While The Transcript could not be called an anti-slavery paper, it did give free access to its editorial columns to William Lloyd Garrison, then a young man, who wrote a great deal over the signature of W. L. G. In 1847 Eppes Sargent, a well-known poet and author, became the editor and continued until 1853, when Daniel M. Haskell sat in the editorial chair until 1874. During the twenty-odd years that Mr. Haskell was editor, he was assisted by such men of literary excellence as E. P. Whipple, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, etc. Since Mr. Haskell's death in 1874, various men have been editors of The Transcript, and each of these has kept the paper up to the high aims of independent journalism which was the keynote of its beginning.
FIRST DAILIES SOLD FOR CENT
Possibly the first daily paper which sold for a penny was The Cent, which started in Philadelphia the same year that The Daily Evening Transcript was established in Boston. The Cent has long been a lost newspaper coin of which little is known save that its circulation was small and its life was short. Its publisher, however, was Dr. Christopher Columbus Conwell, who died in 1832.
By mere coincidence the man who first conceived the idea of publishing a penny paper in New York was also a physician, Dr. Horatio David Shepard. As he walked through the Bowery and noticed how readily candy, peanuts, and other trinkets, which sold for a cent, were passed over the counter, the thought occurred to him that a newspaper sold at the same price would be successful. Enthused with the idea he went to several printers and tried to get them interested in his proposition to start a penny newspaper. At first he was unsuccessful, but finally persuaded Horace Greeley to join him in bringing out such a paper. Greeley, however, insisted that the price was too sudden a reduction from the six pennies ordinarily charged for a newspaper and insisted on doubling the proposed price. With a capital of only two hundred dollars and with a credit which was scarcely good for forty dollars' worth of type, The Morning Post started on January 1, 1833, as a two-cent paper with Dr. Shepard, Horace Greeley, and Francis W. Story as its printers and pub-
