As a personal friend of Van Buren, Bryant had been among the first to applaud the movement for his nomination, and he warmly championed him throughout the campaign of 1836. At the South the _Evening Post_ was for some time declared to be Little Van’s chosen organ for addressing the public, much to the President’s embarrassment; for the _Post’s_ views on the growing anti-slavery movement were not his. Van Buren’s greatest measure, the sub-treasury plan, was stubbornly opposed by the bankers and most other representatives of capital in New York. It ended the distribution of national moneys among the State banks, where Federal funds had been kept since 1833, and it was a terrible blow to them. The _Evening Post_ had consistently stood for a divorce of the government and the banks, and it supported the sub-treasury scheme through all its vicissitudes. It had always opposed the division of the surplus revenue among the States, and in applauding Van Buren’s determination to stop it the paper again aroused the wrath of the business community in New York. But upon certain other issues it crossed swords with the President.
Bryant, like Ellery Channing, J. Q. Adams, Whittier, Wendell Phillips, and Salmon P. Chase, took up the fight for free speech and found that it rapidly led him into the battle for free soil. In January, 1836, Ex-President Adams began in the House of Representatives his heroic contest with the Southerners for the unchecked reception of abolitionist petitions there, and in May the “gag” resolution against these petitions was passed. Bryant’s indignation was scorching. He wrote upon the speech of a New York Senator (April 21):
Mr. Tallmadge has done well in vindicating the right of individuals to address Congress on any matter within its province.... This is something, at a time when the Governor of one State demands of another that free discussion on a particular subject shall be made a crime by law, and when a Senator of the Republic, and a pretended champion of liberty, rises in his place and proposes a censorship of the press more servile, more tyrannical, more arbitrary, than subsists in any other country. It is a prudent counsel also that Mr. Tallmadge gives to the South--to beware of increasing the zeal, of swelling the ranks and multiplying the friends, of the Abolitionists by attempting to exclude them from the common rights of citizens.... Yet it seems to us that Mr. Tallmadge ... might have gone a little further. It seems to us that ... he should have protested with somewhat more energy and zeal against the attempt to shackle the expression of opinion. It is no time to use honeyed words when the liberty of speech is endangered.... If the tyrannical doctrines and measures of Mr. Calhoun can be carried into effect, there is an end to liberty in this country; but carried into effect they cannot be. It is too late an age to copy the policy of Henry VIII; we lie too far in the occident to imitate the despotic rule of Austria. The spirit of our people has been too long accustomed to freedom to bear the restraint which is sought to be put upon it. Discussion will be like the Greek fire, which blazed the fiercer for the water thrown upon it; and if the stake be set and the faggots ready, there will be candidates for martyrdom.