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.
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, 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: