own corps of reporters. To Texas, therefore, belongs the honor
of being the first in cooperative journalism in America.
PASSING OF PRENTICE
In Louisville, Kentucky, there came a most remarkable jour- nalism change brought about by the new conditions which had arisen in that city, where for more than thirty years George Denison Prentice had been not only the foremost journalist of Kentucky and the entire South, but also one of the greatest edi- tors of the middle nineteenth century. His journalistic career began in 1828 on The New England Review, as an associate of John Greenleaf Whittier, who, though a Quaker, was a most in- tense fighter for the freedom of the negro. Induced by Con- necticut Whigs at Hartford to prepare a campaign life of Henry Clay, Prentice went to Kentucky to gather data. At that time the Democrats were determined to defeat Clay in his own State and Prentice was persuaded to start a paper to attack the Jack- son Democracy. Accordingly The Louisville Journal appeared on November 24, 1830. From the start the paper had attracted national attention by its clever satirical epigrammatic para- graphs, which William Cullen Bryant of The New York Evening Post called "the stinging, hissing bolts of scorn. " Many of these satiric arrows from his editorial quiver were aimed at Andrew Jackson. When it was announced that General Jackson had be- come a member of the Presbyterian Church, subscribers of The Journal wondered what Prentice, who had been educated in a Presbyterian school, would say: following his bare announce- ment of Jackson's decision were two lines to which no Presby- terian could object, for they were taken from a hymn by Dr. Watts:
While the lamp holds out to burn The vilest sinner may return.
The mention of sinners recalls another flip from Prentice's pen, "A well-known writer says that a fine coat covers a multi- tude of sins, but it is still truer that such coats cover a multitude of sinners." Many of these squibs were later collected in a book entitled "Prenticeana, or Wit and Humour in Paragraphs."
Prentice was ever prepared to fight, not only with his
