me year a second indictment was
found against him for saying that the first was secured by political
trickery. The trial, for various reasons, did not come off until
November, 1841. Webb made a public retraction of the statements upon
which the second indictment was found; and this was accepted on the part
of the prosecution. On the trial for the first indictment the jury
disagreed. The defendant objected to Cooper's summing up the case, and
this objection the court sustained. It was a wise policy: for the trials
in the civil suits showed that the novelist was full as effective in
addressing a jury orally as he ever was in addressing the public in his
most successful stories. One amusing feature of this case was that the
two volumes of "Home as Found" were read to the jury from (p. 190)
beginning to end by the plaintiffs counsel, Ambrose L. Jordan.

Cooper was not discouraged by the ill result of this trial. The
indictment was still pressed. A second trial took place at Cooperstown
in June, 1843. Again the jury disagreed. A third trial is reported to
have taken place and to have resulted in the acquittal of Webb; but I
find no account of it in the newspapers to which I have had access.

The suits brought against the "Albany Evening Journal" were, however,
the most striking in this whole contest. They show, too, more clearly
than the others, the spirit and methods with which it was waged on both
sides. Some features are especially marked. One is the illustration
furnished of the onslaughts that were made upon the novelist's character
and reputation, not from any real ill-will, but from pure wantonness or
at least very slight political hostility. Another is the jaunty
superciliousness with which the conductors of the press at first
affected to treat the threats of prosecution. More noteworthy than
anything else, however, is the view given of the deliberate manner in
which Cooper began these suits, and the relentless tenacity with which
he followed them up. The "Evening Journal," of which Thurlow Weed was
then the head, partly from the political skill of its editor, and partly
from its being the organ of the party at the state capital, was, at that
time, the most influential Whig journal in New York. Weed published in
it, in two different numbers of August, 1837, the articles which had
appeared in the "Chenango Telegraph" and the "Otsego Republican" about
the Three Mile Point controversy. He accompanied them with