At his death in 1878 William Cullen Bryant had been, for fifty-one
years, the chief editor and a principal owner of the New York
Evening Post. The paper had been started in 1801 by lawyer William
Coleman in association with the Federalist political Alexander
Hamilton. In 1826, Coleman hired Bryant as a reporter. Although
Coleman may have engaged his services because of his growing
distinction as a poet, Bryant was also by then an experienced
writer of prose, having published more than fifty critical and
familiar essays. He had been both editor of and most frequent
writer for the monthly New York Review and the United State Review,
and was known widely for his lectures on poetry before the New York
Athenaeum. By the time he assumed the direction of the Evening Post
after Coleman's death in 1829 he had proved himself, in three
annual volumes of the holiday gift book The Talisman, to be
proficient in a wit and irony soon reflected in his editorials.
Bryant brought the conservative journal to the support of the
Democratic Party of President Andrew Jackson, and held it
thereafter to liberal principles, advocating free trade, free
labor, and Free Soil. Except for the years from 1829 to 1836,
Bryant held the editorial pen largely alone until after the Civil
War. Occasional contributors formed a representative roster of
leaders in many fields: Charles Francis Adams, Thomas Hart Benton,
Francis P. Blair, Salman P. Chase, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore
Cooper, Hamilton Fish, Parke Godwin (Bryant's son-in-law), Bret
Harte, James K. Paulding, John Randolph, Samule J. Tilden, Martin
and John Van Buren, Artemus Ward, Gideon Wlles, Walt Whitman, and
Silas Wright. And now and then there were articles by British
Parliamentarian Richard Cobden and artist-economist George Harvey,
and the French critic Charles Sainte-Beuve. Bryant's editorials
after 1860 suggest separate treatment. The present volume traces
the growth of his political and social maturity as he made of a
conservative, parochial, small-city newspaper into a national organ
which Charles Francis Adams in 1850 called "the best daily journal
in the United States."
General
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