ABSTRACT
In the Advertisers’ Gazette for December, 1866, one may read a paragraph stating that “Charles H. Sweetser, founder and for some time manager of the Round Table, has retired from the ownership and editorship in order that he may at once carry out his favorite idea of a cheap evening paper in New York.” That was the origin of the New York Mail. The paper he started was called the Gazette. And what an ideal paper it was—a tea table paper—clean, literary, well written, brisk, sharp, thoroughly likable and good; but it requires money to found a new paper in New York City, and Sweetser and the brother associated with him had but little. There was a man in the counting room of the Evening Post, a prudent, saving, red-haired Scotchman named Johnson, who had accumulated some capital, and he, after a time, acquired an interest in the Gazette. He was a man who disliked putting out a dollar without seeing a pretty certain chance of getting back more than a dollar next day, and his economies made the Sweetsers so wild that they could not put up with the condition they found themselves in, so one day there appeared on the streets a new paper called the Mail, that was the very counterpart of the Gazette, and the Sweetsers were managing it. They took to it the features that had gained the Gazette the good will of many people, and it seemed likely to prosper. The Gazette meantime quickly lost what hold on the community it had obtained and soon ceased to appear. I do not know what became of Johnson. Probably his savings were dissipated in the venture. The Mail seemed to prosper, but it had no Associated Press franchise, and after James and Erastus Brooks died there was a consolidation, and we had the Mail and Express. Sweetser did not live long, but the paper still appears, and there are many people who think 432highly of it. In later times the name of the Express was dropped from the heading, and in name and character the paper is something like what the Sweetser Brothers hoped to make it, only there is nothing of the old-time snap in it.
