The bitterness and militancy of the _Evening Post_ thenceforth increased day by day. The recapture of the slave Burns in Boston during the summer of 1854, the slave whom Thomas Wentworth Higginson tried at the head of a mob to rescue, and who was marched to the wharf by platoons of soldiers and police through a crowd of fifty thousand hissing people, moved the _Evening Post_ to call the Fugitive Slave law “the most ruffianly act ever authorized by a deliberative assembly.” Month after month it exhorted the North to send emigrants to Kansas and Nebraska to uphold the free-soil cause. It invited Southerners to stay at their own watering-places in summer. It taunted the South with its lack of literature and culture, declaring that the only Southern book yet written which would not perish was Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View,” a free-soiler’s work. In the State election of 1855 it supported the Republican ticket, and when “Prince” John Van Buren attacked it for doing so, it assailed him in turn as the “degenerate son” of a great father. As 1855 closed with fresh news every day of bloodshed in the territories, the paper cried its encouragement to those who fought for free soil:
Every liberal sentiment--the love of freedom, the hatred of oppression, the detestation of fraud, the abhorrence of wrong cloaked under the guise of law--every feeling of the human heart which does not counsel cowardly submission and the purchase of present safety as the price of future evils, takes part with the residents of Kansas. They may commit imprudent acts, they may be rash ... but their cause is a great and righteous cause, and we must stand by it to the last.
It was a foregone conclusion at the beginning of 1856 that the _Evening Post_ would lend energetic assistance to the half-organized Republican party. During the previous summer and autumn it had devoted several editorials to the disintegration of the Whig party in both sections, and to that of the Democratic party at the North. The time had come, it said, when the old party names meant nothing upon the principal issues, and it welcomed the formation of a new party of definite tenets. Bigelow, more impetuous than Bryant, made the _Evening Post_ an energetic champion of Fremont more than a month before the Republicans nominated him for the Presidency. Even the _Tribune_ was held back until later by the doubts of Greeley’s lieutenant, Pike, so that the _Post_ was one of the first powerful Northern sheets for him.