Chapter THIRTEEN: The Critical Days of the CIVIL War (2)

News of the complete victory at Vicksburg, arriving in New York at the same time that it became evident Meade was not vigorously following up his repulse of Lee at Gettysburg, brought home to the East the superiority of Grant as a commander. That superiority the _Evening Post_ had begun to recognize as early as Feb. 14, 1862, when it had contrasted his capture of Fort Donelson, in a sea of mud, using men half trained and half supplied, with McClellan’s inaction in Virginia. “A capable, clear-headed general,” it said, who knew that where there is a will there is a way. After Corinth the paper hailed Grant (Oct. 8, 1862) as the one general “able not only to shake the tree, but to pick up the fruit.” When by a brilliantly bold campaign he invested Vicksburg, it used precisely the comparison that John Fiske used years later in his history of the Mississippi Valley in the Civil War: “The dispatches from the Southwest read like the bulletins of the young conqueror of Italy when he first awakened the world to the fact that a new and unprecedented military genius had sprung upon the stage.”

Sober history doubts whether Lincoln actually said that if he knew what whisky Grant used he would send other generals a barrel; but the _Evening Post_ almost said it. Just after the surrender of Vicksburg it published (July 8) a defense of Grant from the charge that he drank heavily. It recalled the many evidences of his single-mindedness, alertness, and decision, and the fact that he had gained more victories and prisoners than any other commander. “If any one after this,” it concluded, “still believes that Grant is a drunkard, we advise him to persuade the Government to place none but drunkards in important commands.”

Years later the _Evening Post_ related that while Grant lay before Vicksburg, a letter from a prominent Westerner assured the editors that the general and his staff had once gone from Springfield to Cairo in the car of the president of the Illinois Central, and that almost the whole party had got drunk, Grant worst of all. By a coincidence, while this letter was under discussion President Osborne of the Illinois Central entered the office. He characterized it as a malignant falsehood. “Grant and his staff did go down to Cairo in the President’s car,” he said; “I took them down myself, and selected that car because it had conveniences for working, eating, and sleeping on the way. We had dinner in the car, at which wine was served to such as desired it. I asked Grant what he would drink; he answered, a cup of tea, and this I made for him myself. Nobody was drunk on the car, and to my certain knowledge Grant tasted no liquid but tea and water.”

After Grant was made commander-in-chief in March, 1864, and took charge in the East, the _Evening Post_ was confident that victory was at hand. This faith increased during the summer. Bryant wrote Bigelow on June 15 that the North ought certainly to bring the war to an end within the year, at least so far as concerned all great military operations. On Sept. 3, just after Grant had asked for 100,000 additional men, he said editorially that if he were given them, peace might be won by Thanksgiving. The next day, when news had come that Sherman had captured Atlanta, the paper renewed the prophecy of an early triumph, changing the date, however, to Christmas. It no longer grumbled over military nervousness and dilatoriness. It was disturbed by the state of the currency, which was making the public debt twice what it should have been; but its chief fear was that the men at the North in favor of a premature peace would rob the Union of the fruits of its bloody struggle.

As early as December, 1862, and January, 1863, Greeley had begun in the _Tribune_ a movement for ending the war by foreign mediation between North and South. The following month Napoleon III actually made an offer of mediation, which Lincoln immediately refused. Advance news of it had been sent Bryant by Bigelow, and the _Post_ was ready to speak vigorously against it. Greeley in July, 1864, again tried to initiate peace negotiations, and asked Lincoln to arrange a conference at Niagara with two Confederate “ambassadors” who were reported to be there, telling him that “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peace, shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” The attitude of the _Evening Post_ was contemptuous. “No,” wrote Bryant as Greeley bought his ticket to Niagara, “the most effective peace meetings yet held are those which Grant assembled in front of Vicksburg, which Meade conducted on the Pennsylvania plains, which Rosecrans now presides over near Tullahoma; their thundering cannons are the most eloquent orators, and the bullet which wings its way to the enemy ranks the true olive branch.”

There was some fear for the moment that the _Times_ would join the _Tribune_ in its readiness for peace without victory. Bryant wrote his wife on Sept. 7, 1864, that he had a good deal of political news which he could not put in his letter. “I wrote a protest against treating with the Rebel Government, which you will have seen in the paper.... I was told from the best authority that Mr. Lincoln was considering whether he should not appoint commissioners for the purpose, and I afterwards heard that Raymond of the _Times_ had been in Washington to persuade Mr. Lincoln to take the step, and was willing himself to be one of the commissioners.” Bryant’s 1,500 word editorial, “No Negotiations With the Rebel Government,” anticipated the arguments of Lincoln’s message to Congress in December opposing any parley.

At this moment the Democratic party was carrying on its campaign for the Presidency upon a platform which declared the war a failure, and asserted that an armistice should be sought at the first practicable opportunity. It is true that McClellan, the party’s candidate, had repudiated these planks. But when he did so, Fernando Wood had wanted at once to repudiate McClellan, saying that the platform was sound, and that the Democrats should call their Chicago Convention together again to seek a man who would stand upon it. The _Daily News_, edited by his brother Benjamin Wood, similarly upheld the platform. So did the _World_, which went to shocking lengths in attacking Lincoln; not content with calling his Administration ignorant and incompetent, it cast imputations upon his personal honesty, while in a phrase that became temporarily famous it remarked that the White House was “full of infamy.” According to the _World_, the war could and should be stopped instantly. The South was ready to reënter the Union if only Lincoln would cancel his outrageous emancipation proclamation. “Are unknown thousands of wives yet to become widows, and unknown tens of thousands of children to become orphans, that Mr. Lincoln’s positive violations of solemn pledges may be assumed by the people as their own?” Manton Marble argued throughout the campaign for an armistice, a convention of all the States, and an effort to conclude peace upon the basis of union and slavery. Emancipation, he asserted, meant “industrial disorganization, social chaos, negro equality, and the nameless horrors of a civil war.”

In this election the _Evening Post_ maintained a straight course. Early in the year Bryant had inclined to doubt, as did Beecher, Greeley, Thaddeus Stevens, George W. Julian, and a majority of Congress, whether Lincoln’s renomination would be wise. This was a reflection in part of his impatient “radicalism,” in part of his attachment to Chase; and on March 25, 1864, he made one of many prominent Union men who wrote the Republican Executive Committee suggesting a postponement of the Convention until September. But no hint of this doubt entered the columns of the _Evening Post_. It never spoke of any other possible nomination than Lincoln’s. Indeed, every one soon saw that the choice was inevitable, and Bryant cast whatever hesitation he felt, which was not much, behind him. “It was done in obedience to the public voice,” he wrote Bigelow June 15, “a powerful _vis a tergo_ pushed on the politicians whether willing or unwilling. I do not, for my part, doubt of his reëlection.” By this time the _Evening Post_ was ready to admit that the President had made fewer errors and seen more clearly than it had supposed. It wrote (Sept. 20):

He has gained wisdom by experience. Every year has seen our cause
more successful; every year has seen abler generals, more skillful
leaders, called to the head; every year has seen fewer errors,
greater ability, greater energy, in the administration of affairs.
The timid McClellan has been superseded by Grant, the do-nothing
Buell by Sherman; wherever a man has shown conspicuous merit he has
been called forward; political and military rivalries have been
as far as possible banished from the field and from the national
councils.... While Mr. Lincoln stays in power, this healthy and
beneficial state of things will continue....

Throughout the campaign Parke Godwin did much public speaking. During October the _Post_ published a weekly campaign newspaper addressed particularly to laboring men, which had an enormous circulation at one cent a copy; the edition the first week was 50,000. In its local result the election justified the labors of the copperhead press, for McClellan carried New York city by a vote double Lincoln’s--78,746 to 36,673. But the national result showed how totally unrepresentative this anti-war press was of any extensive Northern sentiment. It proved that Bryant had been right in declaring in the _Post_ of March 16, 1863, when Greeley and the _Tribune_ actually said the nation should give up if the campaign then beginning failed:

It certainly is remarkable how unable the newspapers of the
country, even those of the largest circulation, have been to
divert the public mind from a fixed determination to put down
the rebellion by every possible means, and to allow no pause in
the war until the integrity of the Union is assured. One class
of journals has labored to show that the war for the Union is
hopeless; the people have never believed them. One class has called
for a revolutionary leader; the call has only excited a little
astonishment, the people being satisfied to prosecute the war under
the legal and constitutional authorities.

The last effort at a premature armistice, that made by the venerable Francis P. Blair, culminating in the Hampton Roads conference between Lincoln and Vice-President A. H. Stephens, was treated by the _Evening Post_ like previous efforts. Blair was an old friend, but under the caption, “Fools’ Errands,” Bryant wrote (Jan. 10, 1865) that his gratuitous diplomacy might do much harm. “No, our best peacemakers yet are Grant, Sheridan, Thomas, Sherman, and Farragut, and the black-mouthed bulldogs by which they enforce their pretensions over more than half of what was once an ‘impregnable’ part of rebeldom.” The final peace, the peace made by the black-mouthed bulldogs, was greeted by the _Post_ three months later in fervent terms:

GLORY TO THE LORD OF HOSTS

The great day, so long and anxiously awaited, for which we have
struggled through four years of bloody war, which has so often ...
dawned only to go down in clouds of gloom; the day of the virtual
overthrow of the rebellion, of the triumph of constitutional order
and of universal liberty,--of the success of the nation against its
parts, and of a humane and beneficent civilization over a relic of
barbarism that had been blindly allowed to remain as a blot on its
scutcheon--the day of PEACE has finally come....

Glory, then to the Lord of Hosts, who hath given us this final
victory! Thanks, heartfelt and eternal, to the brave and noble men
by land and sea, officers and soldiers, who by their labors, their
courage and sufferings, their blood and their lives, have won it
for us. And a gratitude no less deep and earnest to that majestic,
devoted, and glorious American people, who through all these years
of trial have kept true to their faith in themselves and their
institutions....

IV

Throughout the Civil War the news pages were in charge of one of the most picturesque and able men ever employed by the paper, Charles Nordhoff. It was a trying position. O. W. Holmes wrote an essay in 1861 called “Bread and Newspapers,” in which he described the state of mind in which the North lived, waiting but from one edition to another. The Civil War was the heroic age of American press enterprise, and while the _Evening Post_ conducted a less extensive war establishment than the _Herald_, _Tribune_, or _Times_--the _Herald_ spent $500,000 on its correspondence--Nordhoff saw that it maintained a creditable position. He stepped into the office just after Bigelow’s departure, in 1861. Along with Bigelow the _Post_ had just lost William M. Thayer. This young man, after a brilliant ten years partly in New York, partly as the only correspondent with the Walker filibustering expedition in Nicaragua, and partly in Washington, had quarreled with Isaac Henderson, while at the same time his health failed; and he was glad to be appointed consul at Alexandria. Nordhoff’s chief assistant in gathering news became Augustus Maverick, a veteran newspaper man previously with the _Times_.

Nordhoff, though only thirty years old in 1831, had already passed through enough adventure to fill an active lifetime. He was born in Prussia, where his father was a wealthy liberal who had served in Blucher’s army and had later set up a school at Erwitte. Compelled for political reasons to leave, the elder Nordhoff gathered together all his funds, about $50,000, and reached America in 1834. The family went to the Mississippi Valley, and for a time lived an anomalous life, eating in the wilderness from rich silver and drinking imported German mineral water. The boy was left an orphan at the age of nine, and was reared by the Rev. Wilhelm Nast of the Methodist Church in Cincinnati. Revolting against the rigid ecclesiastical discipline to which he was subjected, believing that his health was suffering from indoors work, and longing for the adventures at sea of which he had read in Marryat and Cooper, in 1844 he ran away.

Hundreds of thousands of American boys in the last half century have read the three books in which Nordhoff graphically relates his experiences aboard men of war, merchant ships, a whaler, and a cod-fishing boat. The story of how he went to sea is an interesting illustration of his pluck and persistence. He had $25, two extra shirts, and an extra pair of socks when he left Cincinnati, and his money took him to Baltimore. At every vessel to which he applied he was met by the same rebuff: “Ship you, you little scamp? Not I; we won’t carry runaway boys. Clear out!” Undaunted, he went on to Philadelphia, and found a place on the _Sun_ as printer’s devil, at $2–4 a week and his board. He confided his ambition to no one, but every Saturday afternoon he was down among the shipping, looking for a place. Finally he heard that the Frigate _Columbus_, 74 guns, was about to sail under Commodore Biddle for the Far East, and sought a berth--again in vain. Still undiscouraged, he induced the editor of the _Sun_, to whose home he daily took a bundle of proofs, to introduce him to Commodore Elliot. The editor’s note ran, “Please give him a talking to,” and the gruff officer scolded the boy roundly for wanting to ruin his life, described the dissolute, brutalizing existence of most sailors, and flatly refused him a place. But Nordhoff returned daily until the Commodore yielded.

The boy soon realized that the sailor’s life had little of the romance that Cooper gave it, but he showed both his grit and shrewdness when with a distinct literary intention he made the most of it. He went around the world in the _Columbus_, and was discharged at Norfolk in 1848; for several years he worked in the merchant marine, visiting Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and the South Sea islands; sailing from Sag Harbor in a whaler which cruised in the Indian Ocean, he deserted at the Seychelles, and for a time supported himself as a boatman in Mauritius; and he finished his eight years at sea by a brief period with the Cape Cod fishermen. All the while he was busy collecting material for his books, losing no opportunity to share new sights and experiences, and pumping his mates for their stories. He wrote his three volumes to give a common-sense picture of a life which he believed had been unduly romanticized; and his pictures of flogging in the navy, of dysentery and cholera aboard a frigate, of the degradation of the naval discipline, of the danger and hardship met on a merchant craft, and of the intolerable monotony of whale-hunting carry out the purpose. It was good preliminary training for a reporter and editor. In 1853 he entered journalism, first on the Philadelphia _Register_ and later on the Indianapolis _Sentinel_, meanwhile writing the sea books, which gave him such a reputation that in 1853 George W. Curtis recommended him to Harper’s as an editorial worker.

Bigelow in the closing days of 1860 made an arrangement with Brantz Meyer, a Baltimore writer of some reputation, to go South for $50 a week and his expenses to do special reporting. He wrote R. B. Rhett, editor of the Charleston _Mercury_, asking whether it would be safe for Meyer to attend the secession convention in Charleston, and Rhett assured him that “no agent or representative of the _Evening Post_ would be safe in coming here”; “he would certainly be tarred and feathered and made to leave the State, as the mildest possible treatment”; “he would come with his life in his hand, and would probably be hung.” Nevertheless, the _Post_ did have unsigned correspondence from Charleston and other Southern cities during the days the secession movement was ripening. When war began, Nordhoff hurriedly whipped a corps of special writers into shape. He requested Henry M. Alden, later editor of _Harper’s_ to go to the Virginia front, but Alden’s health was too precarious to permit him to face the hardships which other young literary men like E. C. Stedman were undertaking. William C. Church, a rising young journalist, who later established the _Army and Navy Journal_ and the _Galaxy_, was obtained. Philip Ripley made another of the staff, and Walter F. Williams was soon sending admirable letters from the field.

Repeatedly during the war the _Post_ scored notable “beats.” Church was with the joint military and naval expedition under Sherman and Dupont that captured Port Royal, and sent the _Evening Post_ the first account published at the North. The best picture of the battle of Pittsburgh Landing in any newspaper was one contributed the _Post_ by a member of Halleck’s staff. The most graphic running account of Sherman’s march to the sea was also that furnished the paper by Major George Nichols, who was on Sherman’s staff, and who later reworked his letters--in which it has been well said the style is photographic, with a touch of national music in the sentences--into a book. When John Wilkes Booth was killed in the burning Virginia barn by Sergeant Boston Corbett, Nordhoff obtained Corbett’s exclusive story of the event--an absorbing three-quarters column of close print. It need not be said that the Paris correspondence which E. L. Godkin, later editor, furnished in 1862, offered the shrewdest and clearest view of French opinion published in any American newspaper. There was a large group of occasional correspondents at various points along the wide fighting line. The _Evening Post_ profited, in a way that it was quite impossible for the _Herald_ to do, from the kindness of loyal Union men of prominence who came into contact with great events or figures, and without thought of remuneration wrote to Bryant. A long and highly interesting article embodying personal reminiscences of Lincoln, for example, was contributed a few weeks after the assassination by R. C. McCormick, then well known in New York political circles. There were frequent bits like the following from a New Yorker who had seen Grant at City Point (Aug. 5, 1864):

“General,” I remarked, “the people of New York now feel that there
is one at the head of our armies in whom they can repose the
fullest confidence.”

“Yes,” he interrupted, “there is a man in the West in whom they
can repose the utmost confidence, General Sherman. He is an able,
upright, honorable, unambitious man. We lost another one of like
character a few days ago, General McPherson.”

One reporter for the _Post_, a young Vermonter named S. S. Boyce, became intimate with the United States Marshal in New York, and distinguished himself by important detective service against disloyalists. The Marshal once handed him a letter taken upon a captured blockade runner, mailed from New York and giving the Southern authorities the time of the sailing of the Newbern expedition. It carried no New York address, but within a fortnight Boyce had tracked down the writer of the letter, and some months later witnessed his hanging.

Many traditions long survived in the office of Nordhoff’s energy, courage, shrewdness, and impassivity in moments of excitement. He was a man of the world, and his sense for news was amazing. Expected to contribute to the editorial page as well as manage the news staff, he would seat himself at his desk and write with unresting hand, meanwhile puffing a black cigar so furiously that he could hardly see his sheet through the smoke. A bluff seamanlike quality was always distinguishable about him; he walked with a sailor’s roll, and used nautical terms with unconscious frequency. His executive ability, geniality, fearlessness, and intense hatred of anything equivocal or underhanded, made the staff love him. Mr. J. Ranken Towse, who knew him after the war, says that “he had a comprehensive grasp of essential knowledge, a great store of common sense, a rare faculty of penetrating insight, and a huge scorn for prevarication or double-dealing. A mistake due to ignorance or carelessness he could and often did overlook, but anything in the nature of a shuffling excuse roused him to flaming ire. He was impetuous and irascible, but naturally generous and tender-hearted.”

During the Draft Riots Nordhoff connected a hose with the steam-boiler in the basement and gave public notice that any assailant would meet a scalding reception. He had not only the _Evening Post_ property to protect, but a score of wounded soldiers in a temporary hospital fitted up on an upper floor. The strain under which he lived in the war days was intense, and he used to spend the summer nights on a small sailboat which he kept on the Brooklyn waterfront, for he could sleep more soundly drifting about the bay than on shore. Yet he managed to find time to contribute to the newspaper’s atmosphere of literary sociability. Paul Du Chaillu had become his friend when, as a worker at Harper’s, he helped put some of Du Chaillu’s books into good English, and a story survives of how Du Chaillu and Nordhoff once took possession of the restaurant stove across the street from the _Evening Post_, and taught the cook to broil bananas--the first bananas ever eaten cooked in the city. Nordhoff’s impress was visible everywhere in the paper of those years, and its marked prosperity was in large degree traceable to his energy. The local reporting was better than ever before, and we are tempted to discern his own hand in the frequent human-interest paragraphs, of which one may be given as a specimen:

AN INCIDENT IN THE CARS

In a car on a railroad which runs into New York, a few mornings
ago, a scene occurred which will not soon be forgotten by the
witnesses of it. A person dressed as a gentleman, speaking to a
friend across the car, said: “Well, I hope the war may last six
months longer. In the last six months I’ve made a hundred thousand
dollars--six months more and I shall have enough.”

A lady sat behind the speaker, and ... when he was done she tapped
him on the shoulder and said to him: “Sir, I had two sons--one was
killed at Fredericksburg; the other was killed at Murfreesboro.”

She was silent a moment and so were all around who heard her. Then,
overcome by her indignation, she suddenly slapped the speculator,
first on one cheek and then on the other, and before he could say
a word, the passengers sitting near, who had witnessed the whole
affair, seized him and pushed him hurriedly out of the car, as not
fit to ride with decent people.

The Government censorship of news early became a painful and difficult question to all journals. Repeatedly during the war Northern papers allowed news to leak to the enemy which should have been kept strictly secret, and the _Evening Post_ early recognized this danger. When Gen. McClellan in August, 1861, drew up his gentlemen’s agreement with the press, the _Post_ hoped that all editors would acquiesce in it, and attacked the Baltimore secession newspapers for giving the South important news. Two months later it blamed the _Herald_ and _Commercial Advertiser_ for twice having given prominence to articles they should have suppressed. Sherman as early as the summer of 1862 raged violently at the press in his private letters for writing some generals up and others down, and the _Post_ had already (Feb. 27) commented upon the same abuse. The _Herald_ in March, 1862, prematurely published the news of Banks’s passage of the Potomac, to the great indignation of the _Post_, which had suppressed it the day before. But Nordhoff himself erred in September, when his publication of some “contraband” facts about the strength of the forces at Newbern brought a protest from Gen. Foster. No other mistake of the sort was made, and this one did not compare with the blunders of other New York journals. Early in 1863 a _Herald_ correspondent, having foolishly printed the substance of some confidential orders, was convicted and sentenced to six months hard labor in the Quartermaster’s Department. In November, 1864, the _Times_ brought an angry protest from Grant by stating Sherman’s exact strength and his programme in the coming march to the sea. The _Tribune_ early the next year, informing its readers that Sherman was heading for Goldsboro, enabled Gen. Hardee on the Confederate side to fight a heavy battle which Sherman had hoped to avoid; and the hero of the great march later refused to speak to Greeley.

But the _Evening Post_ repeatedly protested against the undue severity of the censorship, just as it protested against improper interferences with personal liberty in other spheres. It complained that the rules laid down by Stanton and the field commanders were often capricious, and that by holding up harmless news they bred harmful rumors.

Thus on Sept. 1, 1862, New York was highly excited all afternoon by a canard that Pope had been pushed back to Alexandria and was being beaten by the Confederates within sight of Washington. Why? asked the _Evening Post_ next day. It was because Stanton wanted all the correspondents kept away from the front, and the public was at the mercy of every rogue or coward who started a false report. The terrible disaster of Fredericksburg was concealed by the censorship in the most inexcusable way. The battle was fought on Saturday, the 13th of December. On the 14th and 15th there was no news; on the 16th the _Post_ carried the bare statement that the army had recrossed the Rappahannock, which it optimistically interpreted as meaning that the heavy rains had swollen the river and imperilled the communications. On the 17th it knew that Burnside’s forces had been flung back with terrible slaughter four days before, and it joined the chorus of the New York press in denouncing the official secrecy. The first authentic news of this battle was sent the _Tribune_ by a future owner of the _Evening Post_, Henry Villard, who obtained it by an heroic all-night ride, and bringing it to Washington, evaded Stanton’s order by sending it north by railway messenger.

Similar secrecy attended the early stages of the battle of Chancellorsville, causing needless agony of mind at the North and profiting only the stock-jobbers. Just before Gettysburg rumors were afloat of a heavy blow to Hooker. C. C. Carleton, said the _Post_, tried to wire his Boston paper, “Do not accept sensation dispatches,” but the telegraph censor brusquely canceled this sensible message. The Philadelphia editors and correspondents long surpassed all others in the picturesqueness of their lies, and the _Post_ called attention to some of their masterpieces--e.g., their circumstantial story of the capture of Richmond by Gen. Keyes in 1862--as made possible by the censor’s concealment of the real facts. Nordhoff complained that some of the paper’s dispatches filed in the morning at 10:30 did not reach New York till 5 p. m., simply because the censor was out of his office or negligent. The worst count in the indictment, however, was that some great bankers got news of the battles by cipher, and used it in speculation while the people remained ignorant of the actual events.

With the Civil War came the first plentiful use of headlines in the _Evening Post_, usually placed on page three, where the telegraphic news was used. In those days verbs in headlines were conspicuous chiefly by their absence; but the writer knew his business. When the bombardment of Sumter began he summarized the whole significance of the event in his first two words: “CIVIL WAR--BOMBARDMENT OF FORT SUMTER--A DAY’S FIGHTING.” After Bull Run he tried to save the feelings of New Yorkers by tactful phrasing: “RETROGRADE MOVEMENT OF OUR ARMY!--GEN. McDOWELL FALLING BACK ON WASHINGTON--OUR LOSS 2,500 to 3,000.” And the two most important headlines of the whole war were admirable in their simple fitness. It would be impossible to improve upon the first three words used on April 15, “AN APPALLING CALAMITY--ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT--MR. LINCOLN SHOT IN FORD’S THEATRE IN WASHINGTON”; or upon the first three of April 10, “THE GLORIOUS CONSUMMATION--THE REBELLION ENDED--SURRENDER OF LEE.”

Throughout the war the _Evening Post_ was as distinguished for one feature--its poetry--as the _Herald_ was for its admirable maps. Every writer of verse took inspiration from the conflict, and sent it to the only newspaper conducted by a great poet. A few days after Sumter surrendered, the editors declared that if poetry could win the war, they already had enough to do it. Four years later, on April 13, 1865, they remarked that “we have received verses in celebration of the late victories enough to fill four or five columns of our paper.”

Among the first war poems published by the _Evening Post_ were two of genuine distinction, R. H. Stoddard’s stirring call to war, “Men of the North and West,” and Christopher Cranch’s stanzas, “The Burial of Our Flag”:

O who are they that troop along, and whither do they go?
Why move they thus with measured tread, while funeral trumpets
blow?--
Why gather round that open grave in mockery of woe?

They stand together on the brink--they shovel in the clod--
But what is that they bury deep?--Why trample they the sod?
Why hurry they so fast away without a prayer to God?

It was no corpse of friend or foe. I saw a flag uprolled--
The golden stars, the gleaming stripes were gathered fold on fold,
And lowered into the hollow grave to rot beneath the mould.

Then up they hoisted all around, on towers, and hills, and crags,
The emblem of their traitorous schemes--their base disunion flags.
That very night there blew a wind that tore them all to rags!

And one that flaunted bravest by the storm was swept away,
And hurled upon the grave in which our country’s banner lay--
Where, soaked with rain and stained with mud, they found it the next
day.

From out the North a Power comes forth--a patient power too long--
The spirit of the great free air--a tempest swift and strong;
The living burial of our flag--he will not brook that wrong.

The stars of heaven shall gild her still--her stripes like rainbows
gleam;
Her billowy folds, like surging clouds, o’er North and South shall
stream.
She is not dead, she lifts her head, she takes the morning’s beam!

* * * * *

Much verse came from writers of the rank of Alice and Phœbe Cary, who published nearly all their war poems in the _Post_. Mrs. R. H. Stoddard, still remembered as a novelist, wrote unfinished but sincere and touching poetry. Miles O’Reilly, whom Walt Whitman found the most popular writer of war verse among the troops, contributed repeatedly. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, leading his black troops in South Carolina, and recalling Bryant’s “Song of Marion’s Men,” sent his graceful “Song from the Camp.” Park Benjamin wrote much in the early years of the war, and before its close Helen Hunt Jackson began to appear in the _Evening Post’s_ pages. One of the most stirring songs of the conflict, “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,” originally appeared in the _Evening Post_ of July 16, 1862. Unsigned, many supposed it was the editor’s. At a large Boston meeting the next night, Josiah Quincy read it as “the latest poem written by Mr. Wm. C. Bryant.” Its actual author was John S. Gibbons, who for a time was financial editor of the _Post_, and wrote two volumes on banking.

Bryant himself published two hymns in the journal, “The Earth Is Full of Thy Riches” (1863) and “Thou Hast Put All Things Under His Feet” (1865). But the finest poetical contribution which he ever made to it was his “Death of Lincoln”:

O slow to smite, and swift to spare,
Gentle and merciful and just!

which first saw the light in the _Evening Post_ of April 20, 1865.