established in the city. The Columbian was started in 1808 by Charles Holt, after he had set The Bee buzzing first at New Lon- don, Connecticut, and later at Hudson, New York. It was an organ of Jefferson and later of Madison. The National Advocate had only just appeared. It was started by Tammany Hall in order that that organization might have an official organ. The Republican newspapers, not only in New York, but in the other cities, lost no opportunity to criticize the British practice of im- pressing American seamen into service. It is rather remarkable that a little later they should have so completely ignored the French decree about the confiscation of American goods, as this decree was only a little short of being a declaration of war.
The darkest period in the history of American journalism was that which began at the close of the second war with England, a tune truthfully characterized as the " period of black journal- ism," when a greater depth of degradation was reached than was ever touched in the so-called "yellow" period of recent times. Those who look over the papers of this era will find that all of the customary courtesies of life were put aside; that the papers of both parties employed the vilest, grossest epithets found in the English language; that the newspapers advanced the most atrocious charges against those holding public offices and even so forgot themselves as to attack wives and sisters in their dis- graceful accounts of the personal activities of office-holders.
But the pendulum began to swing the other way. Its first push toward the legitimate function of the newspaper was given by Charles Hammond of The Gazette of Cincinnati. He refused to make his paper simply an organ for a great party leader and turned it into a medium for the discussion of the great principles of the Republican Government. In him there was an inborn love of truth for its own sake. Hammond once expressed his opinion of the violent personal journalism of the period as fol- lows: "I am afraid my quondam crony, Mr. Shadrach Penn, of The Louisville Public Advertiser, has kept a great deal of bad company since the days of our political intimacy. He seems to mistake vulgarity for wit and misrepresentation for argument;
