CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

INDEPENDENCE IN POLITICS: THE ELECTIONS OF ’72 AND ’76

If any one had told Bryant and Godwin in 1865 that within a half dozen years the party which led the crusade against slavery to victory, and which had carried the nation through the furnace of the war, would seem intolerable to many for its moral laxity and inefficiency, he would not have been believed. It was then the party of youthful idealism, of enthusiasm in a great moral cause, of vigorous achievement. Yet in 1872 the _Evening Post_ all but abandoned the Republican banner--it would have done so had the reform elements found a fit leader; and in 1876 the temptation to secede was presented in a new and equally strong form. Though it stayed with the party, in neither campaign did the paper surrender a jot of its independence, and in neither did it give the Republicans enthusiastic support.

There was but one tenable position in the election of 1868 for a journal which had supported Lincoln and the Union throughout the war--to follow Grant; for the Democrats could not be trusted with Reconstruction, while they offended all believers in sound finance by proposing to pay the war bonds in greenbacks. The _Evening Post_ declared itself for Grant on Dec. 2, 1867, and published frequent editorials advocating his nomination until it took place six months later. It expressed a wholehearted faith in his courage, patient good temper, administrative energy, and judgment of subordinates. This belief was shared by others as discerning as Bryant. Lowell informed Leslie Stephen that Grant had always chosen able lieutenants, that he was not pliable, and that he would make good use of his opportunity to be an independent President.

The cordiality of the _Evening Post_ for Grant was increased by its distaste for his Democratic rival. Bryant wrote to his friend Salmon P. Chase before the Democratic Convention, urging him to take a receptive attitude, and Chase replied hopefully; but it was Horatio Seymour who obtained the nomination, and for Seymour the _Post_ had only contempt. A mere local politician, it termed him; it recalled how as the “copperhead” Governor of New York he had displayed a plentiful lack of both dignity and sagacity, and it believed him a weak creature, who would be controlled by dangerous men like George H. Pendleton and Francis Blair.

The _Times_ was heartily for Grant, and so was the _Sun_, Charles A. Dana helping write the campaign biography of him. The _Tribune_ was of course loyally Republican. It had to forget a good many rash--though, as it proved, too nearly true--words of the previous year, when, irritated by Grant’s loyalty to President Johnson, it had said that his prominence in politics was due merely to “the dazzling and seductive splendor of military fame,” and that he would make “a timid, hesitating, unsympathetic President.” But the _Tribune_ was used to retracting impolitic judgments, and was soon fighting with the _World_ in that hammer and tongs style of which Greeley and Manton Marble were masters.

The disillusionment that followed so rapidly upon Grant’s inauguration was bitter to the whole of the decent Republican press. It is one of the most creditable chapters in American journalism that so many newspapers--Greeley’s _Tribune_, Horace White’s Chicago _Tribune_, Samuel Bowles’s Springfield _Republican_, Murat Halstead’s Cincinnati _Commercial_, and the _Evening Post_--had the courage to assert their independence of the Republican party when it fell into unworthy hands. Grant’s failure was more bitter to the _Evening Post_, the Springfield _Republican_, and other low-tariff journals than it was to the high-tariff New York _Tribune_; it was more painful to the _Evening Post_ and other organs which advocated a mild Southern policy than to the _Nation_, which advocated a fairly severe one. But they all took a protestant attitude which was far in advance of that of the general public.

All administrations begin with a sort of political honeymoon, in which every one gives the new President a fair field, and criticism is temporarily reserved. For some months the _Post_ tried hard to believe that Grant was destined to solve satisfactorily all the problems bequeathed him by Andrew Johnson. It praised his inaugural speech highly. The principal task before him, it declared, was to get rid of the bummers, camp-followers, and contractors:

The first and especial work which Gen. Grant undertakes is to clear the government of those who take its money without giving an equivalent; lobbyists, railway projectors, speculators in grants of every form, whisky thieves, revenue swindlers, gold sharks, and the whole train of useless and costly hangers-on. These men are no longer an outside band of robbers who are unimportant enough to be disregarded. They have grown to be a great power; if united, perhaps they would be the greatest political power in the land. It is a work scarcely second to that of destroying Lee’s army itself, to destroy the system of plunder which now threatens our institutions. (Feb. 9, 1869.)

The task second in importance, the _Evening Post_ believed, was a sharp reduction in the wartime tariff, which David A. Wells, Special Commissioner of Revenue, had just shown to be miraculously effective in making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Under it, said Bryant, the pig-iron manufacturers doubled their capital annually, while the workmen lived worse than before; one of the two companies which enjoyed a monopoly of salt had earned $4,600,000 on a capital of $600,000 in seven years; and the lumber companies, Canadian competition being shut out, were piling up enormous fortunes while housing grew ever costlier. The _Post_ demanded also a revision of the uneconomic wartime revenue system, under which 16,000 different articles were taxed; they might advantageously be reduced to fewer than 200. It asked for measures paving the way to a resumption of specie payments, such as the accumulation of a large gold reserve in the Treasury, and the passage of legislation authorizing contracts to pay in gold. Railway jobbery, involving the wasteful distribution of the national domain, should be stopped, while civil service reform was prominent in the _Evening Post_ programme. Of course, it wished military rule in the South brought to an end as speedily as possible, and the States placed upon their old footing.

But all of Bryant’s and Parke Godwin’s high expectations failed. The _Post_ thought Grant’s Cabinet weak, and was especially shocked by his choice of the protectionist George S. Boutwell to be Secretary of the Treasury. It was equally offended by the selection of Elihu Washburne to be Minister to France, and Gen. Daniel Sickles to Spain--Spanish relations then being highly important on account of Cuba. There was no change in the tariff until 1870, when a new act reduced the duties on only one important protected commodity, pig iron, while it increased them on a half dozen. The revenue system was left in its complex iniquity. Secretary Boutwell did nothing effective to bring the nation back to a specie basis, while the _Evening Post_ sharply condemned his action in the “Black Friday” crisis (September, 1869) in selling $4,000,000 worth of gold without notice, and thus breaking the corner in gold which Jay Gould and James Fisk, jr., were trying to build up. This, it said, was taking sides unnecessarily in a battle between two sets of gamblers, when the Treasury had always before acted on the principle that all sales of gold should be public, with ample advance notice of the amounts to be sold, and should be ordered solely upon public grounds, without reference to speculation. Reconstruction, going from bad to worse, was by 1870 a confused mixture of grasping carpet-baggers, downtrodden whites, corrupt Legislatures, and ignorant, poverty-stricken negro voters. Grant’s one marked display of energy had been in an effort to force the annexation of Santo Domingo, a measure which the _Post_ abominated.

Two months after Grant’s administration began, the Chicago _Tribune_ harshly attacked him. The _Post_ then pleaded for patience, but by midsummer of 1870 it was growing restive.

The last straw for the _Evening Post_ was Grant’s dismissal of his two ablest Cabinet members. He asked for the resignation of Attorney-General Ebenezer Hoar in June, 1870, sacrificing him for the votes of Southern Senators promised in behalf of the Santo Domingo treaty. Four months later, Gen. Jacob Cox was forced out of the Interior Department simply because the politicians wished to raid it for spoils. Already Sumner had been deprived, by Grant’s orders, of the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, a slap in the face to the great body of liberal and intellectual Northerners who had admired Sumner ever since he had come forward as an anti-slavery leader. The dismissal of Motley from the post of Minister to England in the fall of 1870 angered Bryant, as it did all other American men of letters. When Secretary Cox resigned, the _Post_ headed its editorial (Oct. 31, 1870): “General Grant’s Unconditional Surrender”--meaning his surrender to the politicians:

Not even Buchanan’s interference in Kansas was more gross and unblushing than President Grant’s attempt to coerce the Missouri Republicans to do his will and not their own. No President except Andrew Johnson has ever so openly tried, by wholesale removals from office and by the appointment of his favorites, to impose his “policy” upon the party.

The letters of General Cox, now published, show that in the practice of the smaller devices of politicians the President has been no less ready. The Secretary, who came into the Cabinet as the especial friend and representative of civil service reform, is forced to leave the Cabinet because the President insists, contrary to Gen. Cox’s desires, upon letting political committees levy tribute upon the poor clerks in the Interior Department.

Three days later, under the caption “The President and His Policy,” the _Post_ joined those organs--the Chicago _Tribune_, Springfield _Republican_, and Dana’s and Greeley’s journals--which had already declared war:

He has now been twenty months in office, and if we look back over the leading and most conspicuous acts of his Administration, we find only the San Domingo treaty, defeated by those who would gladly support him in everything right or wise; the gross interference with the elections in Missouri; and the disgrace--so far as he could disgrace them--of Mr. Hoar, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Cox. That is a record of which General Grant will not be proud in those days of retirement from public life which await him.

The Liberal Republican movement in the East began to assume shape when the Free Trade League called a conference upon revenue and tariff reform in New York city for Nov. 22, 1870. It was attended by Bryant, Schurz, E. L. Godkin, Horace White, Samuel Bowles, Gen. Cox, former Commissioner Wells, and Charles Francis Adams, with some others. The first five named represented respectively the _Evening Post_, the St. Louis _Westliche Post_, the _Nation_, the Chicago _Tribune_, and the Springfield _Republican_, and the first four are all on the list of editors of the _Evening Post_. James G. Blaine, the Speaker, was so disturbed by this conference that he journeyed to Chicago to tell Horace White that he meant to give the tariff reformers a majority of the Ways and Means Committee. Meanwhile, in Missouri, Carl Schurz and B. Gratz Brown had already launched their insurgent movement, and by a coalition with the Democrats that same month swept the State. Everywhere the elements in favor of civil service reform, fiscal reform, low tariff and cleaner government began drawing together.

Just how far should the Liberal Republican movement go? Schurz by the spring of 1871 was intent upon forming a new party, while men like Sumner wished to stay within the old party and reform it. The Chicago _Tribune_, the Springfield _Republican_, and the Cincinnati _Commercial_ were soon supporting Schurz’s plan, while the _Evening Post_ and the _Nation_ held back. They were sympathetic with Liberal Republicanism, but they did not commit themselves to it. Bryant was as reluctant to give up his Republican allegiance now as he had been to forsake the Democratic standard in 1844, and he assailed the Administration without assailing the party. The _Post_ declared in March, 1871, that the Republican organization was substantially sound; that it distrusted Grant and the politicians, but knew that the rank and file had resisted such follies as the deposition of Sumner and the Santo Domingo treaty. Next month, after the Liberal gathering at Cincinnati, it defined the movement as intended only “to bring back the Republican party to sound and constitutional legislation.” It would have been a dramatic display of independence for the _Post_ to have broken with the regulars, as it was to do in 1884, but the event showed that it was well it remained lukewarm. When the Liberal Republicans shipwrecked their reform effort by naming a candidate quite unacceptable to the _Post_, it could change its attitude instantly from sympathy to hostility and derision.

E. L. Godkin relates that in the spring of 1864 he was invited to a breakfast in New York at which he found Wendell Phillips, Bryant, and one or two other men. Greeley entered and approached the host, who was standing by the fire talking with Bryant, but the poet ignored his fellow-editor. “Don’t you know Mr. Greeley?” the host inquired in an audible whisper. Bryant’s whisper came back more audibly still: “No, I don’t; he’s a blackguard--he’s a blackguard!”

This prejudice upon Bryant’s part, largely identical with the prejudice which made him refuse to speak to another editor whose principles and personality were both offensive to him, Thurlow Weed, had its share in the _Evening Post’s_ hostility to Greeley when the Liberal Republicans nominated him for President. Bryant remembered that in 1849 Greeley had commenced a reply to an editorial in the _Post_ with the words: “You lie, villain! wilfully, wickedly, basely lie!” It must also be considered that Greeley’s high tariff views were anathema to the _Post_, that his readiness to haul down the Union flag at various critical moments in the Civil War had provoked the indignation of other editors, and that his extremely radical reconstruction policy had offended all moderate organs.

The news that the Liberal Republican Convention had nominated Greeley for President was telegraphed to New York on the evening of May 3, 1872. Bryant next morning was late in reaching the office. A vigorous discussion was going on, says Mr. J. Ranken Towse, over the character of the editorial comment to be made. “It was ended suddenly by the entrance, in hot haste, of Mr. Bryant, who said briefly, ‘I will attend to that editorial myself,’ and promptly shut himself up in his room. The resultant article--cool, logical, bitter, but not violent--was distinctive in its animating spirit of contemptuous scorn, and carried a sharp sting in its closing assertion that in the case of a candidate for the highest honor at the disposal of the country, it was essential that the candidate should be, at least, a gentleman.”

W. A. Linn, long managing editor of the _Evening Post_, saw Bryant a moment. “Well,” the poet observed with a quiet twinkle, “there are some good points in Grant’s Administration, after all.”

The news was in every way a shock to the paper. When the Liberal Republican Convention opened, the _Post_ had been filled with as high hopes for its success as those entertained by the Chicago _Tribune_, Cincinnati _Commercial_, or Springfield _Republican_. It had implored the leaders to make their enterprise “a movement for genuine reform, and not a mere antagonism to persons and Administrations”; it had warned them that they must choose a strong man for Presidential nominee, for the people admired Grant’s strength of personality. Judge David Davis was not sufficiently a statesman, Gov. B. Gratz Brown of Missouri lacked experience, and “as for Mr. Greeley, his nomination would be a deathblow to the reform movement, because he is the embodiment of centralization and monopoly.” Its favorites were Charles Francis Adams, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and Gov. John M. Palmer of that State, in the order named. Had either of the first two been named, upon an acceptable platform, the _Post_ would have supported him; but not the erratic, simple-minded prophet of high tariff, Greeley, who, the _Post’s_ special correspondent at the Convention reported, was pushed forward by a combination of politicians against the reformers.

Bryant’s editorial was one of two in the _Evening Post_ that day. That given the leading position, written probably by Charlton M. Lewis, was entitled “The Fiasco at Cincinnati,” and was just such an editorial as appeared in dozens of other disheartened newspapers. It declared that the Convention, so big with promise, had gone the way of many a similar assemblage, surrendering its lofty principles to the wirepullers. The _Post’s_ blow from the shoulder was struck by Bryant in the second column. He gave his editorial the mild title, “Why Mr. Greeley Should Not Be Supported for the Presidency,” but each of the numbered paragraphs was vitriolic.

First, said Bryant, Greeley lacked the needed courage, firmness, and consistency. His course during the Civil War had been one prolonged wabble, which at its best moments was irresolute, and at its worst was cowardly. Second, his political associates were so bad that his administration, if he were elected, could not escape corruption. Here Bryant referred to such of Greeley’s friends as R. E. Fenton, the leader of those New York city Republicans, who, leagued with the Tammany Ring, had done so much to help Tweed do business. The _Times_, which had exposed Tweed, vigorously insisted upon the same point. The third objection, wrote Bryant, was that Greeley had no settled political principles, with one exception, and the fourth was the exception. “He is a thorough-going, bigoted protectionist, a champion of one of the most arbitrary and grinding systems of monopoly ever known in any country.” When in 1870 the duty on pig iron was reduced from $9 a ton to $7, Greeley had told Grant that he would make it $100 a ton if he could. The fifth objection to Greeley, the climax of the editorial, lay in “the grossness of his manners,” as Bryant put it. “With such a head as is on his shoulders, the affairs of the nation could not, under his direction, be wisely administered; with such manners as his, they could not be administered with common decorum.” By this, Bryant did not refer to Greeley’s slovenly dress, nor to his use of the lie direct, but meant a certain Johnsonian grossness which he thought Greeley permitted himself in the drawing-room.

Taken as a whole, the editorial was a regrettably extreme attack upon a man who, if erratic and uncouth, was also the soul of kindliness and sincerity; and Samuel Bowles was justified in complaining that the _Post_ showed personal feeling. Yet the fierce and contemptuous attitude of Bryant by no means stood isolated. The _Times_ that day called Greeley’s nomination “a sad farce,” said that the first impulse of every one was to laugh, and declared that “if any one man could send a great nation to the dogs, that man is Mr. Greeley.” He would disorganize every department, commit the government to every crude illusion from Fourierism to vegetarianism, and embroil it with every foreign country. Schurz was heartsick, and for some time refused to support the nominee, while the German leaders and newspapers, from which much had been hoped, were almost unanimously hostile. In a number of States independents openly repudiated the ticket. E. L. Godkin, of the _Nation_, was totally disgusted, for he detested Greeley’s high tariff views. He had written as early as 1863 that Greeley “has no great grasp of mind, no great political insight,” and now his biting pen did more than that of any other writer to defeat the candidate.

The _Atlantic Monthly_ promptly fell in behind Grant. Manton Marble of the _World_ had watched the Cincinnati Convention with a hopefulness equaling, but differing from, Bryant’s. Now he lashed out at the Convention’s mistake, stayed with the journal long enough to express wholehearted dislike of Greeley, and then retired so that the _World_ might give him unenthusiastic support. _Harper’s Weekly_ brought out the absurdities of Greeley’s candidacy in striking fashion. Thomas Nast’s cartoons kept the old editor in a ridiculous light week after week--now devouring, with a wry face, a bowl of boiling porridge labeled “My own words and deeds,” now at his Chappaqua farm seated well out on a limb, which he was earnestly sawing off between himself and the tree. Greeley’s chief assistance in New York, aside from the _Tribune_, came from Dana and the _Sun_; indeed, Dana had come out for his eventual nomination as early as 1868, when almost no one was thinking of it. The other Democratic newspapers, as the _Express_, climbed rather grumblingly on the Greeley bandwagon; since Bennett’s death the _Herald_ had not been of their number.

For a time the _Evening Post_, in its intense dissatisfaction with the candidate, had some hope that another nomination could be effected. It suggested such an attempt, and that the selection be made by an assembly of leaders, not left to the “dangerous machinery of a convention.” The Free Trade League made itself the instrument of this effort, and called a meeting at Steinway Hall on May 30, to be presided over by Bryant. Gen. Jacob Cox, ex-Commissioner Wells, and others gave it their support, but the gathering came to nothing. In June the _Post_ was placed definitely behind Grant. The campaign was dismal for it, as for all other conscientious journals. It was impossible for even the _Times_ to be enthusiastic over Grant, or even Dana over Greeley. The _Evening Post’s_ attitude toward the regular Republican nominee was precisely that which the Springfield _Republican_ took towards the Liberal Republican candidate. “Support the ticket, but don’t gush,” Bowles had telegraphed his subordinates from Cincinnati. How far Bryant was from abandoning his criticism of the President is evident from an August editorial entitled “Grant’s Real Character.”

The _Post_ objected to the “Napoleon-Cæsar-Tweed” theory of Grant, the belief that he was a corrupt man of colossal ambition, egotism, and determination, but it said nothing more in his defense than that he was “a plain American citizen, with his average defects, his average ignorance, his average intelligence, and his average vices and virtues.” It made fun of his ignorance of political economy--he had said that the nation could never be poor while it had the gold locked in the Rockies. It scored his liking for money, gifts, good dinners, flashy associates, fast horses, and “style.” The _Post_ spoke thus caustically of Grant because Bryant had no idea of stultifying the newspaper, even to help beat Greeley; but it did it the more readily because it knew Greeley had not a chance. The mass of the party was with Grant, and he received a plurality of three quarters of a million.

When Greeley’s insanity and death followed so tragically upon his humiliating defeat, the _Evening Post_ made belated amends for its campaign severity. Its obituary editorial of Nov. 30 was marked by a generosity which it might well have shown earlier:

Without money, family, friends, or any of the usual supports by which men are helped into eminence, Mr. Greeley won his place of influence and distinction by the sheer force of his intellectual ability and the determination of his character. By good natural abilities, by industry, by temperance, by sympathy with what is noblest and best in human nature, and by earnest purpose, the ignorant, friendless, unknown printer’s boy of a few years since became the powerful and famous journalist, whose words went forth to the ends of the earth, affecting the destinies of all mankind.

II

An entirely different question was posed by the election of 1876--the question whether the long friendship of Bryant and the former sub-editors for Samuel J. Tilden should carry the _Evening Post_ over to the Democratic side. The decision finally made is of peculiar interest, for it shows how little Bryant was inclined to let personal considerations sway him upon any public question.

Early in the thirties, while Bryant and other editors were wrangling over the Bank, an ardent Democrat from New Lebanon, N. Y., named Elam Tilden, visited the _Evening Post_, and introduced his son Samuel, a boy in roundabouts. Bryant often spoke in later years of the impression made on him by the youth’s precocity, handsome features, and cultivated speech. A few years later young Tilden studied at New York University, and improved his acquaintance with the poet. When in the fall of 1841 Bryant made one of his country excursions, he chose New Lebanon for headquarters, and visited the Tilden family. The ties between Tilden and the _Post_ were much strengthened after 1848, when Bigelow became junior editor. We have seen that they were acquainted as young lawyers, and Bigelow was State prison inspector at the same time that Tilden began his political career in the Assembly. Tilden frequently visited the _Post_ and discussed political topics, it was there that he published an explanation of his stand in the campaign of 1860, and it was with the freedom of an old friend that he told Bigelow that he and Bryant shared the blood-guilt of the conflict.

After the war his visits were less frequent. But he made the _Evening Post_ his mouthpiece when, in 1871–2, he, ex-Mayor Havemeyer, and Andrew H. Green pushed home the fight against the Tweed Ring. The _Post_ always credited Tilden with being the chief agent in proving the actual guilt of Tweed’s lieutenants. During the spring of 1873 an acrimonious controversy was carried on between Tilden and the _Times_, turning in the main upon a new Charter proposed at Albany, which Tilden attacked and the _Times_ defended. Tilden used the _Post_ for the publication of his letters, and Bryant editorially supported him.

As Governor, Tilden invited Bryant in the early weeks of 1875 to pay him a visit at the Executive Mansion, and the editor accepted. Both branches of the Legislature tendered Bryant a public reception, the first time that the State had paid such an honor to any man of letters. At a dinner party on Tilden’s birthday, Bryant, in toasting the Governor, said that the public would not be displeased if his present position proved a stepping-stone to the Presidency. At all times the _Post_, like other New York papers, expressed golden opinions of Tilden’s administration, and in especial of his attacks upon the “Canal Ring,” a bi-partisan organization which had gained huge sums through fraudulent contracts for the repair of the State canals.

It was therefore natural that when in 1876 the election of a successor to Grant approached, Tilden’s friends had a strong hope that Bryant and the _Evening Post_ would lend the Governor their support. The newspaper gave no advance hint of its attitude. When Hayes was nominated by the Republicans on June 16, it, like all other independent journals, was pleased. Its overshadowing fear had been that Blaine, whom it detested as dishonest, would be named, and it saw in Hayes as good a man as its own previous favorite, Bristow of Kentucky. While some sneered at the nomination as negative and weak, the _Post_ predicted that it would “turn out to be positive and strong.” On the other hand, it thought the platform poor. It called the civil service plank platitudinous and empty, and the currency plank, which temporized with regard to specie resumption, worse still.

Nor did the _Evening Post_ immediately commit itself after the Democratic Convention. Over Tilden’s nomination it rejoiced even more than over that of Hayes. It recognized his sterling integrity and zeal as a reformer and was delighted that he had beaten both Tammany and the mediocre Western aspirants, Senator Thurman and Gov. Hendricks. But it did not openly pronounce for him, and its comment upon the Democratic platform maintained a careful impartiality. “In respect to financial reform their position is worse than that of the Republicans; in respect to a reform of the civil service they offer nothing better; in respect to revenue reform they have done better.” The decision was left until after the 4th of July.

All the influence of Bigelow, who sometimes still wrote editorials for the _Post_, was in favor of Tilden. He was the candidate’s campaign manager, and would be Secretary of State if Tilden won. So was all the influence of Parke Godwin, Bryant’s son-in-law and formerly a part owner. Bryant’s own friendship for Tilden weighed heavily in the balance. But the decision was not, as the public supposed, Bryant’s alone. Some years earlier the _Evening Post_ had been reorganized as a joint stock company, and Bryant held exactly half, not a majority, of the shares. The other half were owned by Isaac Henderson, the able, smooth-tongued, rubicund business manager, who had been a partner since the early fifties, and whose influence as Bryant became older gradually extended outside the business office to the editorial rooms. His one anxiety for the _Evening Post_ was that it should pay fat dividends, and he was no more scrupulous as to the means than the business managers of other newspapers. Mr. J. Ranken Towse tells us how distinct by 1876 was the influence he exerted upon the editorial policy:

It was not often that legitimate exception could be taken to its utterances, but as much could not be said of its unaccountable reticences. For some of these there may have been a good and sufficient reason, at which I cannot even guess, but there were others which could be understood only too easily. The simple fact is that William Cullen Bryant, though editor-in-chief and half owner, was by no means in absolute control of the paper. Between the counting room and the editorial department there was a constant, silent, irrepressible conflict, not to say antagonism--for I have always been convinced that the limits of it were defined by some sort of agreement, written or tacit--whenever the question at issue was one of direct commercial profit, which often acted as a bar to the candid discussion of inconvenient topics.

When on June 29 the _Post_ printed its warm but noncommittal praise of Tilden’s nomination, Henderson, who knew that commercial sentiment in New York was in favor of the Republicans, came upstairs and was closeted with Bryant in a long discussion of editorial policy. The next important editorial utterance, July 5, was an angry attack upon the Democratic platform. The Democratic Party was condemned for its “knavish” indifference to sound currency, and was represented as an unsafe organization to be given charge of Southern affairs while they remained so unsettled. On July 6 the _Post_ remarked that the hard-money Tilden, running in 1876 upon a soft-money platform, presented an exact parallel to the high-tariff Greeley running in 1872 upon a low-tariff platform; that “the two canvasses are alike in their treachery, their evasiveness, their shameless surrender of principle.” On July 10 it declared fully for Hayes.

Bigelow and Parke Godwin have published a number of Bryant’s letters relating to this stand by the _Evening Post_. One is his refusal of Tilden’s request that he let his name head the ticket of Democratic electors. Another is his letter to J. C. Derby explaining that, while he believed Tilden a truer statesman than Hayes, he thought the Republican principles, especially with regard to sound money and the merit system, so much superior that it was impossible to detach the _Evening Post_ from the party that had won the Civil War. He implied that his control of the paper was complete, and said that its utterances had suited him in everything except some details; while Henderson explicitly stated to the somewhat incredulous Derby that this was true. But Bigelow’s and Godwin’s own letters of the time have not been printed, and they show a strong belief that Bryant did not make the _Post’s_ decision. It is sufficient to quote one by Bigelow, dated Albany, July 14:

The principal result of my talk with Henderson was to satisfy me that--[Bigelow simply made a long, wavy line]. The rest I will tell you when I see you.

I can hardly trust myself to talk about the _Post_. I hope to be spared the necessity of writing about it. But the _Evening Post_ that you and I have known and honored, which educated us and through which we have educated others in political science, I fear no longer exists. The paper which bears its name is no more our _Evening Post_ than the present _Commercial Advertiser_ is the sheet once edited under that name by Col. Stone. I only wish Mr. Bryant had his name stricken out of it.

Allowance must be made for Bigelow’s chagrin. The probability is that Bryant at the end of June was wavering; that Henderson advanced his arguments respectfully but firmly; and that Bryant of his own free will placed the _Evening Post_ behind Hayes. After all, his old associates in attacking Grant, the Liberal Republican leaders, flocked back to the G. O. P. He had the resumption of specie payments close to his heart, and was alarmed by the soft-money convictions of western Democrats; he feared the shock to hopes of civil service reform if a horde of office-hungry Democrats poured into Washington; and the recent conduct of the Democratic House gave him reason to think they would do little for tariff reduction. It was perfectly logical for the journal to stand with the party which it had helped found and had ever since supported, while it would have been hard to find a logical justification for leaving it. Throughout the campaign it stood by Hayes, though with very moderate zeal, and it rejoiced when the Electoral Commission gave him the Presidency. Bryant later wrote that he had never before felt so little interest in a contest for the Presidency. No one ever knew for whom he voted on election day, for, saying with a smile that the ballot was a secret institution, he always refused to tell; Bigelow believed that he voted for neither candidate.