Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/360

34 satisfaction,—although it brought with it political honors, they never gave him such disturbing moments as those with which the great eastern editor had to contend.

Such education as Medill received he obtained while working on his father's farm in Stark County, Ohio. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1864; his association with the editor of the local paper attracted him to journalism, howeyer, and he learned to set type and work a hand press. The result was that he gave up the idea of practicing law, and in 1843 he bought out the Coshocton Whig, changing the name to Coshocton Republican. Like so many young men in the middle west at that time, he burned with indignation over the aggressiveness and the arrogance of the South, and in his little paper the editorials were so bitter that on one occasion sundry Democrats waylaid him and answered his editorial attacks with cuts and bruises. Two years later he moved to Cleveland, and established the first Free Soil morning paper in that city. This paper, the name of which was changed to the Cleveland Leader, is to-day one of the important papers of the country.

Medill's great work was to unite the Free Soil and the Whig parties. The Whigs were controlled by the slave element, and it was Medill's task to draw such of the Whigs as were not under the domination of the proslavery element, into a new party, which he proposed to call the "Republican." He wrote to Horace Greeley to ask his advice about his proposed third party; we see from this how easy it was for Greeley to influence the country, when men like Joseph Medill looked to him as a leader.

"Go ahead, my friend, with your proposed Republican party, and God bless you," Greeley replied. "I hope you will have the best of luck. The time has indeed come to bury our beloved party; it is dead. But we have many