Allan Nevins

“ The spirit of our people has been too long accustomed to freedom to bear the restraint which is sought to be put upon it. Discussion will be like the Greek fire, which blazed the fiercer for the water thrown upon it; and if the stake be set and the faggots ready, there will be candidates for martyrdom.
When in August of this year a meeting in Cincinnati resolved to silence J. G. Birney’s abolitionist press by violence, the Evening Post used similar words. No tyranny in any part of the world was more absolute or frightful than such mob tyranny. ”

“ The political condition of the nation, the State, and the city, with Mark Hanna, Platt and Quigg, Croker and Sheehan at the height of their power, was such as to make the editor feel that the forces against which he had battled were too strong to defeat. But as Charles Eliot Norton wrote him, he had earned the right to leave the field. “When the work of this century is summed up, what you have done for the good old cause of civilization, the cause which is always defeated, but always after defeat taking more advanced position than before—what you have done for this cause will count for much.” ”

“ The best journalist is not made from a man who is thus lukewarm in his work. Moreover, even had Bryant thrown himself heart and soul into his calling, his literary tastes, his retiring temper, his keen sense of dignity, his fame as a poet, would have prevented his breaking new ground as Bennett did. He had no equal before Greeley, and no superior later, in writing editorials, and he made the intellectual influence of the Evening Post one of the strongest in the nation. He was a great editor. ”

“ 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? ”

“ It is a thousand pities that a man of Parke Godwin’s strength of mind and strength of principle is by any chance or cause cut off from his proper sphere of usefulness and power, the press of New York. He has a clearer head and less gush than Greeley, and he is hardly any lazier than Manton Marble, though older; he writes with as much dash and point as Hurlburt, and his knowledge of the practice of journalism is not inferior to that of Greeley and Nordhoff. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nature, writhing under the poignancy of her feeling, and finding no utterance in words or tears, found a vent at length for her indescribable sensations in a spontaneous, idiotic laugh. The impression made upon all who were present, will never be forgotten. His dreadful imprecations upon his daughters, his solemn appeals to heaven, struck the soul with awe.
On the final night, Dec. 28, according to the report in the Evening Post, the theater rang with unprecedented plaudits, and at the close the audience rose by common impulse and cheered Kean three times three. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ But it is the old Evening Post still; a newspaper which, with a history one of the longest and richest in American journalism, has from generation to generation preserved the same sterling character. The objects of its conductors may be easily stated. They wish to keep it as public-spirited as the Evening Post of Hamilton and Coleman; as ardent in defense of democracy and the oppressed as the Evening Post of Leggett; as dignified, elevated, and fearless as the Evening Post of Bryant, Bigelow, and Godwin ”

“ 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. ”

“ That Monday Bryant’s leading editorial, “The Union, Now and Forever,” took its text in the President’s call for volunteers. “If he calls for only 75,000,” said the Evening Post, “it is because he knows that he can have a million if he needs them.” George Cary Eggleston has said that he and Bryant’s other associates were often amazed to see how calmly he would write an editorial that proved full of intense eloquence, every line blazing. This was such an editorial, ending in a ringing peroration: “‘God speed the President!’ is the voice of millions of determined freemen to-day.” ”

“ The Whigs, counting upon the reflex of the panic of 1837, and the unpopularity of Van Buren, to elect Harrison, had taken care to commit themselves to no platform. The Evening Post therefore attributed to them all the evil policies they had ever espoused. Was it worth while to shoulder the burden of a high tariff and a costly internal improvement system, to restore the corrupt union of bank and state, to pay the enormous State debts out of the national treasury, and to strengthen Federal power at the expense of the States, all for the sake of having a President who quaffed hard cider? ”

“ The danger to be apprehended from his activities and ambition was not that the Evening Post would be brought under dishonest management, but simply that it would be brought under a management which thought first and always of money-making, steered its course for the greatest patronage, and shrank from such self-sacrificing independence as the paper had displayed in the Bank war or the early stages of the slavery struggle. Henderson never thought of it as a sternly impartial guide of public opinion; he thought of it as a producer of revenue. ”

“ As one State after another passed out of the Union, therefore, a half dozen newspapers, the Herald, Daily News, Journal of Commerce, Day Book, Staats Zeitung, and Courrier des États Unis were taking an attitude friendly to the South; one, the Tribune, simply wrung its hands; and the Evening Post, Times, and World alone urged severe measures. Jefferson Davis, wrote the Evening Post, “knows that secession is a forcible rupture of an established government; he knows that it must, if persisted in, lead to war.” ”

“ We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject for discussion, and argument, and declamation, as the difference between whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians and Calvinists.” This was at a time when the right of Abolitionists to continue their agitation was denied from some of the most influential New York pulpits, when the great majority of citizens had no tolerance for them, and when newspapers like Bennett’s Herald and Hallock’s Journal of Commerce, both pro-slavery, gave them nothing but contempt and denunciation. ”

“ He has a rosy face, auburn beard and hair—the latter in short, crisp curls—and brown eyes as round as marbles, which, seen through the glasses he always wears, seem to have just looked up from some absorbing study and to be scarcely yet ready to take in the common scenes of life. His is not a changeful countenance, but of the same calm, self-reliant expression on all occasions, as if he took the world philosophically and was always in good humor with it. ”

“ We see the Bryant who used to meet with Verplanck and Sands at the house of the latter’s father in the hamlet of Hoboken, and make it ring with declamation and uproarious laughter. We see the poet-editor who used to throw off all anxieties and go for long walks, studying nature or chatting with companions, and who once at an evening party apologized for his fatigue by explaining that he had covered the road from Haverstraw to New York, nearly forty miles, that day. ”

“ Before fighting had fairly commenced it ventured upon a prophecy which the fate of three thrones has fully justified:
The human mind cannot yet begin to grasp the consequences. One of them, however, seems plainly written in the book of the future. It is that, after this most awful and most wicked of all wars is over, the power of life and death over millions of men, the right to decree the ruin of industry and commerce and finance, with untold human misery stalking through the land like a plague, will be taken away from three men. No safe prediction of actual results of battle can be made. ”

“ Since a year’s subscription cost $8, or ten days’ wages for a workingman, the poor simply could not afford it. Thrifty householders exchanged sheets, and at the taverns they were read to wide circles. The journal was never sold on the streets, and if Coleman had caught an urchin peddling it he would have boxed his ears for a fool; whenever a visitor at the City Hotel, or a merchant particularly pleased by some long editorial, wished a copy, he not only had to pay the heavy price of 121⁄2 cents, but had to go to the printer’s room for it. ”

“ Bryant could never see anything in the Crimean War but a useless and inexcusable sea of blood and misery. When the threat of the Franco-Prussian War first appeared, the Evening Post held that if the ambition of the French to dictate boundaries and sovereigns to Europe was to go on retarding civilization till it met an effectual check, now was the time to check it. Like every other American newspaper, the Post had been embittered against Napoleon III by his interference in Mexico and other acts of hostility toward the United States. ”

“ We cannot see, for our part, why it should not attract men of the first talents and the most exalted virtues. Why should not the discussions of the daily press demand as strong reasoning powers, as large and comprehensive ideas, as profound an acquaintance with principles, eloquence as commanding, and a style of argument as manly and elevated, as the debates of the Senate? ”

“ And if we did demand it, how could we expect Spain to accede until the Cortes met on April 25, since only the Cortes had power to surrender Spanish territory? It was true that the Cubans refused an armistice and autonomy. But, argued Godkin, they did so only because they counted on dragging us into the war upon the margin between autonomy and absolute independence. And what a pitiful margin that was! No one believed that the Cubans were ready for absolute independence, for like the Central American peoples, they would be turbulent and unstable, requiring constant oversight. ”

“ As he wrote long after, James G. Blaine’s audacity, good humor, horror of rebel brigadiers, and contempt for reformers made his nomination sooner or later inevitable, and such a nomination in Godkin’s eyes presented a moral question of the first magnitude. No American newspaper has ever conducted a more effective campaign fight than that which the Evening Post waged in 1884. It was a fight not only against Blaine, but in behalf of the one contemporary American statesman whom Godkin, in his long journalistic career after 1865, highly admired. ”