Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/247

Rh of which lasted but a short time, but which were, in their way, an influence in preparing the public for the higher issues. Some of these papers were: The Telescope, (New York City), The Spirit of the Age, (Rochester), Southern Free Press, (Charleston. S. C), The Spirit of the Age, (Tuscaloosa), Free Press, (Wilmington, Del.), The Friend of Equal Rights, (New York), and the Daily Sentinel, (New York).

Given a cause and there was immediately a flood of publicity. It was the newspaper contract made in March, 1826, between William Morgan and David C. Miller, editor of the Republican Advocate—in which Morgan agreed to write an attack exposing the secrets of the Masonic craft—that led to the mysterious disappearance of Morgan. Almost immediately there was an anti-Masonic party, and a powerful party it became, too, with its organs and its fighting journalists, among them Thurlow Weed, whose Albany Journal was started as an anti-Masonic paper.

While the northwestern territory was yet in process of settlement, a movement began there,—a journalistic crusade, in fact—that was not to end until the great Civil War had rent the Union.

All history is more or less dramatic, but the American is justified in the feeling that the great elemental qualities, the qualities that abounded in the wilderness then so recently conquered, have appeared also in the doings of the conquerors in their relation with their fellow-men. Hardly, it would seem, had the original settlers finished building up communities to protect them from the savages and wild animals, before they were announcing, to a world old in civilization and laws, the new law for a free press. Before, by old world standards, they could be presumed to crawl, they were proclaiming themselves a