Briggs was what became known in later years as a "Cotton Whig". He was in favor of protectionist tariffs, and opposed the expansion of slavery into western territories, but did not seek to threaten the unity of the nation with a strong stance against slavery. He served on the Committee on Public Expenditures and the Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads, serving for a time as the chairman of each. The Post Office committee was a regular recipient of complaints from southern states concerning the transmission of abolitionist mailings, which were seen there as incendiary; the matter was of some controversy because southern legislators sought to have these types of mailings banned. Briggs' friend Hiland Hall, who also sat on the committee, drafted a report in 1836 rebutting the rationales used in such legislative proposals, but the committee as a whole, and then the House, refused to accept the report. Although the authorship of the report appears to be entirely Hall's, Briggs may have contributed to it, and was a signatory to Hall's publication of the report in the "National Intelligencer", a major political journal. The document was influential in driving later Congressional debate on legislative proposals concerning abolitionist mailings, none of which were ever adopted. Briggs and Hall were both instrumental in drafting and gaining passage of the Post Office Act of 1836, which included substantive accounting reforms in the wake of financial mismanagement by Postmaster General William Taylor Barry.