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.
