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.”