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Chapter 1 The Systems Analyst and IS Development
1-2
Business Need: Increase efficiency in storing, updating, and retrieving information
on employee injury claims.
Business Requirements: Automated system which allows for electronic submission
of reports via a secure web site.
Business Value: Reduce response time for employee inquiries, increase effectiveness
of storing, updating, and retrieving employee injury claims. Reduce storage costs
of paper files.
Special Issues: Must have someone who understands how to create and maintain a
secure web site. Must have resources to migrate paper files to data storage. Must
work within HIPAA guidelines to ensure that medical documents are treated
according to regulations.
Answer toYourTurn 1-4: Too Much Paper, Part 2
1. Issues arising from digital signatures and electronic documents typically focus on
establishing validity for signatures and originators. As these issues can be
overcome using certificates and encryption, they don’t necessarily affect the
project feasibility. However, they do need to be addressed.
2. Answers will vary. The project champion, organizational management, and
perhaps most importantly a subset of the stakeholders must believe in and show
support for the project. One solution would be to plan and provide for sufficient
training that demonstrates how their jobs might be easier to accomplish with the
automated system.
Answer toYourTurn 1-5: Discovering VisibleAnalyst - Lesson 1
Student answers and experiences will vary based on the adoption of the software
package, Visible Analyst. It is highly recommended that a CASE tool be used for
modeling throughout this course.
Answer to Concepts inAction 1-A: Managerial Causes of IT Failures
Qantas provides for an “ice-breaker” discussion topic for the first class. Perhaps group
the students and have them discuss this company and then provide for class discussion
about the importance of IT project success.
Answer to Concepts inAction 1-B: BPI on the Farm
Efficiency gains are mentioned in this Concept in Action. What are the drawbacks to this
scenario? Is it as easy as it seems? Issues such as Wi-Fi coverage on a farm, perhaps
even cellular coverage can come into play as can weather, dust, and other issues inherent
with a farming enterprise.

1-3
Answer to Concepts inAction 1-C: Interview with Don Hallacy, President,
Technology Services, Sprint Corporation
This is an opportune time to identify the responsibilities of the differing roles that an
analyst serves.
Answer to Concepts inAction 1-D: Carlson Hospitality
Carlson Hospitality can use the information from the survey to determine whether the
one-point increase in market share revenue ($20 million per point) will offset costs
associated with increasing the level of services to high-quality customers which would
result in a 10% increase in customer satisfaction.
Answer to Concepts inAction 1-E: Return on Investment
1. One method for determining a return on investment is to complete a Cost-Benefit
Analysis using the Present Value Method. Many of the costs for server
virtualization are associated with the initial construction: physical manipulation of
the servers and software licensing. The ongoing costs of labor in updating and
accessing tables would be relatively small. Using this type of analysis would
allow the project sponsors to show how the benefits of the virtualization would be
realized on a long term basis.
2. Implementing a major change to a system should certainly include a systems
analyst. Systems analysts typically have a broad view of the system, and would be
able to ascertain how virtualizing the servers will affect the whole system.
Answers to End of Chapter Questions
1. List and describe the six general skills all project team members should have?
[1] Technical skills (knowledge of how to employ technology in development system
solutions). [2] Business skills (knowledge of how to apply IT to business problems to
achieve a valuable solution). [3] Analytical skills (ability to solve complex
problems). [4] Interpersonal skills (oral and written communication skills with both
technical and non-technical audiences). [5] Management skills (ability to manage
others and cope with an uncertain environment). [6] Ethical skills (ability to deal
with others honestly and ethically).
2. What are the major roles on a project team?

1-4
Business analyst – emphasis on the business issues addressed by the system: value of
new system; identification of problems and opportunities; revision of business
processes and policies.
Systems analyst – emphasis on IS issues of the system: how IT can be used to
support business processes; design of new business process and IS; and enforcement
of IS standards.
Infrastructure analyst – technical issues associated with integrating new system
components to existing technical infrastructure.
Requirements analyst – eliciting the requirements of the new system from all
stakeholders. They understand the business well, are excellent communicators, and
are highly skilled in obtaining system requirements.
Change management analyst – emphasis on facilitating organizational adaptation to
new system. Helping to identify and overcome resistance to change and assuring
adequate training and documentation of new system.
Project manager – ensuring that progress is made on the project; time schedules and
budgets are met; supervision of project team; and manage relations with project
sponsor and users.
3. Compare and contrast the role of a systems analyst, business analyst, and
infrastructure analyst.
These three roles emphasize different perspectives on the system. The business
analyst represents the sponsor/users interests, while the systems analyst knows how to
apply IS to support business needs. Together, the systems analyst and the business
analyst can design a system that conforms to the IS standards while adding value to
the business. The infrastructure analyst has more technical knowledge and provides
the team with technical constraints, or identifies infrastructure changes that the new
system will require.
4. Compare and contrast the role of requirements analyst, change management analyst,
and project manager.
These three roles also emphasize different perspectives on the system. The
requirements analyst focuses on eliciting the requirements from the system
stakeholders. The change management analyst focuses on people and managing
issues surrounding the installation of the system. The project manager ensures that
the project is completed on time and within budget and that the system delivers the
expected value to the organization.
5. Describe the major phases in the systems development life cycle (SDLC).
The planning phase focuses on determining if there is justification to build an
information system and developing a plan to accomplish the development project.
The analysis phase is focused on understanding the existing situation and determining
the needs and requirements expected from the new system. The design phase refines

1-5
the system requirements (from analysis) and develops specifications for how the new
system will fulfill those requirements. The implementation phase involves
constructing (or installing) the new system, testing, converting, training, and
providing support for the new system.
6. Describe the principal steps in the planning phase. What are some major
deliverables?
Step 1 – Project Initiation: the project sponsor works with the IS department to
develop a preliminary assessment of the project’s feasibility. It is important to make
an initial evaluation of the project’s value (is it worth doing; is it technically possible
for us; will it be used?). The system request and the results of the feasibility analysis
are usually presented to management for approval. If the project is accepted, we
move to:
Step 2 – Project Management: the project work plan is created, project staffing is
determined, and project management controls and procedures are established. These
elements comprise the project plan.
The deliverables in the planning phase include the feasibility analysis and the project
plan.
7. Describe the principal steps in the analysis phase. What are some major
deliverables?
Step 1 – Analysis Strategy: based on the nature of the project, the project team will
formulate the approach that will be used to develop the requirements for the new
system. The strategy usually includes the following steps:
Step 2 – Analyze the current system: gather information from the project sponsor and
users of the current system regarding its strengths and weaknesses. Use the problems
identified to formulate objectives for the new system.
Step 3 – Create new system concept: based on the gathered information, develop a
general concept of the new system, including functions and capabilities it will have.
Step 4 – Modeling activities: express ideas for the new system’s processing and data
requirements with process models and data models.
Step 5: Prepare and present system proposal: assemble the analysis results, system
concept, process model and data model into a proposal for the new system. Project
sponsor and/or approval committee will determine if system has enough merit to
continue development.

1-6
The primary deliverable for the analysis phase is the system proposal, which
combines the information generated during this phase into a document that expresses
the initial conceptual design for the new system and the basis for the design decisions.
8. Describe the principal steps in the design phase. What are some major deliverables?
Step 1 – Design Strategy: based on the nature of the project, the project team will
determine the appropriate means of developing the system (in-house custom
development, purchase of pre-written software, or outsourcing development to a 3rd
party. Following this, the steps below outline the various design tasks that must be
performed:
Step 2 – Design the system architecture: describe the basic hardware, software, and
networking that will be used in the new system.
Step 3 – Design the user interface: the overall structure of the system, the user’s
navigation through the system; the inputs and outputs of the system, and the
appearance of the screens are designed.
Step 4 – Design the database and/or files: develop specifications for the data storage
structures that will be implemented for the new system.
Step 5: Design the programs: develop plans and outlines for each program that will
be written to implement the functions and capabilities of the new system.
The primary deliverable for the design phase is the system specification, which
combines all the design specifications mentioned above. The system specification is
the basis for the construction work that will be performed by the programmers.
9. Describe the principal steps in the implementation phase. What are some major
deliverables?
Step 1 – Build the system: programs are written and tested, and various infrastructure
components are installed. Testing is conducted to verify system performance.
Step 2 – Train the users: develop and conduct training programs so that end users are
thoroughly familiar with the new system’s functions and work procedures.
Step 3 – Convert to the new system: transition from the old system and procedures to
the new system and procedures.
Step 4 – Support the new system: evaluate the development process for lessons
learned from this project, and establish methods for identifying and implementing
change to the new system as needed.

1-7
The primary deliverables for the Implementation phase includes the completed and
documented programs, users manuals and procedures manuals, training materials, and
plans for system support.
10. Which phase in the SDLC is most important?
While each phase is important to the overall systems analysis, special attention must
be given to the planning and analysis phase. The planning phase is intended to
determine the feasibility of a project and to create a project plan. If the feasibility
analysis is poorly done or misunderstood or the project is ill-planned, then the chance
of success is extremely low. Similarly, if the analysis phase is shortened or omitted
altogether, then the requirements of the system will not be fully defined and may
result in either a system that does not address business needs or one that does not get
completed due to continuous rework.
11. What does gradual refinement mean in the context of SDLC?
Generally, the clarity of understanding and the depth of detail of the new system are
gradually refined during the phases of the SDLC. Initially, the requirements are only
vaguely understood. This understanding is improved during the Analysis phase.
Further detail is developed during Design, and then is fully expressed during
Implementation.
12. Describe the four steps of business process management (BPM). Why do companies
adopt BPM as a management strategy?
BPM is a methodology used by organizations to continuously improve end-to-end
business processes. It follows a cycle of systematically creating, assessing, and
altering said processes. The four steps of BPM are:
Step 1: defining and mapping the steps in a business process,
Step 2: creating ways to improve on steps in the process that add value,
Step 3: finding ways to eliminate or consolidate steps in the process that don’t add
value, and
Step 4: creating or adjusting electronic workflows to match the improved process
maps.
By studying and improving their underlying business processes, organizations can
achieve several important benefits, including: enhanced process agility, improved
process alignment, and increased process efficiencies.
13. Compare and contrast BPA, BPI, and BPR. Which is most risky? Which has the
greatest potential value?

1-8
The three techniques applied within BPM for business processes are that of
Automation (BPA), Improvement (BPI), and Reengineering (BPR). It is entirely
possible that all three of these techniques could be used on the same project
depending on the scope and impact the planned change will have on the steps of
BPM.
As a rule, when technology is applied to a process to enhance agility and provide
more ability for change the project would be a BPA. When a process incorporates
industry “best practices” or perhaps finds ways to eliminate or consolidate steps in the
process it would be termed BPI. The BPR technique changes the fundamental way in
which the organization operates. In effect, BPR makes major changes to take
advantage of new ideas and new technology.
BPR is considered to contain the most amount of risk of the three techniques due to
the significant organizational and operational changes that result.
The answers can certainly vary with regard to greatest potential. In many cases it will
be a “hybrid” blend of all three that could hold the most potential for the organization.
14. Give three examples of business needs for a system.
• To maintain or improve the competitive position.
• To perform a business function more efficiently.
• To take advantage of a new business opportunity.
15. Describe the roles of the project sponsor and the approval committee.
The project sponsor is the individual or department responsible for initiating a
systems request. Typically during the Planning phase the project sponsor works with
the IT department to conduct a feasibility analysis. The approval committee (or
steering committee) then evaluates the systems request along with the results of the
feasibility study to determine whether or not to approve the request.
16. What is the purpose of an approval committee? Who is usually on this committee?
The approval committee generally serves as the decision making body regarding
investments in information systems projects. This committee generally has a broad
organizational representation and therefore can avoid allocating resources that will
serve only narrow organizational interests. The approval committee commonly has
project oversight responsibilities as well; monitoring project performance after the
project has been accepted. The composition of the approval committee will vary
from organization to organization, but generally consists of high-level managers from
throughout the organization. The committee is often chaired by the CIO.
17. Why should the system request be created by a businessperson as opposed to an IS
professional?

1-9
Usually, the system request originates with a businessperson because the need for the
system or system improvement is recognized in the business unit. It is unlikely the IS
professionals in the organization will be able to recognize all the business needs and
opportunities for systems and improvements in the business units since they are not
involved directly in those areas. Also, the businessperson will have a much better
idea of the value of the proposed system or improvement, and therefore is in a better
position to create a meaningful system request.
18. What is the difference between intangible value and tangible value? Give three
examples of each.
Tangible value represents the system benefits that are quantifiable and measurable.
Intangible value represents benefits that are real, but are difficult to quantify and
measure. Examples of tangible benefits might be increased sales, reduced operating
costs, and reduced interest costs. Examples of intangible value might include
increased customer satisfaction, improved decision making, improved problem
recognition.
19. What are the purposes of the system request and the feasibility analysis? How are
they used in the project selection process?
The purpose of the system request is to initiate a systems project. The system request
pulls together preliminary ideas on the reason for the system and its expected value to
the organization. The feasibility analysis represents a more detailed investigation into
the proposed system outlined in the system request. The system analyst and the
project sponsor work together to more fully develop the objectives of the system and
to understand its potential costs and benefits to the organization. The system request
and the feasibility analysis are the key inputs used by the approval committee in
determining if the proposed system has enough merit to move into the analysis phase.
20. Describe two special issues that may be important to list on a system request.
Any special circumstances that could affect the outcome of the project must be clearly
identified. Examples of special issues that may be important to include are:
environmental factors that should be considered (e.g., new governmental reporting
requirements); competitive factors (e.g., IS-enabled systems introduced or anticipated by
competitors); externally imposed deadlines that cannot be altered (e.g., completion by the
start of the next fiscal year); mandated technologies.
21. Describe the three dimensions of feasibility analysis.
Technical feasibility looks at the capability of the organization to successfully
develop the proposed system. Included in this assessment are the project size, the
types of technologies to be used in the project, and the amount of prior experience
with that technology and the business application. Economic feasibility addresses the

1-10
economic justification of the project. Here, we attempt to determine if the value of
the project’s benefits justifies investing in the project’s estimated costs.
Organizational feasibility evaluates whether the system is likely to be accepted and
used by the organization. Included in this assessment will be the strength of the
sponsor’s and management’s support for the project and the enthusiasm or resistance
of the users for the project.
22. What factors are used to determine project size?
Some factors that can be used to determine project size include: the number of
people on the project team, the expected time to complete the project, the
breadth/scope of the project, the number of distinct features to be included in the
system, the degree of integration required between the system and existing systems.
23. Describe a “risky” project in terms of technical feasibility. Describe a project that
would NOT be considered “risky.”
A project that would be technically risky would be one that is large in scale, utilizes
technology that we have little or no experience with, and is for a business area that is
new and unfamiliar to the organization. A project that would not be considered
technically risky would be one that is small in scale, uses technology that is well-
understood, and is for a business area that is very familiar to the users and developers.
24. What are the steps for assessing economic feasibility? Describe each step.
To assess economic feasibility, one should:
1. Identify costs and benefits of the proposed system. List tangible costs and
benefits, including one-time and recurring costs.
2. Assign values to the costs and benefits. Work with business users and IT
professionals to quantify each of the costs and benefits. Try to estimate intangible
costs and benefits as well.
3. Determine the cash flow of the project over the analysis period. Project the costs
and benefit annually over the analysis period, usually 3-5 years.
4. Determine the project’s net present value. Calculate the present value of each
year's costs and benefits, using the appropriate required rate of return for the
project. Subtract the cumulative PV of costs from the cumulative PV of benefits
to determine the project's net present value. If it is a positive number, the project
is considered acceptable.
5. Determine the project’s return on investment. Use the ROI formula to calculate
the return the organization will get on its investment in the project. ROI = (Total
benefits - Total costs) / Total costs.
6. Calculate break-even point. Determine the point in time when the project has
generated enough cash flow to recapture its cost.
7. Graph break-even point. Plot the yearly costs and benefits on a line graph. The
point of intersection is the break-even point.

1-11
25. List two intangible benefits. Describe how these benefits can be quantified.
One example of an intangible benefit is reduced response time to address customer
requests. Estimating the increase in the number of customers that could be served
and the average revenue gained per customer could approximate the value of this
benefit. So, if we currently have 1000 customers, the average revenue per customer
is $100, and by reducing our response time we can increase the number of customers
served by 30%, then our benefit will be $30,000 (300 add’l customers @ $100).
A second example of an intangible benefit is improved customer satisfaction.
Determining how much repeat business we lose from dissatisfied customers could
approximate the value of this benefit. The amount of repeat business lost could be
determined through customer satisfaction surveys or marketing research. Assume we
currently have 1000 customers, each customer brings in average revenue of $100, and
we currently lose the repeat business of 10% of our customers due to dissatisfaction.
If an improvement in customer satisfaction resulted in losing only 5% of repeat
business, then the value of that benefit would be $5,000 (50 customers retained
@$100).
26. List two tangible benefits and two operational costs for a system. How would you
determine the values that should be assigned to each item?
Two tangible benefits are: an increase in sales and a decrease in uncollectible
accounts receivable. The best way to measure these benefits is to go to the business
people who understand these areas and ask them for reasonable estimates. The sales
and marketing managers and the accounts receivable managers will be in the best
position to determine these values.
Operational costs are the ongoing costs associated with the new system, and are fairly
easy to determine objectively. One common operational cost is that of maintenance
agreements for new hardware, which can be determined by contacting hardware
vendors about the costs of their maintenance contracts. Another common operations
cost is that of new employees that will be needed to run the new system. Salaries and
benefits for new employees can be determined by checking local and regional salary
and wage surveys for the type of employee needed.
27. Explain how an expected value can be calculated for a cost or benefit. When would
this be done?
An expected value consists of a combining set of possible outcomes along with the
associated probability of each outcome. For example, the Production department may
estimate possible increases in costs for parts based on economic indicators. They
estimate that there is a 40% chance the costs will increase to $300,000, a 25% chance
the costs will increase to $400,000 and a 35% chance the costs will increase to
$350,000. Overall the expected value of the rise in costs would be estimated to be
$342,500 = ($300,000 * .40) + ($400,000 * .25) + ($350,000 * .35).

1-12
Estimating the expected value of a cost or benefit would be done when assigning
costs and benefits when determining economic feasibility.
28. Explain the net present value and return on investment for a cost-benefit analysis.
Why would these calculations be used?
The net present value (NPV) method compares the present values of the project’s
cash inflows and outflows. If the present value of the benefits (inflows) is equal to or
greater than the present value of the costs (outflows), then the project is considered
economically justifiable. NPV has the advantage of including a required rate of
return in the calculation, so the NPV figure captures the costs associated with tying
up money in the project. NPV also explicitly considers the timing of the cash flows
throughout the system life. The return on investment (ROI) method simply compares
the total net cash flows from the project with the total outflows in aggregate. While
this ROI number gives some sense of how much money the project generates in
comparison to its total cost, it omits any consideration of the timing of the cash flows
and the time value of money. The ROI method, while simple to compute, is flawed in
many ways and should not be used as the only economic indicator of a project’s
merit.
29. What is the break-even point for the project? How is it calculated?
The break-even point is the point in time when the project has generated enough cash
flow to recapture its cost. The year in which the project breaks even is the first year
in which the cumulative NPV is a positive number. The exact point during that year
at which break even occurs is calculated by: (Yearly NPV (for first positive year) -
Cumulative NPV at that year) / Yearly NPV (for the first positive year)
30. What is stakeholder analysis? Discuss three stakeholders that would be relevant for
most projects.
Stakeholder analysis is a systematic process that identifies all parties that will be
affected by a new information system, and attempts to estimate the consequences of
the project for each stakeholder group. A major goal of stakeholder analysis is to
ensure that the consequences of a new system are considered for all parties that will
be affected by the system. The most common stakeholders to consider for most
systems projects are the system champion, the system users, and the organization’s
management. The system champion is the person or group who initiates the project
and provides support for it. The users are the individuals who will work with the
system once it is implemented. The organization management commits resources to
the project and has an interest in seeing those resources be used to improve the
functioning of the organization.

1-13
Solutions to End of Chapter Exercises
A. Go to www.bls.gov and perform a search for “systems analyst.” What is the
employment outlook for this career? Compare and contrast the skills listed with the
skills that were presented in this chapter.
Student answers will vary. The search returned more than 8,500 responses from the
bls website. This is an eye opening exercise for all students to complete. These skills
are consistent with those presented in this chapter.
B. Think about your ideal analyst position. Write a job posting to hire someone for that
position. What requirements would the job have? What skills and experience would
be required? How would the applicants demonstrate that they have the appropriate
skills and experience?
Student answers will vary, depending on their preferences regarding being a systems
analyst, business analyst, infrastructure analyst, or change management analyst. Try
to verify that the student has correctly associated the skills needed with the type of
analyst position for which they aspire. Demonstration of skills and experience should
come from prior actual positions held, responsibilities and accomplishments in those
positions, and references.
C. Locate a news article in an IT trade web site (e.g., Computerworld.com,
InformationWeek.com) about an organization that is implementing a new computer
system. Describe the tangible and intangible value that the organization seeks from
the new system.
Students' answers will vary. Verify that the tangible examples are easy to quantify
and measure. Verify that the intangible value examples represent those benefits that
are more difficult to quantify (e.g., customer goodwill or repeat business).
D. Car dealers have realized how profitable it can be to sell automobiles by using the
Web. Pretend that you work for a local car dealership that is part of a large chain
such as CarMax. Create a system request you might use to develop a Web-based
sales system. Remember to list special issues that are relevant to the project.
System Request
Sponsor: Sales Manager.
Business Need: Increase sales, increase market share, broaden geographic reach to
potential customers.
Business Requirements: Web-based access to vehicle inventory including pictures.
Search capabilities. Ability to process requests for more information about a
vehicle.

1-14
Business Value: Increase sales by 4%; increase market share by 1.5%; broaden reach
to customers within 250 mile radius of dealership.
Special Issues: Must have someone who will keep Web-site content up to date
constantly. Who will handle customer inquiries? How will this person be
compensated? Will the compensation of our current sales force be affected?
How will the sales force feel about this new system? Will having our own Web-
based sales system affect our participation in the CarMax chain?
E. Think about your own university or college and choose an idea that could improve
student satisfaction with the course enrollment process. Currently, can students
enroll for classes from anywhere? How long does it take? Are directions simple to
follow? In online help available? Next, think about how technology can help support
your idea. Would you need completely new technology? Can the current system be
changed?
Create a system request that you could give to the administration that explains the
sponsor, business need, business requirements, and potential value of the project.
Include any constraints or issues that should be considered.
On most campuses this is a “hot topic” which would make this an excellent exercise
to complete on the classroom whiteboard as a way of introducing the system request
form and how to complete it.
F. Think about the idea that you developed in Exercise E to improve your university or
college course enrollment process. List three things that influence the technical
feasibility of the system, the economic feasibility of the system, and the organizational
feasibility of the system. How can you learn more about the issues that affect the
three kinds of feasibility?
Technical Feasibility – Student responses will vary
Economic Feasibility – The cost associated with such a system will be a large
unknown for the students. They might not realize that the existing system is
probably a part of a much larger and very expensive enterprise system.
Organizational Feasibility – Understanding the organizational makeup is paramount.
Is the current system free standing within the college or university, or is it a part
of a system-wide (multi-campus operation?)
G. Amazon.com was very successful when it decided to extend its offerings beyond books
to many other products. Amazon.com was unable to compete successfully with
eBay.com’s auction site, however, and eventually abandoned its own auction site.
What feasibility factors probably had the most significance in this failure? Explain.
Most certainly it was Economic. The company lost vast sums of money annually.
Technically it was not a challenge to compete, Organizationally, Amazon did not
want to lose, but finally Economically it had to be abandoned.

1-15
H. Interview someone who works in a large organization and ask him or her to describe
the approval process that exists for approving new development projects. What do
they think about the process? What are the problems? What are the benefits?
Students' answers will vary.
I. Reread the “Your Turn 1-2” box (Implementing a Satellite Data Network). Create a
list of the stakeholders that should be considered in a stakeholder analysis of this
project.
A list of stakeholders would include the project sponsor (also known as project
champion), managers in the organization (particularly inventory), and users at the
regional and national headquarters.
Answers to Textbook Minicases
1. The purpose of this minicase is to encourage students to recognize the value of the
structure of the four phases of the SDLC to smaller projects, even end-user computing
projects such as this. This minicase provides an opportunity for the class to be divided
into small groups, each responsible for one of the main sections of the minicase, and then
have the small groups present and discuss their answers.
A. Planning:
i. What is the purpose of the Planning Phase for a project such as this?
In a smaller, end-user computing situation, the Planning phase ensures that the project scope
is understood prior to “diving in” to the project work. A system request may not be formally
prepared, but the business purpose of the project and the value to the business should be
articulated. Feasibility should be considered for any project. Technical feasibility evaluation
should encourage the developer to identify places where he/she might need assistance from
the IS professionals. Economic issues and organizational feasibility concerns should help
determine if the project has enough value to justify the time and costs, and organizational
feasibility assessment should help alert the developer to organizational acceptance issues.
While a formal project plan may not be required, it is important to organize the project and
lay out the timetable for work on the project. If additional help will be needed, the individuals
who can provide that help must be lined up at the appropriate time.
ii. What are the typical outcomes of the Planning Phase?
Typically, the Planning phase produces a System Request, preliminary Feasibility
Assessment, and Project Plan, including workplan and staffing plan. The main point of the
planning phase is to more thoroughly understand the project, verify that it has value and is
worth doing, and be prepared to tackle the project.
iii. How did not doing this step affect Megan’s project outcome?
Megan did not adequately appreciate the scale of the project she was taking on. Her
approach, “…set up the basics for the system and then tweak it around until I got what I
wanted…” demonstrates that a haphazard attitude toward such a project results in a poor
outcome. She also did not adequately understand the interests and reactions of her assistant
and the members of her sales staff.
B. Analysis:

1-16
i. What is the purpose of the Analysis Phase?
The purpose of the Analysis Phase is to develop a thorough understand of the functional
requirements of the new system. In other words, we should clearly know what things the new
system needs to provide to its users.
ii. What is the key outcome produced during the Analysis Phase?
The Analysis Phase produces the System Proposal, which is documents the functional
requirements of the system in clear, unambiguous terms.
iii. In what ways do you think this project was hurt by not going through a typical
Analysis Phase?
Megan had a list of things she thought would be useful in the new system, but she did not take
the time and effort to understand the details of the features she had identified. She also did
not apparently talk to any of the ultimate users of the system: her assistant and the members of
her sales staff. If she had taken the time to involve these individuals, she could have gotten a
much better grasp of the features and functions that they really need, and they would have had
the benefit of contributing their ideas to the system’s requirements.
C. Design:
i. What is the purpose of the Design Phase?
The Design Phase allows the developer a chance to consider options for implementing the
system. The make versus buy decision is considered along with a detailed assessment of the
alternatives. If any custom development is undertaken, the work that will be done is carefully
laid out using various design tools.
ii. How do you think this project could have been improved by going through a typical
Design Phase?
Megan was given some advice on the development environment to use (WordPress). This
may or may not have been good advice. If a more careful Design process had been followed,
Megan could have done an assessment of all her options. For example, there may be a
software product that she could have purchased that would have been suitable for her
purposes that would have been far easier for her, rather than the setup involved with a
WordPress site. If she chose to move ahead with the WordPress platform, she could have
been better prepared if she had worked on the design of each of the site features prior to
implementation in Word Press.
iii. Do you think Megan’s assistant and sales force members could have helped at all
during the design phase? If so, how?
At the very least, Megan could have met with her assistant and sales force members and
discussed the design for the main system features. Their ideas and reactions probably would
have led to a much better outcome for the project.
D. Implementation:
i. What type of work is done in the Implementation Phase for a project like this?
Implementation involves the construction of the system, testing of the system, training of the
users, developing documentation, putting the system into production, and maintaining the
system.
ii. What is usually done during the Implementation Phase to ensure that the users of the
system are satisfied with it?
Training and final testing are activities that enable the users to be able to use the system and
to be satisfied that the system performs as it should.

1-17
iii. Megan’s approach to “construction” was to throw something together and “tweak it
around.” How do you think that approach contributed to the problems she is now
experiencing with her project?
As the answers to the previous sections make clear, Megan’s haphazard approach to the
project was a significant factor in the poor outcome of this project. Even projects that seem
simple and small in scope benefit from an orderly, well-thought-out approach. Many end-user
computing projects like this end up wasting a lot of time and resources. Knowing and
following an orderly development project that is based on the SDLC should greatly enhance
the chances of a successful project that provides value to the business and provides useful
features for the users.
2. Student answers may vary; A sample answer is provided below:
 What is your specific objective for this Internet system? (There is a big difference
between a web site that advertises and promotes products versus one that enables
order entry).
 What specific things do you want customers to be able to do via the web site?
(Review products; see store locations; search for products; place orders; process
credit card payments; track order status; track shipment).
 How were the revenue estimates you gave developed? How accurate do you feel
your estimates are?
 What budget are you considering for this project?
 What outside help will we be able to utilize in this project?
 Do you foresee an adverse response by the store owners, perhaps a feeling that this
will take sales away from them?
 Are there any other adverse consequences we should anticipate from this system?
3. Students’ spreadsheets may differ; the following sample suggests an appropriate format:
Decker Company Revenue Estimates
New
Response
Time
Service
Calls per
Truck per
'Week
Increase
in Service
Calls
Average
Revenue
per Call
Revenue
Increase
per Truck
per Week
Annual
Revenue
Increase
Likelihood
Estimate
Expected
Annual
Revenue
2 hours 20 8 150 1200 600,000 20% 120,000
3 hours 18 6 150 900 450,000 30% 135,000
4 hours 16 4 150 600 300,000 50% 150,000
Total Expected Value: 405,000
4. As the numbers indicate, this would not be an economically feasible project for a number
of reasons. It would take more than the projected 4- year life span to breakeven on the
initial investment, the return on investment is a very low number (-1), and the net present
value is currently projected as a number less than zero.

1-18
Supplemental Minicase
1. Refer to Minicase 2 in Chapter 1 of the textbook. Harry has met with Bill and determined
that Bill would like a system that allows customers to browse through products on-line, find
store locations nearest them, and also place orders for products with credit card payments.
Based on this scope, Harry is preparing an assessment of the feasibility of this system to
present to the Board of Directors. He is working on the technical feasibility issues currently.
Prepare a summary of the technical risks that appear to be associated with this proposed
system.
Answer:
 This business application is new to the organization. No one has experience or
understands Internet-based commerce. Many businesses are doing this, so we are not
breaking new ground; we just don’t have any in-house expertise in this type of business
venture.
 We do not have any in-house experience with the technologies associated with Internet-
based commerce. No one on staff has done anything like this before. Given the short
time frame, it will be difficult for the existing staff to get up to speed on the needed
technology and determine how to use it effectively for this project.
Client Server System
2005 2006 2007 2008 Total
Benefits
Increased Sales 30,000 33,000 36,300 39,930
Reduced Inventory 15,000 15,000 15,000 15,000
Total Benefits 45,000 48,000 51,300 54,930 199,230
Present Value Total Benefits 41,284 40,401 39,613 38,914 160,212
Development Costs
Systems Analysts 40,000
Programmer Analysts 35,000
GUI Designer 8,000
Telecommunications Specialist 2,500
System Architect 5,000
Database Specialist 675
System Librarian 3,750
Development Training 14,000
Hardware 18,700
Software 15,650
Total Development Costs 143,275
Operational Costs
Labor: Programmer Analysts 8,750 9,100 9,643 9,843
Labor: System Librarian 300 312 325 337
Hardware Maintenance 995 995 995 995
Software Maintenance 525 525 525 525
Preprinted Forms 3,300 3,300 3,300 3,300
Total Operational Costs 13,870 14,232 14,788 15,000 57,890
Total Costs 143,275 13,870 14,232 14,788 15,000 201,165
Total Benefits - Total Costs (143,275) 31,130 33,768 36,512 39,930 (1,935)
Cumulative Cash Flow (143,275) (112,145) (78,377) (41,865) (1,935)
Present Value Total Costs 143,275 12,725 11,979 11,419 10,626 190,024
NPV (PV Total Benefits - PV Total
Costs (29,812)
ROI -1% (-1,935/201,165)
Breakeven Point = not realized
within this schedule

1-19
 We have a very small IS staff who are currently kept busy maintaining our existing
systems. Given this small staff, this is a sizeable project for us to undertake.
This project represents a very high technical risk for this IS department. Point out that this is
an ideal situation to outsource or hire consultants to do. Technically, our current staff is
probably incapable of developing this system in a timely manner.
2. Jay Martin, the director of Marketing at Pier Systems, Inc., requested a new system be
developed to assist his sales staff in more effectively managing their customer contacts. As a
side benefit of this system, Jay will receive detailed information about each salesperson’s
daily productivity, including number of customer contacts, time spent per contact, orders
placed per contact, and revenues generated per contact. This detailed information about sales
staff productivity has not been previously available to Jay.
Jay has been a strong and vocal advocate of this new system, although he has heard some
grumbling in the sales staff ranks about it. The sales staff has enjoyed considerable
autonomy in the way they conduct their work day, and this system will provide a much
clearer picture of how each salesperson spends his/her time. Other top managers have
expressed interest in the system, although much managerial attention has been focused
recently on the implementation of a major new computer-based manufacturing and
production system, which has been far behind schedule and plagued with problems. Based
on his discussions with his IS contact, Jay feels certain this system is technically and
economically viable. How would you assess the Organizational Feasibility of this system?
Answer: The project has an enthusiastic and committed project champion. Organizational
management is supportive, but their attention is on another project that has not gone well. It
does not seem likely that organizational management will provide more that modest support
and enthusiasm for this project, as their energy is diverted toward the other implementation
under way. The end user support is very questionable. The material provided does not really
reveal the benefits that the sales staff will gain directly. The end users will have to be
handled very carefully to gain their support and diminish their fears about this new system.
All in all, the organizational feasibility risk of this system seems quite high at this time.
Experiential Exercises
1. Purpose: To help students gain an appreciation of the terms phase, step, technique,
and deliverable, and how those terms relate to understanding a process of significant
length and complexity.
Divide class into groups of 3. Each group will address the same task. The task is to
discuss the experience of being a student at your institution, from pre-admission to
graduation, in terms of phases, steps, techniques, and deliverables. Precede the group
work with a general discussion of these terms.
Although answers will vary, phases may include pre-admission to the institution,
enrollment as student, pre-professional study, admission to professional program,
professional study, and graduation. Steps may be courses of study to follow, course

1-20
sequences and prerequisites, general education requirements, professional program
requirements, etc. Techniques may include such things as study habits, research
methods, speed reading classes, study groups, etc. Deliverables will be course
requirements (papers, projects, exams), course grades, transcripts, certificates, and
diplomas.
After each group has developed its ideas, class discussion should focus on comparing
results and clarifying the meaning of each term through the examples presented.
2. Purpose: To help students understand and appreciate the role of the project sponsor
in an IS development project.
Assign students to identify a person in an organization who has initiated and
sponsored the development of an information system application. This person will
generally be a business-oriented manager rather than an IS staff member. Either
singly or with a partner, the students should arrange an interview with this person to
discuss their experiences as a project sponsor. [As an alternative, the instructor may
arrange for a person who has served as a project sponsor to visit a class session and
be interviewed by the entire class about his/her experiences in the project sponsor
role.]
It may be helpful to ‘force’ students to develop a list of interview topics before
undertaking the interview. Have the students prepare an interview agenda for your
approval prior to the interview. Questions should be targeted toward understanding
the project, the circumstances that motivated the project, and the involvement the
sponsor had throughout the development process.
Students should prepare a written summary of their interview, and/or make a class
presentation of their interview results. If class presentations are made, class
discussion should focus on identifying common themes or similarities between the
interviewees, and also identifying significant areas of difference.
3. Purpose: to help students understand the difference between tangible and intangible
values.
The following 2 exercises come from CIO Magazine. The purpose is to show that everything
can be measured - even intangibles.
Exercise 1: Is it logical to say that more X (an intangible) is better than less, but it is in no
way different or observable? Then in what way is X "better?" If you believe X is a good
thing, then you must also believe that it is somehow different from not having X. And if
it is different in a way that is relevant, then it must be observable. So ask what the
observable consequence is. Once you have identified an observable consequence,
thinking of a way to measure it is pretty easy.
Exercise 2: Create a thought experiment in which you imagine you have cloned an entire
organization into twin organizations, A and B. The two are identical in every way except
for one thing: Organization A has more of intangible X than organization B. Now,

1-21
imagine that you are an objective observer standing outside these organizations looking
in. What do you imagine you observe to be different between A and B? If X is such a
desirable thing, then there has to be some difference. What is it? Are certain things
getting done cheaper or faster? Are the customers of A likely to come back for more
business than the customers of B? Is employee turnover lower? Are mistakes of some
type less frequent? Just think it through-and be specific.
4. Purpose: to help students understand the different roles played on a systems
development project team.
Have students undertake a Web search for job descriptions similar to Business
Analyst, Systems Analyst, Project Manager, Technical Specialist (equivalent to
Infrastructure Analyst). Have students develop a summary list of job responsibilities,
qualifications, and experience required for each job category. Class discussion
focuses on developing a “master list” for each job category, and comparing and
contrasting the positions.

Other documents randomly have
different content

Neither the general postoffice, nor the general
government itself, possesses any power to prohibit the
transportation by mail of abolition tracts. On the contrary, it is
the bounden duty of the government to protect the
abolitionists in their constitutional right of free discussion; and
opposed, sincerely and zealously as we are, to their doctrines
and practices, we should be still more opposed to any
infringement of their political or civil rights. If the government
once begins to discriminate as to what is orthodox and what
heterodox in opinion, what is safe and what unsafe in
tendency, farewell, a long farewell, to our freedom.
Only three of the really influential newspapers of the land
declined to admit that Kendall had either done right, or had simply
chosen the lesser of two evils: the Boston Courier, edited by J. T.
Buckingham, the Cincinnati Gazette, edited by Charles Hammond,
and the Post.
Unpopular as was the Evening Post’s defense of free speech, its
stand upon financial and economic questions was far more heartily
detested. It rapidly ceased, after its first attacks upon the Bank, to
hold its old position as a representative of the city’s commercial
interests. It is true that some rich New Yorkers felt a jealousy of the
Bank because it belonged to Philadelphia, while others stood loyally
with the Democratic Party in denouncing it. But Gulian Verplanck and
Ogden Hoffman, close friends of the Post, were typical of many who
went over to the Bank’s side. Not a few business men affiliated with
Tammany joined the ranks of Jackson’s enemies. Historical opinion
inclines to the view that Jackson did not have a sufficient case
against the Bank, which was a salutary institution, and certainly New
York commercial circles believed this. A majority of the voters were
with Jackson. Thurlow Weed told a friend that all of Webster’s
unanswerable arguments for the Bank would not win one-tenth the
ballots won by two sentences in Jackson’s veto message relating to
European stockholders and wicked special privilege. But it was not
the mass of poor voters on which a sixpenny journal like the Evening

Post relied for sustenance, but upon the professional and business
men.
Leggett’s cardinal conviction, expressed with a fire and energy
then unequaled in journalism, was that the great enemy of
democracy is monopoly. He hated and assailed all special
incorporations, for in those days they usually carried very special
privileges. Charters were obtained by wire-pulling and legislative
corruption, he said, to put a few men, as the ferry-owners in New
York City, in a position where they could gouge the public. He
wished banking placed upon such a basis that legislative
incorporation, exclusive in nature, would not be needed. He wanted
all franchises abolished, and would have forbidden any grant to a
company of the exclusive right to build a turnpike, canal, railroad, or
water-system between two given points. He objected even to the
incorporation of colleges and churches, quoting Adam Smith to show
that his views upon this head were less eccentric than they seemed.
Joint stock partnerships, he believed, would meet all business
necessities. The Legislature should “pass one general law, which will
allow any set of men, who choose to associate together for any
purpose, to form themselves into that convenient kind of partnership
known by the name of incorporation”; so that any group would be
permitted freely to form an insurance company, a bank, or a college
granting degrees. This, of course, would not exclude governmental
supervision. Although there were then grave abuses in monopolistic
incorporation, Leggett pushed his doctrine quite too far.
Equality was Leggett’s watchword. Those were the days when
State Legislatures were abolishing the last property restrictions upon
suffrage, and vitriolic was the wrath which the Evening Post poured
upon all who opposed the movement. The whole period it pictured
as a battle between men and money; between “silk-stocking,
morocco-booted, high-living, white-gloved gentlemen, to be tracked
only by the marks of their carriage wheels,” and hardworking
freemen. It objected to the theory that the state was an aggregation
of social strata, one above the other, and maintained that all useful
citizens should fare alike. Upon the word “useful,” in Carlylean vein,

it insisted, for they must be “producers.” Tariffs, internal
improvements at the expense of State and nation, and special
incorporations, were violations of equality; while the spirit of
speculation was condemned as creating a “paper aristocracy.” On
Dec. 6, 1834, Leggett vindicated the right of the laboring classes to
unite in trade unions, a right then widely denied. It is clear that his
ultra-democratic crusade was essentially an accompaniment of the
rise of a new industrialism. It had its affinities with the frontier
equalitarianism personified by Jackson, but its primary aim was the
protection of the toiling urban masses.
Leggett was upon firm ground when in 1835 he began to attack
the inflation, gambling, and business unsoundness of which every
day afforded fresh proofs. There was grotesque speculation in
Southern cotton lands, Maine timber, New York and Philadelphia real
estate, and the Western lands enhanced in value by the Erie Canal.
Capital was abundant, prices were rising, and every one seemed to
be getting rich. Most Northern States were undertaking costly
internal improvements with a reckless faith in the future. Leggett
looked with two-fold alarm and indignation upon the flood of paper
money then pouring from small banks all over the country.
Depreciated paper, in the first place, was used to lower the real
wages of mechanics; in the second place, he maintained that the
grant to State banks of the power to issue bills placed the measure
of value in the hands of speculators, to be extended or contracted
according to their own selfish wishes. On Dec. 24, 1834, just before
the Legislature met, the Evening Post published an appeal to Gov.
Marcy. The banknotes, it said, were driving specie out of circulation,
and causing a fever of reckless speculation. “Already our merchants
are importing largely. Stocks have risen in value, and land is selling
at extravagant rates. Everything begins to wear the highly-
prosperous aspect which foretokens commercial revulsion.” It
recommended that the State should forbid the issue of any
banknotes for less than $5.
“For these views,” Leggett wrote in March, “we have been
bitterly reviled.” On June 20, 1835, the Post published a striking

editorial entitled “Out of Debt,” in allusion to the current boast that
the nation owed no one. On the contrary, it stated, the people “are
plunging deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit of unredeemed
and irredeemable obligations.” It estimated that the six hundred
banks of the nation had issued paper in excess of $200,000,000.
“Who will pay the piper for all this political and speculative dancing?”
The panic of 1837 gave the answer.
By his ringing editorials, written day after day at white heat, a
really noble series, Leggett became the prophet of the Loco-Foco
party, which arose as a radical wing of the New York Democracy and
lived only two years, 1835–37. The origin of the name is a familiar
story. On Oct. 25, 1835, a meeting was held at Tammany Hall to
nominate a Congressman; the conservative Democrats named their
man in accordance with a prearranged plan, put out the lights, and
went home; the anti-monopoly radicals produced tallow candles
from their pockets, lit them with loco-foco matches, and nominated
a rival candidate. Leggett was not an active politician. But the Loco-
Foco mass-meetings of the two ensuing years, and their two State
conventions, enunciated the same equalitarian doctrines which
Leggett had begun to preach in 1834.
Not only those whose interests were affected by Leggett’s anti-
monopoly, anti-speculation, anti-aristocracy crusade, but many other
staid, moderate men, were horrified by it. He was charged with
Utopianism, agrarianism, Fanny-Wrightism, Jacobinism, and Jack
Cade-ism. His writings were said to set class against class, and to
threaten the nation with anarchy. Gov. William M. Marcy called
Leggett a “knave.” The advance of the Loco-Foco movement was
likened to the great fire and the great cholera plague of these years.
When Chief Justice Marshall died in the summer of 1835, Leggett
unsparingly assailed him and Hamilton as men who had tried “to
change the character of the government from popular to
monarchical,” and to destroy “the great principle of human liberty.”
Marshall was regarded by most propertied New Yorkers as the very
sheet-anchor of the Constitution, and for them to see him
denounced as a man who had always strengthened government at

the expense of the people was too much. Ex-Mayor Philip Hone was
handed that editorial on an Albany steamboat by Charles King, and
dropped the journal with the vehement ejaculation, “Infamous!”
“This is absolutely a species of impiety for which I want words to
express my abhorrence,” he entered in his diary.
For the courage, the eloquence, and the burning sincerity of
Leggett’s brief editorship we must heartily admire him; but it cannot
be denied that he made the Evening Post, for the first and last time
in its career, extravagant. He was public-spirited in all that he wrote;
his prophecy of a financial crash was shrewd; in defending the
abolitionists against persecution he was in advance of his
generation; and his comments upon many minor questions of the
day were sound. But the newspaper lacked balance, and its
influence was perhaps not so great as when Bryant had been at
hand to exercise a restraint upon Leggett. Such an impetuous man
could not spare his own health. Almost daily the Evening Post had
carried an editorial of from 1,000 to 2,000 words. On Oct. 15, 1835,
these utterances broke abruptly off, and it became known that
Leggett was gravely ill of a bilious fever. His place was temporarily
supplied by Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., and then by Charles Mason, an
able lawyer of the city. Bryant, loitering along the Rhine, had hastily
to be recalled.
Although Leggett had boasted the previous May that the Evening
Post had more subscribers than ever before and an undiminished
revenue from advertisements, its condition was rapidly declining
when the editor fell ill. For this there were a number of reasons.
Leggett’s radicalism had offended many sober mercantile
advertisers. He, like some other editors, had objected to blackening
the newspaper’s pages with the small conventional cuts of ships and
houses used to draw attention to advertisements, and had thereby
lost patronage. After the death of Michael Burnham, in the summer
of 1835, the business management had fallen to a scamp named
Hanna, who was generally drunk and always insolent. Warning
symptoms of the approaching panic were in the air, money becoming
so tight late in 1835 that reputable mercantile firms could not

discount their notes a year ahead for less than 30 per cent. Leggett,
finally, had offended valuable government friends. As he wrote
(Sept. 5, 1835):
We once expressed dislike ... of the undignified tone of
one of Mr. Woodberry’s official letters, as Secretary of the
Treasury, to Nicholas Biddle; and the Treasury advertisements
were thenceforward withheld. The Secretary of the Navy,
having acted with gross partiality in regard to a matter
recently tried by a naval court-martial, we had the temerity to
censure his conduct; and of course we could look for no
further countenance from that quarter. The Navy
Commissioners, being Post-Captains, ... have taken in high
dudgeon our inquiry into the oppression and tyranny
practised by their order; and “stop our advertisements!” is the
word of command established in such cases. When the
Evening Post exposed the duplicity of Samuel Swartwout, the
Collector of the Port, it at once lost all further support from
the Custom House. And now, having censured the doctrines
of Mr. Kendall and the practice of Mr. Gouverneur, the
postoffice advertising is withdrawn, of course.
II
While Bryant was in Europe, while the Evening Post in the spring
of 1835 was beginning its abrupt plunge toward financial disaster,
there occurred the simultaneous birth of the New York Herald and a
new journalism. Its immediate effect upon the Post was small; its
effect in the long run upon all newspapers was profound. It was to
not only a half-wrecked Evening Post, but to revolutionized
journalistic conditions, that Bryant returned from Heidelberg.
When Bryant and Leggett had taken full charge of the Evening
Post in 1829, the New York newspapers were a quarrelsome group

of sixpenny dailies, some political, some commercial, and in their
news features all slow, dull, and half-filled by modern standards. The
best-known morning journal was the Courier and Enquirer, of which
the editor and after a year the sole proprietor was James Watson
Webb, a rich, hot-tempered, exceedingly handsome young man of
twenty-seven, as mercurial as any Southerner, with a native taste for
fighting which had been developed by his West Point education and
some years in the army. Webb knew the use of the sword, pistol,
and cane decidedly better than that of the pen. The Evening Post
well characterized him as “a fussy, blustering, quarrelsome fellow.”
He repeatedly assaulted fellow-editors in the street; he repeatedly
journeyed to Washington or Albany to tweak somebody’s nose or
exchange shots; and while our envoy to Brazil he wanted to kill the
British Minister there. When in the early thirties Congressman Cilley
of Maine charged him with taking a bribe, and refused to accept
Webb’s challenge on the ground that the latter was no gentleman,
the impetuous editor persuaded his second to challenge and kill
Cilley. Ten years later Webb provoked Congressman Thomas F.
Marshall, of Kentucky, by coarse attacks, into fighting a duel, and
was sentenced to two years in the State prison. Greeley and many
others of note signed a petition for a pardon, which Bryant
indignantly opposed, but Gov. Seward granted it.
Chief among the Courier’s morning rivals was the Journal of
Commerce, founded in 1827 as an advocate of the introduction of
religion into business affairs, which went into the hands of David
Hale and Gerard Hallock after the abolitionist silk merchant, Tappan,
gave it up. It refused to advertise theaters and other amusement-
places, and was considered a little fanatical, but it showed
extraordinary enterprise for that day in news-gathering. In 1828 it
stationed a swift craft off Sandy Hook to intercept incoming ships
and bring the first European news up the harbor, and it subsequently
arranged a relay of fast horses from Philadelphia to bring the
Congressional debates a day in advance of its competitors. Webb
followed the example, extending the pony relay to Washington, and
spending from $15,000 to $20,000 a year on his clipper boats. Some

episodes of this rivalry are amusing. After the fall of Warsaw in the
Polish war, the Courier and Enquirer, to punish its competitors for
news-stealing, printed a small edition denying—upon the strength of
dispatches by the ship Ajax—the reported fall, and saw that copies
reached the doorstep of all morning journals. There was no such
arrival as the Ajax. Several newspapers reprinted the bogus news
without credit, the Journal of Commerce doing so in its country but
not its city edition; and great was the Courier’s sarcastic glee.
Though Webb was too explosive, too dissipated, and too slender
in ability to be a great editor, he had the money to obtain able
lieutenants. One was the Jewish journalist M. M. Noah, who had
edited the National Advocate in Coleman’s day, and written patriotic
dramas. In 1825, conceiving that the time had come for the
“restoration of the Jews,” Noah had appeared at Grand Island, near
Buffalo, in the insignia of one of the Hebrew monarchs, and
dedicated it as the future Jerusalem and capital of the Jewish nation,
calling it Ararat in honor of the original Noah. Disillusioned in this
project, Noah bought a share in the Courier in 1831, and in 1832
resigned it. Another worker on the Courier was Charles King; James
K. Paulding contributed; and in the forties it obtained Henry J.
Raymond’s services. But the most notable of its writers when the
year 1829 ended was a smart young Scotchman named James
Gordon Bennett, who, after knocking about from Boston to
Charleston in various employments—he had even essayed to open a
commercial school in New York—had made a shining success in 1828
as Washington correspondent for Webb.
Bennett, at this time highly studious, had examined in the
Congressional Library one day a copy of Horace Walpole’s letters,
and at once began to imitate them in his correspondence, making it
lively, full of gossip, and even vulgarly frank in descriptions of men of
the day. Some Washington ladies were said to be indebted to
Bennett’s glowing pen-pictures for their husbands. He was active in
other capacities for the journal—he reported the White-Crowinshield
murder trial in Salem, Mass., wrote editorials, squibs, and amusing
articles of sorts; and Webb showed how fundamentally lacking he

was in editorial discernment when he never let Bennett receive more
than $12 a week. In 1832 the homely, thrifty youngster from
Banffshire left the Courier.
Others among the eleven dailies were the Commercial
Advertiser, the Daily Advertiser, and the Star, the last-named being
the Post’s closest rival in evening circulation. Much attention was
attracted to the Daily Advertiser in 1835 by the Washington letters of
Erastus Brooks, a young man who wrote as brightly as Bennett but
more soberly. The following year he and his brother James founded
the Express, also a sixpenny paper, which succeeded against heavy
obstacles. Compared with London, the New York field was
overcrowded, and no journal had many subscribers; the Courier was
vastly proud when it printed 3,500 copies a day. Newspapers were
sold over the counter at the place of publication, and at a few hotels
and coffeehouses, but not on the streets; the first employment of
newsboys excited indignation, and was denounced as leading them
into vice. Advertising rates continued ridiculously small. The Evening
Post and its contemporaries still made the time-honored charge of
$40, with a subscription thrown in, for indefinite space; the first
insertion of a “square,” 8 to 16 lines, cost seventy-five cents, the
second and third twenty-five, and later insertions eighteen and
three-fourths cents. When the daily advertising of the Courier (apart
from yearly insertions) reached $55, that sum was thought
remarkable.
The harbinger of the new journalism was Benjamin H. Day, a
former compositor for the Evening Post, who in September, 1833,
began issuing the first penny newspaper with sufficient strength to
survive, the Sun. The idea of this innovation came from London,
which had possessed its Illustrated Penny Magazine since 1830, sold
in huge quantities in New York and other American cities; Bryant had
often praised it as an instrument for educating the poor. The Sun
began with a circulation of 300, which it rapidly increased, until after
the publication of the famous “moon hoax” in 1835 it boasted the
largest circulation in the world; three years later it distributed 38,000
copies daily. Not until the Civil War did it raise its price above one

cent, and it continued to be read by the poor almost exclusively. It
was not a political force, for it voiced no energetic editorial opinions,
nor was it a better purveyor of intelligence than its neighbors. It
showed no more enterprise in news-collecting, its correspondence
was inferior, and its appeal, apart from its cheapness and special
features, lay in its great volume of help-wanted advertisements.
The new journalism therefore had its real beginning when, on
May 6, 1835, in a cellar in Wall Street—not a basement, but a cellar
—Bennett established the Herald. He had fifteen years’ experience,
five hundred dollars, two chairs, and a dry-goods box. It also was a
penny paper. But its distinction rested upon the fact that it embodied
four original ideas in journalism. The first, and most important, was
the necessity of a thorough search for all the news. The second was
that fixed principles are dangerous, and that it is most profitable to
be on the winning side. Bennett felt with Hosea Biglow that
A merciful Providence fashioned us hollow
In order thet we might our princerples swallow.
The third was the value of editorial audacity—that is, of impudence,
mockery, and Mephistophelian persiflage—for Bennett had seen in
Boston that the saucy, indecorous Galaxy had been universally
abused, and universally read. The fourth idea embodied in the
Herald was the value of audacity in the news; of unconventionality,
vulgarity, and sensationalism.
Above all, Bennett gave New York city the news, with a
comprehensiveness, promptness, and accuracy till then undreamed
of. At first, compelled by poverty to do all the work himself, and
unable to hire his first reporter for more than three months, he
found the task hard. But within five weeks (June 13) he began
publishing a daily financial article, something that Bryant, Col. Stone,
Webb, and Hallock had not thought of, although thousands were just
as keenly interested in the exchange then as now. From one to four
every business afternoon, having labored in his cellar since five in
the morning, Bennett was making the rounds of the business offices,

collecting stock-tables and gossip. Local intelligence began to be
thoroughly gathered. Incomparably the best reports of the great fire
of December, 1835, are to be found in the Herald. He was the first
editor to open a bureau of foreign correspondence in Europe,
something that Bryant might well have done. He soon went the
Courier and Journal of Commerce one better by keeping his clipper
off Montauk Point, and running a special train the length of Long
Island with the European newspapers. A Herald reporter, notebook
in hand, began to be seen in precincts which had never known a
journalist. In 1839 Bennett made bold to report the proceedings of
church sects at their annual meetings, and though the
denominational officers were at first indignant, they became
mollified when they saw their names in print. Important trials were
for the first time followed in detail, and important public speeches
reproduced in their entirety. The interview was invented.
This “picture of the world” was served up with a sauce. Bennett
had no reverence and no taste. He announced his own forthcoming
marriage in 1840 in appalling headlines: “To the Readers of the
Herald—Declaration of Love—Caught at Last—Going to be Married—
New Movement in Civilization.” The Herald was not a year old before
it was ridiculing republican institutions, and in shocking terms
assailing the Catholic Church, the Pope, and the doctrine of
transubstantiation. When the Erie Railroad began its infamous early
career, Bryant attacked the schemes of the speculators with great
effect, and helped stop the first effort of the promoters to sack the
State treasury. The Herald’s comment was brief and characteristic:
“The New York and Erie Railroad is to break ground in a few days.
We hope they will break nothing else.” James Parton quotes one of
Bennett’s impudent paragraphs as representative. “Great trouble
among the Presbyterians just now. The question in dispute is,
whether or not a man can do anything toward saving his own soul.”
In even the few and brief book-notices this tone was maintained.
Reviewing an Annual Register which told him that there were 1,492
rogues in the State Prison, Bennett added: “And God only knows

how many out of prison, preying upon the community, in the shape
of gamblers, blacklegs, speculators, and politicians.”
By the prominence it gave to crimes of violence, divorces, and
seduction, and by its bold personal gossip, the Herald fully earned
the name of a “sensation journal.” Most of the other newspapers,
the magazines, and the Catholic and Protestant pulpits, denounced it
roundly. The Evening Post did not mention it by name, but in 1839
condemned “the nauseous practice which some of our journals have
imitated from the London press of adopting a light and profligate
tone in the daily reports of instances of crime, depravity, and
intemperance which fall under the eye of our municipal police,
making them the subject of elaborate witticisms, and spicing them
with gross allusions.” The Herald’s cynical contempt for consistent
principles increased the dislike with which it was viewed. In general
it was Hunker Democratic, and built up a large Southern following,
but it supported Harrison in 1840 and Taylor in 1848. The English
traveler, Edward Dicey, said that it had but two standing rules, one
to support the existing Administration, the other to attack the land of
Bennett’s birth. Dicey found that as late as Civil War times Bennett
was barred from society, and that when he went to stay at a
watering place near New York, the other guests at the hotel told the
landlord that he must choose between the editor’s patronage and
their own—and Bennett left.
But upon Bennett’s success was largely founded that of other
great morning newspapers of the next decades. “It would be worth
my while, sir, to give a million dollars,” said Henry J. Raymond, “if
the devil would come and tell me every evening, as he does Bennett,
what the people of New York would like to read about next
morning.” The Sun was given new life when it passed into the hands
of Moses Y. Beach in 1838. Greeley, with a capital of $1,000,
founded the Tribune in April, 1841, to meet the need for a penny
paper of Whig allegiance. The sixpenny journals, the Evening Post,
Commercial Advertiser, Courier, Journal of Commerce, and Express,
perforce learned much from the Herald about news-gathering. Years

later the Evening Post described the new spirit of enterprise which
had seized upon journalism by the early forties:
In those days expresses were run on election nights, and
in times of great excitement the Herald and Tribune raced
locomotive engines against each other in order to get the
earliest news; on one occasion, we remember, the sharp
reporter engaged for the Tribune “appropriating” an engine
which was waiting, under steam, for the use of the opposition
agent, and so beating the Herald at its own game.... Nor was
the competition confined to enterprises like these. For want of
the boundless facilities now afforded by the organized
enterprises of the newspaper offices, there were curious
experiments in unexpected directions; type was set on board
of North River steamboats by corps of printers, who had a
speech ready for the press in New York soon after its delivery
in Albany; carrier pigeons, carefully trained, flew from Halifax
or Boston with the latest news from Europe tucked under
their wings, and delivered their charge to their trainer in his
room near Wall Street; an adventurous person, known at the
time by the mysterious title of “the man in the glazed cap,”
made a voyage across the Atlantic in a common pilot boat
twenty years ago, secretly and with only three or four
companions, in the interest of two or three journals which
determined to “beat” the others in their arrangements for
obtaining early news from abroad.
Charles H. Levermore twenty years ago expressed regret in the
American Historical Review that the revolution in journalism had
been wrought by the unprincipled Bennett, and not by a man of
such education, taste, and high-mindedness as Bryant, whose name
would assure the standards of his newspaper. The best journalist
and worst editor in the country, Parton called Bennett, deploring the
fact that during the Civil War neither the Times, Tribune nor World
could reduce the “bad, good Herald,” which Lincoln read, to a

second rank. Parke Godwin, writing upon Bennett’s death in 1872 in
the Evening Post, refused him the title of a great journalist even,
stating that he was a great news-vender. “What he said from day to
day was said merely to produce a sensation, to raise a laugh, or to
confirm a vulgar prejudice; and so far as he had any influence at all
as a writer, it was one that debased and corrupted the community in
which his paper was read. He did more to vulgarize the tone of the
press in this country than any man ever before connected with it;
and the worst caricatures that the genius of Balzac, Dickens, and
Thackeray has given us of the low, slang-whanging, dissolute, and
unprincipled Bohemian, of the Lousteaus, Jefferson Bricks, and Capt.
Shandons of the journalistic profession, fail to depict what Bennett
actually was.” But his journal was read as no other had been. Men
concealed it when they saw a friend approaching it, but they bought
it and examined every column.
Bryant had neither the necessary inclinations nor aptitudes to
accomplish such a revolution. When he started home from Germany
he left his family there, meaning soon to return. Upon learning how
straitened was the condition of the Evening Post, he became
temporarily disheartened. Within two months he wrote Dana that he
earnestly hoped that “the day will come when I may retire without
danger of starving, and give myself to occupations that I like better.”
Near the end of the year he informed his brother John in Illinois that
he thought of removing thither with $3,000-$5,000 for a new home.
The best journalist is not made from a man who is thus lukewarm in
his work. Moreover, even had Bryant thrown himself heart and soul
into his calling, his literary tastes, his retiring temper, his keen sense
of dignity, his fame as a poet, would have prevented his breaking
new ground as Bennett did. He had no equal before Greeley, and no
superior later, in writing editorials, and he made the intellectual
influence of the Evening Post one of the strongest in the nation. He
was a great editor. But he could not have gone down into the busy
‘Change with his pencil as Bennett did; he could not have attended
meetings, visited theaters, and mingled with common men in offices
and on street corners, with Bennett’s constancy of purpose.

The Evening Post had as much news as some sixpenny rivals,
but it sadly needed the Herald’s stimulus. Its reports of the great fire
of 1835 were partly original, partly taken from the Express. When
the Astor House was opened the following summer, an exciting
event, it clipped its report from the Daily Advertiser—and even the
latter had but one meager paragraph. Probably the most striking
instance of its deficiency occurred in December, 1829, the month
that Chancellor Lansing disappeared from the city streets—the
greatest mystery of the kind in New York political history. The Post’s
only account was left by Lansing’s friends:
Notice.—On Saturday evening, the 12th instant,
Chancellor Lansing, of Albany, arrived in this city, and put up
at the City Hotel; he breakfasted and dined there. Shortly
after dinner he retired to his room and wrote for a short time,
and about the hour that the persons intending to go to
Albany usually leave the Hotel, he was observed to leave his
room. He has not been seen or heard of since that time. He
left his trunk, cane, etc., in his room. His friends in this city
have heard this morning from Albany that he has not
returned home.
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.
III
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:
We do not admit, until we have further examined the
question, that the law is as laid down by the Judge; but if it
be, the sooner such a tyrannical and wicked law is abrogated
the better. His doctrine has, it is true, a decision of the
Supreme Court in its favor; but the reasoning by which he
attempts to show the propriety of that decision is of the
weakest possible texture. The idea that arrangements and
combinations for certain rates of wages are injurious to trade
and commerce, is as absurd as the idea that the current
prices of the markets, which are always the result of
understandings and combinations, are injurious.
The next day the tailors were heavily fined. The Evening Post,
declaring this monstrous, showed its wicked absurdity in a series of
clear expositions. It had been made criminal for the working classes
to settle among themselves the price of their own property!
According to Judge Edwards, the owners of the packets, who had
agreed upon $140 as the standard fare to Liverpool, were criminals;
so were the editors, who had agreed upon $10 for a yearly
subscription; so were the butchers and bakers. The very price
current was evidence of conspiracy. Bryant recalled the fact that in

England the Tories themselves had expunged the laws against labor
unions from the statute books twelve years before. “Can anything be
imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and
justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix,
by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have
forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of
labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him
to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.”
Other newspapers, of which the Journal of Commerce and the
American were the most prominent, took the side of Judge Edwards.
For a time the excitement was intense. A mass-meeting of
mechanics, which the Evening Post declared the largest ever seen in
the city, was held in City Hall Park on the evening of June 13; and
Bryant continued his editorials at intervals for a month.

CHAPTER SEVEN
THE RISE OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION; THE
MEXICAN WAR
Bryant’s real editorial career dates from 1836, for all that had
preceded was mere preparation. He quickly mastered his first
discouragement, and throwing aside the idea of becoming an Illinois
farmer or lawyer, devoted himself to the Evening Post as the work,
poetry apart, of his life. We catch a new and determined note in his
letters by 1837, when he was laboring like a born journalist at his
desk from seven to four daily, and, says his assistant, was so
impatient of interruption that he often seemed irascible. He was so
fully occupied, he wrote Dana in February, “that if there is anything
of the Pegasus in me, I am too much exhausted to use my wings.”
In an unpublished note to his wife, who had returned in the fall of
1836, he declared: “I have enough to do, both with the business
part of the paper and the management of it as editor, to keep me
constantly busy. I must see that the Evening Post does not suffer by
these hard times, and I must take that part in the great
controversies now going on which is expected of it.”
He still longed for literary leisure. But he courageously stuck to
his post, writing Dana in June, 1838, that his editorial labors were as
heavy as he could endure with a proper regard to his health, and
that he managed to maintain his strength only by the greatest
simplicity of diet, renouncing tea, coffee, and animal food, and by
frequent walks of a half day to two days in the country. By this date,

he said, he could look back rejoicing that he had never yielded to
the temptation of giving up the newspaper.
Leggett did not return. He had borrowed so much of Mrs.
Coleman’s part of the dividend in the last year of his connection with
the paper that she compelled him, by legal steps, to surrender his
third share of the Evening Post to her; and Bryant would not give
him that freedom for vehement writing which he wished. In
December, 1836, he established the Plaindealer, a short-lived weekly
to which the Evening Post made many complimentary references.
But his health continued bad, and on May 29, 1839, just after
President Van Buren had offered him the post of confidential agent
in Central America in the belief that a sea voyage would benefit him,
he died.
His place was supplied in part by chance. During the summer of
1836 Parke Godwin, a briefless barrister of only twenty, a graduate
of Princeton, was compelled to remove to a cheaper boarding-house,
and went to one at 316 Fourth Street, kept by a native of Great
Barrington, Mass. He was introduced one evening to a newcomer, a
middle-aged man of medium height, spare figure, and clean-shaven,
severe face. His gentle manner, pure English, and musical voice were
as distinctive as his large head and bright eyes. “A certain air of
abstractedness made you set him down as a scholar whose thoughts
were wandering away to his books; and yet the deep lines about his
mouth told of struggle either with himself or with the world. No one
would have supposed that there was any fun in him, but, when a
lively turn was given to some remark, the upper part of his face,
particularly the eyes, gleamed with a singular radiance, and a short,
quick, staccato, but hearty laugh acknowledged the humorous
perception.” On public affairs this stranger spoke with keen insight
and great decision. That evening Godwin was told that he was the
poet Bryant. For some months, till after Mrs. Bryant’s return, the two
were thrown much together, without increasing their acquaintance.
Bryant’s greeting to strangers was chilly, he never prolonged a
conversation, he was fond of solitary walks, and he spent his
evenings alone in his room. Godwin was therefore much surprised

when one day the editor remarked: “My assistant, Mr. Ulshoeffer, is
going to Cuba for his health; how would you like to take his place?”
The young lawyer, after demurring that he had had no experience,
went to try it—and stayed, with intermissions, more than forty years.
“Every editorial of Bryant’s opens with a stale joke and closes
with a fresh lie,” growled a Whig in these years. It was part of the
change from Leggett’s slashing directness to Bryant’s suavity that
the latter prefaced most political articles with an apposite illustration
drawn from his wide reading. When the Albany Journal, Thurlow
Weed’s newspaper, was arguing the self-evident proposition that the
State should not buy the Ithaca & Oswego Railway, he told the story
of the perspiring attorney who was interrupted by the judge in a
long harangue: “Brother Plowden, why do you labor so? The Court is
with you.” The effrontery of a Whig politician caught in a bit of
rascality inspired an editorial which opened with the grave plea of a
thievish Indian at the bar: “Yes, I stole the powder horn, but it is
white man’s law that you must prove it.” Again, with more dignity,
Bryant began an article on the Bank with a reference to Virgil’s
episode of Nisus and Euryalus.
In 1839 Webster’s friends professed great indignation because
the orator had been called a “myrmidon.” The myrmidons, Bryant
remarked, were soldiers who fought under Achilles at Troy, and the
opprobrium of being called one was much that of being called a
hussar or lancer. The wrath of Webster’s defenders seemed to him
like Dame Quickly’s:
Falstaff: “Go to, you are a woman, go.”
Hostess: “Who, I? I defy thee, I was never called so in
mine own house before.”
But, he added, there was one important difference between Webster
and a myrmidon. He had never heard of the high-tariff friends of a
myrmidon making up a purse of $65,000 for services well done.
Bryant was always master of a grave humor. When another journal

assailed him, he wrote: “There is an honest shoemaker living on the
Mergellina, at Naples, on the right hand as you go towards Pozzioli,
whose little dog comes out every morning and barks at Vesuvius.”
Bryant had need of this persuasive tact, for in 1836 the following
of the Evening Post consisted chiefly of workmen, who could not buy
it, and of the young enthusiasts who polled a city vote of only 2,712
that fall for the Loco-Foco ticket. The policy was not changed. The
paper continued to attack special banking incorporations, and in
1838 had the satisfaction of seeing a general State banking law
passed. It kept up its fire against the judicial doctrine that trade
unions were conspiracies against trade, and saw it rapidly
disintegrate and vanish. During 1837 it was able to point to the
panic as an exact fulfillment of its predictions. By 1840 it was clear
that it had said not a word too much when it attacked the craze for
State internal improvements as not only making for political
corruption and favoritism between localities, but as leading to
financial ruin. Gov. Seward that year declared that New York had
been misled into a number of impractical and profitless projects,
Gov. Grayson of Maryland called for heavy direct taxes as the only
means of averting disgraceful bankruptcy, and Gov. Porter, of
Pennsylvania, said that his State had been loaded with a multitude
of undertakings that it could neither prosecute, sell, nor abandon.
This proved its old contention, said the Post, that “the moment we
admit that the Legislature may engage in local enterprises, it is beset
at once by swarms of schemers.” In 1837 Bryant asked for the
repeal of the usury laws, but in this he was not years, but
generations, ahead of his time.
As a personal friend of Van Buren, Bryant had been among the
first to applaud the movement for his nomination, and he warmly
championed him throughout the campaign of 1836. At the South the
Evening Post was for some time declared to be Little Van’s chosen
organ for addressing the public, much to the President’s
embarrassment; for the Post’s views on the growing anti-slavery
movement were not his. Van Buren’s greatest measure, the sub-
treasury plan, was stubbornly opposed by the bankers and most

other representatives of capital in New York. It ended the
distribution of national moneys among the State banks, where
Federal funds had been kept since 1833, and it was a terrible blow
to them. The Evening Post had consistently stood for a divorce of
the government and the banks, and it supported the sub-treasury
scheme through all its vicissitudes. It had always opposed the
division of the surplus revenue among the States, and in applauding
Van Buren’s determination to stop it the paper again aroused the
wrath of the business community in New York. But upon certain
other issues it crossed swords with the President.
II
Bryant, like Ellery Channing, J. Q. Adams, Whittier, Wendell
Phillips, and Salmon P. Chase, took up the fight for free speech and
found that it rapidly led him into the battle for free soil. In January,
1836, Ex-President Adams began in the House of Representatives his
heroic contest with the Southerners for the unchecked reception of
abolitionist petitions there, and in May the “gag” resolution against
these petitions was passed. Bryant’s indignation was scorching. He
wrote upon the speech of a New York Senator (April 21):
Mr. Tallmadge has done well in vindicating the right of
individuals to address Congress on any matter within its
province.... This is something, at a time when the Governor of
one State demands of another that free discussion on a
particular subject shall be made a crime by law, and when a
Senator of the Republic, and a pretended champion of liberty,
rises in his place and proposes a censorship of the press more
servile, more tyrannical, more arbitrary, than subsists in any
other country. It is a prudent counsel also that Mr. Tallmadge
gives to the South—to beware of increasing the zeal, of
swelling the ranks and multiplying the friends, of the

Abolitionists by attempting to exclude them from the common
rights of citizens.... Yet it seems to us that Mr. Tallmadge ...
might have gone a little further. It seems to us that ... he
should have protested with somewhat more energy and zeal
against the attempt to shackle the expression of opinion. It is
no time to use honeyed words when the liberty of speech is
endangered.... If the tyrannical doctrines and measures of Mr.
Calhoun can be carried into effect, there is an end to liberty in
this country; but carried into effect they cannot be. It is too
late an age to copy the policy of Henry VIII; we lie too far in
the occident to imitate the despotic rule of Austria. The spirit
of our people has been too long accustomed to freedom to
bear the restraint which is sought to be put upon it.
Discussion will be like the Greek fire, which blazed the fiercer
for the water thrown upon it; and if the stake be set and the
faggots ready, there will be candidates for martyrdom.
When in August of this year a meeting in Cincinnati resolved to
silence J. G. Birney’s abolitionist press by violence, the Evening Post
used similar words. No tyranny in any part of the world was more
absolute or frightful than such mob tyranny. “So far as we are
concerned, we are resolved that this despotism shall neither be
submitted to nor encouraged.... We are resolved that the subject of
slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject for discussion,
and argument, and declamation, as the difference between
whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians and
Calvinists.” This was at a time when the right of Abolitionists to
continue their agitation was denied from some of the most influential
New York pulpits, when the great majority of citizens had no
tolerance for them, and when newspapers like Bennett’s Herald and
Hallock’s Journal of Commerce, both pro-slavery, gave them nothing
but contempt and denunciation. When Elijah P. Lovejoy was
murdered at Alton, Ill., by a mob, there were influential New Yorkers
who believed that he had received his deserts, but Bryant cried out
in horror. Without free tongues and free pens, the nation would fall

into despotism or anarchy. “We approve, then, we applaud—we
would consecrate, if we could, to universal honor—the conduct of
those who bled in this gallant defense of the freedom of the press.
Whether they erred or not in their opinions, they did not err in the
conviction of their right, as citizens of a democratic State, to express
them; nor did they err in defending their rights with an obstinacy
which yielded only to death.”
Before 1840 Bryant had enrolled himself among those who held
that the spread of slavery must be stopped. President Van Buren had
pledged himself to veto any bill for emancipating the slaves in the
District of Columbia. Although the plan of freeing the District slaves
was abominated by most people in New York city, and even J. Q.
Adams would not vote in favor of it in 1836, the Evening Post
attacked and derided Van Buren’s pledge. When this reform was
included in the Compromise of 1850, it boasted that New Yorkers
had been converted to an advocacy of it as overwhelming as their
opposition a dozen years earlier. During 1839 a considerable stir was
produced in the city by the Armistad affair. A number of Africans sold
as slaves in Cuba being transported from Havana to Principe on the
schooner Armistad, rose, took possession of the craft, and compelled
those of the crew whom they had not killed to steer the vessel, as
they believed, to Africa. It was brought into Long Island Sound
instead, and the negroes were seized as criminals. Bryant asked his
friend Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., to investigate the law, and the latter
came to the conclusion, which he expounded at length in the
Evening Post, that the blacks could not be held. They had gained
their freedom, he said, and were heroes and not malefactors.
Secretary of State Forsythe and Attorney-General Grundy did all they
could to vindicate the claim of the Spanish Minister to the negroes,
but the courts upheld Sedgwick’s view of the issue, and they were
liberated.
Every conscientious Democratic journal of the North was faced
by a common embarrassment in the decade 1840–1850, when a
dominance over the Democratic party was steadily established by
advocates of the extension of slavery. If, like the Herald or Journal of

Commerce or Express, they were friendly to the South in defiance of
conscience, they felt no difficulty. But the Evening Post believed
slavery a curse. What could it do when Polk was nominated in 1844
by its own party upon a platform favorable to this vicious institution,
and when the Democratic leaders carried the nation into the Mexican
War with the effect, if not the calculated purpose, of adding to the
slaveowners’ domain? Bryant did not wish to abandon the great
party which stood for low tariff, opposition to the squandering of
public money on internal improvements, and a decisive separation
between the government and banking. He could only do in 1844
what Greeley and the Tribune did in 1848, when Taylor, whom the
Tribune distrusted, was nominated by the Whigs; stick to his party,
reconcile his feelings as best he could with his party allegiance, and
labor to improve the party from within.
The picturesque log-cabin campaign of 1840 offered no
perplexities to the Evening Post. It still looked upon President Van
Buren with satisfaction, and wished him reëlected. Like its opponent
the Tribune, it was glad that Harrison had beaten Henry Clay for the
Whig nomination, but that was in no degree because it respected
Harrison. It regarded the retired farmer and Indian fighter of North
Bend, Ohio, as all Democratic organs regarded him, a nonentity.
What title had this feeble villager of nearly seventy, whose last public
office had been the clerkship of a county court, to the Presidency?
No one has ever thought Harrison a great statesman, and any undue
severity on the part of the Evening Post may be attributed to the
warmth of the campaign. It called him “a silly and conceited old man
whose irregularities of life have enfeebled his originally feeble
faculties, and who is as helpless in the hands of his party as the idols
of a savage tribe we have somewhere read of, who are flogged
when they do not listen to the prayers of their people for rain.” At
the beginning of March it declared that Harrison might be elected,
but that the most sinister figure in his party would direct his policies;
“Harrison may be the nominal chief magistrate, but Clay will be the
Charles Martel, the Mayor of the Palace.”

The hard-cider, coonskin-cap, log-cabin enthusiasm sickened the
Evening Post. The plan, commented Bryant on the Harrison songs,
“is to cut us to pieces with A sharp, to lay us prostrate with G flat, to
hunt us down with fugues, overrun us with choruses, and bring in
Harrison with a grand diapason.” “The accomplishment of drinking
hard cider, possessed by one of the candidates for the Presidency,”
he later wrote, was the safest the Whigs could urge. “If they were to
talk now of his talents, of his opinions, of his public virtues, and of
the other qualifications which are commonly supposed to fit a citizen
of our republic for the office of its chief magistrate, they would find
themselves much embarrassed.” The Whigs, counting upon the
reflex of the panic of 1837, and the unpopularity of Van Buren, to
elect Harrison, had taken care to commit themselves to no platform.
The Evening Post therefore attributed to them all the evil policies
they had ever espoused. Was it worth while to shoulder the burden
of a high tariff and a costly internal improvement system, to restore
the corrupt union of bank and state, to pay the enormous State
debts out of the national treasury, and to strengthen Federal power
at the expense of the States, all for the sake of having a President
who quaffed hard cider?
During the campaign it was hinted by the Evening Post that if
chosen, Harrison could not live to the end of his official term. It
recorded the fact that when he arrived in Washington, the fatigue of
receiving his friends was “so great that he was obliged to forego the
usual ceremony of shaking hands with them.” A month later the
paper was commenting upon the ghastly contrast between the
festivities, pageants, and congratulations which attended his
inauguration, and the solemnity and gloom as the plumed hearse
carried his body, behind six white horses, to the Congressional
burying ground. Because Bryant refused to write panegryrically of
the dead President, though he did write respectfully, and because he
refrained from using heavy black column rules for mourning, a
practice which he called “typographical foppery,” he was violently
assailed by the Whig press as a “vampire” and “ghoul.”

Bryant and Parke Godwin naturally hoped for the renomination
of Van Buren in 1844, believing that the battle unfairly won by the
Whigs in 1840 ought to be fought again on the same field, and with
the same well-tried Democratic leader. Bryant told the story of the
Santa Fé hunter who used to pat his rifle, carried for forty years,
saying: “I believe in it. I know that whenever I fire there is meat.” In
midsummer of 1843 he was confident that victory was already
assured, the political reaction since 1841 being “without a parallel in
the history of the peaceful conduct of affairs in this country.” The
Evening Post welcomed the “black tariff” of 1842, the work of the
Whig protectionists, as contributing magnificently to this reaction. It
was like an overdose of poison; instead of accomplishing its purpose,
it would act as an emetic and be rejected at once. But between that
date and Polk’s nomination in May, 1844, there arose the questions
of Texas and slavery, offering all editors of Bryant’s views the most
distressing dilemma.
From a very early date the Evening Post had opposed the
annexation of Texas, except under circumstances that would fully
satisfy Mexico on one hand, and free soil sentiment on the other. On
June 17, 1836, when Texas had just declared its freedom, Bryant
asserted that if the United States, under the circumstances, even
acknowledged Texan independence, “our government would lose its
character for justice and magnanimity with the whole world, and
would deserve to be classed with those spoilers of nations whose
example we are taught as republicans to detest.” He frequently
spoke with satisfaction of the growth of the little republic, noting in
1843 that it had 80,000 people. But when it became evident early
the next year that President Tyler was determined to effect its
annexation, the newspaper was alarmed. The first rumor that
Secretary of State Calhoun had negotiated a secret treaty with
Texas, reaching New York in March, threw it into a fever of
indignation. Its chief apprehension arose from the fact that the
treaty was said to permit slavery in all parts of the new territory save
a small corner to which it was uncertain the United States would

have any title. This led the Evening Post to call the project “unjust,
impolitic, and hostile to the freedom of the human race.”
The actual treaty, sent to the Senate on April 22 by President
Tyler, was assailed with a variety of arguments, but the Evening Post
harped chiefly upon the anti-slavery objection. It would inevitably
involve the United States in war with Mexico, and cost a huge sum in
men and money. The Senate having been elected at a time when no
one was thinking of the Texan question, it would be wicked to decide
so important an issue affirmatively; there must be some form of
national referendum. But above all, the treaty was evil because it
would increase the slave population of the nation and bulwark this
monstrous Southern institution. It would “keep alive a war more
formidable than any to which we are exposed from Great Britain or
any other foreign power—we mean the dissensions between the
northern and southern regions of the Union. The cause of these
dissensions, if the territory of the republic be not enlarged, is
gradually losing strength and visibly tending to its extinction, but by
the admission of Texas it will be reinforced and perpetuated.”
Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., writing under the pen-name “Veto,” was
hurriedly impressed into service for a series of articles—admirable
articles, too.
The treaty was defeated in the Senate; and then ensued the
Presidential campaign of 1844, hinging upon it—the first campaign
directly to involve the slavery question.
When the Democratic Convention met at Baltimore on May 27,
1844, it was the fervent hope of the Evening Post and whole
northern wing of the party that it would nominate Van Buren. He
had publicly declared against immediate annexation of Texas,
asserting that it would look like territory-grabbing and intimating
that, as the Post had repeatedly said, colossal jobbery by land-
speculators was involved. The South was determined that he should
not be named. The balloting for a nominee was therefore a decision
whether Democracy should stand for or against the extension of
slave territory; and because the Southerners were the more

aggressive, they won. Van Buren was defeated by the revival of a
rule requiring a two-thirds majority, his vote steadily declining, and
Polk, a comparatively unknown slave-holder, was named. On May 8
Bryant had said editorially that “the party cannot be rallied, however
the politicians may exert themselves,” in favor of an annexationist
Southerner. He repeated this warning regarding the candidate on the
eve of the convention; “if he declares himself for the annexation of
Texas, he will encounter the determined opposition” of the North. It
was with unconcealed dismay that the Evening Post chronicled Polk’s
nomination. He was a man of handsome talents, manly character,
and many sound views, it said, “but like most Southern politicians, is
deplorably wrong on the Texas question.”
Should the Evening Post bolt? For a time Bryant considered
doing so. But it simply could not accept Clay, the Whig candidate;
and admitting that “the fiery and imperious South overrides and
silences the North in matters of opinion,” Bryant prepared to make
the best of a wretched situation. He explained his stand by saying
that on the one hand, he could not possibly assist Clay to win the
Presidency and restore the United States Bank; on the other, he did
not believe annexation inevitable under Polk. The Democratic
platform had declared for annexation “at the earliest practicable
moment”; and by emphasizing the word “practicable,” and arguing
that it involved all kinds of delays, and the establishment of national
good faith precedent to the step, the newspaper tried to argue that
it was at least distant.
Bryant’s position was made more tenable when, midway in the
campaign, Clay wrote his famous and fatal “Raleigh letter,” in which
he said that if annexation could be accomplished without dishonor,
war, or injustice, he would be glad to see it. This meant, as
thousands of Whigs felt when they stayed from the polls on election
day, that there was perhaps little to choose between the candidates.
Yet the Post never quite surrendered its independence, and tried
throughout the summer to lead a movement within the party for a
proper solution of the Texas question. There were enemies to

annexation in Texas itself, it believed; there were enemies
throughout the South, even in South Carolina, and the initial
enthusiasm for it was beginning to cool. If the Northern Democrats
asserted themselves forcibly against it as a party measure, “the day
of this scheme, we are fully assured, will soon be over.” In pursuance
of this policy, Bryant, Theodore Sedgwick, David Dudley Field, and
three other New Yorkers drew up a confidential circular to a number
of Democrats of like views, proposing a joint manifesto in opposition
to annexation, and a concerted effort to elect anti-annexationist
Congressmen. This manifesto appeared in the Evening Post of Aug.
20, and made a considerable impression in New York. But such
efforts were in vain. Polk’s election made the entrance of Texas into
the Union a certainty, and it was indeed authorized by a joint
resolution of Congress the day before he took office. Bryant must
have questioned that March whether his newspaper, which had so
decisively lost its fight, should not have taken the side of the hated
Clay.
The final protests against annexation did not commit the Post to
any opposition to the Mexican War. That conflict did not begin for
more than two years, until April, 1846; and the events of the interim
convinced Bryant that Mexico rather than America was responsible
for it. Polk acted pacifically, and the poet’s friend, Bancroft, then
Secretary of the Navy, wrote him that “we were driven reluctantly to
war.” Mexico had, the Evening Post believed, committed numberless
aggressions upon American interests, while after severing diplomatic
relations, she would not renew them except on impossible terms.
The journal affirmed its belief (May 13, 1846) in “the inconsistency
of a war of invasion and conquest with the character of our
government and the ends for which Providence has manifestly raised
up our republic.” It said then and when peace had come that the
nation would yet hold to a fearful responsibility the Southerners who
had precipitated the annexation and the war for the perpetuation of
slavery. But it did not think that the weak and violent Mexican
government had a right to the perpetual allegiance of Texans, or to
menace our territory after the annexation. Whereas every one of

sense had opposed a war with England over the Oregon question,
Bryant wrote, only one or two newspapers were attacking this
collision. Writing that “we approve of such demonstrations of vigor
as shall convince Mexico that we are in earnest,” the editor favored a
resolute prosecution of the struggle.
III
While the Evening Post was establishing a militant free-soil
position, its news features were improving. The office force
remained pitifully small. In addition to Bryant, his assistant, Parke
Godwin, and a reporter, at the end of 1843 room was made for a
commercial editor, who supplied information on the markets, wrote
upon business affairs, and supervised the marine intelligence; these
four made up the staff. The paper was enlarged in 1840, going from
seven columns to eight and lengthening its page, while in 1842
commenced the issuance of a weekly Evening Post, in addition to
the semi-weekly—a profitable innovation. It was wonderful that so
few men could do so much. In the fact that they did we have the
explanation of a little note Mrs. Bryant wrote to Mrs. William Ware,
wife of the author of “Zenobia,” in the late thirties: “Mr. Bryant has
gone to his office. You cannot think how distressed I am about his
working so hard. He gets up as soon as it is light, takes a mouthful
to eat,—it cannot be called a breakfast, for it is often only what the
Germans call a ‘stick of bread’; occasionally the milkman comes in
season for him to get some bread and milk. As yet, his health is
good, but I fear that his constitution is not strong enough for such
intense labor.” Occasionally a little help was lent by outsiders—James
K. Paulding as well as Sedgwick contributed editorials early in the
forties; but it was little.
Year by year the local news improved. Bryant had at first
objected to reports of criminal cases on moral grounds, but he now
took the sensible view that to have the light let in upon evil assisted

in combating it. As early as 1836 he had the famous murder of
Helen Jewett covered in detail. Another of his early prejudices was
against the reporting of lectures by which many literary men of the
day made part of their living, on the ground that if the report was
faithful, it tended to prevent a repetition of the lecture, but even
while he voiced this opinion, in 1841, he was giving a comprehensive
summary of Emerson’s addresses. Beginning in 1845, the Evening
Post published a daily column with the heading, “City Intelligence,”
which was often a queer mélange of news and editorial comment,
for it discussed urgent municipal needs—the improvement of the
Tombs, the adoption of mechanical street sweepers, the substitution
of a paid fire department for the volunteer system, and so on. The
headings for a typical Monday in 1848 run thus:
Confusion Among the Judges (Six courts met at 10 a. m.,
at City Hall, with only four rooms among them).
Foul Affair at Sea (The brig Colonel Taylor arrives, and
reports that its mate at sea threw a sailor overboard).
Removal of the Telegraph Offices (Albany and Buffalo
Company removes to 16 Wall Street).
Case of Mme. Restel (Developments in a murder case).
Fires—A Child Burnt to Death (The week-end
conflagrations totalled eleven, a modest list. At one in Leroy
Street nine houses had been burnt; at one in Thirteenth
Street a child and six horses had been killed).
City Statistics (The last year saw 1,823 new buildings
erected; the city had 327 licensed omnibuses, 3,780 taverns
and saloons, 168 junkshops, and 681 charcoal peddlers).
And so the column continued through police news, theater puffs,
and notices of academy commencements, until it ended just above
an advertisement of Sands’s Sarsaparilla and the Balsam of Wild
Cherry, glowingly recommended by testimonials.

But the chief improvement in the news was wrought by special
correspondence, which early in the forties attained a surprising
extent and finish. By various means, including advertising for
correspondents, Bryant built up a staff of contributors that covered
every part of the nation. In 1841–2 each week during the sessions
of Congress brought letters from two men, “Z” and “Very,” while
during the legislative session there were two Albany correspondents,
“L” and “Publius.” Every important State capital north of Richmond
had its contributor. In the first week of 1842, for example, appeared
letters from Springfield, Ill., Providence, R. I., and Detroit, Mich. A
Paris correspondent wrote regularly over the initials “A. V.,” and a
London correspondent signed much more frequent articles “O. P. Q.”
This London correspondence ran to great length. Into one typical
article, printed on March 14, 1842, “O. P. Q.” crowded an account of
the royal christening, at which the future Edward VII “was got back
to the Castle without squalling”; the Dublin elections; Macready’s
experiment at Drury Lane Theater, where for the first time the pit
seats had been “provided with backs, and, together with the boxes,
numbered, and a ticket given to the occupant, who thus keeps his
seat throughout the evening”; of Adelaide Kemble’s singing at
Covent Garden; of Douglas Jerrold’s new comedy, “Prisoners of
War”; and of the new books, including Mrs. Trollope’s “Blue Belles of
England”; the whole concluding with some gossip about a ruler in
whom Americans were more interested than in President Tyler:
It is said that the Queen still continues staunch Whig;
that she is civil, but laconic, to the Tories; and that pleasant
old Lord Melbourne’s easy chair, in which he used to take his
after-dinner nap when he dined at the palace, is still kept for
his use alone, being wheeled out of the closet when he dines
there, and wheeled back when he takes his departure.
Her majesty and her husband appear to go on as
comfortably as if they lived in a cottage (ornée) untroubled
with crowns and royal christenings. Prince Albert is a good

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