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.