McMaster returned to New York, worked as a freelance journalist, and in 1848 became the publisher and editor of the city's principal Catholic newspaper, ''
The New York Freeman's Journal,'' which he purchased from then-bishop
John Hughes. He changed his surname to McMaster, an Irish-looking name with more appeal to the paper's largely Irish-American readership than the Scottish-spelling MacMaster. Any number of articles from that period might have offended Hughes, but McMaster crossed a line in a May 31 editorial about the Bleeding Kansas controversy when he offered the view that if someone took a gun to abolitionists
Horace Greeley,
Theodore Parker, and
William Lloyd Garrison, a "great relief" would be felt across the nation. That was not a sentiment that the archbishop shared or could afford to be associated with. McMaster strongly opposed sending Catholic children to public schools. He supported slavery and the secession. He opposed the
Wilmot Proviso, advocating the right of Americans to hold slaves in every state. Meekness and generosity held no appeal for McMaster. The
H.L. Mencken of his day, the publisher of the ''Freeman's Journal'' made clear when hiring anyone that he wanted writers with a fluent pen, a disregard for consequences, and a large capacity for malice. He expected his underlings to share his many prejudices (e.g., a belief in states' rights, a hatred of abolitionists, a lifelong suspicion of the Jesuits) and said that he wrote "to edify such good people as are not overstocked with brains or at least not trained to follow theological discussions." McMaster was jailed at
Fort Lafayette and his newspaper shut down during
President Lincoln's suspension of the
writ of habeas corpus at the start of the
American Civil War. When released from prison, he continued to write against the war effort, always believing that the South had a right to secede from the Union. ==Death==