The _Post_ supported an abortive effort to amend the Charter in 1846, and in 1853, after Azariah Flagg as Controller had stripped some flagrant extravagance and grafting, it gave its voice to another movement which proved successful. Tweed was at this time an alderman. The newspaper charged the body of which he was a member with selling city property and valuable franchises for nominal prices, and then by its control of the courts quashing all efforts at prosecution. When by a smashing popular vote (June 7, 1853) the new Charter was carried, abolishing the Board of Assistant Aldermen, and excluding the aldermen from sitting in the courts of Oyer and Terminer and of the Sessions, the _Post_ said that “a more significant and humiliating rebuke was never administered upon a body of public officers in this State before.” It little thought then that the corruption of the past was but a trifle to the corruption coming.
Bryant’s place as the foremost citizen of the lusty young metropolis was by 1850 becoming secure. He, Irving, and Cooper were universally regarded as the country’s greatest literary men. Irving was passing his final placid years at Sunnyside; Cooper on Otsego Lake, one of the most quarrelsome men in the country, was near the end of his stormy career. The city heard of them only occasionally. But Bryant was in the prime of life, seen almost daily on the streets, and heard upon every passing question. In the late forties he began to be known as a speaker upon public occasions. He delivered his eulogy upon the artist Cole in 1848 with much nervousness, but by 1851, when he presided over the press banquet to Kossuth, he had acquired self-confidence and ease. Thereafter he was in constant demand for addresses to all kinds of audiences--literary groups, the New York Historical Society, the Scotch when they celebrated the centenary of Burns’s birth, the Germans in their Schiller celebration, and so on. His increasing prestige in the city was naturally reflected upon the _Evening Post_.
LITERARY ASPECTS OF BRYANT’S NEWSPAPER, 1830–1855
For reasons fairly evident Bryant seldom used the _Evening Post_ for the publication of his poems; he was too modest, and the magazines of the day too earnestly besought him for whatever he might write. In 1832 he brought out “The Prairies” in it, and in 1841 “The Painted Cup”--that was all in early years. He had no time for literary essays, even had he felt the _Post_ the place for them. As for the new books, no one yet thought that dailies should give them more than brief notices; moreover, Bryant disrelished book-reviewing, a task against which he had protested while a magazine editor, and he never quite trusted his judgment upon new volumes of poetry. The _Evening Post_ had less literary distinction in his early editorship than might be supposed; but it had much literary interest.