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The Father of "Gales and Seaton."

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small scraps of news culled from the exchanges and log-books. These items would always appear in the penny papers of the next morning! Sometimes they would be left out of the Advertiser. The cheap press would thus derive more advantage than the Advertiser from Dustan's labors.

Amos Butler was a short, thick-set man-a respectable old publisher, who, in a nice, neat suit of black, lived to see the new class of papers prosper. Among his last editorial writers were, we believe, Redwood Fisher, and Wakeman H. Dikeman, a gentleman who has been for many years at the head of an important bureau in the office of the Comptroller of the City of New York.

New Hampshire could boast of other papers than those already mentioned. The Exeter Federal Miscellany was issued in Exeter by Henry Ranlet in 1789. It was a strong Federalist organ at that time, if the publication of a song early in 1799, of which the following was the closing verse, is any sign of the political status of the paper:

Midst Faction enkindled, just bursting to flame,

See ADAMS, like Atlas, our glory supporting;

While the foes of our freedom, encrimsoned with shame,

Scarce own the mad rabble, whose smiles they've been courting:
Then, ADAMS our guide,

In him we 'll confide,

And safe o'er the whirlpools of Faction we 'll ride:
And ne'er to the shrine of a tyrant will fall

While Phœbus his chariot impels round the ball.

About 1799, Joseph Gales, the father of "Gales and Seaton," was induced to establish the Register in Raleigh, N. C. Nathaniel Macon, that fine old gentleman of the old North State, was one of those who enticed him away from the seat of government. Like many other journalists, Gales had a history. He was born near Sheffield, England. He learned the art of printing in Manchester. In Sheffield he published a paper named the Register. These three sentences are three cantos of his early life. When the successful editor

of the Sheffield Register, he became a reformer, an oracle, and a bookseller. One of his apprentices or assistants, obtained through the medium of an advertisement, was a youth named James Montgomery. This young man was quite useful to him, first as a clerk, then as an assistant editor, and finally as his successor, and always his friend. He is now known to fame as Montgomery the Poet. Amid the political excitement of England, an effort was made to arrest Gales for "words spoken in debate," or rather for an article published in the columns of his newspaper. This was in 1792, when the Revolution in France had thrown all the political reformers of the world into a state of frightful excitement and frenzy. Fortunately for Gales, he was absent from home when the king's messenger

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paid his domicile a visit. He was advised of the affair by friends. Although innocent and honest, he well knew that his fate was sealed if he returned to Sheffield. Sensible of this, he turned his face towards Germany, and then his heart, with wife and children, towards America, and, after a long passage from Hamburg, landed in Philadelphia. Montgomery settled his home affairs and purchased the Register, on the foundation of which he published the Sheffield Iris. On his long passage across the Atlantic, like Morse inventing his telegraph characters, Gales studied stenographic characters. On going out in the streets of Philadelphia, he found his labors upon the ocean were "bread upon the waters." In the spring of 1793 he obtained employment as printer. One day, Claypole, his employer, asked him, "Can you report? Our Congressional reports do not satisfy me. I would like better ones if I could get them.” Like Croghan, later in time, when asked if he could take Fort Erie, Gales modestly replied, "I'll try." Greatly to the astonishment of the public and the delight of Claypole, the next day's proceedings in Congress appeared in the next morning's paper fuller and better than ever before. There was no delay. There was the debate. Miraculous for those days. Wonderful art has stenography proved to be the camera obscura of speech. It is to the utterance of the human tongue what the photographic art is to expression of the human face-they preserve the present for the future. So Gales prospered. He became the proprietor of the Independent Gazetteer, which he conducted till 1799, when it was turned over to Samuel Harrison Smith, who followed the government to Washington, where he established the National Intelligencer, in the columns of which Gales the younger, in after years, practiced the stenographic art for a long period in our nation's history, and so usefully for its historians. Gales the elder went to North Carolina, as we have stated, and the Raleigh Register loomed up into life, bearing the old name he left behind in England, and with the public printing of the new state of his adoption as a reward for his industry. After years of successful toil he left the Register to his son, Weston Gales, and retired to Washington, where his son Joseph had become part proprietor of the Intelligencer.

One of the cleverest writers for the newspapers at the close of the last or in the early part of this century was Joseph Dennie, the "Lay Preacher" of the Farmers' Weekly Museum, a paper established by Isaiah Thomas in Walpole, N. H., in 1793. Griswold, in alluding to this popular journalist, said:

Take, for example, the case of Joseph Dennie, the celebrated editor of The PortFolio. Although the writings of Dennie do not vindicate his traditional fame, he was unquestionably a man of fine and peculiar genius, who exercised in various

Joseph Dennie, the Lay Preacher.

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ways an extraordinary influence upon the mental habits and tastes of our countrymen. A brief obituary in The Port-Folio, with a few reminiscences in the pleasant volumes of autobiography by J. T. Buckingham, furnish all that is here given us of this remarkable individual. Not one word is said of his political troubles in Philadelphia; his intimacy with Thomas Moore; his memoir of Moore's early life, prefixed to the first collection of that poet's works ever printed in the United States; his wonderful talents as a raconteur; the brilliancy and kindliness of his spoken wit, "which sometimes," according to his friend Ingraham, "kept his friends in laughter and tears till they were startled from the night's enjoyment by breakfast bells;" of the ruin induced by his amiable infirmities; the epitaph for his monument, in which his young friend, John Quincy Adams, described his character; the youthful writers whom he had brought forward; or the curious fact that one of them—the subsequently renowned Nicholas Biddle-was his immediate successor in the editorship of his magazine. Indeed, we have almost nothing of what should have constituted Dennie's biography.

The reputation of Dennie became so wide-spread that the paper was named the Farmers' Museum, or Lay Preacher's Gazette. The "sermons" of Dennie were copied regularly in nearly all the newspapers of the country. In 1799 Dennie migrated to Philadelphia, where in 1800 he established the Port-Folio in partnership with Asbury Dickens, the father, if we are not mistaken, of the respected Secretary of the United States Senate for many years.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE OFFICIAL ORGANS IN WASHINGTON.

THE FIRST NEWSPAPER IN WASHINGTON. THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER. -GALES AND SEATON.-ORGANS OF THE GOVERNMENT.-CONGRESSIONAL REPORTING.-ADVENT OF JACKSON. THE TELEGRAPH AND DUFF GREEN. -THE QUARREL OF JACKSON AND CALHOUN.-THE GLOBE.-FRANCIS P. BLAIR AND AMOS KENDALL. THE SPECTATOR AND CONSTITUTION. -INTRIGUES AND INCIDENTS.-JAMES Watson Webb and Duff Green.-The UNION. THOMAS RITCHIE. — INTERESTING REMINISCENCES. THE MADISONIAN. THE NEWSPAPERS OF TO-DAY.

ALL governments have their organs. All political parties, all cliques, all religious denominations have their newspapers, through which they communicate with the people. Nearly every senator and member of Congress has a home organ, more vulgarly called a "mouth-piece."

The English government has the London Gazette, established in 1665. It still lives, and is the second oldest organ in the world; the Pekin Gazette, the official paper of China, being the father of organs. The French government had Le Moniteur Universal; Fournal Officiel de l'Empire Français. It was started in 1789, but on the 1st of January, 1869, Napoleon abandoned it, as it was private property, and established a new organ, which he called the Journal Of ficiel de l'Empire Français. The empress, it is said, had her organ in La France. Both were swept away by Sedan in 1870. The Thiers government at Versailles and the Communist government in Paris had each a Journal Officiel in 1871. Austria and Andrassy speak through the Gazette of Vienna; Prussia through the Staats Anzarger in decrees and judgments, and Bismarck through the Nord Deutsche Algemeine Zeitung; Italy and Victor Emanuel through the Gazetti Officielle of Florence; Spain and Amadeus through the Gacêta de Madrid; the Pope and Antonelli through the Observatore Romano; Mexico and Juarez through the Diario Oficial; Greece and George through the Messenger of Athens; Russia and Alexander through the Pranitelstoennii Vyestaik; and Turkey and Abdel Aziz through the Turkie.

The present organ of Russia is a new one. The Czar recently became displeased with the Invalide Russe of St. Petersburg, and set it aside. This paper was first issued in 1813, to raise a fund for the relief of the wounded soldiers. It is stated that in that and the

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two following years it gave relief to sixteen hundred and fifty invalids, and at the close of the war in 1815 it handed over to the committee of relief nearly two hundred thousand dollars. Since then it raised an annual income of ten thousand dollars till the Crimean War, when it paid to this fund fifty thousand dollars. It was the organ, especially the military organ, of Nicolas and Nesselrode, and Alexander and Gortschakoff, from 1839 till superseded in 1868. M. Thiers, in the Corps Legislatif in 1868, thus spoke of the influence of a newspaper organ in Russia:

Voyez la presse en Autriche: elle est encore bien jeune, cependant elle révèle déjà l'opinion du pays. Et dans un autre pays que vous serez peut-être étonnés d'entendre citer, en Russie, où la presse n'est pas libre, elle commence cependant à avoir la parole, et il s'y produit un phénomène remarquable; le gouvernement est sage, discret, mesure, sincère même dans son langage; et pourtant, si l'on n'entendait que lui, on ne saurait pas la vérité. Mais il y a à Moscou un homme politique de grande intelligence, M. de Katkof, rédacteur de la Gazette de Moscou; et pour avoir une idée exacte de ce qui se passe en Russie, des mouvemens de cette grande puissance et de ses tendances, il faut combiner les dires du gouvernement avec le langage de la Gazette de Moscou.

The Ottoman Moniteur was edited by M. Blecque, father of the Turkish minister to the United States in 1869. Although printing was introduced in Turkey in 1727, the first newspaper did not make its appearance in that country till 1827, when this same M. Blecque started the Spectator of the East at Smyrna. The present official organ of the Sultan has already been mentioned.

These papers are entirely under the control of the governments de facto. Nothing appears except by authority. There is an amusing illustration of this in the announcement, said to be taken from the Moniteur of France, in March, 1815, on the escape of Napoleon from Elba:

First announcement. -"The monster has escaped from the place of his banishment; and he has run away from Elba."

2nd. "The Corsican dragoon, (l'ogre) has landed at Cape Juan."

3rd. "The tiger has shown himself at Gap. The troops are advancing on all sides to arrest his progress. He will conclude his miserable adventure by becoming a wanderer among the mountains; he cannot possibly escape."

4th. "The monster has really advanced as far as Grenoble, we know not to what treachery to ascribe it."

5th. "The tyrant is actually at Lyons. Fear and terror seized all at his appearance."

6th. 64 march." 7th. "

The usurper has ventured to approach the capital to within sixty hours'

Bonaparte is advancing by forced marches; but it is impossible he can reach Paris."

8th. "Napoleon will arrive under the walls of Paris to-morrow." 9th. "The Emperor Napoleon is at Fontainebleau."

10th. "Yesterday evening his Majesty the Emperor made his public entry, and arrived at the Tuilleries-nothing can exceed the universal joy !"

Our government, at first, had no organ. When located in New York and Philadelphia, and during the formation of parties, the papers arranged themselves for and against the acts of Congress as

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