William Moseley Swain (May 12, 1809 – February 16, 1868) was an American newspaper owner, journalist, publisher, editor, and businessman.

The paper was the first daily to establish a pony-express-style delivery service during the late 1830s and through the next few decades for routing its reporter/correspondent dispatches from throughout the eastern states.

The system was made famous twenty-five years later, in 1861, by the United States Post Office Department, with a series of riders and horses across the Western United States from Missouri to California, at the same time of the construction of the Western Union telegraph line, coast to coast.

The Ledger and its younger sister paper, The Sun of Baltimore, which was established a year later by both Abell and Swain, were two of the first publications to use the new electric telegraph that was invented by their friend, former artist/painter Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872).

Three years later, both The Sun and The Ledger made extensive use of the new revolutionary quick communications system to transmit news of the events and battles of the Mexican–American War (1847–1848), thousands of miles southwest as hostilities extended into the capital of Mexico City.