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NEWSPAPERS CHIEFLY POLITICAL TRACTS

After the Constitution was adopted political leaders found that they needed mouthpieces for a wider expression of their views. They divided themselves into parties of which the com- mon people knew little or nothing. To get the people to take sides on political questions they founded newspapers which, while giving a little news, did more to advance and spread the doctrines of party leaders, for politics tended to make the jour- nals of the period not newspapers in the modern sense of the term, but chiefly political tracts : the moral essay of the Colonial Period was omitted and in its place was substituted a coarse and frequently vulgar attack upon a rival. Papers conceived amid intense political feeling and born simply to be bulletin boards for party leaders, continued to increase in number in spite of a high death-rate. At a political meeting it was considered quite proper to pass a resolution calling upon "our party newspapers to attack at once the reputations of all the leading Federalists in the State," or vice versa, for most papers were either Federal or Republican.

PERSONAL ATTACKS OF PRESS

In view of such conditions the newspapers of the last decade of the eighteenth century with here and there an exception only to prove the rule abounded in little else than libelous and scandalous personal attacks. The new freedom of the press promoted not truth but calumnies and falsehoods. Chief Jus- tice McKean, in a libel case (1798) against William Cobbett, of Peter Porcupine Gazette in the City of Brotherly Love, remarked :

Every one who has in him the sentiments either of a Christian or a gentleman cannot but be highly offended at the envenomed scurrility that has raged in pamphlets and newspapers printed in Philadelphia for several years past, insomuch that libelling has become a national crime, and distinguishes us not only from all the states around us, but from the whole civilized world. Our satire has been nothing but ribaldry and billingsgate; the contest has been who could call names in the greatest variety of phrases; who could mangle the greatest number of characters, or who could excel in the magnitude of their lies; hence the honor of families has been stained, the highest posts rendered cheap and vile in the sight of the people, and the greatest services and virtue blasted.