William Cullen Bryant brought to American newspaper journalism not only the argumentative and rhetorical skills of the lawyer but the sensibility of the poet. His reputation as one of the few major poets of the early republic has gradually overshadowed, since his death, his career as a newspaper editor, editorialist, and proprietor, to which he gave more than fifty of his eighty-three years. As editor in chief of the New-York Evening Post, he left his imprint, that of a classical liberal and humanitarian, on nearly every major national issue from the fight over the Second Bank of the United States through Reconstruction. To nineteenth-century journalism, he lent a civility and literary quality generally lacking in his contemporaries. By the time he concluded his career, he was hailed as New York's first citizen and elder statesman.

Bryant's long life began in 1794 in what was then a fringe of civilization...