History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
NEWSPAPERS AND THE CAPITAL
We go back to the seat of government to follow, practically to its end, the direction of public opinion by the heads of government, through semi-official newspapers. Hamilton's genius conceived the idea of such publications,—papers that should direct and inform the public, at the same time guiding them gently into such trains of thought as were desirable.
We know, however, that the publications set on foot by Hamilton soon led to the establishment of opposition papers by Jefferson. The chief protagonist of the democratic idea, when he came to the Presidency, did not hesitate to follow in Hamilton's footsteps. As we have seen, he gave to Duane and others such patronage and encouragement as served to keep them contented, and acceptably representative of his administration.
When the capital was moved to Washington, that city was not of sufficient size or importance to warrant the settling there of men of weight and standing in journalism. Consequently, it was in Philadelphia and New York that they found opportunities for producing papers that would affect the public. In a capital that was not a historic city,—a capital, moreover, where the inhabitants were all citizens of other sections of the country—journalism was bound to assume a peculiar phase, radically different from any to be found in the European countries, where the journalism of the nation was dominated by that of the capital.
It is interesting to speculate as to the differences that might have been in the history of American journalism had Washington been the metropolis, and had the journals of that city swayed the thought of the country. The attempt to influence the country throtigh Washington is part of the history of the slave power. The failure of the attempt and the rise of anti-slavery journalism which did so much to sweep the slave power out of Washington, is the story of northern journalism.
The geographical position of the capital brought the journals, as well as the social life, under the influence of the south. This was, as we shall see, to the distinct detriment of the newspapers, for, although there was no difference of mental or intellectual ability between northern and southern journalists, the social characteristics of the south were opposed to the democratic idea which was the life and breath of journalism. Moreover, American journalism, as it was to devdop, could not live where the duello was so much in vogue as it was in the south. Here and there editors of extraordinary character might be found, men who could write and shoot with equal facility, but the usual intellectual development produced no such ambidexterity.
With the leading minds of the country gathered in Washington for the greater part of the year, it was natural that there should soon be the germ of great influence there. Because Washington was not the center of population, and because the papers there wer the immediate influence of the government, no national journals, such as those associated with the names of Hammond, Medill, Greeley, Bowles or Bennett, were ever developed at the capital.
Furthermore, Washington journals having little or no influence on the home constituents of the legislators, the editors were not men whom it became customary to take into the party councils. As in the case of Gales and Seaton, however, a few of the editors showed themselves to be such conspicuously able citizens that the leading statesmen of the country were glad and proud of their friendship.
As early as 1796, before the capital was located at Washington, a weekly paper had been printed there, under the auspices of Benjamin More. The year previous an unsuccessful attempt had been made by T. Wilson, who had founded the Impartial Observer, which lasted but a short time.[1]
Jefferson, for the benefit of the party, induced Samuel Harrison Smith, then the proprietor of the Philadelphia Universal Gazette, to move to Washington when that city became the capital. Smith had recently purchased the paper from Joseph Gales, one of the aliens at whom the Alien and Sedition laws had been aimed. Gales had been a conspicuous journalist in England and had fled because of threatened prosecution for political articles which had appeared in his paper, the Sheffield Register. It was said that he studied stenography during the long voyage to this country; one can readily believe that he might have mastered many sciences in the time such a voyage occupied in those days. He worked as a printer on the Philadelphia papers and was one of the first to report Congressional debates by stenography. In 1797 he decided to move to Raleigh and sold his Philadelphia paper to Smith, who changed the name from Independent Gasetter to Universal Gazette. On the first of October, 1800, Smith inaugurated the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, which was issued three times a week; he also transferred the Universal Gazette to Washington, making it the weekly edition of the Intelligencer."[2] At about the same time Jefferson's opponents set up a paper called the Washington Federalist; it lasted but a very short time, while Smith's paper rapidly became prosperous and influential and was known as the "court journal."
In 1809 Smith admitted as partner Joseph Gales, Jr., son of the man from whom he had purchased the Independent Gazetteer. During the temporary retirement of Smith, Gales associated with him William W. Seaton, his brother-in-law, and the two became official stenographers to Congress, one reporting the Senate, the other the House of Representatives. They were the first official reporters of Congress; to them the country is indebted for the notes of the famous Missouri Compromise debates and other great oratorical clashes, including that of Webster and Hayne. Their seats were near those of the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, and, as one of the perquisites, they shared with those officials in the use of the official snuff-boxes. [3]
After the war of 1812, their position was even more important than it had been before, for the British, when they captured the city, were reported to have destroyed their office "in revenge."
Gales and Seaton became a famous partnership and both were important men in the City of Washington. Clay rushed to avail himself of the columns of the In- telligencer when he was attacked by an unknown congressman in the Columbia Observer, and it was therein boldly denied that he had been guilty of making a coalition with John Quincy Adams by which he was to be made Secretary of State in return fof his support of Adams for President. Webster is reported to have said that Gales and Seaton were the two wisest heads in the country, and that Gales knew more about the history of government than "all the political writers of the day put together."
It was Seaton who in 1824 entertained General Lafayette at his home, and the two partners, in turn, served as mayors of the City of Washington. Gales was elected Mayor in 1827 and again in 1828, while Seaton served for ten years. When Gales was not a candidate in 1830, it was intimated in his paper that national politics was playing a part in local affairs, which would indicate that Andrew Jackson was not allowing the editor of an opposition paper to advance politically with his permission. It was due to Gales and Seaton that the first attempt was made to publish under separate form the debates of Congress, and this was attempted at their own risk and expense.
In the last few months that Monroe held office, a number of personal organs appeared, papers intended to advance the political fortunes of various individual statesmen. During the administration of John Quincy Adams, the National Journal was the favored one. It was edited by Peter Force, another practical printer, who later achieved considerable influence in Washington life.
With Andrew Jackson's inauguration in 1829, both the Intelligencer of Gales and Seaton and Force's National Journal lost their semi-official positions, and Duff Green's United States Telegraph became the "official paper," al though Green's warm friendship for John C. Calhoun led him to follow that leader rather than the President.
Amos Kendall, who was an assistant editor under Green, afterward became Jackson's confidential advisor. Green's friendship for Calhoun led the President to decide on having an organ of his own, edited by a man whom he could trust; he selected for this purpose Francis P. Blair, editor of the Frankfort Argus, a paper controlled by Kendall. Jackson brought Blair to Washington and established the Globe, and more directly than had Hamilton or Jefferson, he made the paper a vehicle for the expression of his personal views.
Green has left on record the statement that President Jackson's action in starting a new paper cost him $50,000 a year. Some one trifed to patch up the differences between Jackson and Green and the latter says that, before the President's own cabinet, he. Green, refused to shake hands. How Harris and Zenger and Edes would have stared at that performance!
It was said that the President often turned his mail over to Blair, allowing him to edit it as he was disposed. Amos Kendall, becoming editorial writer on the Globe, had nightly private conferences with Jackson, at which the President would lie down and smoke and dictate his ideas "as well as he could express them," while Kendall would write and re-write until by alterations and corrections he had succeeded in getting his articles as the master mind wished them. "General Jackson needed such an amanuensis—intelligent, learned, industrious—as Mr. Kendall was," says Henry A. Wise of Virginia. "He could think but could not write; he knew what nerve to touch, but he was no surgeon skilled in the instrument of dissection. Kendall was."[4] Following the Whig victory of Harrison and Tyler in 1840, the Globe ceased to be the organ of the administration, but the Intelligencer was not restored entirely to its old position. A rival had developed in the Madisonian, which originally had been Van Buren's paper, but which, having seen a great light, had gone over to the Whigs.
The proprietor of the Intelligencer was made printer for the House of Representatives and the Senate selected the publisher of the Madisonian as its printer. When Harrison died most of the Whig journals deserted Tyler, but the Madisonian took up his cause, becoming a daily shortly afterward. The South Carolina or Calhoun section of the Democratic party blossomed forth about this time with a new paper, the Spectator. A change was also made in the method of doling out patronage to the papers. Since 18 19 the practice had been to print the laws in newspapers in the different states and territories, whereas now it was directed that they should appear in at least two and not more than four of the principal papers in Washington, preference to be given to those with the largest circulation.
When the Democrats came back into power with James K. Polk in 1844, they returned to the old practice of scattering patronage throughout the Union, instead of giving it to the Washington organs. The wiser men in the party were beginning to see the uselessness of the administration organs, but there were still those who believed in them. "For want of an official organ to explain the principles of action," observed the Boston Advertiser, "the Polk administration has acquired no political character."
Consequently the Globe outfit was purchased,—the left-over organ was always supposed to have "claims"—and the Washington Union was issued in its place by Thomas Ritchie, then seventy years of age, and one of the most influential political editors of the day. During this administration the dailies dropped to two, the Intelligencer and the Union.
On August 8, 1846, a law was enacted that, instead of each house selecting its own printer, the contract should go to the lowest bidder. In the meantime, Blair and Rives had more firmly established the Congressional Globe, in which the debates in Congress appear verbatim, so that the Globe became the recognized official reporter of Congress, a position it continued to hold until the work was taken over by the Congressional Record.
It was said of President Taylor that, although overruled in the selection of his official advisors, he was allowed to have his own way in the choice of a newspaper organ. As the National Intelligencer, under Gales and Seaton, had been very friendly to Daniel Webster and had denounced Taylor's nomination as "one not fit to be made," the President sought his editorial advisors in other quarters. Alexander Bullitt and John O. Sergeant, one from New Orleans and the other from New York, were brought to Washington to become editors of the Republic, the new official paper.
This organ had but little weight, and, when Fillmore succeeded to office and Webster became the head of his cabinet, the Massachusetts statesman saw to it that his favorites were immediately restored to favor. The Intelligencer was once more the official mouthpiece of the Whigs.[5]
But the selection was no longer a matter of national importance. It had degenerated into a mere designation of so much patronage.
It was Jackson's use of patronage that had lessened the influence of the administration organ as a molder of public opinion. Furthermore, the country had expanded, not only in population and wealth but in political independence and knowledge, to the point where the idea of administration papers was manifestly inadequate. A semi-official organ at the capital itself would necessarily be found ineffective, when so many of the papers had their own representatives writing and telegraphing news which, though it could carry a certain amount of color for a while, was obliged, in the long run, to be responsive to the demand for uncolored news or else to forfeit not only its standing but its existence. What was effective in a personal organ—friendly interpretation within judicious limits—might be obtained from some if not all of these Washington correspondents without the cost of supporting a paper. More important still, with a country growing as rapidly as was the United States, it was not the organ at the capital that was most effective; the newspapers in the large cities, or even in small ones,—those having able editors and writers—were the ones that were in a position to affect the public. Men who were leaders did not, as the country grew, look to the capital for guidance. Many of the men who swayed public opinion were not connected with Washington, and in many instances, when they did go to the capital in official positions, they went there with set opinions, carrying with them the endorsement of their own communities and expecting, not to be guided, but to guide.
Cheetham, the editor of the Citizen of New York, who had been Coleman's bitter antagonist, was one of the first to establish himself in Washington during the session of Congress, and, through his intimacy with Jefferson, he developed a correspondence for his paper that had some of the force of official utterances. Duane of the Aurora, and Joseph T. Buckingham of the Boston Galaxy were also conspicuous figures in the early days.
It was during the exciting debates of 1824, however, that newspapers began sending their own representatives to report them, relying less on the papers printed in Washington. Any success of such semi-official journalism as Jackson planned was bound to be temporary at best, especially when the men outside the official circle were of such caliber as were James Gordon Bennett, who acted as correspondent to the New York Courier from 1827 to 1832; Richard Houghton, afterward editor of the Boston Atlas, the man responsible for undermining Daniel Webster's hold on the country and bringing about the nomination of William Henry Harrison; James Webb of the New York Courier and Enquirer; George D. Prentice of the Louisville Journal; Thurlow Weed of the Albany Evening Journal; Henry B. Anthony of the Providence Journal; Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Enquirer, and later Horace Greeley, John W. Forney and Henry J. Raymond. Every one of these men would have scoffed at taking "dictation," even from a President.