Founding editor and publisher John G. Collins, a career printer and journalist, said the name came from the paper's promised dedication to "the true and tried principles of Old Time Democracy."

Three years later, in 1908, Collins contracted influenza and sold the newspaper to Milton Asbury Smith, an Alabama newspaperman and entrepreneur.

Griscom was a scion of a prominent New York family that owned a plantation covering much of northeast Leon County (Tallahassee) and he operated newspapers on Long Island.

Griscom ran the newspaper mostly as an absentee owner, ceding most decisions to his protege and publisher, John "Jack" Tapers.

Knight Ridder operated the Tallahassee Democrat until August 3, 2005, when the newspaper was acquired by its current owner, the Gannett Company.

At the time, after the disenfranchisement of African Americans with the end of Reconstruction, the Democratic party was overwhelmingly the dominant party in the states of the former Confederacy (see Solid South); it was committed, in the South, to Jim Crow laws and racial discrimination.