WILLIAM LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR; DEPRESSION, RIVALRY, AND THREATENED RUIN  
One of the most popular pieces of sculpture the country has ever known, Horatio Greenough’s “Chaunting Cherubs,” was being widely discussed in the early thirties, as was Hiram Powers’s “Greek Slave,” a little later. In a witty moment the Courier and Enquirer christened Bryant and William Leggett, for Leggett also wrote poetry, “the chaunting cherubs of the Evening Post.” The name had outward appropriateness, but it would really have been more fitting to call Leggett a spouting volcano.
While Bryant controlled the journal, it abstained from any harsh abuse of other journals. His rule was to notice no personal attacks, and to make none in retaliation. Only once in fifty years did he, passing in the street an editorial adversary who had given him the lie direct, lose control of himself. The diarist Philip Hone tells the story under date of April 20, 1831:
While I was shaving this morning at eight o’clock, I witnessed from the front window an encounter in the street nearly opposite, between William C. Bryant and William L. Stone; the former one of the editors of the Evening Post, and the latter editor of the Commercial Advertiser. The former commenced the attack by striking Stone over the head with a cowskin; after a few blows the men closed, and the whip was wrested from Bryant and carried off by Stone. When I saw them first, two younger persons were engaged, but soon discontinued their fight.
The next day Bryant made a public statement of this incident, pointing out the gross provocation that he had received, but apologizing to his readers for having taken the law into his own hands. Particularly as there developed some doubt whether Col. Stone was the author140 of the attack, he could never hear the matter referred to without showing his chagrin and regret.
But Bryant had no sooner left the office for Europe than it became plain that Leggett had no such scruples. In one brief paragraph he managed to call the editor of the Star a wretch, liar, coward, and a vile purchased tool who would do anything for money. The “venomous drivel” of the Commercial Advertiser might sometimes require notice, he wrote a few days later, but his contempt for the editor was “so supreme that to us, personally, he is as if he were not—a perfect non-entity.” In the autumn Assembly campaign Leggett shotted his guns, and on Sept. 23 and 24 let off broadsides that shook the town. He accused the Daily Advertiser of “a vile untruth”; he called the editor of the American a “detestable caitiff,” a “craven wretch, spotted with all kinds of vices,” and “a hireling slave and public incendiary”; while he characterized the Courier and Enquirer as a blustering, bullying sheet, reeking with falsehood, pandering to the vulgar, profligate, impudent, inane, and inciting men to riot and bloodshed. On Sept. 26 Leggett was able to fill a column with answers. “The editor is deranged,” said the American; he should be “committed to Bedlam,” averred the Gazette; “a writ de lunatico” is needed, chimed in the Courier; this, said the Star, “is too true to make a jest of”; and the Boston Atlas professed horror at “the ferocious, mad, and bloody words of this desperate print.”
Leggett was not deranged, but simply in full fighting trim, and showing the defects of his really sterling virtues. By sheer slashing vigor as a political writer he achieved in a half dozen years upon the Evening Post a permanent fame as a reformer and controversialist. Whittier, in his essays, compares Leggett with Hampden and Vane, and declares that “no one has labored more perseveringly, or, in the end, more successfully, to bring the practice of American democracy into conformity with its professions.” His poetical tribute to “the bold reformer” and his “free and honest thought, the angel utterance141 of an upright mind,” is better known. Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., believed that but for Leggett’s untimely end he might have made one of the greatest names in American history. Bryant’s memorial tribute:
The words of fire that from his pen
Were flung upon the fervid page,
Still move, still shake the hearts of men,
Amid a cold and coward age,
was no exaggeration, but true for the whole generation which followed Leggett’s death. The editor’s political writings were perhaps the most potent force in shaping the ideas of democracy held by Walt Whitman, who in 1847 wrote of the necessity of following the doctrines of the “great Jefferson and the glorious Leggett,” and who in his old age spoke to Horace Traubel of his high admiration for him. A recent historical writer has said that Leggett was “one of the most sincere and brilliant apostles of democracy that America has ever known.”
When Leggett became junior editor of the Evening Post he was known solely as a writer of essays, stories, and verse. He was a New Yorker by birth, but had been educated at Georgetown, D. C., had been given a taste of Illinois prairie life in his later youth, and had entered the navy as a midshipman at the age of twenty, resigning six years later because of the overbearing conduct of his commander. A volume of his poems, “Leisure Hours at Sea,” and some tales of pioneer and sailor life which he published in annuals and magazines, gave him a sufficient reputation to enable him to found his weekly miscellany, the Critic. He stipulated with Bryant that he should not be required to write upon political topics, “on which he had no settled opinions, and for which he had no taste”; but within a few months he found himself almost wholly devoted to them. Bryant imbued him with his own ardent free-trade doctrines, and his own warm admiration for Jackson and Jacksonian measures. He was eight years younger than the senior editor. His associates describe him as a man of middle stature, compact142 frame, great endurance, and a constitution naturally strong, but somewhat impaired by an attack of the yellow fever while serving with the United States squadron in the West Indies. His naval training had given him a dignified bearing, his address was easy, and his affability and mildness of manner surprised those who had known him only by his fiery writings. He was fond of study; and his ability to write fluently in his crowded, littered back room on Pine Street, the crash of the presses in his ear, amid a thousand distractions, amazed everybody.
Bryant and Leggett had now labored together five years, 1829–1834. The chief local occurrence in this period was the great cholera epidemic of 1832, causing an exodus from the city which the Evening Post of August 6 estimated at above 100,000. The two editors worked manfully, though perhaps hardly candidly, to allay the panic. Although the first case appeared on June 26, so late as July 13 they maintained that there was no epidemic, in the strict sense of the word; and ten days later they denied with vehemence the allegation of the Courier and Enquirer, which was exaggerating the plague, that two Evening Post employees had died of cholera.
Throughout the great war over the Bank of the United States the Evening Post had stood by the President. Jackson appealed to the loyalty of Bryant and Leggett in equal degree, but differently. To Leggett he was “the man of the people,” a son of the frontier, a democrat from heel to crown. In Bryant he awakened the same admiration that he aroused in Irving, Cooper, Bancroft, and in Landor abroad: admiration for his adventurous heroism, his unspotted honesty, his simplicity, his stern directness, his tenacity in pressing forward to his goal. One had to be either the wholehearted admirer of “Old Hickory” or his wholehearted opponent, and as early as Jackson Day in 1828 Bryant had become the former, writing for a dinner at Masonic Hall an ode which, according to Verplanck, threw Van Buren into ecstasies. Not a single measure of Jackson’s, not even his wholesale removals from office under the spoils system, was censured143 by the Evening Post, and by 1832, after the end of nullification, it was hailing him as “the man destined to stand in history by the side of Washington, the one bearing the proud title of the Father of his Country, the other the scarcely less illustrious one of Preserver of the union.”
All Jackson’s charges against the Bank—that it was a source of political corruption, that it was monopolistic, that it was hostile to popular interests and dangerous to the government, that it was unsafely managed—were echoed by Bryant and Leggett. Probably only the accusation that it had gone into politics was fully warranted, but the Evening Post pressed them all. Speaking of the Bank’s “enormous powers” and “its barefaced bribery and corruption,” it applauded Jackson’s veto of the bill to recharter it, and his withdrawal in 1833 of the government deposits in it. When the Bank curtailed its loans to meet the withdrawal of these deposits, the editors thought that it was trying to coerce the people and government, by threatening a panic, into yielding. “The object of the Bank is to create a pressure for money, to impair the confidence of business men in each other, and to keep the community at large in a state of great uncertainty and confusion, in the hope that men will at last say, ‘let us have the Bank rechartered, rather than that ... the whole country should be thrown into distress.’” The alliance of the chief statesmen in Congress on behalf of the Bank drew from the journal three interesting characterizations (March 31, 1834):
Clay:— ... The parent and champion of the tariff and internal improvements; of a system directly opposed to the interests and prosperity of every merchant in the United States, and calculated and devised for the purpose of organizing an extensive and widespread scheme through which the different portions of the United States might be bought up in detail.... By assuming the power of dissipating the public revenue in local improvements, by which one portion of the community would be benefited at the expense of many others, Congress acquired the means of influencing and controlling the politics of every State in the union,144 and of establishing a rigid, invincible consolidated government. By assuming the power of protecting any class or portion of the industry of this country, by bounties in the shape of high duties on foreign importations, they placed the labor and industry of the people entirely at their own disposal, and usurped the prerogative of dispensing all the blessings of Providence at pleasure....
It is against this great system for making the rich richer, the poor poorer, and thus creating those enormous disproportions of wealth which are always the forerunner of the loss of freedom; it is against this great plan of making the resources of the General Government the means of obtaining the control of the States by an adroit species of political bribery, that General Jackson has arrayed himself.... He has arrested the one by his influence, the other by his veto.
Calhoun:—Reflecting and honest men may perhaps wonder to see this strange alliance between the man by whom the tariff was begotten, nurtured, and brought to a monstrous maturity, and him who carried his State to the verge of rebellion in opposition to that very system. By his means and influence, this great union was all but dissolved, and in all probability would at this moment lie shattered into fragments, had it not been for the energetic and prompt patriotism of the stern old man who then said, “The union—it must be preserved.” Even at this moment Mr. Calhoun ... still threatens to separate South Carolina from the confederacy, if she is not suffered to remain in it with the privilege of a veto on the laws of the union.
Webster:—Without firmness, consistency, or political courage to be a leader, except in one small section of the union, he seems to crow to any good purpose only on his own dunghill, and is a much greater fowl in his own barnyard than anywhere else. He is a good speaker at the bar and in the House; but he is a much greater lawyer than statesman, and far more expert in detailing old arguments than fruitful in inventing new ones. He is not what we should call a great man, much less a great politician; and we should go so far as to question the power of his intellect, did it not occasionally disclose itself in a rich exuberance of contradictory opinions. A man who can argue so well on both sides of a question cannot be totally destitute of genius.
And here these three gentlemen, who agree in no one single principle, who own no one single feeling in common, except that of hatred to the old hero of New Orleans, stand battling side by side. The author and champion of the tariff, and the man who on every occasion denounced it as a violation of the Constitution;145 the oracle of nullification and the oracle of consolidation; the trio of antipathies; the union of contradiction; the consistency of inconsistencies; the coalition of oil, vinegar, and mustard; the dressing in which the great political salad is to be served up to the people.
In this aggressive writing we see Leggett’s pen; and it was only after Bryant left the Evening Post in his sole charge that it entered upon its hottest fighting. The first episode, its defense of abolitionists in the right of free speech, was highly creditable to it.
The abolitionists had begun to arouse popular resentment in New York so early as 1833; on Oct. 2 of that year, a meeting of the “friends of immediate abolition” at Clinton Hall had been broken up by a tumultuous crowd, which adjourned to Tammany Hall and there denounced the agitators. Lewis Tappan, head of one of the largest silk houses in the city, and for a short time after 1827 editor of the Journal of Commerce; his brother Arthur Tappan; Joshua Leavitt, the Rev. Dr. F. F. Cox, the Rev. Mr. Ludlow, and several other Protestant clergymen made up a constellation only less active than that formed in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Samuel J. May, and John Pierpont. During the spring of 1834 these men continued their speechmaking, and Ludlow and Cox went so far as to appeal to all Northern negroes for support, and to defend intermarriage between whites and blacks. Few New Yorkers then regarded Southern slavery as a national shame, and almost none had any patience with abolition. Most of the press denounced the movement emphatically; the Evening Post refused to do this, though it called it wild and visionary.
On July 7 some negroes repaired to the Chatham Street Chapel for a belated celebration of the Fourth, and at the same time the Sacred Music Society met there for practice, claiming a prior right of occupancy. Patriotism and music were forgotten in the ensuing mêlée. The Evening Post had felt that trouble was brewing, and it raised a warning voice:
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The story is told in the morning papers in very inflammatory language, and the whole blame is cast upon the negroes; yet it seems to us, from those very statements themselves, that, as usual, there was fault on both sides, and especially on that of the whites. It seems to us, also, that those who are opposed to the absurd and mad schemes of the immediate abolitionists, use means against that scheme which are neither just nor politic. We have noticed a great many tirades of late, in certain prints, the object of which appears to be to excite the public mind to strong hostility to the negroes generally, and to the devisers of the immediate emancipation plan, and not merely to the particular measure represented. This community is too apt to run into excitements; and those who are now trying to get up an excitement against the negroes will have much to answer for, should their efforts be successful....
Other journals, especially the Courier and Enquirer, continued their provocative utterances and called for public meetings to protest against the abolition movement. The result was that disturbances occurred on the night of Wednesday, the ninth, and reached their climax on Friday in scenes not equaled until the Draft Riots.
At an hour after dark on Friday, Lewis Tappan’s store was attacked and its windows were broken. At ten o’clock the mob broke in the doors of Dr. Cox’s church on Laight Street, and demolished its interior, after which it made a rush for his home on Charlton Street, but found it picketed by the police and retired. The next objective was Mr. Ludlow’s church on Spring Street, which was half demolished, together with the Session House next door. Thereupon the rioters made for the principal negro quarter of the town, in the region about Five Points. The Five Points has figured on some of the blackest pages of New York’s history. It was here that fourteen negroes were burned in 1740 during the so-called Negro Insurrection; here the Seventh Regiment was called out in 1857 to quell a riot; here the “Dead Rabbits” later fought the “Bowery Boys,” and here stood the notorious Old Brewery that the Five Points Mission displaced. But it never saw more panic and outrage than on that night. The St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church in Centre Street and a negro church in Anthony Street147 were left mere battered shells by the mob; a negro school-house in Orange Street was wrecked; and twenty houses were wholly or partly destroyed, and much of the contents stolen. Innocent negroes were beaten into unconsciousness. The colored people by hundreds fled northward into the open fields. Just before midnight infantry and cavalry arrived, but took no punitive measures. The Evening Post called for unremitting severity:
Let them be fired upon, if they dare collect together again to prosecute their infamous designs. Let those who make the first movement toward sedition be shot down like dogs—and thus teach to their infatuated followers a lesson which no milder course seems sufficient to inculcate. This is no time for expostulation or remonstrance.... We would recommend that the whole military force of the city be called out, that large detachments be stationed wherever any ground exists to anticipate tumultuary movements, that smaller bodies patrol the streets in every part of the city, and that the troops be directed to fire upon the first disorderly assemblage that refuses to disperse at the bidding of lawful authority.
The Post’s uncompromising stand was thoroughly unpopular—unpopular with not merely the ignorant, but with most business men. A Boston journal noted that “the Evening Post was the only daily paper in that city which condemned the riots with manly denunciation, without a single sneering allusion to the abolitionists, and in return for this manifestation of a love of law and order, the Courier assailed the Post as a promoter of the plan of parti-colored amalgamation, and strongly hinted that the mob ought to direct its vengeance against that office.” This was true. The Courier and Enquirer had said that Editor Leggett, who had dared defend the vile abolitionists, richly deserved the severest castigation which had been planned for those who would make their daughters the paramours of the negro.
In the summer of 1835 Leggett showed even greater courage upon the same subject. The postmaster of Charleston, S. C., had refused to deliver abolitionist letters and documents upon the ground that they were incendiary148 and insurrectionary, and on Aug. 4 Postmaster-General Kendall upheld him in a letter stating that by no act or order would he aid in giving circulation to documents of the kind barred. It must be remembered that the Evening Post had thus far stood by Jackson’s administration in every particular. It must also be remembered that Leggett at this time thoroughly disapproved of the abolition movement as untimely and impracticable. But he saw in Kendall’s measure a bureaucratic censorship in its most odious and arbitrary form, and he called the action an outrage:
Neither the general postoffice, nor the general government itself, possesses any power to prohibit the transportation by mail of abolition tracts. On the contrary, it is the bounden duty of the government to protect the abolitionists in their constitutional right of free discussion; and opposed, sincerely and zealously as we are, to their doctrines and practices, we should be still more opposed to any infringement of their political or civil rights. If the government once begins to discriminate as to what is orthodox and what heterodox in opinion, what is safe and what unsafe in tendency, farewell, a long farewell, to our freedom.
Only three of the really influential newspapers of the land declined to admit that Kendall had either done right, or had simply chosen the lesser of two evils: the Boston Courier, edited by J. T. Buckingham, the Cincinnati Gazette, edited by Charles Hammond, and the Post.
Unpopular as was the Evening Post’s defense of free speech, its stand upon financial and economic questions was far more heartily detested. It rapidly ceased, after its first attacks upon the Bank, to hold its old position as a representative of the city’s commercial interests. It is true that some rich New Yorkers felt a jealousy of the Bank because it belonged to Philadelphia, while others stood loyally with the Democratic Party in denouncing it. But Gulian Verplanck and Ogden Hoffman, close friends of the Post, were typical of many who went over to the Bank’s side. Not a few business men affiliated with Tammany joined the ranks of Jackson’s enemies. Historical149 opinion inclines to the view that Jackson did not have a sufficient case against the Bank, which was a salutary institution, and certainly New York commercial circles believed this. A majority of the voters were with Jackson. Thurlow Weed told a friend that all of Webster’s unanswerable arguments for the Bank would not win one-tenth the ballots won by two sentences in Jackson’s veto message relating to European stockholders and wicked special privilege. But it was not the mass of poor voters on which a sixpenny journal like the Evening Post relied for sustenance, but upon the professional and business men.
Leggett’s cardinal conviction, expressed with a fire and energy then unequaled in journalism, was that the great enemy of democracy is monopoly. He hated and assailed all special incorporations, for in those days they usually carried very special privileges. Charters were obtained by wire-pulling and legislative corruption, he said, to put a few men, as the ferry-owners in New York City, in a position where they could gouge the public. He wished banking placed upon such a basis that legislative incorporation, exclusive in nature, would not be needed. He wanted all franchises abolished, and would have forbidden any grant to a company of the exclusive right to build a turnpike, canal, railroad, or water-system between two given points. He objected even to the incorporation of colleges and churches, quoting Adam Smith to show that his views upon this head were less eccentric than they seemed. Joint stock partnerships, he believed, would meet all business necessities. The Legislature should “pass one general law, which will allow any set of men, who choose to associate together for any purpose, to form themselves into that convenient kind of partnership known by the name of incorporation”; so that any group would be permitted freely to form an insurance company, a bank, or a college granting degrees. This, of course, would not exclude governmental supervision. Although there were then grave abuses in monopolistic incorporation, Leggett pushed his doctrine quite too far.
150 Equality was Leggett’s watchword. Those were the days when State Legislatures were abolishing the last property restrictions upon suffrage, and vitriolic was the wrath which the Evening Post poured upon all who opposed the movement. The whole period it pictured as a battle between men and money; between “silk-stocking, morocco-booted, high-living, white-gloved gentlemen, to be tracked only by the marks of their carriage wheels,” and hardworking freemen. It objected to the theory that the state was an aggregation of social strata, one above the other, and maintained that all useful citizens should fare alike. Upon the word “useful,” in Carlylean vein, it insisted, for they must be “producers.” Tariffs, internal improvements at the expense of State and nation, and special incorporations, were violations of equality; while the spirit of speculation was condemned as creating a “paper aristocracy.” On Dec. 6, 1834, Leggett vindicated the right of the laboring classes to unite in trade unions, a right then widely denied. It is clear that his ultra-democratic crusade was essentially an accompaniment of the rise of a new industrialism. It had its affinities with the frontier equalitarianism personified by Jackson, but its primary aim was the protection of the toiling urban masses.
Leggett was upon firm ground when in 1835 he began to attack the inflation, gambling, and business unsoundness of which every day afforded fresh proofs. There was grotesque speculation in Southern cotton lands, Maine timber, New York and Philadelphia real estate, and the Western lands enhanced in value by the Erie Canal. Capital was abundant, prices were rising, and every one seemed to be getting rich. Most Northern States were undertaking costly internal improvements with a reckless faith in the future. Leggett looked with two-fold alarm and indignation upon the flood of paper money then pouring from small banks all over the country. Depreciated paper, in the first place, was used to lower the real wages of mechanics; in the second place, he maintained that the grant to State banks of the power to issue151 bills placed the measure of value in the hands of speculators, to be extended or contracted according to their own selfish wishes. On Dec. 24, 1834, just before the Legislature met, the Evening Post published an appeal to Gov. Marcy. The banknotes, it said, were driving specie out of circulation, and causing a fever of reckless speculation. “Already our merchants are importing largely. Stocks have risen in value, and land is selling at extravagant rates. Everything begins to wear the highly-prosperous aspect which foretokens commercial revulsion.” It recommended that the State should forbid the issue of any banknotes for less than $5.
“For these views,” Leggett wrote in March, “we have been bitterly reviled.” On June 20, 1835, the Post published a striking editorial entitled “Out of Debt,” in allusion to the current boast that the nation owed no one. On the contrary, it stated, the people “are plunging deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit of unredeemed and irredeemable obligations.” It estimated that the six hundred banks of the nation had issued paper in excess of $200,000,000. “Who will pay the piper for all this political and speculative dancing?” The panic of 1837 gave the answer.
By his ringing editorials, written day after day at white heat, a really noble series, Leggett became the prophet of the Loco-Foco party, which arose as a radical wing of the New York Democracy and lived only two years, 1835–37. The origin of the name is a familiar story. On Oct. 25, 1835, a meeting was held at Tammany Hall to nominate a Congressman; the conservative Democrats named their man in accordance with a prearranged plan, put out the lights, and went home; the anti-monopoly radicals produced tallow candles from their pockets, lit them with loco-foco matches, and nominated a rival candidate. Leggett was not an active politician. But the Loco-Foco mass-meetings of the two ensuing years, and their two State conventions, enunciated the same equalitarian doctrines which Leggett had begun to preach in 1834.
152 Not only those whose interests were affected by Leggett’s anti-monopoly, anti-speculation, anti-aristocracy crusade, but many other staid, moderate men, were horrified by it. He was charged with Utopianism, agrarianism, Fanny-Wrightism, Jacobinism, and Jack Cade-ism. His writings were said to set class against class, and to threaten the nation with anarchy. Gov. William M. Marcy called Leggett a “knave.” The advance of the Loco-Foco movement was likened to the great fire and the great cholera plague of these years. When Chief Justice Marshall died in the summer of 1835, Leggett unsparingly assailed him and Hamilton as men who had tried “to change the character of the government from popular to monarchical,” and to destroy “the great principle of human liberty.” Marshall was regarded by most propertied New Yorkers as the very sheet-anchor of the Constitution, and for them to see him denounced as a man who had always strengthened government at the expense of the people was too much. Ex-Mayor Philip Hone was handed that editorial on an Albany steamboat by Charles King, and dropped the journal with the vehement ejaculation, “Infamous!” “This is absolutely a species of impiety for which I want words to express my abhorrence,” he entered in his diary.
For the courage, the eloquence, and the burning sincerity of Leggett’s brief editorship we must heartily admire him; but it cannot be denied that he made the Evening Post, for the first and last time in its career, extravagant. He was public-spirited in all that he wrote; his prophecy of a financial crash was shrewd; in defending the abolitionists against persecution he was in advance of his generation; and his comments upon many minor questions of the day were sound. But the newspaper lacked balance, and its influence was perhaps not so great as when Bryant had been at hand to exercise a restraint upon Leggett. Such an impetuous man could not spare his own health. Almost daily the Evening Post had carried an editorial of from 1,000 to 2,000 words. On Oct. 15, 1835, these utterances broke abruptly off, and it153 became known that Leggett was gravely ill of a bilious fever. His place was temporarily supplied by Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., and then by Charles Mason, an able lawyer of the city. Bryant, loitering along the Rhine, had hastily to be recalled.
Although Leggett had boasted the previous May that the Evening Post had more subscribers than ever before and an undiminished revenue from advertisements, its condition was rapidly declining when the editor fell ill. For this there were a number of reasons. Leggett’s radicalism had offended many sober mercantile advertisers. He, like some other editors, had objected to blackening the newspaper’s pages with the small conventional cuts of ships and houses used to draw attention to advertisements, and had thereby lost patronage. After the death of Michael Burnham, in the summer of 1835, the business management had fallen to a scamp named Hanna, who was generally drunk and always insolent. Warning symptoms of the approaching panic were in the air, money becoming so tight late in 1835 that reputable mercantile firms could not discount their notes a year ahead for less than 30 per cent. Leggett, finally, had offended valuable government friends. As he wrote (Sept. 5, 1835):
We once expressed dislike ... of the undignified tone of one of Mr. Woodberry’s official letters, as Secretary of the Treasury, to Nicholas Biddle; and the Treasury advertisements were thenceforward withheld. The Secretary of the Navy, having acted with gross partiality in regard to a matter recently tried by a naval court-martial, we had the temerity to censure his conduct; and of course we could look for no further countenance from that quarter. The Navy Commissioners, being Post-Captains, ... have taken in high dudgeon our inquiry into the oppression and tyranny practised by their order; and “stop our advertisements!” is the word of command established in such cases. When the Evening Post exposed the duplicity of Samuel Swartwout, the Collector of the Port, it at once lost all further support from the Custom House. And now, having censured the doctrines of Mr. Kendall and the practice of Mr. Gouverneur, the postoffice advertising is withdrawn, of course.
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II
 
While Bryant was in Europe, while the Evening Post in the spring of 1835 was beginning its abrupt plunge toward financial disaster, there occurred the simultaneous birth of the New York Herald and a new journalism. Its immediate effect upon the Post was small; its effect in the long run upon all newspapers was profound. It was to not only a half-wrecked Evening Post, but to revolutionized journalistic conditions, that Bryant returned from Heidelberg.
When Bryant and Leggett had taken full charge of the Evening Post in 1829, the New York newspapers were a quarrelsome group of sixpenny dailies, some political, some commercial, and in their news features all slow, dull, and half-filled by modern standards. The best-known morning journal was the Courier and Enquirer, of which the editor and after a year the sole proprietor was James Watson Webb, a rich, hot-tempered, exceedingly handsome young man of twenty-seven, as mercurial as any Southerner, with a native taste for fighting which had been developed by his West Point education and some years in the army. Webb knew the use of the sword, pistol, and cane decidedly better than that of the pen. The Evening Post well characterized him as “a fussy, blustering, quarrelsome fellow.” He repeatedly assaulted fellow-editors in the street; he repeatedly journeyed to Washington or Albany to tweak somebody’s nose or exchange shots; and while our envoy to Brazil he wanted to kill the British Minister there. When in the early thirties Congressman Cilley of Maine charged him with taking a bribe, and refused to accept Webb’s challenge on the ground that the latter was no gentleman, the impetuous editor persuaded his second to challenge and kill Cilley. Ten years later Webb provoked Congressman Thomas F. Marshall, of Kentucky, by coarse attacks, into fighting a duel, and was sentenced to two years in the State prison. Greeley and many others of note signed155 a petition for a pardon, which Bryant indignantly opposed, but Gov. Seward granted it.
Chief among the Courier’s morning rivals was the Journal of Commerce, founded in 1827 as an advocate of the introduction of religion into business affairs, which went into the hands of David Hale and Gerard Hallock after the abolitionist silk merchant, Tappan, gave it up. It refused to advertise theaters and other amusement-places, and was considered a little fanatical, but it showed extraordinary enterprise for that day in news-gathering. In 1828 it stationed a swift craft off Sandy Hook to intercept incoming ships and bring the first European news up the harbor, and it subsequently arranged a relay of fast horses from Philadelphia to bring the Congressional debates a day in advance of its competitors. Webb followed the example, extending the pony relay to Washington, and spending from $15,000 to $20,000 a year on his clipper boats. Some episodes of this rivalry are amusing. After the fall of Warsaw in the Polish war, the Courier and Enquirer, to punish its competitors for news-stealing, printed a small edition denying—upon the strength of dispatches by the ship Ajax—the reported fall, and saw that copies reached the doorstep of all morning journals. There was no such arrival as the Ajax. Several newspapers reprinted the bogus news without credit, the Journal of Commerce doing so in its country but not its city edition; and great was the Courier’s sarcastic glee.
Though Webb was too explosive, too dissipated, and too slender in ability to be a great editor, he had the money to obtain able lieutenants. One was the Jewish journalist M. M. Noah, who had edited the National Advocate in Coleman’s day, and written patriotic dramas. In 1825, conceiving that the time had come for the “restoration of the Jews,” Noah had appeared at Grand Island, near Buffalo, in the insignia of one of the Hebrew monarchs, and dedicated it as the future Jerusalem and capital of the Jewish nation, calling it Ararat in honor of the original Noah. Disillusioned in this project, Noah bought a share in the Courier in 1831, and in 1832 resigned156 it. Another worker on the Courier was Charles King; James K. Paulding contributed; and in the forties it obtained Henry J. Raymond’s services. But the most notable of its writers when the year 1829 ended was a smart young Scotchman named James Gordon Bennett, who, after knocking about from Boston to Charleston in various employments—he had even essayed to open a commercial school in New York—had made a shining success in 1828 as Washington correspondent for Webb.
Bennett, at this time highly studious, had examined in the Congressional Library one day a copy of Horace Walpole’s letters, and at once began to imitate them in his correspondence, making it lively, full of gossip, and even vulgarly frank in descriptions of men of the day. Some Washington ladies were said to be indebted to Bennett’s glowing pen-pictures for their husbands. He was active in other capacities for the journal—he reported the White-Crowinshield murder trial in Salem, Mass., wrote editorials, squibs, and amusing articles of sorts; and Webb showed how fundamentally lacking he was in editorial discernment when he never let Bennett receive more than $12 a week. In 1832 the homely, thrifty youngster from Banffshire left the Courier.
Others among the eleven dailies were the Commercial Advertiser, the Daily Advertiser, and the Star, the last-named being the Post’s closest rival in evening circulation. Much attention was attracted to the Daily Advertiser in 1835 by the Washington letters of Erastus Brooks, a young man who wrote as brightly as Bennett but more soberly. The following year he and his brother James founded the Express, also a sixpenny paper, which succeeded against heavy obstacles. Compared with London, the New York field was overcrowded, and no journal had many subscribers; the Courier was vastly proud when it printed 3,500 copies a day. Newspapers were sold over the counter at the place of publication, and at a few hotels and coffeehouses, but not on the streets; the first employment of newsboys excited indignation, and was denounced as leading them into vice. Advertising157 rates continued ridiculously small. The Evening Post and its contemporaries still made the time-honored charge of $40, with a subscription thrown in, for indefinite space; the first insertion of a “square,” 8 to 16 lines, cost seventy-five cents, the second and third twenty-five, and later insertions eighteen and three-fourths cents. When the daily advertising of the Courier (apart from yearly insertions) reached $55, that sum was thought remarkable.
The harbinger of the new journalism was Benjamin H. Day, a former compositor for the Evening Post, who in September, 1833, began issuing the first penny newspaper with sufficient strength to survive, the Sun. The idea of this innovation came from London, which had possessed its Illustrated Penny Magazine since 1830, sold in huge quantities in New York and other American cities; Bryant had often praised it as an instrument for educating the poor. The Sun began with a circulation of 300, which it rapidly increased, until after the publication of the famous “moon hoax” in 1835 it boasted the largest circulation in the world; three years later it distributed 38,000 copies daily. Not until the Civil War did it raise its price above one cent, and it continued to be read by the poor almost exclusively. It was not a political force, for it voiced no energetic editorial opinions, nor was it a better purveyor of intelligence than its neighbors. It showed no more enterprise in news-collecting, its correspondence was inferior, and its appeal, apart from its cheapness and special features, lay in its great volume of help-wanted advertisements.
The new journalism therefore had its real beginning when, on May 6, 1835, in a cellar in Wall Street—not a basement, but a cellar—Bennett established the Herald. He had fifteen years’ experience, five hundred dollars, two chairs, and a dry-goods box. It also was a penny paper. But its distinction rested upon the fact that it embodied four original ideas in journalism. The first, and most important, was the necessity of a thorough search for all the news. The second was that fixed principles158 are dangerous, and that it is most profitable to be on the winning side. Bennett felt with Hosea Biglow that
A merciful Providence fashioned us hollow
In order thet we might our princerples swallow.
The third was the value of editorial audacity—that is, of impudence, mockery, and Mephistophelian persiflage—for Bennett had seen in Boston that the saucy, indecorous Galaxy had been universally abused, and universally read. The fourth idea embodied in the Herald was the value of audacity in the news; of unconventionality, vulgarity, and sensationalism.
Above all, Bennett gave New York city the news, with a comprehensiveness, promptness, and accuracy till then undreamed of. At first, compelled by poverty to do all the work himself, and unable to hire his first reporter for more than three months, he found the task hard. But within five weeks (June 13) he began publishing a daily financial article, something that Bryant, Col. Stone, Webb, and Hallock had not thought of, although thousands were just as keenly interested in the exchange then as now. From one to four every business afternoon, having labored in his cellar since five in the morning, Bennett was making the rounds of the business offices, collecting stock-tables and gossip. Local intelligence began to be thoroughly gathered. Incomparably the best reports of the great fire of December, 1835, are to be found in the Herald. He was the first editor to open a bureau of foreign correspondence in Europe, something that Bryant might well have done. He soon went the Courier and Journal of Commerce one better by keeping his clipper off Montauk Point, and running a special train the length of Long Island with the European newspapers. A Herald reporter, notebook in hand, began to be seen in precincts which had never known a journalist. In 1839 Bennett made bold to report the proceedings of church sects at their annual meetings, and though the denominational officers were at first indignant, they became mollified when they saw their names in print. Important trials were for159 the first time followed in detail, and important public speeches reproduced in their entirety. The interview was invented.
This “picture of the world” was served up with a sauce. Bennett had no reverence and no taste. He announced his own forthcoming marriage in 1840 in appalling headlines: “To the Readers of the Herald—Declaration of Love—Caught at Last—Going to be Married—New Movement in Civilization.” The Herald was not a year old before it was ridiculing republican institutions, and in shocking terms assailing the Catholic Church, the Pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. When the Erie Railroad began its infamous early career, Bryant attacked the schemes of the speculators with great effect, and helped stop the first effort of the promoters to sack the State treasury. The Herald’s comment was brief and characteristic: “The New York and Erie Railroad is to break ground in a few days. We hope they will break nothing else.” James Parton quotes one of Bennett’s impudent paragraphs as representative. “Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now. The question in dispute is, whether or not a man can do anything toward saving his own soul.” In even the few and brief book-notices this tone was maintained. Reviewing an Annual Register which told him that there were 1,492 rogues in the State Prison, Bennett added: “And God only knows how many out of prison, preying upon the community, in the shape of gamblers, blacklegs, speculators, and politicians.”
By the prominence it gave to crimes of violence, divorces, and seduction, and by its bold personal gossip, the Herald fully earned the name of a “sensation journal.” Most of the other newspapers, the magazines, and the Catholic and Protestant pulpits, denounced it roundly. The Evening Post did not mention it by name, but in 1839 condemned “the nauseous practice which some of our journals have imitated from the London press of adopting a light and profligate tone in the daily reports of instances of crime, depravity, and intemperance which fall160 under the eye of our municipal police, making them the subject of elaborate witticisms, and spicing them with gross allusions.” The Herald’s cynical contempt for consistent principles increased the dislike with which it was viewed. In general it was Hunker Democratic, and built up a large Southern following, but it supported Harrison in 1840 and Taylor in 1848. The English traveler, Edward Dicey, said that it had but two standing rules, one to support the existing Administration, the other to attack the land of Bennett’s birth. Dicey found that as late as Civil War times Bennett was barred from society, and that when he went to stay at a watering place near New York, the other guests at the hotel told the landlord that he must choose between the editor’s patronage and their own—and Bennett left.
But upon Bennett’s success was largely founded that of other great morning newspapers of the next decades. “It would be worth my while, sir, to give a million dollars,” said Henry J. Raymond, “if the devil would come and tell me every evening, as he does Bennett, what the people of New York would like to read about next morning.” The Sun was given new life when it passed into the hands of Moses Y. Beach in 1838. Greeley, with a capital of $1,000, founded the Tribune in April, 1841, to meet the need for a penny paper of Whig allegiance. The sixpenny journals, the Evening Post, Commercial Advertiser, Courier, Journal of Commerce, and Express, perforce learned much from the Herald about news-gathering. Years later the Evening Post described the new spirit of enterprise which had seized upon journalism by the early forties:
In those days expresses were run on election nights, and in times of great excitement the Herald and Tribune raced locomotive engines against each other in order to get the earliest news; on one occasion, we remember, the sharp reporter engaged for the Tribune “appropriating” an engine which was waiting, under steam, for the use of the opposition agent, and so beating the Herald at its own game.... Nor was the competition confined to enterprises like these. For want of the boundless facilities now161 afforded by the organized enterprises of the newspaper offices, there were curious experiments in unexpected directions; type was set on board of North River steamboats by corps of printers, who had a speech ready for the press in New York soon after its delivery in Albany; carrier pigeons, carefully trained, flew from Halifax or Boston with the latest news from Europe tucked under their wings, and delivered their charge to their trainer in his room near Wall Street; an adventurous person, known at the time by the mysterious title of “the man in the glazed cap,” made a voyage across the Atlantic in a common pilot boat twenty years ago, secretly and with only three or four companions, in the interest of two or three journals which determined to “beat” the others in their arrangements for obtaining early news from abroad.
Charles H. Levermore twenty years ago expressed regret in the American Historical Review that the revolution in journalism had been wrought by the unprincipled Bennett, and not by a man of such education, taste, and high-mindedness as Bryant, whose name would assure the standards of his newspaper. The best journalist and worst editor in the country, Parton called Bennett, deploring the fact that during the Civil War neither the Times, Tribune nor World could reduce the “bad, good Herald,” which Lincoln read, to a second rank. Parke Godwin, writing upon Bennett’s death in 1872 in the Evening Post, refused him the title of a great journalist even, stating that he was a great news-vender. “What he said from day to day was said merely to produce a sensation, to raise a laugh, or to confirm a vulgar prejudice; and so far as he had any influence at all as a writer, it was one that debased and corrupted the community in which his paper was read. He did more to vulgarize the tone of the press in this country than any man ever before connected with it; and the worst caricatures that the genius of Balzac, Dickens, and Thackeray has given us of the low, slang-whanging, dissolute, and unprincipled Bohemian, of the Lousteaus, Jefferson Bricks, and Capt. Shandons of the journalistic profession, fail to depict what Bennett actually was.” But his journal was read as no other had been. Men concealed it when they saw a162 friend approaching it, but they bought it and examined every column.
Bryant had neither the necessary inclinations nor aptitudes to accomplish such a revolution. When he started home from Germany he left his family there, meaning soon to return. Upon learning how straitened was the condition of the Evening Post, he became temporarily disheartened. Within two months he wrote Dana that he earnestly hoped that “the day will come when I may retire without danger of starving, and give myself to occupations that I like better.” Near the end of the year he informed his brother John in Illinois that he thought of removing thither with $3,000-$5,000 for a new home. The best journalist is not made from a man who is thus lukewarm in his work. Moreover, even had Bryant thrown himself heart and soul into his calling, his literary tastes, his retiring temper, his keen sense of dignity, his fame as a poet, would have prevented his breaking new ground as Bennett did. He had no equal before Greeley, and no superior later, in writing editorials, and he made the intellectual influence of the Evening Post one of the strongest in the nation. He was a great editor. But he could not have gone down into the busy ‘Change with his pencil as Bennett did; he could not have attended meetings, visited theaters, and mingled with common men in offices and on street corners, with Bennett’s constancy of purpose.
The Evening Post had as much news as some sixpenny rivals, but it sadly needed the Herald’s stimulus. Its reports of the great fire of 1835 were partly original, partly taken from the Express. When the Astor House was opened the following summer, an exciting event, it clipped its report from the Daily Advertiser—and even the latter had but one meager paragraph. Probably the most striking instance of its deficiency occurred in December, 1829, the month that Chancellor Lansing disappeared from the city streets—the greatest mystery of the kind in New York political history. The Post’s only account was left by Lansing’s friends:
163
Notice.—On Saturday evening, the 12th instant, Chancellor Lansing, of Albany, arrived in this city, and put up at the City Hotel; he breakfasted and dined there. Shortly after dinner he retired to his room and wrote for a short time, and about the hour that the persons intending to go to Albany usually leave the Hotel, he was observed to leave his room. He has not been seen or heard of since that time. He left his trunk, cane, etc., in his room. His friends in this city have heard this morning from Albany that he has not returned home.
It is supposed that he had written a letter to Albany and that he had intended to put it on board the steamboat that left here for that place at five o’clock that afternoon. He had made an engagement to take tea at six o’clock that evening with Mr. Robert Ray, of this city, who resides at No. 29 Marketfield Street.
He was dressed in black, and wore powder in his hair. He was a man of a large and muscular frame of body, and about five feet nine inches in height. He was upwards of seventy-six years of age. He was in good health, and has never been known to have been affected by any mental aberration. Any intelligence concerning him will be most gratefully acknowledged by his afflicted friends and family, if left for them, at the bar of the City Hotel.
No effort whatever was made to push an inquiry into this mystery, which a generation later would have made the press ring for weeks.
III
 
Bryant resumed his editorial chair in the Pine Street office on Feb. 16, 1836, and set heroically to work to restore the Evening Post. The net profits that year fell to $5,671.15, and in the panic year following to $3,242.76. Leggett was only slowly convalescing at his New Rochelle home, and the editor was assisted by Mason till the end of May, when he obtained the services of Henry J. Anderson, professor of mathematics at Columbia. He took a large furnished room on Fourth Street, and was accustomed to be in his office at seven o’clock in the morning. There was no money to hire many helpers, and until 1840 three men did practically all the writing. Bryant wrote the editorials and literary notices; his chief assistant, first Anderson and then Parke Godwin,164 clipped exchanges, furnished dramatic criticism, and contributed short editorial paragraphs; and another man acted as general reporter. Ship news was gathered by pilots in the common employ of the evening papers.
Yet in this moment of adversity occurred one of those displays of liberalism and enlightened judgment which are the special glory of the Evening Post. After Leggett’s illness, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., had written an editorial (Nov. 14, 1835) arguing against the attitude of condemnation which nearly all employers then took toward labor unions, which were just beginning to find imperfect shape. He affirmed that the whole body social was interested in promoting the objects of these unions—in diminishing the hours of labor and increasing the wages of the mechanics. The laboring masses, under the principle of universal suffrage, held the government in their hands, and would exercise their power wisely only if they had education and prosperity. This was not the case: “compelled to labor the extremest amount that nature can endure, and receiving for that excessive labor a compensation which makes year after year of excessive toil necessary to obtain independence, what leisure have they to devote to the acquisition of ... knowledge ...?” Bryant felt precisely as Leggett and Sedgwick did on this subject. At the end of May, 1836, twenty-one journeymen tailors who had formed a union were indicted for a conspiracy injurious to trade and commerce, and after a three days’ trial in the court of Oyer and Terminer, Judge Edwards charged the jury to find them guilty. Bryant immediately (May 31) attacked him:
We do not admit, until we have further examined the question, that the law is as laid down by the Judge; but if it be, the sooner such a tyrannical and wicked law is abrogated the better. His doctrine has, it is true, a decision of the Supreme Court in its favor; but the reasoning by which he attempts to show the propriety of that decision is of the weakest possible texture. The idea that arrangements and combinations for certain rates of wages are injurious to trade and commerce, is as absurd as the165 idea that the current prices of the markets, which are always the result of understandings and combinations, are injurious.
The next day the tailors were heavily fined. The Evening Post, declaring this monstrous, showed its wicked absurdity in a series of clear expositions. It had been made criminal for the working classes to settle among themselves the price of their own property! According to Judge Edwards, the owners of the packets, who had agreed upon $140 as the standard fare to Liverpool, were criminals; so were the editors, who had agreed upon $10 for a yearly subscription; so were the butchers and bakers. The very price current was evidence of conspiracy. Bryant recalled the fact that in England the Tories themselves had expunged the laws against labor unions from the statute books twelve years before. “Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.”
Other newspapers, of which the Journal of Commerce and the American were the most prominent, took the side of Judge Edwards. For a time the excitement was intense. A mass-meeting of mechanics, which the Evening Post declared the largest ever seen in the city, was held in City Hall Park on the evening of June 13; and Bryant continued his editorials at intervals for a month.