Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/152

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New York Daily Gazette: it was absorbed by The New York Journal of Commerce in 1840.

HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON AS JOURNALISTS

Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, though usually classified in histories as statesmen, were also journalists by proxies. Their names are associated with possibly the two best illustrations of the party press and the personal organs The Gazette of the United States and The National Gazette. The first of these, edited by John Fenno, was the leader of the Federal press and was the political organ of Hamilton; the second, edited by Philip Freneau, was the leader of the Republican press and was the personal organ of Jefferson. Both editors were employed by the Government: Fenno was "the printer" to the Treasury Department at a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars a year; Freneau held a "clerkship for languages" in the State Depart- ment at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a year.

ORGAN OF HAMILTON

The Gazette of the United States was the older publication, being established in New York City on April 11, 1789, when that city was still the seat of the Government. As soon as the Govern- ment removed to Philadelphia, in 1790, The Gazette of the United States followed it and appeared with a Philadelphia imprint on April 14, 1790. Hamilton was thus the first in the field with a personal organ.

ORGAN OF JEFFERSON

Jefferson, perceiving that The Gazette of the United States was, to quote his own words, "a paper of pure Toryism, disseminat- ing the doctrine of monarchy, aristocracy, and exclusion of the people," desired a paper that would be a "Whig vehicle of in- telligence," and if he did not bring Freneau to Philadelphia, he at least sympathized with the latter's ambition to start a paper which should be distinctly Republican in policy. The Gazette of the United States soon had a rival in The National Gazette which Freneau established in Philadelphia on October 31, 1791. From the start it had a national rather than a local circulation: in this