At that time a partisan supporter of newly elected President Andrew Jackson, Webb ran his newspaper in the interest of what was becoming the Democratic Party.

[1][2] By the 1830s, Bennett's and Webb's Courier and Enquirer had developed a crack reportorial system for gathering news from New York-based ships and from Washington, D.C.

In a key sign of this split, in 1832 associate editor Bennett left the Courier and Enquirer to start his own Democratic paper, the New York Herald.

"[1] Democrats considered Webb to be a disloyal traitor to their side, and responded to the Courier and Enquirer's news coverage with great bitterness.

Its pages tended to be filled with the texts of letters written on paper and physically delivered to the editor from distant locations (from where we get our word for a newspaper reporter, "correspondent"), and partisan editorials.

Soon the Morse lines reached New York City, and Webb's competitors, headed by rival Whig editor Horace Greeley, proved to be more adept in adapting to the new technology and publishing daily newspapers filled with fresh news.

Webb grew increasingly uninterested in his journalistic duties, and began, starting in 1849, to trawl for appointment as a United States ambassador or to some other post that would grant him the social status he wanted.

While this kind of coverage was little problem for the newspaper in the 1830s and 1840s, the growth of free soil and even abolitionist sentiment throughout the Northern states in the 1850s made the Courier and Enquirer look archaic.

[2] The Courier and Enquirer's close coverage of three U.S. Senate opponents of Andrew Jackson, namely Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, is credited with enlarging the reputation of these three men into key figures of the Second Party System or antebellum period of U.S. history, and eventually to their reputation as members of the Great Triumvirate.