antipathies bred by the war, he argued, had taken too deep root.[1]
News, in the sense of personalities, could not be carried further than he carried it in depicting the scene when his sanctum was invaded by an irate citizen, who threatened to kill him. This was a news development that was afterward to be emulated by James Gordon Bennett and other editors attacked under similar circumstances.
When it came to the fight for the adoption of the Constitution, Russell was a tower of strength in the only issue that ever, gave the Federalist party any great popularity. But he went further. He organized meetings of the plain people of Boston to urge ratification; and as other states ratified, each ratification was set forth prominently. There is modern enterprise shown in his account of the part he played when the Massachusetts convention, held in a church, came to pass on the Constitution:
I never had studied stenography, nor was there any person then in Boston that understood reporting. The presiding officer of the convention sat in the Deacon's seat, under the pulpit. I took the pulpit for my reporting desk, and a very good one it was. I succeeded well enough in this my first effort to give a tolerable fair report in my next paper; but the puritanical notions had not entirely faded away, and I was voted out of the pulpit. A stand was fitted up for me in another place, and I proceeded with my reports, generally to the acceptance of the Convention. The doubts that still existed as to whether enough of the states would come into the compact to make the Constitution binding, made the proceedings of the Convention intensely interesting. When the news arrived of the acceptance of it by the state of Virginia, there was a most extraordinary outbreak of rejoicing. It seemed as if the meeting-house would burst with the acclamation.[2]
His loyalty is instanced by the fact that he printed the public laws gratuitously and, when the bill was asked for,
