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 author 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 utterance 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, compact 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.