Just how much basis there was for the _Evening Post’s_ view that the mob was not spontaneous, but instigated by disloyalist leaders of brains, it is impossible to say. On the second day “a distinguished and sagacious Democrat,” Bryant wrote editorially, visited the office to warn him that the riots “had a firmer basis and a more fixed object than we imagined.” But it is certain that the copperhead press seemed to cheer on the mob even while it denounced it. Thus the _World_ on Tuesday spoke of the rioters as possessed “with a burning sense of wrong toward the government,” and though it appealed to them to stop, asked: “Does any man wonder that poor men refuse to be forced into a war mismanaged almost into hopelessness, perverted almost into partisanship?” The _Evening Post_ was particularly incensed by the _Herald’s_ references to the riots as a “popular” outbreak, and that of the _Daily News_ to “the people fired on by United States soldiers.” Not the people, it said; “a small band of cutthroats, pickpockets, and robbers.” It wanted the miscreants given an abundance of grape and canister without delay, and declared that an officer who had used blank cartridges ought to be shot. To this the _Herald_ made its usual impudent kind of rejoinder. Aren’t the members of the mob people, it asked? They have arms, legs, and five senses; “their intelligence is low, but it is at least equal to that of the editors of the niggerhead organs.” III News of the complete victory at Vicksburg, arriving in New York at the same time that it became evident Meade was not vigorously following up his repulse of Lee at Gettysburg, brought home to the East the superiority of Grant as a commander. That superiority the _Evening Post_ had begun to recognize as early as Feb. 14, 1862, when it had contrasted his capture of Fort Donelson, in a sea of mud, using men half trained and half supplied, with McClellan’s inaction in Virginia. “A capable, clear-headed general,” it said, who knew that where there is a will there is a way. After Corinth the paper hailed Grant (Oct. 8, 1862) as the one general “able not only to shake the tree, but to pick up the fruit.” When by a brilliantly bold campaign he invested Vicksburg, it used precisely the comparison that John Fiske used years later in his history of the Mississippi Valley in the Civil War: “The dispatches from the Southwest read like the bulletins of the young conqueror of Italy when he first awakened the world to the fact that a new and unprecedented military genius had sprung upon the stage.”