Although Alexander Russel, successor in 1849 to Charles Maclaren, who had been the Scotsman's editor since 1821, argued against the removal of the stamp duty, the Scotsman responded quickly to the competition from the new dailies. On 29 June 1855, the day that the repeal of the Stamp Act came into force, and after overcoming the resistance of the main proprietor, John Ritchie, it became the Daily Scotsman, price one penny, retaining the adjective until 1860. The Daily Scotsman claimed in December 1857 that its circulation now surpassed the ‘total circulation of any other newspaper in Edinburgh published oftener than once-a-week’. This brought squeals of indignation from the twice-weekly Witness and the now daily Caledonian Mercury and got a partial withdrawal from the Scotsman. James Bell of the twice-weekly North Briton took the matter to the small debt court, suing for ‘loss, injury and damage’, but the Sheriff dismissed the action.

The Scotsman's twice-weekly edition also continued until 1860, when it was replaced by a twopenny Weekly Scotsman. It was suggested that the intention of the penny daily was to see off its rivals and then raise the price once again. With the Crimean War reaching its peak, very quickly the paper's circulation more than doubled to around 6,000 copies a day, although advertisers were slow to switch to the daily edition.

The move to a daily was overseen by John Ritchie Findlay, grand-nephew of John Ritchie, one of the founding proprietors and, from 1849, sole proprietor. Findlay had joined the paper in the 1840s to work with the editor Charles MacLaren and it was he who increasingly took control of the business side of the paper before passing that on to James Law, who, at the age of eighteen, in 1857 became business manager. Law, who had been briefly with the Glasgow Examiner, was to continue as business manager of the paper for 64 years. In 1868 Law joined Russel and Findlay in a partnership with John Ritchie in John Ritchie & Co. as owners of the paper, and ownership into the twentieth century remained with the Findlay and Law families.