has
been called forward; political and military rivalries have been
as far as possible banished from the field and from the national
councils.... While Mr. Lincoln stays in power, this healthy and
beneficial state of things will continue....
Throughout the campaign Parke Godwin did much public speaking. During
October the _Post_ published a weekly campaign newspaper addressed
particularly to laboring men, which had an enormous circulation at
one cent a copy; the edition the first week was 50,000. In its local
result the election justified the labors of the copperhead press, for
McClellan carried New York city by a vote double Lincoln’s--78,746 to
36,673. But the national result showed how totally unrepresentative
this anti-war press was of any extensive Northern sentiment. It proved
that Bryant had been right in declaring in the _Post_ of March 16,
1863, when Greeley and the _Tribune_ actually said the nation should
give up if the campaign then beginning failed:
It certainly is remarkable how unable the newspapers of the
country, even those of the largest circulation, have been to
divert the public mind from a fixed determination to put down
the rebellion by every possible means, and to allow no pause in
the war until the integrity of the Union is assured. One class
of journals has labored to show that the war for the Union is
hopeless; the people have never believed them. One class has called
for a revolutionary leader; the call has only excited a little
astonishment, the people being satisfied to prosecute the war under
the legal and constitutional authorities.
The last effort at a premature armistice, that made by the venerable
Francis P. Blair, culminating in the Hampton Roads conference between
Lincoln and Vice-President A. H. Stephens, was treated by the _Evening
Post_ like previous efforts. Blair was an old friend, but under the
caption, “Fools’ Errands,” Bryant wrote (Jan. 10, 1865) that his
gratuitous diplomacy might do much harm. “No, our best peacemakers
yet are Grant, Sheridan, Thomas, Sherman, and Farragut, and the
black-mouthed bulldogs by which they enforce their pretensions over
more than half of what was once an ‘impregnable’ part of rebeldom.” The
final peace, the peace made by the black-mouthed bulldogs, was greeted
by the _Post_ three months later in fervent terms:
GLORY TO THE LORD OF HOSTS
The great day, so long and anxiously awaited, for which we have
struggled through four years of bloody war, which has so often ...
dawned only to go down in clouds of gloom; the day of the virtual
overthrow of the rebellion, of the triumph of constitutional order
and of universal liberty,--of the success of the nation against its
parts, and of a humane and beneficent civilization over a relic of
barbarism that had been blindly allowed to remain as a blot on its
scutcheon--the day of PEACE has finally come....
Glory, then to the Lord of Hosts, who hath given us this final
victory! Thanks, heartfelt and eternal, to the brave and noble men
by land and sea, officers and soldiers, who by their labors, their
courage and sufferings, their blood and their lives, have won it
for us. And a gratitude no less deep and earnest to that majestic,
devoted, and glorious American people, who through all these years
of trial have kept true to their faith in themselves and their
institutions....
IV
Throughout the Civil War the news pages were in charge of one of the
most picturesque and able men ever employed by the paper, Charles
Nordhoff. It was a trying position. O. W. Holmes wrote an essay in 1861
called “Bread and Newspapers,” in which he described the state of mind
in which the North lived, waiting but from one edition to another.
The Civil War was the heroic age of American press enterprise, and
while the _Evening Post_ conducted a less extensive war establishment
than the _Herald_, _Tribune_, or _Times_--the _Herald_ spent $500,000
on its correspondence--Nordhoff saw that it maintained a creditable
position. He stepped into the office just after Bigelow’s departure,
in 1861. Along with Bigelow the _Post_ had just lost William M.
Thayer. This young man, after a brilliant ten years partly in New
York, partly as the only correspondent with the Walker filibustering
expedition in Nicaragua, and partly in Washington, had quarreled with
Isaac Henderson, while at the same time his health failed; and he was
glad to be appointed consul at Alexandria. Nordhoff’s chief assistant
in gathering news became Augustus Maverick, a veteran newspaper man
previously with the _Times_.
Nordhoff, though only thirty years old in 1831, had already passed
through enough adventure to fill an active lifetime. He was born in
Prussia, where his father was a wealthy liberal who had served in
Blucher’s army and had later set up a school at Erwitte. Compelled for
political reasons to leave, the elder Nordhoff gathered together all
his funds, about $50,000, and reached America in 1834. The family went
to the Mississippi Valley, and for a time lived an anomalous life,
eating in the wilderness from rich silver and drinking imported German
mineral water. The boy was left an orphan at the age of nine, and was
reared by the Rev. Wilhelm Nast of the Methodist Church in Cincinnati.
Revolting against the rigid ecclesiastical discipline to which he was
subjected, believing that his health was suffering from indoors work,
and longing for the adventures at sea of which he had read in Marryat
and Cooper, in 1844 he ran away.
Hundreds of thousands of American boys in the last half century
have read the three books in which Nordhoff graphically relates
his experiences aboard men of war, merchant ships, a whaler, and a
cod-fishing boat. The story of how he went to sea is an interesting
illustration of his pluck and persistence. He had $25, two extra
shirts, and an extra pair of socks when he left Cincinnati, and his
money took him to Baltimore. At every vessel to which he applied he was
met by the same rebuff: “Ship you, you little scamp? Not I; we won’t
carry runaway boys. Clear out!” Undaunted, he went on to Philadelphia,
and found a place on the _Sun_ as printer’s devil, at $2–4 a week and
his board. He confided his ambition to no one, but every Saturday
afternoon he was down among the shipping, looking for a place. Finally
he heard that the Frigate _Columbus_, 74 guns, was about to sail under
Commodore Biddle for the Far East, and sought a berth--again in vain.
Still undiscouraged, he induced the editor of the _Sun_, to whose home
he daily took a bundle of proofs, to introduce him to Commodore Elliot.
The editor’s note ran, “Please give him a talking to,” and the gruff
officer scolded the boy roundly for wanting to ruin his life, described
the dissolute, brutalizing existence of most sailors, and flatly
refused him a place. But Nordhoff returned daily until the Commodore
yielded.
The boy soon realized that the sailor’s life had little of the romance
that Cooper gave it, but he showed both his grit and shrewdness when
with a distinct literary intention he made the most of it. He went
around the world in the _Columbus_, and was discharged at Norfolk in
1848; for several years he worked in the merchant marine, visiting
Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and the South Sea islands;
sailing from Sag Harbor in a whaler which cruised in the Indian Ocean,
he deserted at the Seychelles, and for a time supported himself as
a boatman in Mauritius; and he finished his eight years at sea by a
brief period with the Cape Cod fishermen. All the while he was busy
collecting material for his books, losing no opportunity to share
new sights and experiences, and pumping his mates for their stories.
He wrote his three volumes to give a common-sense picture of a life
which he believed had been unduly romanticized; and his pictures of
flogging in the navy, of dysentery and cholera aboard a frigate, of the
degradation of the naval discipline, of the danger and hardship met
on a merchant craft, and of the intolerable monotony of whale-hunting
carry out the purpose. It was good preliminary training for a reporter
and editor. In 1853 he entered journalism, first on the Philadelphia
_Register_ and later on the Indianapolis _Sentinel_, meanwhile writing
the sea books, which gave him such a reputation that in 1853 George W.
Curtis recommended him to Harper’s as an editorial worker.
Bigelow in the closing days of 1860 made an arrangement with Brantz
Meyer, a Baltimore writer of some reputation, to go South for $50
a week and his expenses to do special reporting. He wrote R. B.
Rhett, editor of the Charleston _Mercury_, asking whether it would
be safe for Meyer to attend the secession convention in Charleston,
and Rhett assured him that “no agent or representative of the
_Evening Post_ would be safe in coming here”; “he would certainly
be tarred and feathered and made to leave the State, as the mildest
possible treatment”; “he would come with his life in his hand, and
would probably be hung.” Nevertheless, the _Post_ did have unsigned
correspondence from Charleston and other Southern cities during the
days the secession movement was ripening. When war began, Nordhoff
hurriedly whipped a corps of special writers into shape. He requested
Henry M. Alden, later editor of _Harper’s_ to go to the Virginia
front, but Alden’s health was too precarious to permit him to face
the hardships which other young literary men like E. C. Stedman were
undertaking. William C. Church, a rising young journalist, who later
established the _Army and Navy Journal_ and the _Galaxy_, was obtained.
Philip Ripley made another of the staff, and Walter F. Williams was
soon sending admirable letters from the field.
Repeatedly during the war the _Post_ scored notable “beats.” Church
was with the joint military and naval expedition under Sherman and
Dupont that captured Port Royal, and sent the _Evening Post_ the first
account published at the North. The best picture of the battle of
Pittsburgh Landing in any newspaper was one contributed the _Post_
by a member of Halleck’s staff. The most graphic running account of
Sherman’s march to the sea was also that furnished the paper by Major
George Nichols, who was on Sherman’s staff, and who later reworked his
letters--in which it has been well said the style is photographic,
with a touch of national music in the sentences--into a book. When
John Wilkes Booth was killed in the burning Virginia barn by Sergeant
Boston Corbett, Nordhoff obtained Corbett’s exclusive story of the
event--an absorbing three-quarters column of close print. It need
not be said that the Paris correspondence which E. L. Godkin, later
editor, furnished in 1862, offered the shrewdest and clearest view of
French opinion published in any American newspaper. There was a large
group of occasional correspondents at various points along the wide
fighting line. The _Evening Post_ profited, in a way that it was quite
impossible for the _Herald_ to do, from the kindness of loyal Union
men of prominence who came into contact with great events or figures,
and without thought of remuneration wrote to Bryant. A long and highly
interesting article embodying personal reminiscences of Lincoln, for
example, was contributed a few weeks after the assassination by R. C.
McCormick, then well known in New York political circles. There were
frequent bits like the following from a New Yorker who had seen Grant
at City Point (Aug. 5, 1864):
“General,” I remarked, “the people of New York now feel that there
is one at the head of our armies in whom they can repose the
fullest confidence.”
“Yes,” he interrupted, “there is a man in the West in whom they
can repose the utmost confidence, General Sherman. He is an able,
upright, honorable, unambitious man. We lost another one of like
character a few days ago, General McPherson.”
One reporter for the _Post_, a young Vermonter named S. S. Boyce,
became intimate with the United States Marshal in New York, and
distinguished himself by important detective service against
disloyalists. The Marshal once handed him a letter taken upon a
captured blockade runner, mailed from New York and giving the Southern
authorities the time of the sailing of the Newbern expedition. It
carried no New York address, but within a fortnight Boyce had tracked
down the writer of the letter, and some months later witnessed his
hanging.
Many traditions long survived in the office of Nordhoff’s energy,
courage, shrewdness, and impassivity in moments of excitement. He was
a man of the world, and his sense for news was amazing. Expected to
contribute to the editorial page as well as manage the news staff,
he would seat himself at his desk and write with unresting hand,
meanwhile puffing a black cigar so furiously that he could hardly see
his sheet through the smoke. A bluff seamanlike quality was always
distinguishable about him; he walked with a sailor’s roll, and used
nautical terms with unconscious frequency. His executive ability,
geniality, fearlessness, and intense hatred of anything equivocal or
underhanded, made the staff love him. Mr. J. Ranken Towse, who knew him
after the war, says that “he had a comprehensive grasp of essential
knowledge, a great store of common sense, a rare faculty of penetrating
insight, and a huge scorn for prevarication or double-dealing. A
mistake due to ignorance or carelessness he could and often did
overlook, but anything in the nature of a shuffling excuse roused him
to flaming ire. He was impetuous and irascible, but naturally generous
and tender-hearted.”
During the Draft Riots Nordhoff connected a hose with the steam-boiler
in the basement and gave public notice that any assailant would meet
a scalding reception. He had not only the _Evening Post_ property
to protect, but a score of wounded soldiers in a temporary hospital
fitted up on an upper floor. The strain under which he lived in the war
days was intense, and he used to spend the summer nights on a small
sailboat which he kept on the Brooklyn waterfront, for he could sleep
more soundly drifting about the bay than on shore. Yet he managed to
find time to contribute to the newspaper’s atmosphere of literary
sociability. Paul Du Chaillu had become his friend when, as a worker
at Harper’s, he helped put some of Du Chaillu’s books into good
English, and a story survives of how Du Chaillu and Nordhoff once took
possession of the restaurant stove across the street from the _Evening
Post_, and taught the cook to broil bananas--the first bananas ever
eaten cooked in the city. Nordhoff’s impress was visible everywhere
in the paper of those years, and its marked prosperity was in large
degree traceable to his energy. The local reporting was better than
ever before, and we are tempted to discern his own hand in the frequent
human-interest paragraphs, of which one may be given as a specimen:
AN INCIDENT IN THE CARS
In a car on a railroad which runs into New York, a few mornings
ago, a scene occurred which will not soon be forgotten by the
witnesses of it. A person dressed as a gentleman, speaking to a
friend across the car, said: “Well, I hope the war may last six
months longer. In the last six months I’ve made a hundred thousand
dollars--six months more and I shall have enough.”
A lady sat behind the speaker, and ... when he was done she tapped
him on the shoulder and said to him: “Sir, I had two sons--one was
killed at Fredericksburg; the other was killed at Murfreesboro.”
She was silent a moment and so were all around who heard her. Then,
overcome by her indignation, she suddenly slapped the speculator,
first on one cheek and then on the other, and before he could say
a word, the passengers sitting near, who had witnessed the whole
affair, seized him and pushed him hurriedly out of the car, as not
fit to ride with decent people.
The Government censorship of news early became a painful and difficult
question to all journals. Repeatedly during the war Northern papers
allowed news to leak to the enemy which should have been kept strictly
secret, and the _Evening Post_ early recognized this danger. When Gen.
McClellan in August, 1861, drew up his gentlemen’s agreement with
the press, the _Post_ hoped that all editors would acquiesce in it,
and attacked the Baltimore secession newspapers for giving the South
important news. Two months later it blamed the _Herald_ and _Commercial
Advertiser_ for twice having given prominence to articles they should
have suppressed. Sherman as early as the summer of 1862 raged violently
at the press in his private letters for writing some generals up and
others down, and the _Post_ had already (Feb. 27) commented upon the
same abuse. The _Herald_ in March, 1862, prematurely published the news
of Banks’s passage of the Potomac, to the great indignation of the
_Post_, which had suppressed it the day before. But Nordhoff himself
erred in September, when his publication of some “contraband” facts
about the strength of the forces at Newbern brought a protest from Gen.
Foster. No other mistake of the sort was made, and this one did not
compare with the blunders of other New York journals. Early in 1863 a
_Herald_ correspondent, having foolishly printed the substance of some
confidential orders, was convicted and sentenced to six months hard
labor in the Quartermaster’s Department. In November, 1864, the _Times_
brought an angry protest from Grant by stating Sherman’s exact strength
and his programme in the coming march to the sea. The _Tribune_ early
the next year, informing its readers that Sherman was heading for
Goldsboro, enabled Gen. Hardee on the Confederate side to fight a heavy
battle which Sherman had hoped to avoid; and the hero of the great
march later refused to speak to Greeley.