During the campaign it was hinted by the _Evening Post_ that if chosen, Harrison could not live to the end of his official term. It recorded the fact that when he arrived in Washington, the fatigue of receiving his friends was “so great that he was obliged to forego the usual ceremony of shaking hands with them.” A month later the paper was commenting upon the ghastly contrast between the festivities, pageants, and congratulations which attended his inauguration, and the solemnity and gloom as the plumed hearse carried his body, behind six white horses, to the Congressional burying ground. Because Bryant refused to write panegryrically of the dead President, though he did write respectfully, and because he refrained from using heavy black column rules for mourning, a practice which he called “typographical foppery,” he was violently assailed by the Whig press as a “vampire” and “ghoul.” Bryant and Parke Godwin naturally hoped for the renomination of Van Buren in 1844, believing that the battle unfairly won by the Whigs in 1840 ought to be fought again on the same field, and with the same well-tried Democratic leader. Bryant told the story of the Santa Fé hunter who used to pat his rifle, carried for forty years, saying: “I believe in it. I know that whenever I fire there is meat.” In midsummer of 1843 he was confident that victory was already assured, the political reaction since 1841 being “without a parallel in the history of the peaceful conduct of affairs in this country.” The _Evening Post_ welcomed the “black tariff” of 1842, the work of the Whig protectionists, as contributing magnificently to this reaction. It was like an overdose of poison; instead of accomplishing its purpose, it would act as an emetic and be rejected at once. But between that date and Polk’s nomination in May, 1844, there arose the questions of Texas and slavery, offering all editors of Bryant’s views the most distressing dilemma.