Most of the metropolitan newspapers emerged from the Civil War with increased circulation, and several, like the Evening Post, with enhanced prosperity. The circulation was not high by present standards: when peace was declared the Sun was printing about 50,000 copies, the Times about 35,000, and the Evening Post about 20,000. But the influence of the New York press has never been larger, for four great journalists were then at the height of their reputation. Raymond of the Times had four more years to live, Bennett of the Herald and Greeley of the Tribune had seven, and Bryant, the oldest editor of all, thirteen. The younger generation was not quite yet needed—not until 1868 did Dana join the Sun, and Whitelaw Reid the Tribune.

When the problems of reconstruction presented themselves, everybody knew where the large group of Democratic journals would stand. The Herald, the World, the Express, and the Daily News, loyal to the grand old party of Polk and Buchanan, would urge the restoration of the Southern States to their former standing as quickly and gently as possible. The only real curiosity was as to the Evening Post, Times, and Tribune.

Having held the radical views of Chase and Sumner in the war, having constantly demanded more energy in its prosecution, the Evening Post might have been expected to advocate severity toward the South. For a time there were indications that it would do so. When Lincoln, just before his death, declared in favor of encouraging and perfecting the new State governments already set up in the South, saying “We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it,” Bryant was doubtful. “But if it should happen that these eggs are cockatrice’s eggs, what then?” he demanded. For some months after Appomattox the Post expressed its wish that “traitors” like Jefferson Davis, Hunter, Benjamin, Wigfall, and Wise could be brought to trial; it was not necessary to put them to death—they could be pardoned if condemned—but justice demanded a stern arraignment.

Yet it soon became evident that the Evening Post’s influence would be on the side of moderation and leniency. Bryant’s fine obituary editorial on Lincoln struck this note clearly. He spoke of Lincoln’s gentle policies:

How skillfully he had avoided and postponed needless troubles, the ease and tranquillity of our return from a time of passionate conflict to a time of serene repose is a proof; how wisely he had contrived to put off the suggestions of an extreme or fanatical zeal everybody has been ready to acknowledge, for Mr. Lincoln brought to his high office no prejudice of section, no personal resentments, no unkind or bitter feelings of hatred, and throughout the trying time of his Administration he has never uttered one rancorous word toward the South....

The whole nation mourns the death of its President, but no part of it ought to mourn that death more keenly than our brothers of the South, who had more to expect from his clemency and sense of justice than from any other man who could succeed to his position. The insanity of the assassination, indeed, if it was instigated by the rebels, appears in the stronger light when we reflect on the generosity and tenderness with which he was disposed to close up the war, to bury its feuds, to heal over its wounds, and to restore to all parts of the nation that good feeling which once prevailed, and which ought to prevail again. Let us pray God that those who come after him may imitate his virtues and imbibe the spirit of his goodness.

The stand taken by Bryant’s friend Chase, the poet’s natural generosity, and the reports of a desire for reconciliation sent by Southern correspondents, caused the paper to assume an unflinching advocacy of President Johnson’s mild policy, and to attack the harsh measures of Congress. In this attitude the Times was with it. The Tribune took the other side vehemently, and, in a more reasonable way, it was espoused by the city’s three great weekly organs of opinion, E.L. Godkin’s Nation, Harper’s Weekly, and the Independent, from which Henry Ward Beecher, disagreeing with Theodore Tilton’s severe views, soon resigned.

Into the Evening Post’s opinions upon the whole kaleidoscopic succession of bills and acts bearing upon reconstruction, from 1865 to 1868, it is impossible to go in detail. Its fundamental doctrine was fully outlined as early as May 2, 1865. The two great objects, it affirmed, were to depart as little as possible from the old-established principles of State government, and “to do nothing for revenge, nothing in the mere spirit of proscription.” It believed that a convention should be called in each State to annul the ordinance of secession, and, by writing a new State Constitution, to repudiate the rebel debt, guarantee the negroes equal civil rights, and regulate the elective franchise according to immutable principles of certain application, discarding all arbitrary and capricious rules. The States should also ratify the anti-slavery amendment of the Federal Constitution by popular vote. “As soon as the political power has thus been regularly reconstituted the State, as a matter of course, resumes her relations to the Union, elects members of Congress, and stands in all respects on a footing with the States” of the North.

Urging this policy, Bryant and the Evening Post wished to end military rule at the South as quickly as possible, while the Congressional radicals, led by Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, like the Tribune and Nation, regarded its indefinite continuance as necessary. The Evening Post held that the illiterate negroes were unfit to vote and should be required to pass through a probationary period; it wished the Southern ballot based upon an educational test. The Tribune and the Sun supported full negro suffrage. When the first Southern States sent Representatives to Congress the Evening Post, like the Times and World, wished them admitted. The World, indeed, bitterly assailed the “rump” Congress which barred them. The Evening Post, Times, and World supported Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, while the Tribune wrung its hands over such journalistic depravity.

There was some justification in the objection of Harper’s Weekly that the Post was too “optimistic.” Bryant appealed to the South to be magnanimous to the negro, and to set to work to educate him and make him the white man’s equal. He was sure that “with their healthy native constitution, their long training to labor, their quick imitative faculties, their new motives to enterprise, the freedmen will grow into a most useful class.” The Post underrated the enormous difficulties of the racial problem at the South. But its course was wisdom and humanity itself when compared with that of the Congressional extremists who insisted upon confiscation and disfranchisement. The Tribune, following these extremists, called the Post and Times “copperhead,” an epithet which came with ill grace from a paper with the Tribune’s war record. Greeley made an able defense of his policy in an address in Richmond in May, 1867, but the Tribune tended in the hands of his lieutenants to be more radical than Greeley himself.

In supporting Johnson, all the moderates found their chief enemy in Johnson himself. When he took the oath of office as Vice-President the authentic reports of his intoxication had caused the Evening Post to demand that he either resign or formally apologize to the nation. A year later, when he made an abusive speech saying that his opponents Sumner and Stevens had tried “to incite assassination,” the journal again called for an apology to the people. The Post supported the Civil Rights bill of 1866, guaranteeing the negro equality before the law with the whites. When Johnson vetoed it, Bryant wrote in a hitherto unpublished letter to his daughter:

The general feeling in favor of that bill is exceedingly strong, and the President probably did not know what he was doing when he returned it to Congress. He has been very silent since, as if the check of passing the bill notwithstanding his objections had stunned him. Mr. Bancroft says that he must have got some small lawyer to write his veto message, and Gen. Dix thinks that the trouble at Washington lessens the eligibility of the President for a second term of office. So you see that those who supported Johnson’s first veto fall off now. Poor Raymond seemed in great perplexity to know which way to turn. He supported the veto, but his paper commended it but faintly and admitted that something ought to be done from the standpoint of the rights of American citizenship when denied by the States.

When President Johnson removed the Governor of Louisiana that summer, the Evening Post condemned his act as unconstitutional. It was outraged by his dismissal of officeholders to influence the Congressional elections of 1866. His “swing around the circle,” the famous speaking tour to Chicago and back in the early fall of 1866, in which he lost all sense of dignity, talked of hanging Thad Stevens, and abused his opponents as “foul whelps of sin,” completely disgusted the Post. “It is a melancholy reflection,” it said, “to those who have found it their duty to support that policy [Johnson’s], that their most damaging opponent is the President, and that he makes a judicious course so hateful to the people that no argument is listened to....” It marveled at his skill “to do the wrong thing at the wrong time, to displease everybody, and to delay that which everybody would be glad to have over.” Moreover, as news arrived of widespread outrages against the negroes in the South, the Post’s attitude toward that section grew less gentle.

Ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, the Evening Post urged the South in the summer of 1866; it is the only way to hasten sane reconstruction. When the Southerners, already denying the negroes their due place at the polls and in the courts, deliberately rejected the amendment, it was ready to give them a stiffer dose. In February, 1867, it pronounced in favor of the great Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten Southern States into five military districts, and undertook to guarantee the negro’s rights by force. That is, the abuses perpetrated made it swing toward the Congressional standpoint—just as general Northern sentiment swung.

But when Congress determined to impeach President Johnson, the protest of the Evening Post was as instant as that of the Times or Sun. The principal charges were based upon the President’s alleged violations of the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited him from dismissing civil officers without the consent of the Senate. When this Act was passed in July, 1867, the Post had called it a silly and mischievous attempt to make the President as powerless as the Mayor of New York, and had regarded it as unconstitutional. The early talk of impeachment it rebuked as threatening “a Mexican madness.” Naturally, then, when Johnson defied Congress by dismissing Secretary Stanton without consulting the Senate, the editors took the view that his intention was merely to bring the act before the courts, and that he should not be impeached unless he persisted in further dismissals after the Supreme Court had decided against him. They had already written (Dec. 2) that the impeachment talk did not carry with it the public sense of justice, without which it must recoil upon the heads of its promoters, and that Congress had enough useful constructive work to do to keep it busy.

When impeachment was actually voted, the Post’s comment was sorrowful rather than angry. “It is a quarrel in which there is really no very great substance,” it said. “It is one that might easily have been avoided, and may be easily brought to an end.”

This was the view of the Sun, which had just passed under the control of Dana, and which declared the impeachment “far too serious an undertaking for the facts and evidence in the case.” It was likewise the opinion of the Times, which asked: “Must the President be punished for maintaining the authority of the Constitution against an invalid law?” The position of the World had its humorous aspects. So long as it had considered Johnson a Republican, it had found no abuse of him too violent. Even in June, 1865, it had called him “a drunken boor,” “an insolent, vulgar, low-bred brute,” and a man “not so respectable as Caligula’s horse.” Now, telling its readers that Congress was attempting to remove the President “in the personal interest of Edwin M. Stanton,” it could not be sufficiently impassioned in his defense. Mayor Hoffman voiced the same Democratic sentiment in saying that the impeachers of Johnson and the assassins of Lincoln would be equally infamous in history.

But the joy of the Tribune was unbounded, and in its references to the President it ran the gamut of denunciation, from “the Great Accidency” and “this bold, bad, malignant man” to “traitor.” Its peroration of one ringing column editorial is a gem of its kind: “He is an aching tooth in the national jaw, a screeching infant in a crowded lecture room; and there can be no peace nor comfort until he is out.” The Nation, originally opposed to impeachment, now approved it with only less gusto. Every one thought Johnson either a fool or a knave, its editor wrote, and his disappearance from the national stage would be a heartfelt relief to all. Harper’s Weekly, assailing Johnson for treachery to the party, hoped that he would sink fast and forever into oblivion.

A contribution to calmness in the first moment of excitement was made by the Evening Post in an editorial entitled “What the People Think.” There was no sustained perturbation, it believed; that sensitive barometer, the gold market, had quickly become as steady as ever. There was even a feeling of relief. Thinking of the solemnity of the constitutional process of impeachment, men were glad that the vindictive fight between the President and Congress “is now carried out of the political arena and into a higher place.” The general public, including many Democrats, held that the President had acted wrongly, even if not in a degree deserving impeachment. But every one was saying that there must be no violence, and the trial must be quick, while there was an equally universal hope that, whatever its outcome, Congress would emerge with its fury vented and in a more reasonable state of mind.

At the outset the Evening Post and the Times were irritated by two assertions of the anti-Johnson radicals. The first was that the President might and should be suspended from office pending the outcome of the trial. Not only was there no constitutional warrant for such action, wrote Bryant, but the question had been discussed in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and it had voted that Congress should have no such power of suspension. The Tribune held also that if the Senate, sitting as a High Court upon the President’s disobedience to the Tenure of Office Act, declared the act unconstitutional, then its decision became forever binding. The Supreme Court would have no authority to pass upon the constitutionality of the act, and if it presumed to do so and to differ from the High Court, Congress would be justified in impeaching or removing the judges. This was too much for the Nation as well as the Evening Post, and Godkin promptly demolished the assertion. It should be said that Greeley at this time was absent in the West, and the Tribune was under the charge of John Russell Young, whose harshness Greeley later disapproved.

On Feb. 27, three days after the impeachment, the Evening Post declared that “the general impression is that the case is essentially prejudged, and that Mr. Johnson will be removed by the Senate.” This was the opinion of all the city’s organs, from the radical Nation on the one side to the World on the other. The World, in fact, made an appeal for a fund of $10,000,000, with which to bribe those Senators who could hardly hope for reËlection anyhow; and while this was a bit of humor—the Tribune alone took it seriously—its point lay in the World’s conviction that the Republican Senators were all so prejudiced that only millions could win over a few of them. Like the Nation, the Post devoted an editorial to a scrutiny of the qualifications of Benjamin Wade, who as President pro tem. of the Senate would succeed Johnson. Bryant admitted Wade’s honesty, courage, and frankness, but regretted that in impetuosity, narrowness, and prejudice he would be too much like the man he replaced. His manners, too, must be mended, for he recalled a Scotch lady’s remark: “Our Jock sweers awfu’, but nae doot it’s a great set-off to conversation.” As the trial progressed the Evening Post was gratified to find that the case was much less nearly prejudged than it had supposed. Disappointed by the lack of eloquence on both sides, it was pleased by the efficiency of Evarts, Stanbery, and others of the President’s counsel in displaying the strength of their case. They made it plain that Johnson’s intention in dismissing Stanton had not been to defy Congress and the law wantonly, but to obtain a judicial test of the Tenure of Office Act. They showed also that some anti-Johnson Senators had, while the Act was pending, expounded the view that it did not protect men held over from Lincoln’s Cabinet, like Stanton. The Post on April 22 credited the Senate with having dealt fairly with the accused and having admitted all the evidence in his favor.

The breakdown of the case against Johnson was gall and wormwood to the more bitter newspaper partisans of Congress. Theodore Tilton’s Independent read Chief Justice Chase, who impartially presided over the trial, out of the party. The Tribune was trembling for “the very existence of the government.” Never noted for gentleness of retort, it now accused Horatio Seymour of “gigantic, deliberate, atrocious lies”; the Herald of “falsehoods”; the World of “dodges and prevarications”; and the Times and Post again of being “copperhead.” The Times remonstrated. Pointing out that Greeley was to preside at the Dickens dinner, as the representative of the American press, it said that he should remember that it was not in the dignity of a gentleman to use the word “liar.” Greeley replied that the truth was not a question of taste, but of flat morality, and that he would never be mealy-mouthed in its defense.

The seven Republican Senators who finally determined to vote against conviction were Fessenden, Lyman Trumbull, Henderson, Fowler, Van Winkle, Grimes, and Ross. It is the belief of all later historians that their courageous and just action is one of the finest episodes of the sordid reconstruction period. But a storm of anger broke upon them in Washington. It was on May 16 that the voting began. Four days earlier the Tribune, flying into a panic, declared that a hundred men had been under pay in Washington since the trial began to cry down impeachment and bet against conviction. It accused Lyman Trumbull of being to blame, and insinuated that his motives were venal: “but a few weeks ago he was paid $5,000 for arguing the constitutionality of the Reconstruction laws.... Republicans ask to-night what the guerdon is for defending the President in the impeachment trial.” Let President Johnson, the incarnation of Treason and Slavery, be acquitted, it added, and he becomes King; as yet he could be removed by law, but “your next attempt will be a revolution.” Next day, May 13, the Tribune headed an editorial attack upon Senator Grimes, who had defended Johnson, “Judas’s Thirty Reasons,” and concluded: “We have had Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Jefferson Davis, and now we have James W. Grimes!” It categorically accused Senator Fowler of accepting a bribe, and it called Henderson and Ross suspect.

Perhaps the best retort was that of the Times, in an editorial debating the question who was the most colossal criminal of the century, and concluding that Senator Ross closely resembled Sennacherib. But a serious answer was necessary, and a dozen indignant journals, including the Nation and Harper’s Weekly, replied to this temporarily misguided oracle of a half-million readers. The Post’s editorial of May 13 was headed, “Coercing a Court”; and in it and an editorial of the next day it graphically described the pressure brought to bear upon the independent Senators, and condemned the attacks against them as undermining both the impartiality of judicial tribunals, and the principle that an accused man shall be believed innocent until proved guilty. It anticipated the verdict of history:

With whom is the sober second thought of the people most likely to agree—with the Tribune and Gen. Butler, or with such men as Trumbull, Grimes, Fessenden, and Henderson? It is plain that these gentlemen perform a duty in many ways painful to themselves; they are driven reluctantly to act in opposition to their own wishes; their verdict is given in favor of a man whom they consider unwise, and whose occupancy of the Presidential chair they believe has brought evils upon the country. Is it not honorable to them that their sense of justice and duty impels them to disappoint the demands of their party?

A scene of eager excitement and tension presented itself outside the office of every evening newspaper in New York on May 16, crowds packing the space before the bulletin boards. The vote was thirty-five for conviction and nineteen for acquittal, or one less than the number needed to depose the President. The Evening Post was outraged by the fact that the first vote was taken on the eleventh impeachment article, that being considered the strongest and the impeachment managers fearing the moral effect of a defeat on the weak early articles; and by the Senate’s immediate adjournment for ten days, which the Post believed a maneuver to permit more pressure to be brought upon the seven independent Senators. “The verdict of acquittal gives general satisfaction,” it said; “it is felt that a conviction, under the circumstances, would have had no moral force, and would only have injured the party....” Like every other decent organ, it condemned as “disgraceful” Senator Wade’s vote against Johnson and in favor of his own elevation to the Presidency, cast at a time when he and others believed that a single ballot would sway the issue. For that act the public never quite forgave Wade.

The Times, Herald, and World equally rejoiced in the acquittal, and the Sun accepted it with a milder approval. The Nation found “several reasons” for regretting it, and the Tribune was inconsolable. But the anger of the radicals was more intense than long-lived. In 1884 one of the editors of the Evening Post, Horace White, was attending the Chicago Convention which nominated Blaine. The name of ex-Senator Henderson was reported for the permanent chairmanship. “The assembled multitude,” wrote White, “knew at once the significance of the nomination, and gave cheer after cheer of applause and approval. It was the sign that all was forgiven on both sides.”