Few newspaper editors enjoyed more influence in the Jacksonian era than William Leggett of the New-York Evening Post. Leggett's reputation as a fiery editor often drew the ire even of his own party members--indeed, President Martin Van Buren once offered Leggett a post in the diplomatic corps just to keep him out of the political arena. Yet for all of his support of equal rights, abolitionism, and free trade and his unqualified opposition to the Bank of the United States and slavery, Leggett also wrote poetry and short fiction, although his efforts at verse were never as well received as his works of fiction, Tales and Sketches (1829) and Naval Stories (1834). Self-educated, a naval officer, and well known in literary circles, Leggett was one of that well-rounded breed of nineteenth-century journalists that included his boss William Cullen Bryant, William Leete Stone, and George Pope Morris, who used editorials to...