The Independent Chronicle of Boston.

137

first number appearing in August. John Anderson was its publisher.

The other paper originating in this year was A New Hampshire Gazette, called so because there was a newspaper then in existence entitled The New Hampshire Gazette. The latter was sometimes called Freeman's Journal, or New Hampshire Gazette, and sometimes Fowle's Gazette. It appears to have been the custom in those days to repeat the names of papers, regardless of principle, proprietorship, meaning, property, or originality. The only two papers published in Virginia before the Revolution bore the same name, the Virginia Gazette, and were issued at the same time and in the same town. Occasionally a weekly paper would be styled the Journal. Time, and experience, and necessity, and genius, perhaps, have made an improvement-a change, at all events, in the title-pages of the Press, for our newspapers now display many curious and some very ludicrous names.

The New England Chronicle, which had been published in Cambridge, and afterward sold to Powers & Willis by Samuel Hall, appeared in the summer of 1776 under the title of The Independent Chronicle. In November of that year Universal Advertiser was added to its name. The Chronicle was a strong Whig paper. With all the papers of the last century, it had a pictorial device at the head of the paper, with the motto, " Appeal to Heaven. Independence. John Hancock, William Gordon, and Samuel Adams wrote for its columns. It was influential in the cause of the Revolution, and powerful in its support of the principles of that great struggle. After the Boston Gazette and Massachusetts Spy, no paper in New England accomplished more for the cause of the country and its independence than the Chronicle. In one of its numbers it published a few verses on the death of Warren on Bunker Hill, one of which we give, embracing the sentiment "of his soul marching on" of the famous John Brown song. It embodied the spirit of the times: Columbia, forbear! not a sigh to alloy, For thy Warren, so justly beloved;

Thy griefs shall be changed into triumphs of joy,
Thy Warren's not dead, but removed.

The sons of the earth, the proud giants of old,
Have broke from their darksome abode;

And this is the news-for in heaven it is told-
They are marching to war with the gods.
A council was held in the chambers of Jove,
And this was the final decree,

That Warren should soar to the armies above

And the charge was entrusted to me.

On the second year of the publication of the paper, early in 1777,

the proprietors said:

The Printers and publishers of the Independent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser, (to keep pace with others of their profession of more ancient standing) beg leave, through this channel, to congratulate their customers on the arrival of the New Year,-being the first that has rolled over since their publication.

At the same time that they welcome in the New Year, they cannot pass over, in silent forgetfulness, the cruel, inhuman treatment, that America has experienced, during a series of months, without mentioning the desolating conflagration of Charleston, Falmouth, Norfolk, &c. from those, whom she once embraced as her bosom friends; and whose interest would, to this day, have been considered as inseperably connected with her own, had not a sincere love to America, in general, and to the great and good law of self-preservation, dictated a total seperation: Which the Grand Council of these Confederated States, in their Wisdom, have seen fit for ever to dissolve.

That America may prove victorious, and all, who have spirit, resolution, fortitude, and virtue, sufficient to assist her much injured (though glorious) cause, obtain what the whole collective wisdom of these States say they have an “inalienable right" to, viz. "PEACE, LIBERTY, and SAFETY" is the ardent wish of the Public's much obliged, and most devoted, humble servants,

THE PRINTERS.

One of the contributors to the Chronicle, the Rev. William Gordon, was the author of the first "History of the American Revolution." He was chaplain of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, and took a great interest in the Constitution of that state, a draft of which was then before the Convention.

The Chronicle was published by Powars and Willis till near the close of the war, and by Willis alone till the end of 1783.

Samuel Loudon, in January, 1776, issued the New York Packet and American Advertiser. It was a revival in name of the Pacquet of 1763. Loudon was born in Ireland, and settled in New York several years before the Revolution, establishing himself there as a shipchandler. He bought a printing-office and material of Frederick Shober, a German, in 1775. With this material he opened a bookstore in Water Street, near Old Slip, and started the Packet. He was a decided Whig. Just before the British took possession of New York he removed with his press and types to Fishkill, where he published his paper till the peace of 1783, when he returned to the city. The Packet, having been established in January, 1776, was the last paper started in New York before the Declaration of Independence.

There was a paper published in Boston in 1776 under the title of The Continental Journal and Weekly Advertiser. Its first number was issued on the 30th of May of that year by John Gill, the former partner of Edes, of the Boston Gazette. Gill was a sound Whig, and aided the Revolutionary cause so far as he could. When James Otis was killed by lightning in Andover in 1783, a fate which, it seems, he singularly desired, Thomas Dawes wrote a poem on his death which was published in the Journal. Otis, a master-spirit of the Revolution, was one of the glorious band which gave the Gazette so much influence in shaping the policy of the colonies in their

Newspapers in New Jersey and Mississippi. 139

struggle with England. Here is an extract from Dawes's apotheosis:

When flushed with conquest and elate with pride,
Britannia's monarch Heaven's high will defied,
And, bent on blood, by lust of rule inclined
With odious chains to vex the freeborn mind,—
On these young shores set up unjust command,
And spread the slaves of office round the land;
Then OTIS rose, and, great in patriot fame,
To listening crowds resistance dared proclaim.
From soul to soul the bright idea ran,
The fire of freedom flew from man to man;
His pen, like Sydney's, made the doctrine known,
His tongue, like Tully's, shook a tyrant's throne:
Then men grew bold, and, in the public eye,
The right divine of monarchs dared to try;
Light shone on all, despotic darkness fled,
And, for a sentiment, a nation bled,

Hark! the deep thunders echo round the skies!
On wings of flame the eternal errand flies;

One chosen charitable bolt is sped,

And Oris mingles with the glorious dead.

It was considered enterprising to publish histories and geographies in full in the columns of the papers. The Journal, for instance, like the Spy, published the whole of Robertson's History of America. It took two years to accomplish this typographical feat.

The first regular newspaper issued in New Jersey was published there on the 3d of December, 1777, the New Jersey Gazette. In 1758, James Parker, the New York printer, established a literary periodical, called the New American Magazine, which was edited by Samuel Nevil, a judge of the Supreme Court of that state, and who had been editor of the London Evening Post. But the first newspaper was published in 1777 by an enterprising Quaker named Isaac Collins, a printer, for a number of years, in that remarkable and respectable province. It was regularly issued till crowded out of existence by other more pretentious papers in November, 1786. Collins, like Franklin in Pennsylvania, printed the paper money of that state, the greenbacks of the last century, with this important exception: the greenbacks of this century are redeemed; those of the Revolution are in public and private museums and collections of curiosities, and unredeemed.

There was a paper, entitled the New Jersey Journal, established at Chatham, N. J., in 1778, by David Franks. It was continued till the close of the Revolution. Franks afterward removed to New York, and issued a weekly paper there. He also published, in connection with Shepard Kollock, the first Directory of that city. He then returned to New Jersey and his first love, and revived the Journal at Elizabethtown, and remained its editor till 1818.

On the 15th of June, 1778, the first number of the Independent Ledger and American Advertiser appeared in Boston-Draper and Folsom publishers. It was revolutionary in sentiment. Its prospectus was modest. Like other papers, it had a motto: "All hands with one inflamed and enlightened Heart." In 1779 the people began to reflect on what kind of government and what code of laws they should have after they had acquired their independence. In dicative of the prevailing sentiment, the Ledger published a peculiar communication on the subject. These communications were the editorials of the newspapers. Original articles, such as fill a page of the Tribune or Sun to-day, on the prevailing topics, were unknown then. Communications from the most distinguished writers were the opinions and sentiments of the paper publishing them.

In 1783 the Ledger was published by John W. Folsom alone. Edward E. Powars, who had been connected with Nathaniel Willis in the publication of the Independent Chronicle, started the American Herald in Boston in 1781, which he continued till 1788, when he removed to Worcester, Mass., and published the paper there for a couple of years with the additional name of Worcester Recorder. Mississippi began to enjoy the luxury of a newspaper in 1779. There was one published there in that year.

Vermont now entered the field of journalism, and closes our epoch of the Revolutionary Press by the publication of the Vermont Gazette, or Green Mountain Post-Boy, in 1781. It was printed at Westminster by Judah Paddock Spooner and Timothy Green. The establishment was removed to Windsor in 1783.

The forty-nine newspapers which were established in the colonies from 1748 to 1783 were all weekly or semi-weekly publicationsnot a daily, not a journal, was issued to this time in America. One paper had been started as a tri-weekly, but failed on that plan, and was then issued semi-weekly, and finally weekly. While New York was occupied by the English troops, the several papers there arranged their days of publication, as has since been done in Liverpool, England, so that one paper was issued each day, thus giving the public a daily newspaper. Of all the newspapers published on this continent to the end of this period, sixty-seven in number, from 1690 to 1783, only forty-three were in existence in 1783, when the independence of the United States was acknowledged by George the Third, and the young republic commenced its career of greatness and glory.

THE FOURTH EPOCH.

1783-1832.

THE POLITICAL PARTY PRESS.

CHAPTER X.

ORGANIZATION OF THE GREAT POLITICAL PARTIES.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION.-THE BEGINNING OF THE Federal and RepubliCAN PARTIES.-METTERNICH'S OPINION.-THE PARTY PRESS.-ITS TROUBLES.-ITS LIBELS.-ITS DUELS AND ASSAULTS.-THE NATIONAL CONSTITUTION. THE MASSACHUSETTS CENTINEL.-MAJOR BENJAMIN RUSSELL. — LOUIS PHILIPPE AND TALLEYRAND IN BOSTON.-THE BLACK AND TRI-COLORED COCKADES. THE METHUSELAHS OF JOUrnalism.

THE printer and the Press have ceased to be martyrs in England and America. The time when journalists were dragged through the streets to Tyburn, or had their ears cut off as with Prynne, or put in the pillory as with Defoe, or had their papers burned by the common hangman as with Zenger, has passed with the Anglo-Saxon race. Occasionally, it is true, by the blunders and passions of those in power, as in the enactment of the Alien and Sedition laws in 1798, in the suspension of the New York World and Journal of Commerce in 1864, and in the arrest of Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield Republican, in New York in 1868, there is a glimmering of the despotism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But this is all. Such mistakes as these are not likely to be repeated on this side of the Atlantic.

After numerous persecutions of the Press in England, more freedom began to dawn on journalism there; and in the great struggle for the abolition of the stamp duty, which originated in an effort to muzzle the Press in 1712, the journalists of Great Britain made rapid progress in acquiring their rights. This struggle began in 1828, and ended, for a time, in 1836, in a reduction of the tax from fourpence to one penny, and its final abolition in 1871. But in obtaining this result there were nearly a thousand prosecutions, imprisonments, and fines for selling unstamped publications. So decisive a victory was only finally achieved after a fierce contest, and through the early exertions of Hetherington, the cheap journalist, aided by