William Cullen Bryant House: Photo Tour of Home of Abolitionist Editor of the NY Evening Post

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In 1858, Bryant became a champion of the little-known Abraham Lincoln. According to Harold Holzer:

“Two men presenting wider contrasts could hardly be found as the representatives of the two great parties,” William
Cullen Bryant’s antislavery New York Evening Post commented in August when the two combatants launched their joint meetings. Not surprisingly, the Post sneeringly described Democrat Douglas as a “short, thick-set, burly man, with a large, round head, heavy hair, dark complexion, and fierce bull-dog bark”— a Vermont native who had clearly forgotten “the ancestral hatred of slavery to which he was the heir.” Lincoln, portrayed by contrast as “very tall, slender, and angular, awkward even, in gait and attitude,” was admittedly not very “comely” in repose. “But stir him up,” marveled the Post, and “the fire of his genius plays on every feature. . . . The Republicans of Illinois have chosen a champion worthy
of their heartiest support, and fully equipped for the conflict.” Within a month, the Post took the temperature of the growing political excitement in Illinois and declared: “The prairies are on fire.”


Holzer, Harold. Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (Kindle Locations 3891-3899). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
 
In 1859, Bryant and Horace Greeley met in Bryant's NYC office to connive in bringing Lincoln to speak in Brookltn at Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church. The editors, through a young Republicans club, offered Lincoln $200 plus travel expenses to come. They hoped to short-circuit Seward's run for the Republican nomination, believing him incapable of carrying the Midwest.

Lincoln agreed to make the speech, but found out when he got to New York that it had been moved to Cooper Union in Manhattan.

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Holzer writes of the Cooper Union speech:

The task of introducing Lincoln at Cooper Union fell to none other than the extravagantly bearded elder statesman among the city’s antislavery editors, the Evening Post’s William Cullen Bryant (Lincoln confided that it was “worth a visit from Springfield, Illinois, to New York to make the acquaintance of such a man”). 54 Bryant took the stage and hailed the speaker of the evening as “a gallant soldier of the political campaign of 1858” and a “great champion” of the Republican cause in Illinois.”

Holzer, Harold. Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (Kindle Locations 4777-4782). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

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Cooper Union in Manhattan was founded by Peter Cooper of Hempstead, Long Island, the village I work in.
 
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Bryant’s Post hailed Lincoln’s “certain mastery of clear and impressive statement.”

Holzer, Harold. Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (Kindle Locations 4839-4840). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
 
From Holzer on the 1860 campaign:

William Cullen Bryant, describing himself as “an old campaigner, who has been engaged in political controversies for more than a third of a century,” was more practical, advising Lincoln that “the vast majority of your friends . . . want you to make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises, nor even give any of those kind words which men are apt to interpret into promises.” 17 Lincoln followed this advice and did nothing at all to advance his candidacy— at least publicly— for the next six months.

Holzer, Harold. Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (Kindle Locations 5193-5197). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
 
When Lincoln was elected president in Nov. 1860, Bryant addressed the New York mass meeting held to celebrate the victory.

Mr. BRYANT, on taking the chair, said that they had met to-night to celebrate one of the most important moral and political victories that had ever been achieved. The youngest of his hearers might live till the next century and not witness another election so pregnant with great results as the one through which they had just passed. And, best of all, they had triumphed. [Applause.] The enemy was conquered. At their feet lay the carcass of that odious slave oligarchy which for so long a period had ruled our country, ruled Northern men, and tyrannized over both. [Tremendous applause.] And they, the young men he saw before him, had aided in dealing that terrible blow which had at length struck the creature to the earth. [Renewed applause.] There it lay before them, dismembered, lifeless, dead, and from that death there was no resurrection. [A Voice -- "Thank the Lord."]

The old era had passed, never to return. A new era had commenced, in which there would be no attempt to force upon an unwilling people a barbarous institution, at once a curse and a calamity to any people; no more attempts to resume that traffic accursed, of God and man, the African Slave-trade; no more attempts to purchase members of Congress and bribe them to enact laws which their consciences disapprove. [Loud applause.] For the part that they, the young men, had taken in the contest, the approval of their own consciences would furnish the best reward, and he exhorted them, through all coming time, to cherish the memory of this great victory, which, without their aid, and the aid of such as they, could never have been achieved. He had long been an observer of public affairs, though never in public life himself, and never intending to be, but only a commentar on public measures, yet he never knew a virtuous cause to be steadily pursued, without in the end being crowned with victory. He remembered when the cloud was no bigger than a man's hand. It now filled the whole scope of the heavens, and shed abundant showers; the dry fields were filled with moisture, and they would enjoy abountiful harvest. [Applause.]


http://www.nytimes.com/1860/11/09/n...-of-wmc-bryant-horace-greeley-and-others.html
 
In 1861, Bryant differed with Lincoln. He did not agree with the president's rescinding Fremont's Missouri emancipation order. He wrote that the general had "done what he government ought to have done from the beginning."
 
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In August 1862, Bryant visited Lincoln to urge the abolition of slavery. He wrote is a letter that "I expressed myself plainly and without reserve, though courteously."
 
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Bryant could be a poet at his retreat, a break from the crazy world of Newspapers:

Bryant himself sheepishly admitted to the bad reputation increasingly attached to professional newspapermen, himself perhaps included: “Contempt is too harsh a word for it, perhaps, but it is far below respect.” 56 Other New Yorkers had already become so accustomed to street brawls between journalists that when the blasé man-about-town Philip Hone spied the Bryant-Stone squabble from his window as it unfolded, the incident did not seem unusual enough to interrupt his shaving.


Holzer, Harold. Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (Kindle Locations 754-757). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Maybe today's press isn't so uncivil after all.
 
In the 1830s, Bryant had toyed with the idea of emancipated slave colonization. He had come to reject it later and was critical of Lincoln when he toyed with the idea of voluntary colonization. He characterized Lincoln as having "limited and perplexing thinking" on the subject.

This stained glass from the Great Room was post-Bryant.

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From Holzer:

Bryant proved one of the few who walked away voluntarily from the newspaper business with his passion for political journalism subdued and his literary reputation intact. After serving for half a century as editor and part-owner of the Evening Post, the graybeard poet retired from the paper in 1878— but not before returning to his first love and publishing new free verse translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. During a Central Park ceremony that same year honoring the Italian journalist-hero Giuseppe Mazzini, however, Bryant slipped and fell. He died of complications a few weeks later at the age of eighty-three.

Holzer, Harold. Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (Kindle Locations 11766-11770). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
 
October
by William Cullen Bryant

AY, thou art welcome, heaven’s delicious breath!
When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay
In the gay woods and in the golden air,
Like to a good old age released from care,
Journeying, in long serenity, away.
In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
Might wear out life like thee, ‘mid bowers and brooks
And dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh;
And when my last sand twinkled in the glass,
Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass.
 
The lectern in the Great Room had this book on it. They had been doings readings from it for a recent program.
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