Before 1840 Bryant had enrolled himself among those who held that the spread of slavery must be stopped. President Van Buren had pledged himself to veto any bill for emancipating the slaves in the District of Columbia. Although the plan of freeing the District slaves was abominated by most people in New York city, and even J. Q. Adams would not vote in favor of it in 1836, the _Evening Post_ attacked and derided Van Buren’s pledge. When this reform was included in the Compromise of 1850, it boasted that New Yorkers had been converted to an advocacy of it as overwhelming as their opposition a dozen years earlier. During 1839 a considerable stir was produced in the city by the _Armistad_ affair. A number of Africans sold as slaves in Cuba being transported from Havana to Principe on the schooner _Armistad_, rose, took possession of the craft, and compelled those of the crew whom they had not killed to steer the vessel, as they believed, to Africa. It was brought into Long Island Sound instead, and the negroes were seized as criminals. Bryant asked his friend Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., to investigate the law, and the latter came to the conclusion, which he expounded at length in the _Evening Post_, that the blacks could not be held. They had gained their freedom, he said, and were heroes and not malefactors. Secretary of State Forsythe and Attorney-General Grundy did all they could to vindicate the claim of the Spanish Minister to the negroes, but the courts upheld Sedgwick’s view of the issue, and they were liberated. Every conscientious Democratic journal of the North was faced by a common embarrassment in the decade 1840–1850, when a dominance over the Democratic party was steadily established by advocates of the extension of slavery. If, like the _Herald_ or _Journal of Commerce_ or _Express_, they were friendly to the South in defiance of conscience, they felt no difficulty. But the _Evening Post_ believed slavery a curse. What could it do when Polk was nominated in 1844 by its own party upon a platform favorable to this vicious institution, and when the Democratic leaders carried the nation into the Mexican War with the effect, if not the calculated purpose, of adding to the slaveowners’ domain? Bryant did not wish to abandon the great party which stood for low tariff, opposition to the squandering of public money on internal improvements, and a decisive separation between the government and banking. He could only do in 1844 what Greeley and the _Tribune_ did in 1848, when Taylor, whom the _Tribune_ distrusted, was nominated by the Whigs; stick to his party, reconcile his feelings as best he could with his party allegiance, and labor to improve the party from within.