[citation needed] During the American Civil War, Bennett's policy, as expressed by the newspaper, was to staunchly support the Democratic Party.

During the mid-19th century, the New York Herald adopted a proslavery stance, with Bennett arguing that the Compromise of 1850 would lead to "but little anxiety entertained in relation to the question of slavery, the public mind will be so fatigued that it will be disinclined to think of the matter any further.

[citation needed] Its ability to entertain the public with timely daily news made it the leading circulation paper of its period.

[16] Publisher Bennett Jr. referred to the paper as a "village publication" for the circle of people in Paris who were interested in international news.

[17] Indeed, during its first decades of publication, a feature of the paper was a list of every American known to be in Paris at the time, culled from inspections of hotel registries.

[14] When the American Expeditionary Forces began arriving in France in 1917, demand for the Paris Herald soared, with eventually some 350,000 copies being printed each day and the edition finally becoming profitable.

In Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), the first thing the novel's protagonist Jake Barnes does on returning from Spain to France is buy the New York Herald from a kiosk in Bayonne in the Basses-Pyrénées department and read it at a café.