History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
SUFFRAGE AND SLAVERY
Important as was the opening-up of the country geographically, still more remarkable were the political and social developments that came as a direct result of the belief in the democratic theory.
While the fathers of the Republic were firm believers in the political ideas which they had proclaimed, no attempt was made by them to put into practice, in the state governments, such theories as that of the equality of all men. It was to the state governments, however, that the Constitution later delegated the right to say what should be the qualifications for electors.
The consequence was that, when the Federal Constitution was adopted, the men who sat as delegates from the states were there more as representatives of the taxpayers than of the people at large. Thus, for example, the Massachusetts Senate consisted of forty men, apportionment among the counties being based on the amount of taxes each county paid.[1]
Only in Vermont did full manhood suffrage exist, while elsewhere the voter had to be a taxpayer. In the same way, while liberty of conscience was guaranteed to all, in many states Catholics could not hold office, and, in most of them, the Jews were disfranchised.
The extension of manhood suffrage was an inevitable result of the assumption of political power by the press; indeed, it was the next logical step. With a suffrage based on the old ideas of property qualifications and special religious privileges, a free and untrammeled press was impossible, and it was equally true that a free press meant the breaking down of the privileged class. The paper with the large circulation was a power in the community, and it derived its power, not from the influential but from the non-voters.
Between 1790 and 1800 religious qualifications were abolished in many states; between 1800 and 18 10 there was a broadening of the suffrage and, in the second decade of the century, when six states were admitted into the union, the property qualifications were done away with in a number, while throughout the entire country there was a steady movement to extend the rights of the people. In the three states—Mississippi, Connecticut and New York—legislation was passed admitting, in libel suits, a defense on the ground of the truth of the allegation.
The generation that had fought at Bunker Hill and Yorktown was passing away. The citizens of the states that were entering the union were the new type. They had none of the old prejudices in their consitutions; they were democratic and modern. Franchise was based on manhood. If there was a class distinction, it was between those who fought for their rights and those who were weaklings.
In 1816 there was a protest against the caucus method of nominating and the Republican party was split by the difference of opinion, but even those who upheld this method as advocates of Monroe's nomination, admitted that it was not truly representative of the people. This in itself was an indication of the growing democracy of the times.
To answer this growing democracy Monroe did what no other president since Washington had done, he started out to show himself to the people. From Philadelphia he went to New York, from New York to New Haven, Hartford and Providence; to Boston, to New Hampshire and Vermont; to Niagara Falls, to Buffalo, to Detroit and then back home. He was the first president to see his country as it was, the president of an era of good feeling for which he was so largely responsible.
There was much loose thinking, but still it was thinking. In the Nashville Gazette, in January, 1822, the idea was advanced that Andrew Jackson, the new type of man—the man representing, not the old "dynasty of the Secretaries "but the people who were developing the country—should be nominated for president.[2] It was in the election of 1824 that the people first began to show a deep interest in the choice of a president. Up to that time it may be truly said that the elections were handled for the people. Now, with the increased freedom and the broadening of the franchise, clubs were being formed, and small groups, composed of those who had formerly been considered ridiculous as political factors, now came into existence. In New York, in which property qualifications for voters were abolished by a new constitution adopted in 1821, organizations of the formerly disfranchised sprang into being within a year.
The spread of interest in human rights was evidence that the leaven of democracy was working. Moreover, the rise of the liberal movement in Europe, following the formation of the Holy Alliance and the endeavor on the part of the Holy Allies to suppress liberal thought, had its reaction in America. The storm aroused throughout the South American republics, leading up to the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine by President Monroe, awakened the thoughts of the people, who had never taken much cognizance of political matters except those immediately surrounding them. Americans began to be conscious of the fact that they had stimulated the world. They began to realize that they, had established a democracy that was affecting the world and, as they saw the reaction, there came pride and conscious power and a greater determination to spread that power among the people. Foreign visitors declared that they had never seen such a proud, conceited people as these Americans.
Part of the same liberalizing movement was evidenced in a revival of religious feeling, which began in 1815 and was coincident with the formation of many philanthropic societies, among which were the Colonization, Tract, Bible, Foreign Mission, Home Mission, SailorsFriend and Peace Societies. It was the time, too, when asylums, hospitals and libraries were founded and when there began to be great interest in the public school, system.
One of the most interesting of these signs was the appearance of a labor party, following which came labor papers in numbers. Among the first of these was the Workingman's Gazette, appearing in October, 1824, advocating many things that were considered radical in those days, such as free education and the abolition of imprisonment for debt.
Many and strange were the phases of the reforming spirit which was spreading throughout the country, resulting in the establishment of a number of papers, some of which lasted but a short time, but which were, in their way, an influence in preparing the public for the higher issues. Some of these papers were: The Telescope, (New York City), The Spirit of the Age, (Rochester), Southern Free Press, (Charleston. S. C), The Spirit of the Age, (Tuscaloosa), Free Press, (Wilmington, Del.), The Friend of Equal Rights, (New York), and the Daily Sentinel, (New York) .
Given a cause and there was immediately a flood of publicity. It was the newspaper contract made in March, 1826, between William Morgan and David C. Miller, editor of the Republican Advocate—in which Morgan agreed to write an attack exposing the secrets of the Masonic craft—that led to the mysterious disappearance of Morgan. Almost immediately there was an anti-Masonic party, and a powerful party it became, too, with its organs and its fighting journalists, among them Thurlow Weed, whose Albany Journal was started as an anti-Masonic paper.
While the northwestern territory was yet in process of settlement, a movement began there,—a journalistic crusade, in fact—that was not to end until the great Civil War had rent the Union.
All history is more or less dramatic, but the American is justified in the feeling that the great elemental qualities, the qualities that abounded in the wilderness then so recently conquered, have appeared also in the doings of the conquerors in their relation with their fellow-men. Hardly, it would seem, had the original settlers finished building up communities to protect them from the savages and wild animals, before they were announcing, to a world old in civilization and laws, the new law for a free press. Before, by old world standards, they could be presumed to crawl, they were proclaiming themselves a defiant nation and they poured into the wilderness back of their shore line, new conquerors.
And now, though the paths through the forests had hardly been cleared, they were beginning a crusade which would have dumfounded and disheartened the Fathers of the Republic. It was in this wild west that obscure individuals were to begin the war on slavery. Under Quaker influence the Manumission Society of Tennessee was formed in Tennessee, as early as 1814, for the purpose of compulsory emancipation. This society published at Greenville a quarterly paper entitled the Manumission Journal.
The direct product of that organization was Benjamin Lundy. He was not a practical printer, not of those with whose history for a century we have been dealing; he was not of the type of the statesman using the press for his political ends, nor yet of the scholar drifting into a journalism that he despised. Lundy was a journalist by virtue of belief in the democracy that, even in the second decade of the nineteenth century, had become a more potent influence in the wilderness of Ohio than the Sage of Monticello ever dreamed possible. Forgotten though Lundy may be, it is well to remember that it was of this obscure saddler and editor that William Lloyd Garrison said, "I owe everything to Benjamin Lundy."
A native of New York, he had, while learning the saddler's trade at Wheeling, Virginia, seen the misery of slavery, and had become so deeply affected that in 1815 he formed an anti-slavery association, called the Union Humane Society, at St. Clairsville, Ohio. He was an unassuming Quaker, without eloquence or particular ability, but with great courage and great faith in his cause. He wrote appeals to the anti-slavery people throughout the country to form similar associations, and began to write articles on the subject for the Philathropist, a paper published at Mt. Pleasant by a Quaker named Charles Osborn—the first publication in this country to advocate immediate emancipation.[3] Osborn having sold his paper, Lundy, with no further encouragement than that offered by its list of subscribers, decided to start another anti-slavery paper at Mt. Pleasant. He walked ten miles to Steubenville with the manuscript, and returned on foot, carrying on his back the entire edition of the first number of the Genius of Universal Emancipation.
It was while touring the country in search of new subscribers that he met, in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison, then a young man of twenty-three. Garrison, after learning to set type in the office of the Newburyport Herald, had gone to Boston to act as sub-editor of the National Philanthropist, the first temperance paper in the United States. Later he began editing a paper at Bennington called the Journal of the Times, an anti-slavery and temperance advocate. Lundy proposed that the two should join forces, which they did at Baltimore, where the anti-slavery sentiment was very strong, and in September, 1829, the publication of the Genius was resumed.
By this time many out-and-out anti-slavery publications had been started. Some of these were: The Philanthropist, first published in 1817; The Emancipator, (Tennessee, 1819); The Genius of Universal Emancipation, (1821); The Abolition Intelligencer, (Kentucky, 1822); The Edwardsville Spectator and the Illinois Intelligencer, 1822 and 1823 respectively; The African Observer, (Philadelphia, 1826); Freedom's Journal, (New York, 1827); The National Philanthropist, (Boston, 1826); The Investigator, (Providence, 1827); The Free Press, (Bennington, 1828); and the Liberalist, (New Orleans, 1828). But the greatest came in 1831, when Garrison, only twenty-six years of age, founded the Liberator and began his historic fight on slavery.
The attitude of the Jackson administration in encouraging the slave-holding power to dominate the country, and the action of Jackson's Postmaster-General, Amos Kendall, in countenancing the non-delivery of northern newspapers in which there were abolition sentiments—as well as the burning of the newspapers in the public square of Charleston in 1835,—mean that, so far as the slaveholders were concerned, the reign of public opinion was at an end in the south. The post-office, which meant the government, here directly aligned itself with the small body of slaveholders and declared that sentiments which were objectionable to them should not pass through the mails. The situation would be equally anomalous if we could imagine the postmaster of the City of New York, in which Wall Street is located, taking the attitude, in the period of 1901-1908, that the western newspapers attacking the so-called "interests" were not to be allowed within the city because of their criticism of various financial concerns.
During the winter of 1835-1836 an effort was made in every free state legislature to pass bills making it a misdemeanor to publish or print writings that could be construed as inciting the slaves to rebellion. The vigilance committee in Louisiana offered $50,000 for the delivery of Arthur Tappan, who, with other abolitionists, had started the New York Journal of Commerce as an anti-slavery paper in 1827, putting at the head of it, as editor, a Virginia abolitionist, William Maxwell.
To cap the climax. President Jackson, in his annual message in December, 1835, recommended to Congress the passage of a law that would "prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the southern states, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection." That part of the message was referred to a committee which reported a bill prohiWting the circulation of any newspaper "touching the subject of slavery," and removing forthwith any postmaster who distributed such newspapers. This bill, however, was defeated on the final ballot, although, strange as it may seem, it was the vote of a New Yorker, Martin Van Buren, that reported it out of committee. The legislatures of the free states adjourned without a single one of them haiving passed any of the press-muzzling laws that had been submitted to them.
This attempt to stifle free discussion marked the beginning of the end of inert submission by the free state citizens to the autocratic domination of the slave-holding power; it now began to be evident to many of thoSe who had sat quietly on the side lines hoping for peace, that when that power could dare to dictate what the North could print, and when its representatives could try to pas& laws limiting the expression of public opinion in public print, it was time to stop hoping for a peaceful solution of this intricate matter, or at least time to show some courage in discussing it.
While thoughtful men throughout the country were beginning to look at the slave issue in this light, and while northern editors were turning over in their minds the question as to whether a policy of craven silence was, after all, the best one, there came a series of sensational events, all within the field of journalism and dealing with men identified with journalism, which aroused, if not the public, men who were destined in turn to arouse the public.
Few reformers, says Barrett Wendell, have lived to such complete victory as did William Lloyd Garrison, who, when he died in 1879, had been for fifteen years a national hero. His fame might be said to have come to him as a result of his having lived to complete his work, whereas his co-laborer, James G. Birney, dying before the Civil War began, failed to obtain even posthumous reward, although he so richly deserved it.
James Gillespie Birney was a native of Kentucky, bom about the time the first newspaper presses were being carried over the mountain roads. After graduating from Princeton, he had practiced law and, at the same time that Garrison was starting the Liberator, had become convinced, from his own accurate knowledge of slavery, that it was undermining the free institutions of the country and endangering the union of the states. He determined to liberate the few slaves that he owned and to move to Illinois, "the best site in the whole world for taking a stand against slavery."[4] His education, ability and firm Christian attitude had made him a national character, and when, in the spring of 1836, he began the publication of the Philanthropist in Cincinnati, interest was shown all over the country as to how far the threats of the pro-slavery element would be carried out.
Birney, in his paper, did more than a host of editors to show the North that the slave power in the South was not content with holding the black man in subjection. In issue after issue he set forth facts that showed that free speech and the free press were threatened by those in political control of the south. The speeches of the governors of Georgia, South Carolina and other states were printed with the speeches of Calhoun and other pro-, slavery statesmen; these he backed up with editorials from the leading papers in the slave states, and the laws passed in slave state legislatures, showing that freedom of speech and of the press was gradually being destroyed. Every time that a southern governor or southern legislature passed a bill demanding that the northern states muzzle the press or deliver some abolitionist editor to a southern governor for trial, Birney printed the demand in full.
It was due to the influence of Charles Hammond, editor of the Gazette, that Birney was permitted to remain in Cincinnati at all. The Post, the Whig and the Republican, the three papers which represented the Whig and Democratic parties, abused him unmercifully, and one of them even suggested lynching.
Amid the onslaught on Birney, Hammond administered to his fellow-editors and fellow-citizens a stern rebuke and emphatically re-asserted the right of freedom of speech and of the press, declaring forcibly that, if Mr. Birney wished to establish a paper in Cincinnati and to discuss slavery, it was his right to do so, and that men who should attempt to molest him would be striking at the fundamental principles of American institutions. For a while this had its effect, but the paper had not been established more than three weeks when a mob broke into the press-room and destroyed most of his material.
The murder of Elijah Lovejoy next stirred the country. Lovejoy was a graduate of an Eastern college, who had gone to St. Louis and had become the editor of a Henry Clay paper. In 1833 he established in St Louis a religious weekly called the Observer, in which he made frequent comments on slavery. It was not until 1835 that his paper became the subject of attack, at which time he, believing that it would be better to publish the paper on free soil, moved his press over to Alton, a small town across the river in Illinois.
When his press was delivered there, a mob smashed it to pieces. A number of citizens promised to make good Lovejoy's losses, a new press was brought from Cincinnati, and for a year the Observer was published without molestation.
In July, 1837, an editorial calling for the formation of a state anti-slavery society infuriated the pro-slavery people and a mob entered the office and destroyed his press and type. Lovejoy issued an appeal for funds to buy a new press. The money was raised; the press arrived and, at the request of the Mayor of the town it was turned over to him for safe keeping. No sooner was this done than the Mayor allowed the mob to enter the warehouse where the press was stored. They smashed it into pieces and threw the important parts into the Mississippi.
A fourth press was ordered and delivered at St. Louis. Lovejoy and his friends gathered to protect it; while standing near the door of the warehouse, Lovejoy was shot five times and died almost immediately.
The northern papers almost unanimously denounced this crime. The southern papers took the attitude that Lovejoy had willfully courted destruction. The politicians turned their attention to other things, but it marked the beginning of the end.
Lundy, Birney, Lovejoy and Garrison are not usually acclaimed as great journalists, but it is due to the spirit of such men that journalism is great and democracy possible.
While it is not within the province of such a study as this to go into special developments of journalism, it is worth pointing out that it was not the white man alone who was developing a newspaper war against slavery. The negro began as early as 1827 to print his own paper, and from 1827 to 1837 were printed, in New York City, the Freeman's Journal, the Rights of All, the Colored
American, the Elevator, and the Ram's Horn, as well as the National Watchman at Troy, New York, the Weekly Advocate at Toronto, Canada, and the North Star, published by Frederick Douglas.[5]