"[4] Elbridge Gerry Paige (1813–1859) and Samuel Nichols (1809?–1854) were the two key editors of the Mercury in its early years,[4][6] and Augustus Krauth joined them as a one-third owner in 1842.

[9][10] Paige left the paper in 1849 and went to California, where he continued to publish Dow Jr. sermons in The Golden Era,[11] but ultimately was unsuccessful there and is said to have died in extreme poverty in 1859.

[6] Nichols was born in Hampstead, England around 1809 and after coming to New York City was eventually installed as the editor of the New Times, an organ of the "Conservatives" political party.

[1] Cauldwell and the Mercury are credited as being the first newspaper to regularly cover the sport of baseball as news, starting in 1853 with a report on a game between the Knickerbockers and the Gothams.

[24] In 1858, Cauldwell hired rising star Henrick Chadwick, later dubbed the "father of baseball", to cover the sport for the paper.

[25] By early 1861, the Mercury's circulation was 145,000, but the advent of the American Civil War cut off about 90,000 of them located in the seceded southern and more isolated western United States.

"[26] Southworth retired from the paper before the end of the war, and Whitney departed around 1876 due to poor health, leaving Cauldwell solely in charge.

[15][28] (Rogers later went on to transform the Commercial Advertiser into The New York Globe, and helped found the Audit Bureau of Circulations in North America.

[47] The paper was then offered to Ochs for outright sale, but that also did not come to fruition when it turned out that the Mercury could not assure that its rights to press association copy would transfer to a new owner.

Hall threw out the Mercury title, called the 'new' sheet the Morning Telegraph, hired Leander Richardson (1856–1918) as managing editor, and put it out as a daily sporting and theatrical newspaper.

[54] Aside from the Short Patent Sermons which brought acclaim to Paige's "Dow Jr." pseudonym in the 1840s, the Mercury went on to publish the work of many leading 19th-century writers, and was at times the first to introduce them to New York and national audiences, including Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward), Robert Henry Newell (Orpheus C. Kerr),[55] Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Charles Godfrey Leland, David Ross Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby),[15][56] Ned Buntline, and Mortimer Thomson (Doesticks).

[2][16][58] Newell, who wrote under the name "Orpheus C. Kerr" (a play on "office seeker"), served for a time as the literary editor of the Mercury, until around 1862.

His satirical weekly columns started in Mercury and gained national fame,[59][60] so much so that President Abraham Lincoln once remarked of Kerr's writings that "anyone who has not read them is a heathen.

"[61] Celebrated actress Adah Isaacs Menken contributed a series of poems to the Mercury in 1860–61, as well as a piece praising Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass in 1860 as "centuries ahead of his contemporaries".