Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/323

Rh The first abolition newspapers were started in the South and the bitterest speeches against slavery were made there. But the movement was driven out and driven North by the slave-holding class, who, although in the minority, represented the material wealth of the country and were, under the social, -political and economic conditions which they had fostered, the sole representatives of public opinion. In those early days when abolition papers were being started in the South, it was a battle of principle against interest, of ideas against force.

But there can be no idealists, no great editors or journals, where brute force and material wealth so completely control, and the result was that the southern men of idealism were ignored in their own communities, or that they went North.

Making due allowances for population, it is interesting to compare the newspaper growth in the free soil states,—Ohio, Indiana or Illinois, for example,—with that of Louisiana, in which there had been, since before the beginning of the nineteenth century, a prosperous city. Even while Louisiana was a French colony, New Orleans had supported a paper; its .first English paper, however, was not published until 1804. But in 1828 there were only nine papers in Louisiana, while Ohio had sixty-six, Indiana seventeen and even Illinois could boast of four.

In 1 8 10 Ohio showed fourteen papers, as compared with Louisiana's ten, but in the period from 1810 to 1828, Ohio gained no less than fifty-two, while Louisiana actually shows a loss of one paper. In 1840 the figures were: Ohio, one hundred twenty-three, Indiana, seventy-three, Illinois, forty-three, Louisiana, thirty-four.

There may have been many reasons for this; the chief one undoubtedly was that, where men are not free to discuss questions without endangering their lives, and where