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.
