er's sufferings and distress will please to indulge themselves one more reflection on the subject." In the succeeding issue he tells the whole story, admitting the folly of trying to conceal what had happened. The jubilant paraders, roused more by his ridicule of themselves than by his attack on the Constitution, had broken into his place and, though he fired twice at the mob, he was obliged to retreat, while most of his plant was destroyed![1] It is a good graphic story that he writes, the kind that editors do write as a rule when their places have been attacked or they have been horse-whipped; the mode of punishment for editors, as we shall see, varying with the generations.
After this Greenleaf naturally turned more earnestly to the anti-Federalist party; his was the first Democratic organ in the country, and the first to attack Washington's administration. His alignment with the Democratic party became so complete that in 1789 he was elected a sachem of Tammany Hall. On his death, the Independent Chronicle of Boston said, "he was a steady, uniform, zealous supporter of the Rights of Humanity."[2]
The crowning glory of the party was the "Federalist," Alexander Hamilton's great contribution to journalism and political literature. To the publication of the "Federalist "in the newspapers of the country has been ascribed the fact that the doubting country accepted the Federal Constitution.
In the Federal convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787, there was no real appreciation of the democratic character of the nation. In that convention, democratic sentiment was in a weak minority; the Federal union was
