The stand taken by Bryant’s friend Chase, the poet’s natural generosity, and the reports of a desire for reconciliation sent by Southern correspondents, caused the paper to assume an unflinching advocacy of President Johnson’s mild policy, and to attack the harsh measures of Congress. In this attitude the _Times_ was with it. The _Tribune_ took the other side vehemently, and, in a more reasonable way, it was espoused by the city’s three great weekly organs of opinion, E. L. Godkin’s _Nation_, _Harper’s Weekly_, and the _Independent_, from which Henry Ward Beecher, disagreeing with Theodore Tilton’s severe views, soon resigned. Into the _Evening Post’s_ opinions upon the whole kaleidoscopic succession of bills and acts bearing upon reconstruction, from 1865 to 1868, it is impossible to go in detail. Its fundamental doctrine was fully outlined as early as May 2, 1865. The two great objects, it affirmed, were to depart as little as possible from the old-established principles of State government, and “to do nothing for revenge, nothing in the mere spirit of proscription.” It believed that a convention should be called in each State to annul the ordinance of secession, and, by writing a new State Constitution, to repudiate the rebel debt, guarantee the negroes equal civil rights, and regulate the elective franchise according to immutable principles of certain application, discarding all arbitrary and capricious rules. The States should also ratify the anti-slavery amendment of the Federal Constitution by popular vote. “As soon as the political power has thus been regularly reconstituted the State, as a matter of course, resumes her relations to the Union, elects members of Congress, and stands in all respects on a footing with the States” of the North. Urging this policy, Bryant and the _Evening Post_ wished to end military rule at the South as quickly as possible, while the Congressional radicals, led by Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, like the _Tribune_ and _Nation_, regarded its indefinite continuance as necessary. The _Evening Post_ held that the illiterate negroes were unfit to vote and should be required to pass through a probationary period; it wished the Southern ballot based upon an educational test. The _Tribune_ and the _Sun_ supported full negro suffrage. When the first Southern States sent Representatives to Congress the _Evening Post_, like the _Times_ and _World_, wished them admitted. The _World_, indeed, bitterly assailed the “rump” Congress which barred them. The _Evening Post_, _Times_, and _World_ supported Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, while the _Tribune_ wrung its hands over such journalistic depravity.