Biography:

The Courier and Enquirer formed in 1829 with the merger of James Watson Webb’s New York Morning Courier and the New-York Enquirer, edited by Mordecai Noah. Webb assumed editorship over the new paper, and after hiring associate editor James Gordon Bennett, it became an early mouthpiece of the Democratic Party. The Courier and Enquirer gained fame in 1830 for setting up a pony express system to bring memos from Washington D.C. to the New York City newspapers.
However, as Jacksonian populism lost steam with the growing business class in New York, the paper began to support Henry Clay’s burgeoning National Republicanism. Webb and the Courier and Enquirer were founding tenets of the new party, and the paper became one of the most powerful in the country. As part of the party machine, it sparked ferocious debate in the U.S. House of Representatives in its 1837-1838 sessions: Kentucky congressman William J. Graves challenged a Maine Democratic congressman, Jonathan Cilley, to a duel after Cilly criticized the Courier and Enquirer on the House floor. It ended with Graves shooting Cilley to death.
The Courier and Enquirer went into decline with the Whig party, as the country moved towards greater unrest. The paper, which had always supported slavery, fell out of favor as many New Yorkers and other Northerners began to become more earnestly interested in abolition. With the election of President Lincoln in 1861 and the onset of the Civil War, the paper merged with the New York World.