The New-York Daily Tribune's front page is dominated by a scathing editorial attack on Connecticut's newly elected Governor Isham G. Toucey, whom editor Horace Greeley accuses of being a rum-soaked hypocrite who won office through the corrupting influence of liquor. Greeley tears into Toucey's contradictory stances on the temperance question—the governor claims to support morality while having been elected by "supporters who went reeling home from the election, and have kept drunk nearly every since." The editorial excoriates Toucey's "sneaking recommendation" of laws against selling liquor to the intemperate while permitting free traffic in spirits, calling it "hypocritical futility." Also featured prominently is a biographical sketch of General Zachary Taylor, the aging Kentucky-born commander whose defense of Fort Harrison in 1812 earned him a brevet promotion, and whose recent triumph at Lake Okeechobee in Florida—where 700 Indians under Alligator and Sam Jones attacked his force of 50 men—cost him 139 casualties but established him as the army's most celebrated Indian fighter. Taylor's reputation as a fearless, skilled commander is on the rise.

This May 1846 edition captures America at a pivotal moment: the Mexican-American War is about to begin (it started six days after this issue), and General Taylor would soon become a national hero commanding troops on the Rio Grande. The editorial assault on Governor Toucey reflects the fierce partisan battles of the era, with Greeley—a Whig—using temperance politics and tariff policy as cudgels against Democratic opponents. The liquor question was deadly serious; temperance movements were gaining power and would reshape American society. Meanwhile, Taylor's celebrity is rising just as the nation prepares for an aggressive war of expansion, though few readers could have known he'd ride that fame to the presidency just four years later.

• The Tribune charges that Connecticut's election system is so corrupt that it allows 'fraudulent votes' to be cast unchallenged if the offerer is 'drunk enough or daring enough to swear through'—suggesting 1840s polling places operated on the honor system with zero safeguards beyond voter registration.
• Greeley mocks Governor Toucey's hypocrisy by noting that if duties on imported pins are merely 'taxes' (as Toucey claims), then the government's protective tariff that raised pin prices from $1 per pound to 40 cents extra should be unpopular—yet Toucey somehow supports both free trade rhetoric and protective policies simultaneously.
• General Taylor's December 1846 victory at Lake Okeechobee cost him 139 killed and wounded from a force of only 500 men—a casualty rate of nearly 28%—yet the battle is celebrated because it was 'the last stand the Indians ever made in a large body' in Florida, marking the effective end of the Seminole Wars.
• The Tribune's subscription rates reveal the economics of 1840s journalism: the daily paper costs two cents per copy or five dollars per year for mail subscribers—meaning a yearly subscription cost roughly what an unskilled laborer earned in a week.
• Greeley's editorial accuses President James K. Polk of removing federal employees for political reasons at the same rate private employers fire workers—but then asks whether Polk, as 'trustee for the whole People,' should have more restraint than a businessman managing 'his own business'—revealing the philosophical tension over executive power that would define antebellum politics.

• General Zachary Taylor was reportedly 56 years old in May 1846—born around 1790, making him a genuine Revolutionary War-era figure still commanding armies. He would be elected president in 1848 and die in office just 16 months later, his presidency cut short by acute gastroenteritis (possibly cholera morbus) at age 65.
• Governor Toucey, whom Greeley attacks so savagely here, would later serve as Secretary of the Navy under James Buchanan (1857-1861) and be widely blamed for mismanaging the navy before the Civil War—Greeley's 1846 assessment of his incompetence proved prophetic.
• The Tribune cost five dollars per year for mail subscribers—but the paper was already experimenting with a 'Weekly Tribune' for rural subscribers at a lower rate, reflecting how newspapers were beginning to segment markets by geography and income, a strategy that would reshape American media.
• Horace Greeley's ferocious editorial style on this page—personal attacks, rhetorical flourishes, moral condemnation—was exactly the kind of 'penny press' journalism that made the Tribune the most influential newspaper in America, reaching 250,000 readers weekly by 1860.
• The editorial focuses on the Oregon Territory boundary dispute (mentioning '49 degrees' and '54-40 or fight'), which was being actively negotiated in London while this paper was being typeset—the Treaty of Oregon would be signed just 11 days later on May 29, 1846, settling the border dispute peacefully and ending American territorial expansion northward.