History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 15

by George Henry Payne

CHAPTER XV

EMIGRATION AND THE PAPERS OF THE WEST

Influence of Hamilton and Jefferson on Journalism—Trans-Appalachian emigration—John Scull and the Pittsburgh Gazette—He borrows "Cartridge Paper"—Paper-mills west of the Alleghanies—Old papers still surviving—List of Kentucky newspapers—Joseph H. Daveiss and Joseph Montford Street—Papers in northwest territory.

Never had a country greater need of human ingenuity and human resourcefulness than had this nation during the years immediately following the war for independence. In a new country, between the shore of the great ocean and the vast wilderness that lay on the other side of the Appalachian range, a new government was about to be formed, by men who were more conquerors of the soil than they were, by nature, statesmen.

If journalism established itself in this country in a way that amazed European critics; if it made progress and worked out developments that perplexed even our own astute thinkers, the explanation is to be found, not in one fact but in many facts. The most important was that in the great crisis in the history of the country and at an acute period in the development of the democratic idea in the world, it was through journalism that two of the country's most brilliant politicians, Hamilton and Jefferson, worked out a great political idea.

As we have said before, even at this distance of time, we are sensitive to the acrimony of that struggle between Hamilton and Jefferson. True, it degenerated into a personal contest of ambitions, but it was, nevertheless, a great epoch-making contest in the history of democracy, for it was to the reading public that they appealed; not to the House of Parliament, not to those alone who enjoyed the suffrage privilege,—a minority at that time — but to the reading public. Their battles in the public press influenced the character of development in the west, where the printing press almost anticipated the trader. So we find in the new settlements, those founded immediately after the Revolution, a vigorous belief in public affairs.

The thin line of colonies on the Atlantic coast had scarcely thrown off the British rule in 1783 when their power, influence and territorial aggrandizement began to develop in a way that was to make the next hundred years far more remarkable than the century just closed. With the end of the Revolutionary War, the country back of the Appalachian mountains began to swarm with new settlers, and in this wilderness the press was not only welcome but was considered a necessary symbol of the dignity of the settlement.

One of the reasons for the emigration after the Revolution was the fact that, for the poor working classes, life was but a miserable existence. They were daily in sharp contrast with those who had plenty. The stories of fertile fields, of easy and independent living, were attractive. Conditions in the wilderness could not be worse than they were in the so-called civilized places, and so these sons of hardy settlers packed their goods and chattels and trekked west.^[1]

Two wagon roads penetrated the great wilderness that lay back of the thirteen colonies, one through Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and the other from the Potomac to the Monongahela, A third load led through Virginia southwesterly to the Holston River and Knoxville in Tennessee.

Those who passed over these roads intending to farm had at least good prospects, but the printers who decided to cast their fortunes with the settlers beyond the mountains faced the probability of failure, for there was nothing to advertise. Even in the centers of western population, money was scarce and barter was still the principal mode of exchange.

The principal road had been completed in 1785, leading from Philadelphia, then the metropolis of the nation, to the forks of the Ohio,—a distance of three hundred miles. An express line of Conestoga wagons passed to and fro on this turnpike, and paper, type, ink and presses had to be transported over it, at the rate of six dollars a hundredweight.

Pittsburgh, at that time the frontier of civilization, was a shabby little river port with a population not exceeding three hundred souls, in less than forty log houses scattered along the levee where many flatboats and river craft waited to carry the immigrants and their goods into the western country.

To this uninviting settlement, with a noble purpose went John Scull, a Quaker boy of twenty-one and a true pioneer. He had seen the chaotic conditions in the country and had decided that it would be a fine thing to print and publish a journal that would arouse the western country to the necessity of standing by the union. He had come west with that idea in mind and on July 29, 1786, the Pittsburgh Gazette was printed. Following a historic precedent, Scull—who was known as "the handsome young man with the white hat,"^[2]—eked out a livelihood by serving as postmaster of the port.

An ardent Federalist, he did the job he had set out to do. Even later he stood by the government so steadfastly during the Whiskey Insurrection that the local faction placed him under arrest. "It is difficult to estimate the services these men performed for the Community," says the historian of Pittsburgh, speaking of Scull and his son and successor.^[3]

We get an inkling of the difficulties that beset the young printer—in addition to the disorganization that preceded the adoption of the Constitution—from a letter addressed by him to the commandant of the fort, asking for the loan of some paper with which to print his journal, none having arrived from the East. The commandant obligingly lent him "twenty-seven quires of cartridge paper."

While the Gazette was a Federal organ, it was liberally conducted, for Scull permitted H. H. Brackenridge to put forth the Jeffersonian ideas at some length. But the anti-Federalists felt that they were not properly supported in this section and in 1798 a paper called the Herald of Liberty was brought out at Washington, Pennsylvania, under the management of John D. Israel. This was followed two years later by one at Pittsburgh called the Tree of Liberty.

So pressing was the necessity for a paper-mill that one was established in 1793, at the Kentucky hamlet of Royal Spring. The second paper-mill west of the Alleghanies was established in 1796, but it was not until 1820 that a type foundry was established in the trans-Alleghany region. Although the pioneer journalists were apt to be adventurers and "frequently unsuccessful as business managers "they were, in the main, men who had to be reckoned with and men who, in addition to winning prominence in the political field, saw the business side of life, and the necessity for developing it.^[4] The promptness with which they started paper-mills and type foundries was evidence that the printers were not content to be merely the mental feeders of the new country.

The Pittsburgh Gazette recently celebrated its one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary. On that occasion it printed the names of the papers which antedated it and which, at that time, were still in existence,—a notable list:

The Courant, Hartford, Conn., 1764
The Connecticut Herald and Weekly Journal, New Haven, 1766
The Chronicle, Augusta, Ga., 1785
The Advertiser, Portland, Maine, 1785
The Maryland Gazette, Annapolis, 1745
The American, Baltimore, 1773
The Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, Mass., 1786
The Register and Mercury, Salem, Mass., 1768
The Journal, Elizabeth, N. J., 1779
The Gazette, Hudson, N. Y., 1785
The Eagle, Poughkeepsie, N. Y., 1785
The Philadelphia North American, 1728
The Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia, 1728
The Mercury, Newport, R. I., 1758
The News and Courier, Charleston, S. C, 1732
The Journal, Windsor, Vt., 1783
The Gazette, Alexandria, Va., 1780
The New Hampshire Gazette, Portsmouth, 1756

The second paper west of the Alleghanies was established in Kentucky as a political necessity. Kentucky was then a part of Virginia, and there was an earnest movement on foot to separate it from the mother state. At a convention held in Danville in 1785, it was resolved that "to insure unanimity in the opinion of the people, respecting the propriety of separating the district of Kentucky from Virginia, and forming a separate government, and to give publicity to the proceedings of the convention, it is deemed essential to have a printing press."^[5] Here, in the wilderness, we see how strong was the idea that "publicity" was an essential of popular government.

Lexington, the most important town west of the mountains, offered inducements in the way of free land to the printers. John Bradford brought a printing press down the river on a flat-boat, had some type cut out of dogwood,^[6] and on August 11, 1787, the Kentucky Gazette was issued, with the following editorial apology:

"My customers will excuse this, my first publication, as I am very much hurried to get an impression by the time appointed. A great part of the type fell into pi in the carriage of them from Limestone (Maysville) to this office, and my partner, which is the only assistant I have, through indisposition of the body, has been incapable of rendering the smallest assistance for ten days past."

Despite the wild condition of the country, the demand for newspapers increased to such an extent that, in 1793, as we have noted, the state was manufacturing its own paper. Newspapers were started in every part of the state where there were a few civilized beings. The rage for journalistic expression is shown in the way the papers sprang up in these towns and hamlets:

1798The Mirror, Washington

1798The Palladium, Frankfort

1798Guardian of Freedom, Frankfort

1798Kentucky Telegraph

1803Western American, Bardstown

1803Independent Gazette, Lexington
1803Weekly Messenger, Washington
1804Republican Register, Shelbyville
1804The Mirror, Danville
1805The Informant, Danville
1806Republican Auxiliary, Washington
1806Western World, Frankfort
1806The Impartial Review, Bardstown
1806The Mirror, Russellville
1808The Lamp, Lincoln County
1808Argus of Western America, Frankfort
1808Louisville Gazette, Louisville
1808The Reporter, Lexington
1808Western Citizen, Paris
1809Farmer's Friend, Russellville
1809Political Theater, Lancaster
1809The Dove, Washington
1809The Globe, Richmond
1810The Examiner, Lancaster
1810American Republic, Frankfort
1810The Luminary, Richmond
1811American Statesman, Lexington
1811Western Courier, Louisville
1811Bardstown Repository, Bardstown
1811The Telegraph, Georgetown

The failure of the Federal government in 1797 to back up the ambitions of Kentucky led the powerful men of the state, through their organ, the Gazette, the only paper thus far published in the state, to attack the administration fiercely, and even General Washington himself. Writers then declared that, if the Federal government did not take Louisiana and put an end to the intolerable situation, they, themselves, would make the conquest of Louisiana. It was in this way that the Federalists, by their indifference to the demands of the west, lost control over a large section of the country.^[7]

Joseph H. Daveiss, District Attorney, in his loyalty to the Union, attempted to arouse the community when he found that Jefferson was indifferent to the machinations of Aaron Burr, who, after killing Hamilton, had wandered west. Daveiss twice presented Burr for treason to the grand jury, and twice the grand jury declared in Burr's favor. The leading Democrats of Kentucky were Burr's friends, while Henry Clay acted as his counsel, Daveiss, however, through the advent of two new settlers, was able to have a newspaper which exposed the treason of Burr and aroused the public.

It was in the summer of 1805 that there arrived in Frankfort, Kentucky, two pedestrians from far-off Virginia. John Wood had been a writer on the New York papers and had been connected with Aaron Burr; later he had gone to Virginia, where he had interested a young man named Joseph Montford Street and to him proposed starting a newspaper either in Kentucky or at New Orleans. Because of political enemies in New York, Wood's part, it was explained, must necessarily be a secret one. With the assistance of William Hunter, the editor of the Palladium, who allowed them to print their paper on his press, and with materials obtained from the editor of a paper published at Lexington, the first number of the Western World appeared on July 5, 1806. The paper was itmocent-looking enough from a modern standpoint. The first article was entitled the "Spanish Conspiracy"; it aroused great excitement. Street was kept busy receiving challenges to duels, and finally notified the public that he would file all challenges in the order received and "from time to time give a list of them in the Western World for the information of the public at large." Not all of his opponents, however, gave him an opportunity to defend himself, for one legislator endeavored to assassinate him.

Street's next sensation was to further the prosecution of Burr; when Burr was acquitted and a ball was given in honor of this event, Street was forcibly ejected from the ball-room. The success of the Western World, however, was such that, at the end of its fourth month, it had a circulation of 1,200, which was a most ample demonstration of its popularity. Meantime Street's partner. Wood, had sold out and tried to corrupt him. Failing in this. Wood left Frankfort for Washington and became attached to the cause of Burr, who had been denounced by President Jefiferson, his arrest following shortly afterward. Street kept up the fight alone as best he could, but was finally impoverished by libel suits, and left the state to work among the Indians of Wisconsin, among whom he did notable service.^[8]

More than ordinary importance attaches to the date of the first newspaper in the Northwest Territory, later to be known as the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Here were to be the most effective forces in later American journalism; here the printer had no social disfavor to work down; here he was a desirable member of the community, even a necessary one, and the character of the men who had become conspicuous editors in this section was such as to give the community that they represented a country-wide reputation far beyond what it would have achieved in the old days when population was the sole method of determining a city's importance.

The historic relation between the post-office and the printing office, established by Campbell in 1704, persisted, as might be expected in a pioneer country where brawn was the first requisite and where those with the literary-political leaning would be few and in demand. The printer-editor, in addition to his educational qualifications for the postmastership of the place in which he settled, had also the fact that by training he was something of a politician and knew how to obtain Federal recognition.

William Maxwell, the second postmaster of Cincinnati, established the first newspaper in that town and incidentally the first in the Northwest. This was the Centinel of the Northwest Territory, issued for the first time November 9, 1793. In 1796 Maxwell sold the Centinel to Edmond Freeman, who changed the name to Freeman's Journal. In 1800 it was moved to Chillicothe, the new capital of the Territory, and in October, 1801, Nathaniel Willis bought Freeman's Journal, merging it with his Scioto Gazette, which continues under that name at the present time. Joseph Carpenter brought out the Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette, May 28, 1799, at Cincinnati, changing the name in 1806 to the Western Spy and Miami Gazette. It was six years after the establishment of the first paper that the first General Assembly of the Northwest Territory met at Cincinnati, a small settlement of seven hundred and fifty people, surrounded by dense and impenetrable forests of the Miami country.

In 1810 there were sixteen newspapers in Ohio; already vigorous men were identified with the journalism of the state. The Rev. John W. Brown, a strong Jeffersonian, established in 1804 at Cincinnati a little sheet known as Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Mercury, which paper very shortly afterwards took into its office as apprentice Stephen l'Hommedieu, who was later to become its proprietor. L'Hommedieu, with Charles Hammond and William D. Gallagher, later gave vigorous support to the Free-soil cause in a community which might, because of material interests, have been led to side with the slave states.

Charles Hammond was one of the ablest journalists of the country, also a distinguished lawyer. It was said of him that "he spoke at the bar as good English as Addison wrote in the Spectator He started the Ohio Federalist in Belmont County, Ohio, in 1813, and moved to Cincinnati in 1826, where he became the first editor of the Cincinnati Gazette. Later he became a man of considerable influence in the city, displaying his independence in many ways, one of which was by wearing a long queue in contempt for social usages. He was a vigorous advocate of a free press and one of the few who realized that the slave-holding power, in endeavoring to throttle the press, was showing a greater arrogance than had ever before been shown on this continent. In the editorial columns of his paper he argued on great questions of constitutional law, and his ability, scholarship, and intellect afiFected the character of Ohio journalism.

He was a member of the first abolition society in Ohio, which was organized at Mt. Pleasant by Benjamin Lundy. It was Hammond, as we shall see, who demanded a fair hearing for James G. Birney, when the abolitionist went to Cincinnati to begin his fight against slavery. The editor of the Gazette saw that the slaveowners were striking at the freedom of the press in their demands that the abolition editors must be muzzled, and his pen was one of the most forceful in the country against any endeavor to stop public discussion. He provided Birney with much of the material that was used to show that the slave-owners were intimidating and assaulting writers who dared discuss the subject of slavery.

The settlement of the land beyond the Ohio was helped by untoward conditions in the east, where hard times, in 1 8 14, had increased taxation. Liability to arrest for indebtedness caused many to sell everything they had and to move west, to the Great Lakes and to the eastern slope of the Mississippi valley. Mt. Pleasant, in Jefferson County, Ohio, which in 1810 was a hamlet of seven families, in 18 15 contained ninety families, three taverns and seven stores, a meeting house, a school house, and a market house; within six miles were two grist-mills, twelve saw-mills, and a paper-mill. In a very short time there was a weekly newspaper, without which no community at that time was complete. This was but one of many similar instances of rapid growth, the emigration fever becoming so strong that it was said that in one day in 18 18, there waited in Pittsburgh several thousand emigrants and goods worth $3,000,000 to be floated down the river.

In 1817 the distress throughout the country was so great that the public were asked to donate fruit and vegetables, as well as money, to take care of the starving. Soup-houses sprang up in a number of cities and men labored, not for salary, but for their daily food. Sugar had risen from 12 cents to 25 cents per pound, and coffee from 18 cents to 37 cents a pound.

The immigration that followed caused the new settlers, when once in their new homes, to look back east with critical and questioning eyes, and with strong feelings against conditions that they believed should not have existed.

The feeling that the east was not so favorable to the development of the west had a great influence in developing an independent western journalism. It was first evidenced in the debate begun by Thomas E. Benton in the Senate, in January, 1830. The opposition of the east to the west was ascribed to the fact that emigration was so great that the east feared that there would be no men to work their factories. It was the continuation of this argument that led Senator Robert Young Hayne, of South Carolina, to make a speech along similar lines, attacking the owners of the woolen-mills and cotton-factories in the east on the ground that they wished to keep the people paupers so that they might make money. This speech of Hayne was the beginning of another nullification movement. It brought about Webster's famous reply in which, meeting Hayne's threat that the west and the south might unite to oppose the east, Webster spoke for the Union.

Despite the importance of the Webster-Hayne debate, not a word of it appeared in the Washington journals for two weeks, and a month went by before it was published in the newspapers of Philadelphia; it was this 'Slowness in printing news when the public mind was becoming active and demanding action, that led to the introduction of real newspapers such as those of Bennett and Greeley.

Between 1810 and 1820 the population of the seaboard states suffered an actual decrease, due to migration; during the decade 1820-1830, however, there was an increase on account of immigration from Europe and a temporary cessation of westward migration. On account of this lessened immigration, the newspapers of Indiana and Illinois did not increase in number with the rapidity that had marked Ohio's development.

The first newspaper in Indiana appeared in 1804 at Vincennes, which was then the capital of the territory. Elihu Stout, a printer on the Kentucky Gazette, went to Vincennes to see what the prospects were for printing a paper, and was so encouraged by the citizens and officials that he immediately returned to Frankfort, purchased his outfit and, in July, 1804, issued the first number of the Indiana Gazette.

It became, in fact, a common occurrence for the town itself, where no individual showed a willingness to assume the financial' obligations, to offer inducements to printers. The consequent demand for their services made it easy for journeyman printers to find employment wherever they went; this soon produced an itinerant class of printers, who gave to their trade a character and a reputation that outlasted, for many generations, the settling of the country in which they had so striking a part. ^[9]

The speed with which the towns developed was a source of amazement to travelers from eastern cities. The town of Vevay, Indiana, was laid out in 1813, in 1814 it was a mere collection of huts—two years later it was a prosperous county seat with a court-house, a school-house, and seventy-five dwellings, and was the boasted possessor of a weekly newspaper called the Indiana Register.^[10]

The founder of the first paper in Indianapolis has left behind a picture of the manner in which the settlers of the west looked to the newspapers as an inevitable accompaniment to a real live town. In 1821 the site of Indianapolis was selected as the permanent seat of government for the new state. Two hundred persons immediately moved there, and within a year Nathaniel Bolton announced the publication of the Indianapolis Gazette, gotten out in a buckeye log cabin of but one room, "part of which was occupied for a family residence." The ink was put on with balls made of dressed deerskin, stuffed with wool. There was no post-office nearer than Connersville, a distance of sixty miles, and every four weeks a person was employed to bring the letters and other mail. President Monroe's message, delivered in December, arrived at Indianapolis in February, and furnished, for three succeeding numbers of the Gazette, a thrilling serial.^[11]

Nor was this an unusual condition, even in the east. An elderly relative of the vvrriter remembers the time when her father, once every two months, walked sixty miles along the Susquehanna River from Laceyville to Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, to get the mail and the newspapers of the large cities.

In Illinois the development came later, and was marked by a lively interest in the Free Soil movement. The first General Assembly of Illinois convened at Kaskaskia on October 5, 1818, and John McLean of Shawneetown was the candidate for governor at the first election. In 1816 his rival, Daniel Pope Cook, who favored the Free Soil party, became part owner of the Illinois Intelligencer, the first newspaper in the territory."^[12]

Other early newspapers printed in the state were in their order, the Illinois Emigrant, published by Henry Eddy and Singleton H. Kimmel at Shawneetown in 1818, its name being changed to the Illinois Gazette in 1824; the Edwardsville Spectator, by Hopper Warren in 1819; the Star of the West, at the same place in 1822, changed to the Illinois Republican in 1823; the Republican Advocate at Kaskaskia in 1823, by R. K. Fleming; the Illinois Journal at Galena, by James Jones in 1826; the Sangamon Spectator at Springfield, the same year, by Hopper Warren; the Illinois Corrector at Edwardsville in 1828; the Galena Advertiser by Newell, Philleo & Co., in 1829; the Alton Spectator in 1830, by Edward Breath; the Telegraph at the same place, by Parks and Treadway, afterwards controlled by John Bailhache, and still a leading paper in Madison County; the Sangamon Journal, now the State Journal, in 1831, by Simeon Francis (and conducted by him until 1855) the publication of which has been uninterruptedly continued until the present time; and the Chicago Democrat, by John Calhoun, at Chicago in 1833. This last was later merged in the Chicago Tribune, the paper made famous by Joseph Medill, to whom we shall refer later.

In the northern section of the Northwest Territory, in what is now Michigan, the first newspaper appeared in 1809, in French and English. The first English paper in Detroit appeared in 1829 and was called the Northwestern Journal; it was later consolidated with the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, now the Detroit Tribune. At the start, the Journal was a Whig paper, established by friends of John Quincy Adams to fight the Democratic party. To this, the opposition made answer two years later, in May, 1831, by the establishment of the Detroit Free Press, one of the country's famous and most successful newspapers.

As early as 1808 the first paper west of the Mississippi, the Missouri Gazette, was founded by Joseph Charles in St. Louis. The place was then a mere trading post, and it was announced that subscriptions were "payable in flour, corn, beef or pork."^[13]

This paper afterwards became the St. Louis Republic, one of the leading papers of the west. When the question of Missouri's admission to the union came up, the territory's newspapers, the Missouri Intelligencer, the St. Louis Gazette, the St. Louis Enquirer, the St. Charles Missourian and the Jackson Herald united in vigorous editorial objections to congressional restriction, showing that the pro-slavery element was stronger in the state than were those opposed to the extension of slavery. The statistics of 1835 show how remarkably this western territory had taken to journallsm. Even Missouri had seventeen papers with an annual circulation of 720,000 copies. Illinois, young state that it was, had eighteen, as many as Louisiana, where the first paper in French, La Moniteur de la Louisiane, had been printed in 1794, and the first one in English, the Gazette, in 1804. Indiana had twenty-three papers, while Ohio had one hundred and forty-'five, and was only exceeded by New York and Pennsylvania, with two hundred sixty and two hundred, respectively. Even Massachusetts, the home of American newspapers, came after this progressive state, while Virginia, oldest of colonies, had only forty papers, less than a fourth of Ohio's count.

In noting the manner in which these new northern states outstripped the southern states in the growth of newspapers it is well to remember that slavery was forbidden in the former by the Ordinance of 1787. To this resolution Webster traced much of the character of the people of this section.

"We are accustomed," he said, "to praise the lawgivers of antiquity; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and Lycurgus; but I doubt whether one single law of any law-giver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787. . . . It fixed forever the character of the population in the vast regions northwest of the Ohio, by excluding from them involuntary servitude. It impressed on the soil itself, while yet a wilderness, an incapacity to sustain any other than freemen. It laid the interdict against personal servitude, in original compact, not only deeper than all local law, but deeper also than all local constitutions."^[14]

1. McMaster, History of the United States, i, 70.
2. W. H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley.
3. Killikelly, History of Pittsburgh, 485.
4. Thwaites, Proceedings of the Antiquarian Society, xix, 350.
5. Pioneer Press of Kentucky, 9.
6. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, iii, 229.
7. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, iv, 2
8. Register, Kentucky State Historical Society, iv. No. 12, 25.
9. See Charles Edward Russell, These Shifting Scenes.
10. McMaster, History, iv, 385.
11. Bolton Early History of Indianapolis.
12. Moses, Illinois, i, 294.
13. Thwaites, in Proceedings of the Antiquarian Society xix 348.
14. Rhodes, History of the United States, i, 16.