Chapter THIRTEEN: The Critical Days of the CIVIL War (1)

When Sumter brought the North to its feet as one man, as Lowell wrote, the press and general public believed the war would be brief. The best editorial judgment in New York had been that the rebellion could be strangled by a blockade alone. “A half dozen ships of war stationed at the proper points is all that is wanted,” said the _Times_ on Feb. 11, 1861. “In a few months’ time the Southern Confederacy would be completely starved out.” The _Tribune_, arguing Jan. 22 for closing the Southern ports, had predicted that as a consequence “the South will decline, and finally collapse, in utter humiliation. And this will not result from bloody wars, but from the peaceful operation of the laws of trade.” On the same date the _Evening Post_ remarked that the secession disease required not cautery or the knife, but a little judicious regimen. Uncle Sam might crush the seceding States with ease. “He could devastate every cotton field, and level every seaboard city in less than a year, if he were so foolhardy and malignant as they have shown themselves to be.” It must be remembered that at the time of all these utterances Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had not yet joined the South. But in his call to arms just after Sumter Bryant allowed himself to boast that every loyal arm was a match for ten traitors. A pathetic _Evening Post_ editorial of June 15, “The Beginning of the End,” following the Confederate evacuation of Harper’s Ferry, predicted that Jefferson Davis meant to make a desperate effort at Manassas, for “his cause is on its last legs, and unless he puts forth a bold stroke now, it is gone.”

It was because the _Tribune_ was so confident of an easy victory that it raised the cry, “On to Richmond!” in June and early July. Simply because it shared the same confidence, the _Evening Post_, with greater wisdom, pleaded for deliberation and care, and carried editorials with such headings as “Patience!” (July 1). After the advance began, it thought that Jefferson Davis ought to be captured within a month (July 17).

When upon this over-confidence fell the shock of the rout at Bull Run, the _Post_ felt it necessary to hearten the North by minimizing the defeat. There was no need to labor the moral that the war was going to be long and hard, and Bryant was worried lest the public should be depressed. Frederic Law Olmsted wrote him that “although it is not best to say it publicly, you should know, at least, that the retreat was generally of the worst character, and is already in its results most disastrous.” The _Post_ harped for some time upon the lesson of the need for better discipline and officers. But it also tried to maintain that Manassas was the Sebastopol of the rebels, a powerful natural position; that “in any fair, open, hand-to-hand fight, the Union troops are too much for the seceders”; and even that the moral effect of the battle would be in the North’s favor. Greeley felt the same impulse when, under the reaction from his “On to Richmond!” mischief, he promised that the _Tribune_ would cease nagging the army, and devote itself to inspiriting the public.

As soon as they perceived that the war would be bitter, the editors of the _Post_ took their stand with what the historian Rhodes calls the radical party of the North; the party of Secretary Chase, Senators Trumbull and Sumner, and Gen. Carl Schurz. The paper’s Washington correspondent early (May 3) divided the Cabinet into radicals--Welles, Chase, Blair--and conservatives--Seward, Bates, and Smith. The radicals wanted the war prosecuted with intense energy, no thought of compromise, and no particular regard for the feelings of the border States and Northern Democrats. Always ardent, sometimes precipitate, they disliked the cautious Seward, and sometimes lost patience with Lincoln himself. In the end their policies were usually adopted, but Lincoln’s wisdom lay in not adopting them prematurely; as Schurz admitted in 1864, when he wrote a schoolmate that he had often thought Lincoln wrong, but in the end had always found him right.

Much of the radicalism of Bryant and Parke Godwin was quite sound. In the first month the _Evening Post_ published no fewer than four editorials asking for a hurried and strict blockade of the South, and prophesying that it would “put an end to the rebellion more quickly than any other plan of action.” On July 20 it anticipated Ericsson by asking for ironclads, recalling that Robert L. Stevens had begun building a floating armored battery under an act of Congress passed in 1842, but had never finished it. The paper thought that “half a dozen thoroughly shot-proof gunboats, of light draft,” could silence Forts Sumter, Pulaski, and Jackson, or better still, run past them and dominate Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. It asked for a national draft on July 9, 1862, nine months before Congress passed a law for one. Lincoln’s early policy was to free and protect all Southern negroes who, having been employed in the military service of the Confederacy, came within the lines of the Northern commands, but this did not satisfy Bryant. On Dec. 6, 1861, he asked Congress to confiscate the property of the rebels, appoint State commissioners of forfeiture to take charge of it, and as fast as negroes came within Northern reach, make them freemen.

Bryant was in direct communication with radical officials in Washington and radical commanders in the field. He corresponded with Secretary Chase; Gen. James Wadsworth and Gen. E. A. Hitchcock wrote him startlingly frank letters; and he heard regularly from Consul-General Bigelow in Paris. The slowness with which the war dragged on was deplored by the _Evening Post_ even as it was deplored by Chase, Schurz, and Sumner. The paper did not criticize Lincoln with the signal lack of judgment Greeley often showed, much less with the rancorous hostility of Bennett’s _Herald_ or the now Democratic _World_. But by the middle of September, 1861, it was censuring him for the reluctance with which he signed the Confiscation Act, and reminding him that “his official position is in the lead, and not in the rear.” On Oct. 11 it published an editorial, “Playing With War,” in which it criticized the Administration for lukewarmness and declared that the public wanted active measures; “the more energetic, the more effective these measures, the more telling the blow, the more they will applaud.”

These complaints, the complaints of a large party all over the North and of an able Congressional group, redoubled as the first half of 1862 passed with almost no news from Virginia but that of disasters. On July 8 the _Post_ asked three sharp questions. Why had enlistments been stopped three or four months earlier--for Stanton, believing success at hand, had foolishly halted the recruiting on April 3? Why had the militia of the loyal States never, since the war began, been reorganized, drilled, and armed? And why had no great arsenals of munitions been collected? “We have been sluggish in our preparations and timid in our execution,” the paper admonished Washington. “Let us change all this.” Such complaints were natural and useful in the dark hour when McClellan’s army recoiled after bloody fighting from its first advance on Richmond. Bryant also did well to press his attacks upon corruption in government contracts, and political favoritism in military appointments. When this month Congress authorized the use of negroes in camp service and trench digging, he reasonably found fault with the Administration for its slowness in acting upon the authorization.

But Bryant’s “radicalism” was not commendable when he complained of the delay in emancipating the slaves; of the prominence of Northern Democrats, not hostile to slavery, in the army and at Washington; and of the consideration given border State sentiment. Had Lincoln acted rashly in the early months of the war, he would have forced Kentucky and Missouri into the arms of the South, and he thought (Sept. 22, 1861) that “to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” Had he made haste to emancipate the slaves, he would irretrievably have offended powerful elements in the North and the Border States which were willing to fight for the Union, but not to fight against slavery. Military historians have generally condemned Lincoln’s interference with McClellan’s plans in the early spring of 1862, an interference into which he was forced by such pressure as Bryant was exerting. The _Evening Post_ was unjust to Lincoln when it explained (July 7, 1862) why the people suspected him of indecision. “He has trusted too much to his subordinates; he has not been sufficiently peremptory with them, either with his generals or his Secretaries; and his whole Administration has been marked by a certain tone of languor and want of earnestness which has not corresponded with the wishes of the people.” It was unjust when it spoke again (July 23) of Lincoln’s “slumbers,” and of the “drowsy influence of border State opiates.”

In condemning the military incapacity of the Union generals in the East the newspaper was upon firmer ground. McClellan became commander of the Army of the Potomac immediately after Bull Run, and was made commander-in-chief of all the armies on Nov. 1, 1861. As the new year arrived without any movement, Bryant began grumbling over the idea held by many officers “that the wisest way of conducting the war is to weary out the South with delays.” He argued that if the North did not show more energy, France or England might eventually interfere. “If we understand the case,” he wrote caustically on Feb. 6, “Gen. McClellan has infinite claims upon our gratitude for the discipline which he has given to the army, but that discipline is still too imperfect to warrant any movement.” He pointed out that the enemy was relying upon this inefficiency, and was so confident of the situation in Virginia that Beauregard had just been dispatched to reinforce the Confederate army in the West. A few days later Bryant received a letter which Gen. Wadsworth wrote him from camp, denouncing McClellan roundly:

I repeat the conclusion intimated in my last letter. The
commander-in-chief is almost inconceivably incompetent, or he has
his own plans--widely different from those entertained by the
people of the North--of putting down this Rebellion. I have just
read the gloomy reports from Europe, threatening intervention, etc.
In my despair, I write in the faint hope of arousing our Press to
speak out what is in the hearts of ninety-nine one hundredths of
the army, and nine-tenths of the country--the commander-in-chief is
incompetent or disloyal. I have come slowly to this conclusion. No
man greeted his appointment more cordially than I did. There is not
the shadow of any personal feeling in my conviction. I have nothing
personal to complain of. I must again caution you, that all this is
strictly confidential.

Wadsworth reiterated this opinion all spring, while Bryant heard from Gen. John Pope and Gen. Hitchcock in the same vein. It was not until May 5 that McClellan fought his first battle, though he had held command since the preceding July. The _Evening Post_ was full of hope in the Peninsular campaign that followed, warning McClellan not to overestimate the enemy’s forces, and that “hitherto our great fault has been that we have not followed up our successes.” Its dejection was proportionately great when in the first days of July the campaign ended in failure, and McClellan withdrew his army from the position he had reached immediately in front of Richmond. The disgust of the radicals with McClellan was now complete, and the _Post_ was as eloquent as the _Tribune_ or _Times_ in attacking him. On July 3 it mournfully remarked that “while the cause cannot perhaps be defeated even by incompetence,” it could be gravely imperilled. “We have suffered long enough from inaction and overcaution. Henceforth we must have action.... If it be asked who is the best man, we can only say that it is Mr. Lincoln’s business to know, but bitter experience has taught us that Gen. McClellan is not.” Lincoln was admonished that he must open his eyes without a moment’s delay to the exigency, dismiss every slothful or imbecile leader, infuse energy and unity into his Cabinet, and recruit new armies. It was now that the _Post_ began asking for conscription, while it gave a ringing endorsement to Lincoln’s call for “three hundred thousand more.”

The _Herald_, incapable of blaming a Democrat like McClellan, in July attacked Stanton for the army’s failure, but the _Evening Post_ showed that McClellan himself had said that he had more than enough troops to take Richmond. The Chicago _Tribune_ later accused it of injustice to Lincoln in saying that McClellan should have been dismissed earlier, since Lincoln could not do so without offending loyal Democrats. That, rejoined the _Post_, is precisely the ground for our objection to McClellan; he was retained for political, not military, reasons.

These July days were the days in which Lincoln grew thin and haggard, Seward was sent upon a circuit of the North to arouse public men in support of the new enlistment programme, and Lowell wrote, “I don’t see how we are to be saved but by a miracle.” Who should succeed McClellan? Chase and Welles believed that the best general in view for the eastern command was John Pope, whose victory at Island No. 10 had given him national fame; and Bryant and Godwin, who had had some personal contact with Pope, agreed. He was called east and given the Army of Virginia. The chief command, however, went to Halleck, whom the _Evening Post_ distrusted as much as Welles did, and had already (July 23) described as slower and less enterprising than McClellan.

To Halleck the _Evening Post_ said that his motto must be that of the Athenian orator, action--action--action. The country wanted a Marshal Vorwarts; should its historians have none to record but General Trenches, General Strategy, or General Let-Escape? A few days later (Aug. 19) it published an editorial headed “Onward! Onward!” “The one essential element in our military movements now is celerity,” it urged. “Promptness in filling up the ranks already thinned by the war, promptness in organizing and sending forward new regiments, promptness in moving on the enemy.” Bryant had written Lincoln protesting against the sluggishness of military operations, and under pressure from other radicals, early in August the editor visited Washington to remonstrate. Mayor Opdyke, President Charles King of Columbia, and many other influential New Yorkers went at about the same time for the same purpose. Bryant tells us that he had a long talk with Lincoln, “in which I expressed myself plainly and without reserve, though courteously. He bore it well, and I must say that I left him with a perfect conviction of the excellence of his intentions and the singleness of his purposes, though with sorrow for his indecision.” A movement immediately began in New York to organize the radicals under a local committee.

In their editorials on military policy Bryant, Parke Godwin, and Charles Nordhoff were guided by officers who wrote from the field or whom they met in the city; and their comments were remarkably sound. At this moment, for example, the _Evening Post_ sensibly ridiculed the talk of a rebel army 200,000 strong. It repeatedly expressed a conviction that never, neither at Manassas, Yorktown, of Richmond, had the enemy been superior. “There is excellent reason to believe that the rebels never had more than 40,000 men at Manassas; it is a notorious fact that when McClellan arrived on the Peninsula, there were not 10,000 men at Yorktown. At Fair Oaks Sumner’s corps and Casey’s division repulsed the whole rebel army.... A close examination of the battles before Richmond proves that the rebels never fought more than 15,000 to 25,000 men there on any one day.” McClellan, it thought, had been frightened by idle fears. But when Pope failed more ignominiously than McClellan, and was soundly drubbed at the second battle of Bull Run (Aug. 30, 1862), the _Evening Post_ did not confine itself to military topics. It fell again into its unjustifiable censure of Lincoln. The President was honest, devoted, and determined--

and yet the effect of his management has been such that, with all
his personal popularity, in spite of the general confidence in his
good intentions, and in spite of the ability and energy of several
of his advisers, a large part of the nation is utterly discouraged
and despondent. Many intelligent and even wise persons, indeed, do
not scruple to express their suspicions that treachery lurks in the
highest quarters, and that either in the army or in the Cabinet
purposes are entertained which are equivalent to treason.

All this has grown out of the weakness and vacillation of the
Administration, which itself has grown out of Mr. Lincoln’s own
want of decision and purpose. We pretend to no state secrets, but
we have been told, upon what we deem good authority, that no such
thing as a continued, unitary, deliberate Administration exists;
that the President’s brave willingness to take all responsibility
has quite neutralized the idea of a conjoint responsibility; and
that orders of the highest importance are issued and movements
commanded, which Cabinet officers learn of as other people do, or,
what is worse, which the Cabinet officers disapprove and protest
against. Each Cabinet officer, again, controls his own department
pretty much as he pleases, without consultation with the President
or with his coadjutors. (Sept. 15, 1862.)

At this juncture the _Times_ and _World_ were vehemently demanding a drastic change of Cabinet officers; and in Washington Congressional sentiment was shaping itself toward the crisis of December, when a Senatorial caucus demanded the resignation of the conservative Seward. The _Herald_, panic-stricken, was telling McClellan that he was “master of the situation”--that is, he might be dictator; and calling upon him “to insist upon the modification and reconstruction of the Cabinet.” It was not unnatural for Bryant to give way to his old fear that the Administration would “fight battles to produce a compromise instead of a victory.”

As befitted such a warlike journal, the _Evening Post_ had its own strategic plan, which it first outlined Oct. 5, 1861, and thenceforth expounded every few weeks until the closing campaigns. Briefly, it held that there was no important object in the capture of Richmond; that the indispensable aim was to destroy the Confederate armies, not to take cities. The Southern capital could be easily removed to Knoxville, Petersburg, or Montgomery. Except in so far as was involved in opening the Mississippi and applying the blockade, it opposed the “anaconda plan” of Scott and McClellan, the plan of attacking with a half dozen armies from a half dozen sides. The rebels, it pointed out, had the advantage of inside lines and could rapidly shift their forces to defeat one Federal onslaught after another. The true strategy was for the Union itself to seize the inside lines. This could be done by concentrating its heaviest forces in those great Appalachian valleys which ran south through Virginia and Tennessee into the heart of the Confederacy. The population was in large part friendly; the Ohio River offered a base of supplies; the flanks could be secured by guarding the passes or gaps; and as the Union armies moved southward in the Tennessee and Shenandoah Valleys, they could force the evacuation of the border States. From the valleys they could fall at will upon Virginia, upon North Carolina, upon Georgia, upon Mississippi, and could rend the Confederacy in twain.

But the good and bad sides of the _Evening Post’s_ radicalism were best exhibited in its eagerness for emancipation. It was a noble object for which to contend, yet no one doubts that Lincoln was right in his long hesitation, and in declaring to Greeley so late as the summer of 1862 that his paramount object was to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery.

Even in the month of Bull Run the _Evening Post_, while rebuking a New England minister who asked for a national declaration in favor of emancipation, believed that the conflict, “though not a war directly aimed at the release of the slave, must indirectly work out the result in many ways.” When Fremont issued his hasty proclamation of September, 1861, liberating all slaves in Missouri, which Lincoln sensibly revoked, the _Post_ called it “the most popular act of the war,” and was much offended by the President. By October it was dropping the uncertainty of tone in which it had spoken of the subject. Early that month it said that if it became necessary to extinguish slavery in order to put down the rebellion, it must be given no mercy; a few days later it demanded the release of all captured slaves and their enlistment as cooks, trench-diggers, and other auxiliaries; while on Sept. 25 it virtually called for emancipation. The paper believed that it “would change the whole aspect of the war, bring to our side a host of new allies, call off the attention of the rebels from their present plan, and hasten the period of their subjugation.” Bryant wrote just before Thanksgiving upon the probable great result of the war; and “that the extinction of slavery will form a part of it,” he declared, “we have not the shadow of a doubt.”

During the first half of 1862 a considerable part of the _Post’s_ criticism of Lincoln sprang from its impatience over his reluctance to free the slaves. This was the attitude of Sumner, of Thaddeus Stevens, of Carl Schurz, of Greeley in the _Tribune_ and nearly all the _Tribune’s_ great constituency; most of Bryant’s friends took it, and many, as Lydia Maria Child, wrote requesting editorial pleas for emancipation. It is an interesting coincidence, that on the very day, July 22, 1862, that Lincoln read his emancipation proclamation to the Cabinet, and upon Seward’s suggestion put it aside, the _Evening Post’s_ leading editorial was an impassioned plea for such a document. Lincoln was only waiting for a victory, that his proclamation might seem to be supported by a military success. Possibly Bryant learned this from his friend Chase. At any rate, although the _Evening Post_ was bitterly grieved by McClellan’s failure to win a decisive victory at Antietam in September, and wrote angrily that such drawn battles were “not war but murder; butchery which fills all right-minded men with horror,” it knew that emancipation might follow Lee’s retreat from Maryland soil. Just after the battle Bryant wrote an editorial (Sept. 17) called, “While the Iron is Hot.” There are crucial junctures, he said, when great blows must be struck at great evils. Such a juncture had arrived; “a proclamation of freedom by martial law would be hailed, we believe, by an almost universal shout of joy in all the loyal States, as the death knell of the rebellion.” Just a week later the _Evening Post_ was rejoicing over the President’s announcement of his forthcoming proclamation:

It puts us right before Europe; it brings us back to our
traditions; it animates our soldiers with the same spirit which
led our forefathers to victory under Washington; they are fighting
today, as the Revolutionary patriots fought, in the interests of
the human race, for human rights....

There was a lesson for all radicals in the resentment which, at even that late date, many Northern newspapers showed over the President’s act. The _Journal of Commerce_ had “only anticipations of evil from it,” and believed that an immense majority of Northerners would view it with profound regret. The _Herald_ predicted that it would ruin the white laborers of the West by bringing the negroes north to compete with them. The _World_ held that it was nugatory--the South would have to be whipped before it could be given any effect. The _Courrier des Etats Unis_ had deplored many errors since the republic “began rolling down the slope which promises to land it in the abyss,” but it thought this blunder the most wanton and complete. What would such papers and the great body of citizens they represented have said six months earlier?

Another and highly praiseworthy evidence of the “radicalism” of the _Evening Post_ was its eagerness for a far-reaching system of taxation, and for having the financial conduct of the war kept as strictly as possible upon a sound-money basis. Having been active in obtaining Chase’s appointment to the Treasury, Bryant felt a special solicitude for that department. During the latter half of 1861 he repeatedly urged Congress to tax to the limit. He believed that the government should be able to pay for the war by heavy taxes, supplemented by the sale of long-term bonds, and only as a final resource should issue Treasury notes payable on demand. It was a disappointment to the paper that Chase took no early steps for the development of an appropriate tax system. A remarkable editorial of Feb. 1, 1862, pictured the wealth of the nation: the universal possession of property, the high per capita prosperity, the bursting granaries, the rich output of precious metals. It recalled the fact that three times the national debt contracted in great wars had been wiped out, while in the thirties the treasury overflowed until men racked their brains with plans for spending the superfluity. Never was a nation more cheerfully inclined to accept high taxes; “the general feeling is one of impatience that Congress is so slow in performing this necessary duty.”

As early as Jan. 15 the _Evening Post_ had uttered its first warning against a reliance upon paper money. Naturally, the passage of the greenback legislation of Feb. 25, 1862, for the issue of $150,000,000 in legal-tender notes, dismayed it. It believed the law grossly unconstitutional, and was certain that it would be disastrous in effect. Secretary Chase wrote to Bryant, on Feb. 4, arguing for the bill, but in vain. “Your feelings of repugnance to the legal-tender clause can hardly be greater than my own,” said Chase; “but I am convinced that, as a temporary measure, it is indispensably necessary.” He thought that a minority of the people would not sustain the notes unless they were made a tender for debt, and that this minority could control the majority to all practical intents. But the _Evening Post_, like all the other New York journals save two, opposed the bill to the last. Bryant did not believe that the measure could be temporary, as Chase put it. In an editorial called “A Deluge at Hand,” he compared the law to the first breach made in one of the Holland dikes:

In all the examples which the world has seen, the evil of an
irredeemable paper currency runs its course as certainly as the
smallpox or any other disease. The first effects are of such a
nature that the remedy is never applied; there is no disposition
to apply it. The inflation of the currency pleases a large class
of persons by a rise of prices and an extraordinary activity in
business. People buy to sell at higher prices; property passes
rapidly from hand to hand; fortunes are made; the community is
delirious with speculation. At such a time suppose Mr. Chase to
step in and say: “My friends, this fun has been going on long
enough; you must be tired by this time of speculation. Let us
repeal the legal-tender clause in the Treasury-note bill and return
to specie payments.” What sort of reception would this proposal
meet?

His prophecy was fulfilled. Successive issues of legal-tender notes followed, until the total reached $450,000,000; prices soared, and the cost of the war was immensely enhanced; and at one time $39 in gold would buy $100 in currency. The _Evening Post_, it may be added, was the first newspaper to suggest the issue of interest-bearing banknotes as an expedient for the gradual contraction of the currency, a measure Congress adopted in March, 1863.

Meanwhile, the Northern armies failed to make progress. When in December, 1862, the criminally incompetent Burnside attacked Lee’s entrenched army at Fredericksburg, and was flung back with the loss of nearly 13,000 men, an outburst of anger came from the whole New York press. “The Late Massacre” was the heading the _Evening Post_ gave its editorial of Dec. 18, in which, three days after Burnside fell back, it could not understand why he was not already removed. “How long is such intolerable and wicked blundering to continue? What does the President wait for? We hear that a great, a horrible crime has been committed; we do not hear that those guilty of it are under arrest; we do not hear even that they are to be removed from the places of trust which they have shown themselves so incapable to fill.” The Democratic press, led by the _Herald_, demanded the reinstatement of McClellan, while the radical press wanted an entirely new general. Once more, like the _Tribune_, _Herald_, and _World_, the _Evening Post_ blamed Lincoln for his generals’ mistakes. “The President has required too little from his agents; his good nature has led him to be less strict toward them than he ought to be, while at the same time his confidence in himself and his advisers has led him, unfortunately, to deny himself that general counsel of the nation by which he might have benefited had he kept up confidential relations between himself and the people.” Yet it had praised the choice of Burnside, calling him an energetic, calm, and judicious leader, who had the prestige of success in his favor.

As the spring campaign of 1863 opened, the _Post_ reflected the renewed hopefulness of the North. It was not pleased by the selection of Hooker to be the new commander, but it was encouraged by his rapid reorganization of the army and restoration of fighting discipline. The new advance had the old result--disaster. On May 7, lamenting Hooker’s ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville, the _Evening Post_ condemned his strategy as incomprehensible. It was quite right in its general verdict, and in a number of specific criticisms, as when it said that the disposition of the forces under Sedgwick had been insane. But we can hardly say as much of its censure of Hooker and the Administration for an alleged failure to use the needed reserves. There were 60,000 men among the Washington defenses, it declared, who might have been replaced by militia and thrown into the battle. As a matter of fact, Hooker had failed to employ 35,000 fresh troops right at hand; his army was large enough, and much too large for his capacity to handle it. It fell back across the Rappahannock, and the stage was set for Lee’s descent upon Pennsylvania.

Rhodes states that “by the middle of June (1863) the movements of Lee in Virginia warned the North of the approaching invasion” that culminated at Gettysburg. But the readers of the _Evening Post_ were warned of it by a column editorial on May 21, two weeks before Lee took his first preliminary steps. That such a prophecy could be made shows how conversant with the military situation the great New York journals were kept by their war correspondents, their files of Southern newspapers, and their high official advisers. Bryant wrote that he believed Jefferson Davis was preparing his last desperate stroke, in the knowledge that Grant might soon wrest the whole Mississippi from him, that there would be more Union cavalry raids like Stoneman’s and Grierson’s, and that even if the Confederacy beat off another attack like Hooker’s, it would prove a Pyrrhic victory:

There are unmistakable indications that Davis is quietly
withdrawing troops from the outlying camps along the seacoasts to
reinforce Lee, which movement will be continued, we think, until
that general has a command of 150,000 to 200,000 men. As soon as
it is ready Lee will move, we conjecture, not in the direction of
Washington, but of the Shenandoah Valley, with a view to crossing
the Potomac somewhere between Martinsburg and Cumberland. It will
be easy for him ... to defend his flanks ... and to maintain
also uninterrupted communications with Staunton and the Central
Virginia railway. The valley itself is filled with rapidly ripening
harvests, and once upon the river supplies may be got from
Pennsylvania.

The editorial proposed either the occupation of the Shenandoah in force, or a new attack on Lee, and advised the Maryland and Pennsylvania authorities to fortify their towns and raise fresh bodies of troops.

When the invasion actually began, parts of the North were frightened, but the _Evening Post_ was almost gleeful. On June 17, when news came that the first Confederates were across the Potomac, it expressed the hope that Lee would push on so that he might be cut off and destroyed. Ten days later, when the rebels had reached Carlisle, Pa., it was jubilant: “It is time for the nation to rise; the great occasion has come, and now, if we had prepared ourselves for it, and had collected and drilled reserve forces, we might end the rebellion in a month.” On June 29, two days before the battle began, it congratulated Meade on an unsurpassed military opportunity, and urged three considerations upon him. He should insist that Washington help and not embarrass him, he should ask for all the reserves available, “and then, having given battle in due time, let him avoid the mistake of McClellan at Antietam, by pursuing the enemy until he is completely overthrown.” That the chance for pursuit would come the _Post_ never doubted.

The close of the three days’ struggle at Gettysburg left Bryant confident that the turning point of the war had been passed. “There is every reason to hope that the rebel army of Virginia will never recross the Potomac as an army,” he said on July 6; but whether Lee crossed it or not, “the rebellion has received a staggering blow, from which it would scarcely seem possible for it to recover.” The next day he insisted that the rebels be followed at once and destroyed, but in his exultation he accepted philosophically Meade’s failure to advance.

II

At this moment of rejoicing over Gettysburg and Vicksburg the city was horrified and humiliated by the Draft Riots, a sharp reminder that the home front was only less important than the battle front. Of this fact the _Evening Post_ had never lost sight. Bryant’s editorials always held in view the necessity of sustaining the spirits of the North. For every “radical” utterance criticizing the Administration’s faults there were ten exhorting the people to support its central aims. In the first months of the war he published two martial lyrics, one addressed to European enemies who hoped for the ruin of the republic, and one a plea for enlistment:

Few, few were they whose swords of old
Won the fair land in which we dwell;
But we are many, we who hold
The grim resolve to guard it well.
Strike, for that broad and goodly land,
Blow after blow, till men shall see
That Might and Right move hand in hand,
And glorious must their triumph be!

It was natural for New York city to have a lusty anti-war press when the struggle for the Union began. It had been Democratic since Jackson’s time, and remained Democratic during the Civil War. Its social connections with the South had always been close, while till 1860 its merchants and bankers had stronger business ties with the South than with the West. After the war began many Southern sympathizers, refugees from the border States, settled in the city.

But the capture of Fort Sumter turned all that indifference to the secession movement which William H. Russell had noted a few weeks earlier into a passionate enthusiasm of the majority for the Federal cause. At 3 p. m. on April 18, the day the first troops passed through New York southward, an excited crowd gathered before the _Express_ office and demanded a display of the American flag. It surged up Park Row and made the same demand of the _Day Book_ and _Daily News_ (the latter Fernando Wood’s organ), and thence poured down Nassau Street and Broadway to the _Journal of Commerce_ building, which also hurried out a flag. Already the _Herald_ had decorated its windows with bunting. The Monday after Sumter, Bennett had braved popular feeling with another demand for peace, but now he hurried to Washington, pledged his support of the Union to President Lincoln, and saw that beginning with the _Herald_ for April 17, that policy was adopted.

Unfortunately, the tone of the pro-slavery press continued so objectionable that on Aug. 22, 1861, the postoffice forbade mail transportation to the _Journal of Commerce_, _Day Book_, _Daily News_, _Freeman’s Journal_, and _Brooklyn Eagle_, all five of which had been presented by a Federal Grand Jury. The _Daily News_ was suppressed in New Jersey by the Federal Marshal. Gerard Hallock of the _Journal of Commerce_, complaining of threats of violence and an organized movement to cut off his subscribers and advertising, sold his interest to David Stone and Wm. C. Prime, and the paper became less offensive. The _Day Book_ permanently and the _Daily News_ temporarily ceased publication. The foreign-language press also failed to show due patriotism, many French citizens in August signing a petition for the suppression of the _Courrier des États Unis_ as disloyal, and the Westchester grand jury presenting the _Staats-Zeitung_ and _National-Zeitung_ as disseminators of treason. The _World_, changing hands, became under the able Manton Marble, who had recently been an employee of the _Post_, a leader of the “copperhead” press.

There is no need to quote from the _World_, _Daily News_, and _Journal of Commerce_ to show how, boldly when they dared, covertly when they did not, they continued to attack the Union cause. Their methods were defined by the _Evening Post_ of May 20, 1863, in a “Recipe for a Democratic Paper,” which may be briefly summarized:

(1) Magnify all rebel successes and minimize all Federal victories;
if the South loses 18,000 men say 8,000 men, and if the North loses
11,000 say 21,000.

(2) Calumniate all energetic generals like Sherman, Grant, and
Rosecrans; call worthless leaders like Halleck and Pope the master
generals of the age.

(3) Whenever the Union suffers a reverse, declare that the nation
is weary of this slow war; and ask how long this fratricidal
conflict will be allowed to continue.

(4) Expatiate upon the bankruptcies, high prices, stock jobbers,
gouging profiteers and “shoddy men.”

(5) Abuse Lincoln and the Cabinet in two ways: say they are weak,
timid, vacillating, and incompetent; and that they are tyrannous,
harsh, and despotic.

(6) Protest vehemently against “nigger” brigadiers, and the
atrocity of arming the slaves against their masters.

(7) Don’t advise open resistance to the draft. But clamor against
it in detail; suggest doubts of its constitutionality; denounce the
$300 clause; say that it makes an odious distinction between rich
and poor; and refer learnedly to the military autocracies of France
and Prussia.

The copperhead politicians were as active as the copperhead press. At their head was Mayor Wood, who ran for reëlection in the fall of 1861 and was opposed by Bryant’s friend George Opdyke. Called a blackguard by the _Tribune_ and a miscreant by the _Evening Post_, Wood based his campaign upon denunciation of the abolitionists and appeals to racial prejudice. In a speech reported by the _Post_ of Nov. 29 he declared that Lincoln had brought the nation to the verge of ruin, that the negro-philes would prosecute the war as long as they could share the money spent upon it, and that “they will get Irishmen and Germans to fill up the regiments under the idea that they will themselves remain at home to divide the plunder.” Just before election day the _Post_ gave part of its editorial page to the following bit of drama:

FERNANDO IN A PORTER HOUSE

AN OCCURRENCE UP-TOWN; NOT A FANCY SKETCH

(_Scene: A porter house in the 22d ward. Proprietor behind the
counter. Behind him a row of bottles, etc. Enter Fernando and a
voter._)

_Fernando_: Good morning, my dear friend. Please let me and my
friend have something to drink. (_Glasses are set before them and a
decanter. They help themselves. Fernando throws a double eagle upon
the counter, waving away the offer to give back change._) You will
support me, I suppose?

_Proprietor_ (_quietly depositing the money in the till_): Yes,
I shall support you for the State prison. You have been up for a
place there, I believe.

_Fernando_ (_going out and coming back_): By the way, you did not
mean what you said just now?

_Proprietor_: Yes, I did mean just that. You deserve State prison
and would have gone there three years ago if you had not cheated
the law.

_Fernando_: Will you give me my change?

_Proprietor_: No, I will not. I want it to show my neighbors how
you tried to influence my vote.

(_Exit Fernando, crestfallen_)

Opdyke, with the first war enthusiasm behind him, won the Mayoralty election from the egregious Wood. But the strength of the Democrats, which in large degree meant the strength of the anti-war party, was thereafter triumphant in every election till Grant took Richmond. The State and Congressional campaign of 1862, coming during the dark period after the Peninsular campaign and the drawn battle of Antietam, aroused the _Evening Post_, _Times_ and _Tribune_ to great exertions. Horatio Seymour, the “submissionist” candidate, contested the Governorship with Gen. James Wadsworth. His speeches, wrote Bryant, have a direct tendency to discourage our loyal troops and sustain the hopes of the South. The _Post_ denied his echo of the _World’s_ and _Herald’s_ statements that the Administration was a failure. “It has been a grand and brilliant success. History will so account it.” Lincoln, predicted the _Post_, need only give rein to the Northern determination, and his name “will stand on the future annals of his country illustrated by a renown as pure and undying as that of George Washington.” But Seymour easily won, obtaining 54,283 votes in New York city against 22,523 given Wadsworth; and the Democrats swept the Congressional districts, including one in which they had nominated Fernando Wood.

One factor in this result, said the _Evening Post_, was the alarm many had taken at the threat of the draft. The _World_ played upon this alarm, and both it and the _Herald_ attacked the emancipation proclamation as a change in the objects of the war; to which Bryant replied that the Revolution had begun to assert the rights of the Colonies within the British Empire, and had shortly become a war to take them out of it. Bryant in the spring of 1863 characterized the _Express_ as an organ “which has called repeatedly upon the mob to oust the regular government at Washington, and upon the army to proclaim McClellan its chief at all hazards”; while the _Journal of Commerce_, he said, “has always denounced the war, and even now argues ... that the allegiance of the citizens is due to the State, and not to the Federal Government.” Some of the most prominent men of the city--Tilden, James Brooks, S. F. B. Morse, August Belmont, David E. Wheeler, and others--met at Delmonico’s on Feb. 6, 1863, and formed a plan for circulating copperhead doctrines, or, as they put it, for “the diffusion of knowledge”; whence the _Post_ nicknamed them “diffusionists.”

When the Draft Act was enforced throughout the North just after Gettysburg, disorders occurred in widely scattered centers; and it was inevitable that they should be gravest in New York. Not merely did the city contain many half disloyal Americans of native birth. It was full of a class of Irishmen who had proved especially responsive to the demagogues opposing the war. Clashes between the Irish and negroes had been common for a decade. In August, 1862, a mob in Brooklyn attacked a factory in which blacks were working, and tried to set it afire with the negroes inside. Similar riots, the _Post_ remarked, had disgraced several Western cities. “In every case Irish laborers have been incited to take part in these lawless attempts; and the cunning ringleaders and originators of these mutinies, who are not Irishmen, have thus sought to kill two birds with one stone--to excite a strong popular prejudice against the Irish, while they used them to wreak their spite against the blacks.”

The copperhead press in the early July days preceding the first drawing of draft numbers was filled with abuse of conscription. The _Herald_, to be sure, which professed neutrality between the “niggerhead” press (the _Evening Post_, _Times_, and _Tribune_) and the copperhead papers, advocated the draft as a means of hastening Union victory, though it abused Lincoln as a nincompoop. But the _World_ spoke of Lincoln’s “wanton exercise of arbitrary powers,” and predicted that if the war was carried on to enforce the emancipation proclamation a million men, not three hundred thousand, would have to be conscripted. “A measure,” it said of the Draft act, “which could not have been ventured upon in England even in those dark days when the press-gang filled the English ships of war with slaves ... was thrust into the statute books, as one might say, almost by force.” The _Daily News_ applauded the speeches at a city peace meeting on July 9, where one orator had declared: “The Administration now feels itself in want of more men to replace those it has slaughtered, and to aid it in upholding its despotism, and for this purpose has ordered the conscription.”

On July 11, 1863, the draft began, and on the 13th, Monday, when an effort was made to renew it, the rioting commenced. The first disturbances occurred at the draft headquarters on the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, which were sacked about noon; the disorders grew much worse on Tuesday, and were not entirely suppressed until Thursday. The story of the four days of bloodshed need not be rehearsed in detail, but the _Evening Post_ files afford certain new lights upon it. The historian Rhodes, in his account, draws upon the files of the _Tribune_, _Times_, _World_, _Herald_, and _Post_ as sources, but only upon the issues of the week of the riot. Ten days later (July 23) an 8,000 word history of the riot appeared in the _Evening Post_, a close-knit, graphic narrative, apparently written by Charles Nordhoff, who had been an eye-witness of much of it.

Nordhoff makes it clear that the mob was against not merely the draft, but the war. “Seymour’s our man”; “Seymour’s for us”; “Yis, and Wood too”; “It’s Davis and Seymour and Wood,” were expressions heard at every turn. “Cheers for Jeff Davis were as common as brickbats.” Above all, Nordhoff was convinced that the mob had intelligent leaders outside of its own ranks. The nucleus of the mob was a gang of about fifty rough fellows who at nine o’clock in the morning began prowling along the East River wharves in the Grand Street neighborhood, picking up recruits. As the crowd grew in size it entered foundries and factories for more men. “It is absolutely certain that there was no planning or directing head among the acting ringleaders. No one could follow or watch them without seeing that they were instigated; though by whom it was impossible to tell. They were men themselves incapable of self-direction; men of the lowest order and of the most brutal passions--and at that doubly infuriated by rum.” Immediately the destruction of the Third Avenue draft headquarters was complete, the mob split into three parts, which at once sought three important objectives, a fact which Nordhoff regarded as proving outside leadership.

One of the three mobs destroyed the Armory on Second Avenue at Twenty-First Street--this was on Monday at four p. m.; a second simultaneously demolished the draft office at Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street; and a third, the largest, sacked and burnt the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile, small groups had begun hunting down negroes and clubbing them to death. Nordhoff describes a scene during the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum:

Opposite the Reservoir stood a knot of gentlemen, strangers to each
other. Said one of them, a timid, clerical-looking man:

“What are we coming to? Is this to go on? Whose family and dwelling
is safe?”

“How long is this to last?” asked another--who might have been a
merchant.

“I will tell you how long,” replied a third, who looked like a
Tammany alderman, but as respectably dressed as either of the
others, and buttoning up his coat to his chin defiantly: “Just as
long as you enact unjust laws.”

The rioting, Nordhoff believed, might have been ended the first day by determined military forces. While ruffians at the Orphan Asylum were crying, “Kill the little devils!” a steady attack by a small armed force would have routed them. “The rioters evidently expected such an attack, and at one time, frightened by a squabble on their outskirts between a few firemen and a gang abusing a bystander, actually took to their heels, but returned to their work with cries of derision.” The first charge was made by the police just after 4 p. m. at the La Farge Hotel, and the rioters ran like sheep, leaving about thirty dead or wounded. Nordhoff’s observation that the pillaging was done mainly by women and boys, who took two hours to carry 300 iron bedsteads from the Orphan Asylum, was borne out by a news item printed by the _Post_ during the riots:

HOW A HOUSE IS SACKED

Having witnessed the proceedings of the rioters on several
occasions ... we describe them for the benefit of our readers. On
yesterday afternoon about six o’clock they visited the residence of
a gentleman in Twenty-ninth Street. A few stragglers appeared on
the scene, consisting mainly of women and children. Two or three
men then demanded and gained admittance, while their number was
largely increased on the outside. One elderly gentleman was found
who had liberty to leave. Then commenced indiscriminate plunder.
This was carried on mostly by old men, women and children, while
the “men of muscle” stood guard. Every article was appropriated,
the carriers often bending under their burden. Women and children,
hatless and shoeless, marched off having in their possession the
most costly of fabrics, some of them broken and unfit for use.

To this wanton destruction of private property the neighbors and
the many visitors drawn to the spot were silent spectators. A word
of remonstrance cost a life. Two gentlemen, we are informed, paid
the penalty yesterday for expressing their righteous indignation....

An hour later, in another visit, we saw the crowd engaged in
breaking the sashes and carrying off the fragments of woodwork.

Nordhoff gave high praise to the city police and the United States troops, but thought the State militia miserably ineffective, and the firemen often allies of the mob. He ascertained that the rioters’ casualties were much higher than the public believed, and estimated that 400 to 500 lives were lost. “A continuous stream of funerals flows across the East River, and graves are dug privately within the knowledge of the police here and there.”

Just how much basis there was for the _Evening Post’s_ view that the mob was not spontaneous, but instigated by disloyalist leaders of brains, it is impossible to say. On the second day “a distinguished and sagacious Democrat,” Bryant wrote editorially, visited the office to warn him that the riots “had a firmer basis and a more fixed object than we imagined.” But it is certain that the copperhead press seemed to cheer on the mob even while it denounced it. Thus the _World_ on Tuesday spoke of the rioters as possessed “with a burning sense of wrong toward the government,” and though it appealed to them to stop, asked: “Does any man wonder that poor men refuse to be forced into a war mismanaged almost into hopelessness, perverted almost into partisanship?” The _Evening Post_ was particularly incensed by the _Herald’s_ references to the riots as a “popular” outbreak, and that of the _Daily News_ to “the people fired on by United States soldiers.” Not the people, it said; “a small band of cutthroats, pickpockets, and robbers.” It wanted the miscreants given an abundance of grape and canister without delay, and declared that an officer who had used blank cartridges ought to be shot. To this the _Herald_ made its usual impudent kind of rejoinder. Aren’t the members of the mob people, it asked? They have arms, legs, and five senses; “their intelligence is low, but it is at least equal to that of the editors of the niggerhead organs.”

III