The expansion of democracy in the United States has found a constant index and gauge in the evolution of the newspaper. As democratic sentiment among us took form and produced the organs of political party life, the journals changed from mere bill-boards to party-organs, and from party-organs to newspapers, obedient finally to the demands of Publicity rather than to those of Party. Prior to 1830 every paper was intended to be the preacher of some partisan gospel. It was filled with personal squibs or stump-speeches and published such stray items of general news as fell easily into its possession.
Glancing back for an instant at the beginnings of journalism in the eighteenth century, we see at once that the colonial press was in no wise a framer or leader of public opinion. Those papers were its humble and passive channels. Neither were they newspapers in our sense of the term. They were bulletin -boards on which were plastered the political arguments or purposes of factions and parties. Provincial New York had more clearly antagonistic political parties than any other colony. The two parties, popular and aristocratic, were somewhat evenly balanced in New York City and each had its chosen journalistic organ since the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Bradford's Gazette was founded in 1729 to be the mouthpiece of the royal governors and of the aristocratic party; Zenger's Journal was established in 1733 to be the similar representative of the popular opposition. As the most favored Tory organ, Bradford's Gazette was succeeded in the decade 1750 to 1760 by Hugh Gaine's Mercury, and in the era of the Revolution by James Rivington's Gazette. The office of this paper was sacked and its types destroyed by a mob of Sons of Liberty, who would not permit freedom of the press except to their own publication. This paper, called Holt's Journal, was the direct successor of Zenger's Journal, and the proprietor, John Holt, was a prominent patriot and Son of Liberty. All these papers were weekly; the first daily paper in New York City was the Daily Advertiser, founded in 1785, of which the poet Freneau was for a short time the editor in 1789-1790.[1] The proprietor of Holt's Journal was now dead, but under different names and through some vicissitudes of fortune this paper remained true to its original political affiliations with radical democracy.
At the beginning of this century the New York City instrument of the Jeffersonian democracy was the lineal descendant and representative of Holt's paper. It was then called the American Citizen. Its editor was an Englishman named James Cheetham, a
- ↑ The first daily newspaper in the country was the American Daily Advertiser, issued at Philadelphia in 1784, and now merged in the paper known as the North American.
