Repeatedly during the war the _Post_ scored notable “beats.” Church was with the joint military and naval expedition under Sherman and Dupont that captured Port Royal, and sent the _Evening Post_ the first account published at the North. The best picture of the battle of Pittsburgh Landing in any newspaper was one contributed the _Post_ by a member of Halleck’s staff. The most graphic running account of Sherman’s march to the sea was also that furnished the paper by Major George Nichols, who was on Sherman’s staff, and who later reworked his letters--in which it has been well said the style is photographic, with a touch of national music in the sentences--into a book. When John Wilkes Booth was killed in the burning Virginia barn by Sergeant Boston Corbett, Nordhoff obtained Corbett’s exclusive story of the event--an absorbing three-quarters column of close print. It need not be said that the Paris correspondence which E. L. Godkin, later editor, furnished in 1862, offered the shrewdest and clearest view of French opinion published in any American newspaper. There was a large group of occasional correspondents at various points along the wide fighting line. The _Evening Post_ profited, in a way that it was quite impossible for the _Herald_ to do, from the kindness of loyal Union men of prominence who came into contact with great events or figures, and without thought of remuneration wrote to Bryant. A long and highly interesting article embodying personal reminiscences of Lincoln, for example, was contributed a few weeks after the assassination by R. C. McCormick, then well known in New York political circles. There were frequent bits like the following from a New Yorker who had seen Grant at City Point (Aug. 5, 1864): “General,” I remarked, “the people of New York now feel that there is one at the head of our armies in whom they can repose the fullest confidence.” “Yes,” he interrupted, “there is a man in the West in whom they can repose the utmost confidence, General Sherman. He is an able, upright, honorable, unambitious man. We lost another one of like character a few days ago, General McPherson.” One reporter for the _Post_, a young Vermonter named S. S. Boyce, became intimate with the United States Marshal in New York, and distinguished himself by important detective service against disloyalists. The Marshal once handed him a letter taken upon a captured blockade runner, mailed from New York and giving the Southern authorities the time of the sailing of the Newbern expedition. It carried no New York address, but within a fortnight Boyce had tracked down the writer of the letter, and some months later witnessed his hanging.