John L. O'Sullivan co-founds and serves as…
1837 CE
John L. O'Sullivan co-founds and serves as editor for The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (generally called the Democratic Review) in 1837.
Its motto, "The best government is that which governs least," is soon to be famously paraphrased by Henry David Thoreau in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.
A highly regarded journal meant to champion Jacksonian Democracy, a movement that has usually been disparaged in the more conservative North American Review, the magazine features political essays—many of them penned by O'Sullivan—extolling the virtues of Jacksonian Democracy and criticizing what Democrats regarded as the aristocratic pretensions of their opponents.
The Democratic Review is also (perhaps even primarily) a literary magazine, promoting the development of American literature by publishing works of authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Hawthorne and O'Sullivan are to become close friends, and Hawthorne is to have more pieces published in O'Sullivan's magazine than in any other periodical.