Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/235

Rh had also the fact that by training he was something of a politician and knew how to obtain Federal recognition.

William Maxwell, the second postmaster of Cincinnati, established the first newspaper in that town and incidentally the first in the Northwest. This was the Centinel of the Northwest Territory, issued for the first time November 9, 1793. In 1796 Maxwell sold the Centinel to Edmond Freeman, who changed the name to Freeman's Journal. In 1800 it was moved to Chillicothe, the new capital of the Territory, and in October, 1801, Nathaniel Willis bought Freeman's Journal, merging it with his Scioto Gazette, which continues under that name at the present time. Joseph Carpenter brought out the Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette, May 28, 1799, at Cincinnati, changing the name in 1806 to the Western Spy and Miami Gazette. It was six years after the establishment of the first paper that the first General Assembly of the Northwest Territory met at Cincinnati, a small settlement of seven hundred and fifty people, surrounded by dense and impenetrable forests of the Miami country.

In 1810 there were sixteen newspapers in Ohio; already vigorous men were identified with the journalism of the state. The Rev. John W. Brown, a strong Jeffersonian, established in 1804 at Cincinnati a little sheet known as Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Mercury, which paper very shortly afterwards took into its office as apprentice Stephen l'Hommedieu, who was later to become its proprietor. L'Hommedieu, with Charles Hammond and William D. Gallagher, later gave vigorous support to the Free-soil cause in a community which might, because of material interests, have been led to side with the slave states.

Charles Hammond was one of the ablest journalists of