Throughout much of the 19th century, the paper was the largest circulating daily in New England and the most widely-read across the U.S., and played a key role in the United States Republican Party's founding.

As rapidly as possible its news-gathering was extended until within a few years its columns contained departments of items from every town and hamlet along the Connecticut Valley, as well as from Springfield.

Known as “Bars Fight,” her poem was told orally until it was published, thirty-three years after her death, first in the Springfield Daily Republican, on November 20, 1854.

Bowles III believed that the newspaper should be a power in the moral, religious, and literary, as well as the political life of the community, and he tried to make his paper fulfill those functions.

With the aid of J. G. Holland and others who joined the staff the paper attained excellent literary quality and a high moral tone.

During the controversies affecting slavery and resulting in the American Civil War, Bowles supported, in general, the Whig and Republican parties, but in the period of Reconstruction under President Ulysses S. Grant, his paper represented anti-administration or Liberal Republican opinions, while in the disputed election of 1876 it favored the claims of Samuel J. Tilden, and subsequently became independent in politics.

During Bowles' lifetime, and subsequently, the Republican office was a sort of school for young journalists, especially in the matter of pungency and conciseness of style, one of his maxims being: "put it all in the first paragraph".

Bowles was an acquaintance of Emily Dickinson, and he published a handful of the very few poems by the poet printed in her lifetime, including "A narrow fellow in the grass" and "Safe in their alabaster chambers".

I. E. "Sy" Sanborn, longtime Chicago sportswriter and one of the original organizers of the Baseball Writers' Association of America in 1908, began his career at The Republican.

The letter read, in part, "To call a maiden Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss.

"[15] In 1915, Samuel Bowles, who had been dead nearly four decades, was compared to William Rockhill Nelson, publisher of The Kansas City Star, who died that year.

[18] An organization called the Springfield Newspapers became the local division of the Newhouse family empire with David Starr, a vice president for Advance, serving as publisher.

[26] Longtime editor and Yankee Quill winner Wayne E. Phaneuf retired in 2020 and was succeeded by Cynthia G. Simison and later Larry Parnass .