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 incendiary 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. Historical 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.
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 issue 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.
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
it 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.
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 signed 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 resigned 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. Advertising 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 principles 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.