Webster:--Without firmness, consistency, or political courage to be a leader, except in one small section of the Union, he seems to crow to any good purpose only on his own dunghill, and is a much greater fowl in his own barnyard than anywhere else. He is a good speaker at the bar and in the House; but he is a much greater lawyer than statesman, and far more expert in detailing old arguments than fruitful in inventing new ones. He is not what we should call a great man, much less a great politician; and we should go so far as to question the power of his intellect, did it not occasionally disclose itself in a rich exuberance of contradictory opinions. A man who can argue so well on both sides of a question cannot be totally destitute of genius. And here these three gentlemen, who agree in no one single principle, who own no one single feeling in common, except that of hatred to the old hero of New Orleans, stand battling side by side. The author and champion of the tariff, and the man who on every occasion denounced it as a violation of the Constitution; the oracle of nullification and the oracle of consolidation; the trio of antipathies; the union of contradiction; the consistency of inconsistencies; the coalition of oil, vinegar, and mustard; the dressing in which the great political salad is to be served up to the people. In this aggressive writing we see Leggett’s pen; and it was only after Bryant left the _Evening Post_ in his sole charge that it entered upon its hottest fighting. The first episode, its defense of abolitionists in the right of free speech, was highly creditable to it. The abolitionists had begun to arouse popular resentment in New York so early as 1833; on Oct. 2 of that year, a meeting of the “friends of immediate abolition” at Clinton Hall had been broken up by a tumultuous crowd, which adjourned to Tammany Hall and there denounced the agitators. Lewis Tappan, head of one of the largest silk houses in the city, and for a short time after 1827 editor of the _Journal of Commerce_; his brother Arthur Tappan; Joshua Leavitt, the Rev. Dr. F. F. Cox, the Rev. Mr. Ludlow, and several other Protestant clergymen made up a constellation only less active than that formed in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Samuel J. May, and John Pierpont. During the spring of 1834 these men continued their speechmaking, and Ludlow and Cox went so far as to appeal to all Northern negroes for support, and to defend intermarriage between whites and blacks. Few New Yorkers then regarded Southern slavery as a national shame, and almost none had any patience with abolition. Most of the press denounced the movement emphatically; the _Evening Post_ refused to do this, though it called it wild and visionary.