Technical Communication

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Technical Communication

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.
 deal liked for the sensible and unassuming manner in which
he has heretofore conducted himself. At the Mayor’s dinner,
the other day, he said he began to feel himself “quite at
home.” One of the papers remarks: “Of course he does; what
respectable man, living two years in the most comfortable
house, with a charming young wife, a rising family, good
shooting, and the general esteem, could feel otherwise than
at home?”

The most striking feature in newspaper correspondence of the

forties was the prominence given mere travel. Americans were more
curious about their expanding and fast-filling land than now, and the
expense and hardship of travel made its vicarious enjoyment greater.
Two midsummer months in 1843 afford a representative view of this
side of the newspaper. Bryant concluded his correspondence written
during a trip to South Carolina and Florida, describing Charleston
Harbor, a plantation corn-shucking, negro songs, alligators, tobacco-
chewing, and the reminders of the Seminole War. From another
corner of the Union an unsigned letter of 3,000 words described an
interesting trip through wilder Michigan. Bryant, returning north,
contributed from Keene, N. H., and Addison County, Vt., a
description of scenery in those two States. From Columbus, O., some
one wrote of his journey thither by way of the Great Lakes. In
August a correspondent at Saratoga waxed loquacious. He narrated
some incidents he had observed of J. Q. Adams’s tour in upper New
York; pictured Martin Van Buren sojourning at the Springs, “as
round, plump, and happy as a partridge,” and said to be looking for
a wife; and sketched N. P. Willis, at a ball there, “surrounded by
bevies of literary loungers and dilettanti, who look up to him with
equal respect for the fashionable cut of his coat and the exceeding
gracefulness of his writings.”
Bryant wrote letters from all his foreign tours—those of 1834–6,
1845–6, 1849, 1852–3, and 1857–8; while others of the staff who
traveled did the same. In 1834 the Evening Post published a series
of letters from South American ports, written anonymously by a
naval officer on an American warship; while for twenty years regular
correspondence was furnished by a resident of Buenos Aires. When
Commodore Biddle sailed into Yeddo Bay the summer of 1846 to try
to establish treaty relations with Japan, an officer of his squadron
sent the Post a highly interesting account of their chill reception. The
vessels were surrounded with hundreds of armed boats from the day
their arrival produced consternation upon land; they had been
supplied with water, wood, poultry, and vegetables, free; but the
authorities had peremptorily refused any further intercourse. Two
years later both the Paris and Berlin correspondents wrote vivid
descriptions of the revolutionary uprisings of that year, the former
being in the thick of the fighting on the Boulevards. Special
correspondence in the early fifties came even from Siam. But we can
best give an impression of the wealth of this mailed matter by
summarizing it for a single month (August, 1850):

From Washington and Albany, continuous

correspondence; from Toronto, three articles, on Dominion
politics and railways; from Montreal, letter on a great fire
there and sentiment toward America; from London, letters by
Wm. H. Maxwell and “XYZ” on Peel’s last speech, California
gold fever, African trade, stock prices, corn laws, sorrow over
President Taylor’s death, etc.; Paris correspondence on dinner
to President Louis Napoleon and shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!”;
Boston, letters on Massachusetts politics and sad case of Dr.
Webster, awaiting execution after having confessed his
murder; New Haven, four articles on Yale Commencement,
President Woolsey’s oration, and a scientific convention;
Chicago, the cholera, the Illinois canal, and crops; Rochester,
the Erie Railroad and the “Rochester rappings”; Brattleboro
and White Mountains, descriptions of summer excursions;
Chester County, Pa., home life of Senator James Cooper, a
hated traitor to free-soil principles; Berkshire Valley, charms
of the Housatonic.
 The world’s first war to be thoroughly and graphically treated in
the daily newspapers was, not the Crimean War in which William H.
Russell won his fame, but the Mexican War. It was George Wilkins
Kendall, a Yankee from New Hampshire who had helped found the
New Orleans Picayune nine years earlier, who made the chief
individual reputation as a correspondent. Campaigning first with
Gen. Zachary Taylor on the Rio Grande, and then joining Winfield
Scott on the latter’s dangerous and triumphant march from Vera
Cruz to Mexico City, always in the thick of the fighting, once
wounded, organizing a wonderfully effective combination of courier
and steamboat service, Kendall gave the Picayune by far the best
current history of a war that journalism in any land had seen. The
New Orleans Delta, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Herald, and, at
a slight remove, the Evening Post, followed the fighting with
admirable enterprise.
News of the war came to the East through two main channels.
The greater part of it was brought from the border (i. e., from
Brownsville or Matamoras) or from Vera Cruz to New Orleans or
Pensacola, and thence overland northward; a smaller part came in
on the long Santa Fé trail to St. Louis. Thus on Christmas Day, 1846,
Col. Doniphan, at the head of a force of confident Missourians,
defeated a Mexican detachment in the little skirmish of Brazitos,
near El Paso. A company of traders from Santa Fé brought the news
into Independence, Missouri, on Feb. 15, and the local news-writer
there wrote a dispatch which was printed in the St. Louis Republic
on the 26th. The Evening Post copied it on March 8, long after most
of Doniphan’s seven wounded men had forgotten their injuries. El
Paso had been captured from the Mexicans on Dec. 27, and the fact
was known in New York on March 10.
The delay in obtaining the news of Buena Vista gave rise to
disheartening rumors. The battle which made “Old Rough and
Ready” a national idol and the next President of the United States
was fought on Feb. 23, 1847, and for a month thereafter the
gloomiest reports appeared in the press. After the middle of March
Washington and New York were confused and alarmed by vague
dispatches from the Southwest; on March 21 President Polk received
a detailed account of Taylor’s perilous position, menaced by a force
three times as large as his own, and New York heard of it
immediately afterward. On the evening of the twenty-second the
messages to Washington had “Taylor completely cut off by an
overwhelming force of the enemy,” but no word of fighting. The
Evening Post of March 30 carried its first news of a definite disaster.
It republished from the New Orleans Delta a dispatch, brought by
ship, stating “that Gen. Taylor was attacked at Agua Nueva and fell
back, in good order, to the vicinity of Saltillo; here he was again
attacked by Santa Anna, and a sharp engagement ensued in which
Gen. Taylor was victorious, continuing his retreat in good order. Gen.
Taylor fell back to Monterey, where he arrived in safety.” Read
between the lines, this meant a humiliating defeat. Every one was
prepared to credit it, and it was partly corroborated by more meager
news carried in the New Orleans Bulletin.
Nevertheless, the Post uttered a shrewd caution against
believing the reports. It was justified the following day when copies
of the New Orleans Mercury arrived, dated March 23, bearing the full
tidings of Taylor’s victory against crushing odds. The false rumors
had filtered out through Tampico and Vera Cruz; the truth was
brought by army messengers to Monterey, who had to make a
detour of hundreds of miles to evade Mexican guerillas. When it
reached Washington it found the politicians fiercely debating who
was responsible for so weakening Taylor’s army as to enable Santa
Anna to smash it; when it reached New York it found the people
depressed and indignant; and when it got to Boston on April 1,
many denounced it as an April Fool’s joke.
As the war continued the dispatches came more rapidly. The
Baltimore Sun early established an express of sixty blooded horses
overland from New Orleans, and when it was in effective operation
newspapers and letters were carried over the route in six days. This
made it possible to have newsboys on Broadway shouting the
capture of Vera Cruz a fortnight after it occurred. As Scott pushed
inland toward Mexico City, dispatches from him were retarded, for
marauding Mexicans made his line of communications with the sea
unsafe. Kendall used to start his express riders from the army at
midnight, and he chose men who knew the country perfectly; but
several were captured and others killed. Nevertheless, the Evening
Post could publish the news of Cerro Gordo, fought on April 18, on
May 7; the news of the capture of Mexico City, which occurred on
Sept. 14, on Oct. 4, or less than three weeks after the event.
Three correspondents in the field furnished the Evening Post
with letters—Lieut. Nathaniel Niles, an Illinois soldier with Gen.
Taylor; “M. R.” with Scott, and “B” at Matamoras. The last gave a
striking history of the rapid Americanization of this Mexican town,
telling how the inhabitants reaped a golden fortune and how Taylor’s
soldiers chafed under their enforced stay. “M. R.” contributed a
picture of the taking of Vera Cruz, in which he carried a rifle. But
Niles was the most active and the best writer. When the New
Orleans papers, with their advantage of position, tried to give all the
credit of Buena Vista to the Mississippi troops (commanded by
Jefferson Davis) and to the Kentuckians, Niles flatly contradicted
them. The Indiana and Illinois men, he said, deserved quite as much
praise. His account of the decisive moment at Buena Vista, when the
attack of the Mexicans had been finally and bloodily repulsed, is
worth quoting:

At length, about three o’clock p. m., we saw the Mexican

force in our rear begin to falter and retrace their steps, under
the well-directed shot of our ranks of marksmen, and the
artillery still pouring its iron death-bolts into their right. Their
lancers, who had taken refuge behind their infantry, and there
watched the progress of the fight, made one desperate
charge to turn the fortunes of the day by breaking the line of
Indiana and Mississippi. But the cool, steady volunteers sent
them with carnage and confusion to Santa Ana, on the plain
above, with the report that our reserve was 5,000 strong, and
filled all the ravines in our rear. The retreat of their infantry,
which paused for a moment, was now hastened by the
 repulse of the lancers, but still under a galling fire. They
marched back in excellent order. While making their toilsome
and bloody way back, Santa Ana practised a ruse to which
any French or English officer would have scorned to resort.
He exhibited a flag of truce, and sent it across the plain to
our right, where stood our generals.

When the Second Indiana, under Col. Bowles, fled from the field
after the first Mexican onset upon the American left, leaving the way
to Taylor’s rear open, some one suggested—says Niles—a retreat.
“Retreat!” exclaimed Taylor; “No; I will charge them with the
bayonet.” Niles reported many human incidents of the war, and dwelt
upon the barbarity of the Mexicans:

They generally killed and plundered, even of their clothes,

all whom the current of battle threw into their hands. We, on
the contrary, saved the lives of all who threw down their
arms, and relieved the wants of the wounded, even in the
midst of battle. I have seen the young American volunteer,
when bullets were flying around him, kneel beside a wounded
Mexican and let him drink out of his canteen. In one heap of
wounded Mexicans we came upon a groaning man, whom an
Illinois soldier raised and gave water. We had gone only a few
steps past when the soldier thus helped twisted himself upon
his elbow and shot our man through the back dead; three or
four volleys instantly repaid this treachery.

The first intimation of the revolution in news-gathering which

occurred in the middle forties was furnished Evening Post readers in
the issue of May 27, 1844, when the Washington correspondent told
of Morse’s successful experiment with the telegraph two days earlier.
“What is the news in Washington?” was the question asked from
Baltimore, where the Democratic National Convention was about to
meet. “Van Buren stock is rising,” came the answer. On May 31 the
correspondent sent another brief mention of
 MORSE’S TELEGRAPH.—This wonderful invention or
discovery of a new means of transmitting intelligence, is in
full and perfectly successful operation. Mr. Morse is the
magician at the end of the line, and an assistant who does
not spell with perfect correctness officiates.
There have arrived numerous telegraphic dispatches since
the meeting of the Convention at Baltimore at nine o’clock
this morning. By one we are informed of the nomination of
Mr. George M. Dallas, of Philadelphia, for Vice-President.

All the New York newspapers, the Herald leading, shortly had a
column of telegraphic news, and from that in the Evening Post we
can trace the steady extension of the wires. In the early spring of
1846 communication was opened between New York and
Philadelphia. When war was declared, April 24, the line to
Washington was incomplete, not having been finished between
Baltimore and Philadelphia, but the gap was soon closed. The fastest
carriage of news between the capital and New York, 220 miles, had
been that of Harrison’s inaugural message, weighty with its Roman
consuls and Greek generals, in eleven hours; now eleven minutes
sufficed. By the middle of September, when the line to Buffalo was
complete, the country had 1,200 miles of telegraph, reaching above
Boston towards Portland, to Washington on the south, and to
Harrisburg on the west.
During 1847 the expansion of the telegraphic system amazed all
who did not stop to think how much simpler and cheaper the
installation of a line was than the building of a road. By March it had
reached Pittsburgh on the west, and by September, Petersburg on
the south. The next month saw it in Cincinnati and Louisville, and
that fall the Evening Post printed telegraph news of a Cincinnati
flood which made 5,000 homeless. In its New Year’s message the
journal congratulated its readers upon such progress that “the
moment a dispatch arrives at New Orleans from our armies in
Mexico its contents are known on the borders of the northern lakes.”
The next year Florida alone of the States east of the Mississippi was
untouched by it. When the President’s message opening Congress in
December, 1848, was transmitted to St. Louis, the Evening Post
remarked that “the idea of a document filling twelve entire pages of
the Washington Union appearing in a city nearly one thousand miles
from Washington, twenty-four hours after its delivery, is almost
beyond belief.” Christopher Pearse Cranch contributed a poem to the
Post upon the marvel:
The world of the Past was an infant;
It knew not the speech of today,
When giants sit talking from mountain to sea,
And the cities are wizards, who say:
The kingdom of magic is ours;
We touch a small clicking machine,
And the lands of the East hear the lands of the West
With never a bar between.

Ten years after the opening of the first American telegraph line
Bryant made some caustic remarks in the Evening Post upon “The
Slow-Coach System in Europe.” For many months, it transpired, the
Allies in the Crimean War had possessed a continuous telegraph line
from London to the battle front. It had been demonstrated that
dispatches sufficient to fill two columns of the London Times might
be sent over it in two hours; yet the French and British publics had
been obliged to wait two weeks for full details of the fall of
Sebastopol, simply because the Allied authorities did not organize a
competent telegraphic staff.

IV
In this decade of rapid changes, 1840–1850, Bryant began to
reap the fruits of his courage, persistency, tact, and industry. The
hostility of the mercantile community had lessened as the Bank
question receded and the correctness of the Post’s warnings against
inflation and speculation was proved by the great panic. On March
30, 1840, Bryant editorially rejoiced that “the prejudices against it,
with which its enemies had labored so vehemently to poison the
minds of men of business, have been gradually overcome.” The
pressure of advertisements forced the enlargement of the sheet in
this year. The weekly edition which it began issuing at New Year’s,
1842, was the only Democratic weekly in New York, and at $2 a year
rapidly obtained an extensive circulation. In competition with
sixpenny evening papers like the Journal of Commerce and penny
papers like the Daily News, the Post held its own. It took its share in
all the business enterprises of the press, as when in 1849–50, at the
height of the gold fever, it published a special “Evening Post for
California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands” just before every
important sailing for the Pacific. Bryant’s sagacity kept the expenses
low, and his ability kept the editorial page easily the best, save for
Greeley’s, in the city.
It was a reflection of the new Evening Post prosperity when
Bryant wrote his brother early in 1843: “Congratulate me! There is a
probability of my becoming a landholder in New York! I have made a
bargain for about forty acres of solid earth at Hempstead Harbor, on
the north shore of Long Island.” He referred to the Roslyn
homestead at which thereafter he was to spend so much of his time.
Between 1839 and 1840 the gross earnings of the journal rose from
$28,355.29 to $44,194.93, and they never thereafter dropped to the
danger point. In 1850 it was calculated that for the preceding ten
years the average annual gross receipts had been $37,360, and that
the average annual dividends had been $9,776.44. Of this Bryant’s
share until 1848 was one-half, and thereafter two-fifths, so that he
enjoyed an ample income; while towards the end of the decade the
profits of the job printing office were a tidy sum.
Nor was there so much drudgery in the office as when he had
first returned in 1836. Parke Godwin draws an interesting picture of
the editor’s life at this period. He liked to take a week of fine
summer weather from the office and spend it in excursions to the
Palisades, the Delaware Water Gap, the Catskills, or the Berkshires,
sometimes alone, sometimes with another good walker. Bryant’s
appreciative descriptions of these scenes did much to raise the
public esteem of them. At the office there were many entertaining
visitors. Cooper always called when he was in town, and the contrast
between the novelist and the poet was striking: “Cooper, burly,
brusque, and boisterous, like a bluff sailor, always bringing a breeze
of quarrel with him; Mr. Bryant, shy, modest, and delicate as a
woman—they seemed little fitted for friendship.” Yet warm friends
they were. John L. Stephens, who had won a reputation by his
travels in Arabia, Nubia, and Central America, and whose books were
in considerable vogue, frequently came, “a small, sharp, nervous
man,” and talked of his adventures. A more magnetic personality
was that of Audubon, whose tall, athletic figure, Indian-bronzed
face, bright eyes, eagle nose, and long white hair attracted the eyes
of every worker. He, too, loved to tell of his exploits in the wilds, and
his experiences in the salons of Europe. Bancroft, who liked Bryant’s
Jacksonian zeal as much as he did his poetry, and William Gilmore
Simms, author of “The Yemassee,” occasionally paid a visit, while
Godwin believed he remembered seeing Edgar Allan Poe “once or
twice, to utter nothing, but to look his reverence out of wonderful
lustrous eyes.”
 CHAPTER EIGHT

NEW YORK BECOMES A METROPOLIS;

CENTRAL PARK

Ten years before the Civil War, New York city had 515,000
people, the population having risen by more than 200,000 in the
forties. The northward march of buildings had passed Twenty-third
Street, and the extreme northern boundary could now be placed at
Thirty-fourth, though there were many empty districts south of that
line. Madison Square had just been laid out. The nineteenth and
twentieth wards were added within a twelvemonth. Broadway was
now more than four miles long from the Battery to the open country,
and along its course as far as Bleecker Street old residences were
being ripped apart in clouds of dust to make way for stores. The
year 1850 was that in which the time-worn City Hotel disappeared,
and in which the Astor Place Opera House was remodeled for
business uses. Canal Street was extended, and Dey Street widened.
Almost before men realized it the old transportation facilities had
become inadequate, and in 1852–3 the Third Avenue and Sixth
Avenue horse railways began to carry passengers. With the whole
lower part of town engrossed by trade, with more well-to-do New
Yorkers fleeing northward year by year for light and air, the city in
1852 undertook the grading of Fifth Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street
to Forty-fifth. The New York which thrilled to Jenny Lind’s singing
and turned out a quarter of a million people to watch the military
procession marking President Taylor’s funeral, was a New York that
had suddenly bloomed into a metropolis.
 In this thriving city, larger than Buffalo to-day, there was not a
single open-air recreation ground worthy of the name. Dickens had
remarked in 1842 that New York’s summer climate was such that it
would throw a man into a fever merely to think what the streets
would be but for the daily breezes from the bay. It was a smoky city
—Bryant had written in the Evening Post of 1832 a striking
description of its unwonted brightness when the cholera stopped
nearly all industry—and it was ill-cleaned. The city directories,
indeed, listed nineteen parks. But a number, as Five Points Park,
Duane Park, and Abingdon Square, were merely places where the
street intersections were a little wider than usual. Others, like
Hudson Square and Gramercy Park, were private property, and still
others, like the Bowling Green, were padlocked. The whole park area
was only about one hundred and seventy acres, and the grounds
open to the public did not exceed one hundred acres; while the
largest single park, the Battery, contained only twenty-one.
The first proposal for a large uptown park was made by Bryant
in the Evening Post, and that journal was the sturdiest of the fighters
for what eventually became Central Park. It was a bold proposal, for
which public sentiment could only slowly be aroused. In Edward H.
Hall’s scholarly history of Central Park, published by the American
Scenic and Historic Preservation Society in 1911, the plan is said to
have originated with Andrew J. Downing, editor of the monthly
Horticulturist, in a letter contributed to that magazine in 1849.
Charles H. Haswell, in his “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,” also
gives Downing the credit, saying that he merits a statue from the
city. But the real originator was the poet-editor. In 1836, Parke
Godwin, taking frequent rambles with him, found him emphatically
expressing the opinion that the city should reserve as a park the
finest area of woodland remaining there, since in a few years it
would be too late. Five full years before Downing’s letter, on a hot
July day in 1844, Bryant made a walking trip over the middle of
Manhattan to examine the adaptability of a certain large tract for
park purposes. Upon his return, he wrote for the issue of July 3,
1844, his proposal, heading it “A New Park.”
 The city the afternoon this article appeared was streaming out to
spend the Fourth at neighboring points. Some, wrote Bryant, would
go to shady retreats in the country; some would refresh themselves
by excursions to the seashore on Staten Island or the river front at
Hoboken. “If the public authorities, who expend so much of our
money in laying out the city, would do what is in their power, they
might give our vast population an extensive pleasure ground for
shade and recreation in these sultry afternoons, which we might
reach without going out of town.” Where? He answered:

On the road to Harlem, between Sixty-eighth Street on

the south, and Seventy-seventh on the north, and extending
from Third Avenue to the East River, is a tract of beautiful
woodland, comprising sixty or seventy acres, thickly covered
with old trees, intermingled with a variety of shrubs. The
surface is varied in a very striking and picturesque manner,
with craggy eminences, and hollows, and a little stream runs
through the midst. The swift tides of the East River sweep its
rocky shores, and the fresh breeze of the bay comes in, on
every warm summer afternoon, over the restless waters. The
trees are of almost every species that grows in our woods—
the different varieties of ash, the birch, the beech, the linden,
the mulberry, the tulip tree, and others; the azalea, the
kalmia, and other flowering shrubs are in bloom here in their
season, and the ground in spring is gay with flowers. There
never was a finer situation for the public garden of a great
city. Nothing is wanting but to cut winding paths through it,
leaving the woods as they now are, and introducing here and
there a jet from the Croton aqueduct, the streams from which
would make their own waterfalls over the rocks, and keep the
brooks running through the place always fresh and full....
If any of our brethren of the public press should see fit to
support this project, we are ready to resign in their favor any
claim to the credit of originally suggesting it.
 Bryant referred to the beauty and utility of Regent’s Park in
London, the Alameda in Madrid, the Champs Elysées in Paris, and
the Prater in Vienna. By the official plan for New York, drawn up in
1807, an area of two hundred and forty acres had been reserved
between Twenty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets, and Third and
Seventh Avenues, to be called the Parade; this, however, had been
reduced by degrees to the six or seven acres of Madison Square. At
the beginning of the century any one had been able to walk in a half
hour from his home to the open fields, but it now seemed that all
Manhattan would soon be covered with brick and mortar.
The editor’s proposal was not for the area now included in
Central Park, and was for a comparatively small tract, though Bryant
had understated its size—it contained about one hundred and sixty
acres, against eight hundred and forty-three in Central Park to-day.
But it would be a magnificent park compared with any then existing,
and the suggestion was sufficient to open a discussion. Jones’s
Wood, as the tract was called, was the last remnant of the primeval
forest on the East River, as wild as when the Dutch had settled on
the island. It was the subject of many a tale and tradition connected
with the infant days of the colony, and was reputed to have been the
favorite resort of pirates who descended through Hell Gate and
landed there to bury their treasure and hold their revels. The first
John Jones purchased it when it was called the “Louvre Farm,” in
1803, and a son by the same name succeeded him. In time it
became a favorite nutting and fishing ground. Anglers would sit in
the shade of its rocky bluffs and overhanging elms and cast their
lines into the deep waters of the East River, while in autumn boys
would wander through its recesses clubbing the branches above.
“What a place of delight Jones’s Wood used to be in the olden days!”
exclaimed “Felix Oldboy” in the eighties.
Nor was it long until Bryant himself suggested the alternative
scheme for a central park. From time to time he recurred editorially
to the subject, now expatiating upon the ever-increasing need for a
city breathing place, now pointing to what European cities had done.
In 1845 he was in England. From London he wrote (June 24) a
glowing description of the fresh and verdurous expanse of Hyde
Park, St. James’ Park, Kensington Gardens, and Regent’s Park, and in
this letter he spoke of a “central” reservation in New York:

These parks have been called the lungs of London, and so

important are they regarded to the public health and the
happiness of the people, that I believe a proposal to dispense
with some part of their extent, and cover it with streets and
houses, would be regarded in much the same manner as a
proposal to hang every tenth man in London....
The population of your city, increasing with such
prodigious rapidity; your sultry summers, and the corrupt
atmosphere generated in hot and crowded streets, make it a
cause of regret that in laying out New York, no preparation
was made, while it was yet practicable, for a range of parks
and public gardens along the central part of the island or
elsewhere, to remain perpetually for the refreshment and
recreation of the citizens during the torrid heats of the warm
season. There are yet unoccupied lands on the island which
might, I suppose, be procured for the purpose, and which, on
account of their rocky and uneven surface, might be laid out
into surpassingly beautiful pleasure-grounds; but while we are
discussing the subject the advancing population of the city is
sweeping over them and covering them from our reach.

The Evening Post repeatedly pressed the park project. Its editors
had the more faith in it, they said, because while New Yorkers were
somewhat slow in adopting plain and homely reforms, they were
likely to engage eagerly in any scheme which wore an air of
magnificence. They wouldn’t take the trouble to keep the streets
clean, but they would spend millions to bring a river into the city
through the Croton aqueduct, forty miles long. They wouldn’t sweep
Broadway, but they would cover Blackwell’s Island with stately
buildings, some of them not needed. Bryant had in this way
prepared the ground when Downing, in 1849, also writing from
London and using many of Bryant’s arguments, published his appeal
in the Horticulturist. Downing, like the poet, had no clear or fixed
idea of the limits that should be assigned the new park. The
fundamental requirements, he said, were that it should be just
above the limits of building, should be spacious, and should be
reserved while the land was yet easily obtainable. Downing’s letter,
followed in 1850 by an admirable series of articles, attracted much
attention. But thanks chiefly to Bryant, the subject was now familiar
to all interested in city improvement. In 1850 Fernando Wood ran for
Mayor against Ambrose C. Kingsland, and both warmly advocated
the establishment of a park. Kingsland, who was supported by the
Evening Post, was elected, and on May 5, 1851, sent the Common
Council a message recommending “the purchase and laying out of a
park on a scale which will be worthy of the city,” but not indicating a
definite site.
The fight was now well begun; and when opposition appeared to
the park project in toto, the Evening Post naturally felt that upon it
lay the chief responsibility for defending the campaign. The Journal
of Commerce attacked the scheme, declaring that the cost to the
taxpayer would be tremendous, that New York city already owned
park lands worth $8,386,000, and that the cool waters and green
country surrounding the city made more unnecessary. The Post’s
answer was contemptuous. As for the cost, the money spent would,
like that laid out upon the Croton water system, be an economy in
the end. “Every investment of capital that renders the city more
healthy, convenient, and beautiful, attracts both strangers and
residents, and leads to a liberal patronage of every department of
trade.” The fact that the city already had eight million dollars worth
of park area had nothing to do with the question. The argument was
as absurd as it would be to compute the area covered by the city
streets, estimate their value, and make that a reason for narrowing
the Bowery or Broadway. London and Paris, like New York, had
waters and a green surrounding country within easy reach, but no
Londoner or Parisian would dispense with his parks.
 Mayor Kingsland’s message was referred to a committee of the
Council, which recommended that Jones’s Wood be selected, and the
Council, adopting this recommendation, applied to the Legislature
for a law to authorize the establishment of the park. In July, 1851,
the Legislature responded by passing a measure to allow the city to
take possession of Jones’s Wood.
But by this time it was believed by many citizens that the 160-
acre stretch upon the East River would be insufficient, and that the
“range of parks and public gardens along the central part of the
island” which Bryant had suggested in 1845 would be preferable.
Downing deserves great credit for his insistence that Jones’s Wood
would be “only a child’s playground.” London, he pointed out,
already possessed parks aggregating 6,000 acres, and New York
should now acquire at least 500. Such a tract “may be selected
between Thirty-ninth street and the Harlem River, including a varied
surface of land, a good deal of which is yet waste area.... In that
area there would be space enough to have broad reaches of park
and pleasure-ground, with a real feeling of the beauty and breadth
of green fields, the perfume and freshness of nature.” The Common
Council was impressed, and in August appointed a committee to
ascertain whether “some other site” was best.
By the autumn of 1851 three main parties had taken shape upon
the question. A large and influential body of business men wanted
no park whatever; a considerable group of citizens would be
satisfied with Jones’s Wood alone; and a growing number wished a
great central park. The Evening Post was for taking both sites.
“There is now ample room and verge enough upon the island for
two parks,” wrote Bryant, “whereas, if the matter is delayed for a
few years, there will hardly be a space left for one.” Having again
and again expressed its hopes with regard to Jones’s Woods, it now
published glowing descriptions of the Central Park area. There was
no part of the island, it said, better adapted to the purpose. “The
elevation in some parts rising to the height of one hundred and forty
feet above tidewater, and the valleys in other parts being some forty
feet below the grading of the streets, a richly diversified surface is
presented, to which a great variety of ornamental and picturesque
effects may easily be given.” The valleys abounded in springs and
streams, which could quickly be converted into artificial lakes, while
the Croton aqueduct could supply water for fountains.
By the efforts of leading citizens, City Hall, and the friendly part
of the press, the Legislature in the summer of 1853 was induced to
sanction the creation of both parks, passing two separate bills. This
filled those who opposed any park at all with rage. Admit the
possibility of two huge pleasure grounds, aggregating perhaps more
than a thousand acres? “What is it, in effect,” demanded the Journal
of Commerce, “but a law or laws to drive our population more and
more over to Brooklyn, Williamsburgh, Staten Island, Jersey City,
etc., by creating a barrier half a mile to two miles wide, north and
south, and occupying half the island east and west, over which
population cannot conveniently pass? If ever these projects should
be carried into effect, they will cost our citizens millions of dollars....
Small parks would be a public blessing; and might be as numerous
as the health and comfort of our citizens would require, but a
perpetual edict of desolation against two and one half square miles
of this small island, might better come from the bitterest enemies of
our city than from its friends.” On the contrary, replied the Evening
Post, the park would dissuade residents of Manhattan, made
desperate by the congestion, dirt, and noise of the streets, from
removing to greener and more spacious districts like Brooklyn and
New Brighton. Even after the parks were created, the island would
offer room for four or five million people. The same sort of skeptics
had assailed the Croton project.
Nor did the Journal of Commerce lack help. In 1854 Mayor Jacob
Westervelt spoke with hostility in his annual message of the two
park projects. The Central Park enactment, he said, reserved six
hundred acres in the center of the island, “toward which the flood of
population is rapidly pouring”; while its limits embraced “an area
vastly more extensive than is required for the purpose, and deprives
the citizens of the use of land for building purposes, much of which
cannot be judiciously spared.” As for Jones’s Wood, it ought not to
be taken at all. “The shore on the margin of this park is generally
bold, affording a depth of water invaluable for commercial purposes.”
The Evening Post denied that the tide of population was setting
toward the center of the island, saying that it moved fastest up the
Hudson and East Rivers—an historical fact. The waterfront of Jones’s
Wood was probably not more than one two-hundredth of the island’s
whole margin. “Can we have no fresh air, no green trees, no
agreeable walks and drives, that Smith may have more houses to
let, and Brown and Co. have less distance to go to their warehouses
and ships?”
The endeavor to save Jones’s Wood failed in 1854, and for a
time it seemed likely that the proposed area of Central Park would
be decidedly reduced. A member of the State Senate that year
introduced a bill for slicing one-sixth off each side of the park on
Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue, for shortening it at both ends, and
for “interspersing the park into suitable squares connecting with
each other but on which, or parts of which, family edifices may be
erected.” This, as the Evening Post said, was simply a scheme to
destroy the park. It could understand “that the eye accustomed to
look upon the dollar as the only attractive object in this world, would
not find the beauty of a park ‘materially lessened’ when beholding it
covered with rent-paying brick and mortar; but the idea of ‘public
recreation’ among dwelling houses, in open spaces like Union and
Washington Squares ... is too absurd.” When hearings were held this
same month (January, 1854), upon Mayor Westervelt’s proposals for
curtailing Central Park, the advocates of the original limits seemed to
be weakening. The Mayor’s supporters desired a park of about one-
third the area originally proposed, and presented a petition with
several thousand signatures. The chief spokesman for the opposite
side, Samuel B. Ruggles, indicated his willingness to consent to a
less drastic reduction, making the park extend from Sixth Avenue to
Eighth, or from Fifth to Seventh, instead of from Fifth to Eighth. But
against any weakening whatever of the plan as it stood the Evening
Post protested energetically. In the heart of London were more than
1,500 acres of park, it said, which would command high prices for
building lots, yet New York jobbers grumbled over sparing 700. The
people owed it “to the thousands coming after them, who will before
many years make this city the first in the world in point of size, to
bequeath them pleasure grounds commensurate with its greatness.”
The struggle continued until, in February, 1856, following a
favorable court decision, Bryant could congratulate the city that it
had been won, and that the landscaping of Central Park might begin
within a few months. This was eleven years after his original
proposal. He, more than any one else, deserves to be called the
father of the idea; though Downing’s labors in promoting it were
quite as great as his.

II
These were years in which much had to be said of the defects of
the municipal services, and especially of the police. When the forties
began there was no force for the prevention of crime, and only a
small, underpaid watch for making arrests. Theodore Sedgwick, Jr.,
remarked in the Evening Post of September, 1841, upon “the
frequency of atrocious crimes”; why was it “that brutal crimes,
murders, and rapes have suddenly become so common?” The
answer, he thought, was that New Yorkers elected their city
administrations for their views upon national questions, not because
they would furnish efficient government. It was then held shocking
that in less than two years, 1838–9, there had been six murders in
the city and no convictions. On the Fourth of July in 1842 a German
named Rosseler, who kept a quiet beer garden on Twenty-first
Street, ejected some ruffians from it; and two days later they
returned, burnt his house, destroyed his property, and almost killed
a neighbor whom they mistook for him. The Evening Post was
moved to demand “a police which has eyes and ears for all these
enormities, and hands to seize the offenders.” Just a week before
Mayor Morris called upon the Legislature (May 29, 1843) in his
annual message to provide an adequate police, Bryant penned
another protest:

We maintain a body of watchmen, but they are of no

earthly use, except here and there to put an end to a street
brawl, and sometimes to pick up a drunken man and take him
to the watch house. In some cases, they have been
suspected of being in a league with the robbers. At present,
we hear of a new case of housebreaking about as often as
every other day. Within a few days past, in one neighborhood
in the upper part of town, two houses have been broken into
and plundered, and an attempt has been made to set fire to
another.
Of course there will be no end to this evil, until there is a
reform in the police regulations—until a police of better
organization and more efficiency shall be introduced. Our city
swarms with daring and ingenious rogues, many of whom
have been driven from the Old World, and who find no
difficulty in exercising their vocation here with perfect
impunity.

“Our city, with its great population and vast extent, can hardly
be said to have a police,” wrote the editor again in the following
February. But immediately after the election of James Harper, the
publisher, as Mayor, a force of 200 patrolmen was organized, a
number soon increased to 800. When Mayor William V. Brady in
1847 proposed abolishing them and restoring the watch system, the
newspaper was amazed. The night watchmen had never arrested
any one when it was avoidable, for every arrest meant that the
officer lost half of the next day from his usual work testifying at the
trial. The watch had never stopped a public disturbance—the
abolition and flour riots had destroyed property that would have
supported a police force several years; but the police had quelled
several incipient outbreaks. The Evening Post was not for abolishing,
but for improving the new force. One of the reforms it sought was
the clothing of the men in distinctive uniforms. As it explained again
and again, a uniformed policeman could be seen from a distance
and accosted for information or help; he would be obeyed by
rowdies when a policeman out of uniform would lack authority; and
he could not loiter in corner groggeries. This salutary improvement
was finally effected in the fall of 1853.
As for the fire department, New York depended upon the
volunteer system from the time the Evening Post was founded until
1865, and at no date after Bryant’s return from Europe in 1836 had
his journal any patience with it. There was never any difficulty in
making the force large enough; when abolished, it consisted of 125
different hose, engine, and ladder companies. The objection was to
its personnel. Gangs of desperate young blackguards, said the Post
at the beginning of 1840, assembled nightly near the engine-houses,
devoted themselves to ribaldry, drinking, fighting, and buffoonery,
and not infrequently were guilty of riots, robbery, and assaults upon
women. They levied forced contributions upon storekeepers to buy
liquor and pay their fines whenever they were jailed. At
conflagrations they carried off whatever movables were spared by
the flames. The volunteer system, collecting these ruffians in various
capacities, gave them the opportunity to gratify their restless love of
excitement, destroyed their fitness for regular employment, and
rapidly made them confirmed drunkards. The clanship engendered
by the hostility of the different companies led to bloody street fights.
What should be done? The Evening Post recommended “the
prohibition of the volunteer system by penal enactments”; and if the
city could not support a paid force, the abandonment of the field to
the insurance companies.
In September, 1841, the Evening Post was again vigorously
denouncing “the desperate scoundrels nourished by the fire
department.” These denunciations it had ample opportunity to keep
up month by month, for the frequency of incendiarism and of street
affrays among the volunteer companies was appalling. The best
companies were ill-equipped, since not until 1856, after obstinate
opposition, were really powerful fire engines introduced from
Cincinnati. The regular firemen were accompanied by a swarm of
“runners” and irregular assistants, many of them known to be guilty
of arson. Whenever two rival companies wished a trial of skill, a fire
was sure to break out in a convenient place. The subscriptions for
funds circulated among shopkeepers and householders were little
better than blackmail, for it was well known that those who withheld
contributions were peculiarly liable to fires. In their deadly feuds the
companies, fighting with hammers, axes, knives, and pistols,
furnished the morgue and the hospitals with dozens of subjects a
year. Thieves frequently started conflagrations. We read in the
Evening Post just after the destruction of Metropolitan Hall (1854):

At the fire on Saturday night, about half of the goods that

were thrown out of the windows of the La Farge Hotel, it has
been estimated, were carried away by thieves. The inmates of
the Bond Street House, who were obliged suddenly to
decamp, found afterwards that their rooms had been rifled,
and all the valuables which they left behind carried away....
There is no city in the world where the thefts committed
at fires are so many and so considerable as with us. The
rogues have an organization which brings them in an instant
to the spot, the goods are passed rapidly from hand to hand,
and disappear forever. A large fire is a windfall to the whole
tribe.

Cincinnati the previous year, as the Post said, had substituted a

paid fire department for the volunteer system. It was disgraceful for
New York to depend on a violent, licentious body which was
educating the city’s youth in turbulence and rowdiness and was
often worse than useless when the firebell sounded. The insurance
companies at this time kept eighty men, at a cost of $30,000, to
guard against fires, and many merchants and families employed
private watchmen. But relief did not come for more than a decade.
 Similar complaints rose constantly from the Evening Post
regarding the foulness of the streets. It said in the early forties that
they ought to be swept daily, as they were in London and Paris, and
by machinery; that with New York’s hot summer climate and the
popular habit of throwing offal into the gutters, it was intolerable to
have them cleaned only every two or three days. In 1846 it called
the neglect “scandalous,” the dust and odors “insufferable.” The
reason why horse-brooms were not employed was that the use of
manual labor gave employment to gangs whose votes the ward-
heelers wanted at election time; but really no men need be thrown
out of work—they could be set to repairing the broken pavements.
When the Crystal Palace exhibition was held in New York in 1853,
the British section contained two street-sweeping machines, one of
which not only gathered together but loaded the dirt. The machines,
it was true, could not vote, but by their use, according to the
Evening Post’s calculations, the cost of cleaning New York might be
reduced from $330,000 a year to between $50,000 and $90,000.
Next year Bryant gave publicity to the experiment of John W. Genin,
a Broadway merchant, who collected $2,000 from his business
neighbors, obtained horse-brooms, and at an expense of $450 a
week, for a month, made Broadway from Bowling Green to Union
Square look like “a new-scrubbed kitchen floor.”
Not until the end of the thirties did allegations of corruption in
the city government become frequent in Bryant’s editorial columns.
In August, 1843, we find the Evening Post beginning the complaints
against the Charter which it was to maintain without interruption
until the early seventies. It believed and continued to believe that
the two boards of aldermen and assistant aldermen, soon
nicknamed “the forty thieves,” had too much power. “They are at
once our municipal legislature and our municipal executive; in part
also, they are our municipal judiciary; they are the directors of the
city finances; they are the fountain of patronage; they are all this for
the greatest commercial city in the western world.” Their
government it held to be always expensive and arbitrary, often
inefficient, and sometimes dishonest.
 The Post supported an abortive effort to amend the Charter in
1846, and in 1853, after Azariah Flagg as Controller had stripped
some flagrant extravagance and grafting, it gave its voice to another
movement which proved successful. Tweed was at this time an
alderman. The newspaper charged the body of which he was a
member with selling city property and valuable franchises for
nominal prices, and then by its control of the courts quashing all
efforts at prosecution. When by a smashing popular vote (June 7,
1853) the new Charter was carried, abolishing the Board of Assistant
Aldermen, and excluding the aldermen from sitting in the courts of
Oyer and Terminer and of the Sessions, the Post said that “a more
significant and humiliating rebuke was never administered upon a
body of public officers in this State before.” It little thought then that
the corruption of the past was but a trifle to the corruption coming.
Bryant’s place as the foremost citizen of the lusty young
metropolis was by 1850 becoming secure. He, Irving, and Cooper
were universally regarded as the country’s greatest literary men.
Irving was passing his final placid years at Sunnyside; Cooper on
Otsego Lake, one of the most quarrelsome men in the country, was
near the end of his stormy career. The city heard of them only
occasionally. But Bryant was in the prime of life, seen almost daily on
the streets, and heard upon every passing question. In the late
forties he began to be known as a speaker upon public occasions.
He delivered his eulogy upon the artist Cole in 1848 with much
nervousness, but by 1851, when he presided over the press banquet
to Kossuth, he had acquired self-confidence and ease. Thereafter he
was in constant demand for addresses to all kinds of audiences—
literary groups, the New York Historical Society, the Scotch when
they celebrated the centenary of Burns’s birth, the Germans in their
Schiller celebration, and so on. His increasing prestige in the city was
naturally reflected upon the Evening Post.
 CHAPTER NINE

LITERARY ASPECTS OF BRYANT’S

NEWSPAPER, 1830–1855

For reasons fairly evident Bryant seldom used the Evening Post
for the publication of his poems; he was too modest, and the
magazines of the day too earnestly besought him for whatever he
might write. In 1832 he brought out “The Prairies” in it, and in 1841
“The Painted Cup”—that was all in early years. He had no time for
literary essays, even had he felt the Post the place for them. As for
the new books, no one yet thought that dailies should give them
more than brief notices; moreover, Bryant disrelished book-
reviewing, a task against which he had protested while a magazine
editor, and he never quite trusted his judgment upon new volumes
of poetry. The Evening Post had less literary distinction in his early
editorship than might be supposed; but it had much literary interest.
The most interesting book comments of the thirties were upon
British travels in America. England did not like it when Hawthorne, in
“Our Old Home,” called the British matron beefy. The United States
did not like Dickens’s portrait of Col. Jefferson Brick, praising the
ennobling institution of nigger slavery; of Prof. Mullit, who at the last
election had repudiated his father for voting the wrong ticket; and
Gen. Fladdock, who halted his denunciation of British pride to snub
Martin Chuzzlewit when he learned that Martin had come in the
steerage. At that period the United States was as sensitive as a
callow youth. “We people of the Universal Yankee Nation,” remarked
the Evening Post in 1833, “much as we may affect to despise the
strictures of such travelers as Fearon, Capt. Roos, Basil Hall, and
Mrs. Trollope, are yet mightily impatient under their censure, and
manifest on the appearance of each successive book about our
country a great anxiety to get hold of it and devour its contents.”
Most Americans joined in indiscriminating complaints over the
animadversions of the British travelers. A few were inclined to
applaud the less extreme criticism in the hope that the sound
portions might be taken to heart. Bryant thought that the country
had been “far too sensitive” to Basil Hall, calling that naval traveler
“a good sort of prejudiced English gentleman, who saw things in a
pretty fair light for a prejudiced man.” He had a high opinion of parts
of Miss Martineau’s travels, though he wrote his wife that she had
been given a wrong impression in some particulars by Dr. Karl Follen
and the narrow-minded Boston abolitionists. Twice he asked Evening
Post readers (1832–3) to remember that although Mrs. Trollope
might be shrewish, she was also shrewd, and that if she had
exaggerated some of the national foibles, she had sketched others
accurately. In her “Domestic Manners of the Americans,” he believed,
“there was really a good deal to repay curiosity. That work,
notwithstanding all its misrepresentations, exaggerations, and
prejudices, was a very clever and spirited production, and contained
a deal of truth which, however unpalatable, has at least proved of
useful tendency.” He called Capt. Marryat’s “Diary in America” a
“blackguard book,” more flippant than profound, and deplored the
fact that Charles Augustus Murray’s “Travels in America,” which was
issued at the same time (1839), and was the work of “a well-
disposed, candid, gentlemanly sort of person,” would not have one-
tenth the sale. An excerpt from the dramatic criticism of the Evening
Post in September, 1832, shows how effective Mrs. Trollope actually
was in improving our manners. At a performance by Fanny Kemble,
a gentleman, between acts, assumed a sprawling position upon a
box railing:
 Hissings arose, and then bleatings, and then imitations of
the lowing of cattle; still the unconscious disturber pursued
his chat—still the offending fragment of his coat-tail hung
over the side. At last there was a laugh, and cries of
“Trollope! Trollope! Trollope!” with roars of laughter, still more
loud and general.

But the most important visit of a foreigner after Lafayette’s was

the American tour of Dickens in the early months of 1842. It is of
special interest in the history of the Evening Post as marking the
active beginning of a campaign in which it took the leading part
among American dailies—the campaign for international copyright,
lasting a full half century.
“The popularity of Mr. Dickens as a novelist throws almost all
other contemporary popularity into the shade,” the Evening Post had
exclaimed on March 31, 1839, when each successive installment of
“Nicholas Nickleby” was being received with unprecedented
enthusiasm in America. “His humor is frequently broad farce, and his
horrors are often exaggerated, extravagant, and improbable; but he
still has so much humor, and so much pathos, that his defects are
overlooked.” His striking originality the paper also praised. In 1840–
41 came the “Old Curiosity Shop,” which, as the Post noted, was
issued in numbers as rapidly as the text could be brought overseas,
and caught up in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia by piratical
publishers. When Dickens spoke at a public dinner in Boston he
recalled how from all parts of America, from cities and frontier, he
had received letters about Little Nell. There were few educated
Americans who were not acquainted with these books, or with the
earlier “Pickwick” or “Oliver Twist”; and the news that this genius of
thirty was to visit the country sent a thrill throughout it.
Before the end of January, 1842, readers of the Evening Post
and other New York papers learned how Dickens had reached Halifax
and been given a reception in the Parliament House. A few days
after, the Post published an account of his welcome in Boston. He
was at the Tremont House, the halls and environs of which were
crowded; one distinguished caller followed another; whenever he
went out to see the sights, or the theater, he was given an ovation;
and deputations were arriving with invitations from distant cities and
towns. “Mr. Dickens, we fear, is made too much a lion for his own
comfort,” observed the paper, and repeated the warning next day.
On Feb. 2 it gave nearly an eighth of its reading matter to an
account of plans for the great Boz Ball, as laid at a public meeting at
the Astor House, presided over by Mayor Robert H. Morris. The Park
Theater was to be converted into a ballroom, and its alcoves fitted
up into representations of the Old Curiosity Shop’s corners, in which
scenes from Dickens’s novels might be illustrated. On Feb. 7 there
appeared an account of the ceremonial Dickens dinner in Boston,
with the happy speech of Mayor Quincy. An invitation to a public
dinner in New York, signed among others by Bryant and Theodore
Sedgwick, had meanwhile been dispatched to Dickens.
The Boz Ball on the fourteenth was, said the Evening Post in an
account that was half news, half editorial, “one of the most
magnificent that has ever been given in this city. The gorgeousness
of the decorations and the splendor of the dresses, no less than the
immense throng, glittering with silks and jewels, contributed to the
show and impressiveness of the occasion. It is estimated that nearly
3,000 people were present, all richly dressed and sparkling with
animation.” Dickens’s letters bear this out—“from the roof to the
floor, the theater was decorated magnificently; and the light, glitter,
glare, noise, and cheering baffle my descriptive powers.” The great
crowd made dancing an ordeal, but the novelist and his wife
remained until they were almost too tired to stand. Some of the
newspapers drew heavily upon the imagination in their personal
references to Dickens. They told how, while a charming young man,
bright-eyed, sparkling with gayety and life, his freedom of manner
shocked a few fashionable people; how he could never have moved
in such fine society in England; and how he was “apparently
thunderstruck” by the magnificence about him. The Evening Post
confined its personal observations to the statement that Dickens
wore black, “with a gay vest,” and that his wife appeared in a white
figured Irish tabinet trimmed with mazarine blue flowers, with a
wreath of the same color about her head, and pearl necklace and
earrings. It described the tableaux in full—Mr. Leo Hunter’s fancy
dress party, the middle-aged lady in the hotel room that Pickwick
invaded, Mr. and Mrs. Mantalini in Ralph Nickleby’s office, the
Stranger and Barnaby Rudge, and so on.
The Boz Dinner, at which Bryant was a leading figure, received
no less than three columns, crowding out all editorial matter—pretty
good evidence that Bryant himself wrote the report. Washington
Irving presided, and made a few halting remarks, toasting Dickens
as the guest of the nation. “There,” he said as he took his seat
(Bryant of course did not mention this), “I told you I should break
down, and I’ve done it.” The Evening Post gave a full transcript of
Dickens’s speech, much of which was a tribute to Irving, and which
concluded with a reference to the presence of Bryant and Halleck as
making appropriate a toast to American literature. The dinner closed
with a storm of applause for the sentiment, “The Works of Our Guest
—Like Oliver Twist, We Ask for More”; and the Evening Post was
soon reporting Dickens’s reception in Washington.
Some observers were puzzled by the enthusiasm of Dickens’s
reception, and the Courrier des Etats Unis tried to account for it by
several theories: first, because Americans were eager to refute the
accusation that they cared nothing for art and everything for money;
second, because they supposed Dickens was taking notes, and
wished to conciliate his opinion; and third, because the austere
Puritanism of America, restraining the people from many ordinary
enjoyments, made them seize upon such occasions as a vent for
their natural love of excitement.
Bryant admitted that there was force in the third part of this
explanation, but in the Evening Post he took the simpler view that
the cordiality originated in the main from a sincere admiration for
the novelist’s genius. He pointed out that Dickens’s excellences were
of a kind that appealed to all classes, from the stableboy to the
statesman. “His intimate knowledge of character, his familiarity with
the language and experience of low life, his genuine humor, his
narrative power, and the cheerfulness of his philosophy, are traits
that impress themselves upon minds of every description.” But his
higher traits were such as particularly recommended him to
Americans. “His sympathies seek out that class with whom American
institutions and laws sympathize most strongly. He has found
subjects of thrilling interest in the passions, sufferings, and virtues of
the mass.” For itself, while regretting a certain excess of fervor in
Dickens’s welcome, the Evening Post regarded it as a healthy token.
“We have so long been accustomed to seeing the homage of the
multitude paid to men of mere titles, or military chieftains, that we
have grown tired of it. We are glad to see the mind asserting its
supremacy—to find its rights generally recognized. We rejoice that a
young man, without birth, wealth, title, or a sword, whose only
claims to distinction are in his intellect and heart, is received with a
feeling that was formerly rendered only to conquerors and kings.”
Dickens’s visit was not merely for pleasure or observation, and in
his endeavors to promote the cause of international copyright
legislation the Post was already keenly interested. As early as 1810
Coleman, under the heading, “Imposition,” had attacked the pirating
of “Travels in the Northern Part of the United States,” by Edward A.
Kendall, an Englishman whom Coleman knew, as not only “a
trespass upon the rights of the author,” but a fraud upon the public,
since the edition was mutilated. In 1826 he or Bryant had
commented acridly upon the appearance of a Cambridge edition of
Mrs. Barbauld’s poems at the same time that the New York
publishers, G. and C. Carvill, brought out an authorized edition the
profits of which went to the author’s heirs. Miss Martineau,
sojourning in America in 1836, had taken up the question with
Bryant. Upon returning home she had sent him a copy of a petition
by many English writers, including Dickens and Carlyle, to Congress,
together with copies of brief letters by Wordsworth, Miss Edgeworth,
Lord Brougham, and others indorsing it; and it was published with
hearty commendation in the Evening Post.
 The question was one in which Bryant, like Cooper and Irving,
had a selfish as well as altruistic interest. All American authors were
trying to sell their wares to publishers and readers who could get
English books without payment of royalty. Each of Dickens’s works,
as it appeared, was snapped up and placed on the market for
twenty-five cents or less. “Barnaby Rudge,” during his tour of this
country, was advertised in the Evening Post as available, complete,
in two issues of the New World, for a total cost of sixteen and one-
fourth cents. The next week it was issued under one cover for
twenty-five cents. The novels of Bulwer, Disraeli, and Ainsworth were
presented in the same way, as was the poetry of Hood and
Tennyson. Napier’s “Peninsular War” was advertised in the Post in
1844 by J. S. Redfield in nine volumes at a quarter dollar apiece, and
Milman’s edition of Gibbon, with his notes copyright in England, by
Harpers in fifteen parts at the same price.
In his speech at the Boston dinner “Boz” boldly set forth the
injustice which he believed the lack of an American international
copyright law was doing English writers. Several Boston journals
were offended, while the paper-makers belonging to the “Home
League” in New York met to express opposition to any new copyright
legislation. Bryant at once (on Feb. 11) took Dickens’s side in the
Evening Post. If the American laws allowed every foreigner to be
robbed of his money and baggage the moment he landed, he wrote,
and closed the courts to his claims for redress, the nation would be
condemned as a den of thieves. “When we deny a stranger the
same right to the profits of his own writings as we give to our
citizens, we commit this very injustice; the only difference is that we
limit the robbery to one kind of property.”
At the New York dinner Dickens advanced the same subject in a
few words. “I claim that justice be done; and I prefer the claim as
one who has a right to speak and be heard,” the Evening Post
quoted him. He breakfasted with Bryant and Halleck, and was
entertained at the poet’s home, where he probably spoke to him in
private and received assurances of the Post’s support. On May 9
there appeared a letter from Dickens “To the Editor of the Evening