There was some justification in the objection of _Harper’s Weekly_ that the _Post_ was too “optimistic.” Bryant appealed to the South to be magnanimous to the negro, and to set to work to educate him and make him the white man’s equal. He was sure that “with their healthy native constitution, their long training to labor, their quick imitative faculties, their new motives to enterprise, the freedmen will grow into a most useful class.” The _Post_ underrated the enormous difficulties of the racial problem at the South. But its course was wisdom and humanity itself when compared with that of the Congressional extremists who insisted upon confiscation and disfranchisement. The _Tribune_, following these extremists, called the _Post_ and _Times_ “copperhead,” an epithet which came with ill grace from a paper with the _Tribune’s_ war record. Greeley made an able defense of his policy in an address in Richmond in May, 1867, but the _Tribune_ tended in the hands of his lieutenants to be more radical than Greeley himself. In supporting Johnson, all the moderates found their chief enemy in Johnson himself. When he took the oath of office as Vice-President the authentic reports of his intoxication had caused the _Evening Post_ to demand that he either resign or formally apologize to the nation. A year later, when he made an abusive speech saying that his opponents Sumner and Stevens had tried “to incite assassination,” the journal again called for an apology to the people. The _Post_ supported the Civil Rights bill of 1866, guaranteeing the negro equality before the law with the whites. When Johnson vetoed it, Bryant wrote in a hitherto unpublished letter to his daughter: The general feeling in favor of that bill is exceedingly strong, and the President probably did not know what he was doing when he returned it to Congress. He has been very silent since, as if the check of passing the bill notwithstanding his objections had stunned him. Mr. Bancroft says that he must have got some small lawyer to write his veto message, and Gen. Dix thinks that the trouble at Washington lessens the eligibility of the President for a second term of office. So you see that those who supported Johnson’s first veto fall off now. Poor Raymond seemed in great perplexity to know which way to turn. He supported the veto, but his paper commended it but faintly and admitted that something ought to be done from the standpoint of the rights of American citizenship when denied by the States.