Seven Events That Made America America (5 page)

During the colonial and revolutionary periods, “news” consisted of mostly local events, although a few overtly partisan papers existed. The
National Gazette
, edited by Philip Freneau, opposed George Washington and the Federalists, as did the anti-Federalist
Aurora
, while the
National Intelligencer
supported the administration. The
Intelligencer
received a government contract for reprinting the speeches of members of Congress, which constituted a monopoly contract, persuading many of the members to hold up publication of their remarks until they, or the party, could alter them. Once again, Van Buren perceived an opportunity, viewing the newspapers as the perfect propaganda instruments to take the message of his new party to the citizens—by the 1858 Senate race between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Douglas mailed more than 350,000 news clippings containing his speeches back to Illinois. Papers had to be faithful to the party’s ideology (which is to say, lack of ideology), meaning they—like other organization loyalists—would be procured with cash.

As historian Robert Remini contended, this constituted “perhaps the single most important accomplishment” of the Jacksonians—the “creation of a vast, nationwide newspaper system” that supported their ideology.
⁵³
The Jacksonians blatantly established their own party organs, such as Duff Green’s Washington-based
United States Telegraph
(1826), by lending the editor the money to start the paper. Green obediently repaid his political masters with pro-Jackson editorials and obligingly turned out a special extra paper during the 1828 election with a circulation of forty thousand.
⁵⁴
He also played Johnny Appleseed to the Jacksonian news nexus, helping to set up other Jacksonian papers around the country. Defenders of Green point to the fact that he was “struggling financially” and thus could not possibly have been “on the take,” but in fact he relied on increasing sales to distant subscribers, and like all other papers of the era, his fell victim to the reluctance of subscribers to actually pay for the paper.
⁵⁵
So the evidence suggests that Green was every bit as partisan as his accusers have claimed and that he was likely just a poor businessman.

Printing profits, for example, averaged 40 percent a year during one ten-year stretch, and an official paper could be charged tremendous lithographing, printing, and engraving fees.
⁵⁶
The motto of the
United States Telegraph
, “Power Is Always Stealing from the Many to the Few,” seems an apt description of what Green and his friends were doing. Not only did he receive official party monies, but Jacksonian loyalists endorsed Green’s personal notes and funneled “soft money” to him on a regular basis, but without this steady flow of funds, the paper never could have survived on its subscriptions. Indeed, as more Democratic papers proliferated, and as Whig papers rose in opposition, almost
none
made money aside from the political cash infusions they received.

Surprisingly, Green himself recognized the dangers of a politicized press. In 1826, he wrote that “it is in vain to talk of a free press when the
favor of power
is essential to the support of editors, and the money of the people, by passing through the hands of the Executive, is made to operate as a bribe against liberty. . . . if liberty shall ever expire in our country, it will die of the poisonous draught of corrupt patronage.”
⁵⁷
Nor was Green alone in his concerns. The same
Richmond Enquirer
editor Thomas Ritchie, who used postmasters as political spies, worried about “showering patronage too much on Editors of newspapers and on Members of Congress, and the rights of the people themselves are exposed to imminent danger.”
⁵⁸
Of course, with patronage dollars flowing in, such concerns tended to be fleeting. Francis Preston Blair’s paper the
Congressional Globe
, supported initially by the State Department to publish session laws, perhaps even exceeded Green’s
Telegraph
in its loyalty to the party. The
Globe
functioned solely as an organ of the Jackson administration, and Blair’s attitude on any given current issues was “determined by Jackson’s stand on them.”
⁵⁹
Indeed, the
Globe
served as the political handbook for the party, printing marching orders for other editors around the country to follow.

Unwilling to consider the dangers of a politicized press, or unable to contemplate the political results, political parties propelled newspaper circulation upward, with circulation growing more than five times as fast as population by 1840, having been roughly equal to population in 1790. This tsunami of newspapers had little to do with market forces and everything to do with political patronage. Publishers carried delinquent customers for months, their deficits offset through political contributions, “loans,” and subsidies from Congress.
⁶⁰
Historian Gerald Baldasty found that in 1830, the state of Georgia had eleven newspapers, “all of them embroiled in political fights,” and the party had at least three patronage papers in each state, with the
Globe
serving as their pilot for editorial policy.
⁶¹
By 1850, political bias so dominated the newspaper industry that the U.S. Census estimated nearly 80 percent of American papers were partisan, while other estimates put the number of partisan papers at close to 100 percent!
⁶²

Thus, at the time “newspapers” emerged as a driving force in American political life, they had almost nothing to do with objective news. To the contrary, they deliberately slanted every report and openly advertised their partisan purposes through their names. Partisanship was their primary raison d’être
.
⁶³
Editors viewed readers as voters who needed to be guided to appropriate views, then mobilized to vote.
⁶⁴
Green’s
Telegraph
flatly condemned neutrality as an absence of principles, and overall, editors increasingly discarded news in favor of propaganda.
⁶⁵
A Louisville paper criticized the neutrality of an Indiana paper, noting, “in this State, people have more respect for an open, independent adversary than for dumb partisans . . . who are too imbecile to form an opinion.”
⁶⁶
One Jacksonian editor stated that “we most of all abhor and detest . . . a neutral paper. It pretends to be all things to all men.”
⁶⁷
This attitude has been confirmed in studies of content, in which the percentage of editorial comment in “news” stories increased, then nearly doubled between 1847 and 1860.

Many editors owed their jobs directly and specifically to the Jacksonians, frequently slipping back and forth between editor positions and postmaster jobs. Jackson himself appointed numerous editors to salaried political positions, including many postmasters, while nationally it is estimated that fifty to sixty editors had been given plum political jobs.
⁶⁸
Rewarding political friends was nothing new—the Federalists had appointed nearly one thousand editors to postmaster positions over a twelve-year period—but the Jacksonians transformed an ad hoc approach to appointments into a strategic political plan.
⁶⁹
Under such circumstances, few readers of “news” doubted where a paper stood on particular positions, nor did people think they were receiving objective facts upon which to make reasoned decisions.

Ironically—keeping in mind that the entire purpose behind founding the Democratic Party was to exclude slavery from the political debate—newspapers had for more than a century provided a cheap and reliable way of catching runaway slaves and overcoming cost barriers of distance.
⁷⁰
One historian of slavery noted that eighteenth-century slave owners used “print to counter the mobility of the unfree, to establish or reestablish confidence in slavery and servitude.”
⁷¹
This aspect of the public discussion of slavery apparently went unnoticed in Van Buren’s schemes, but it reflected a truth about slavery and the press, namely, that to not take a stand against slavery was to endorse it.
⁷²
Put another way, at the local level, “printers and postmasters . . . served as agents for masters. They were go-betweens” who supported the slave structure through the dissemination of information needed to reacquire runaways.
⁷³
This fact clashed on the most profound level with the Jacksonian imperative that required that slavery be pushed out of the public sphere, subtly and consistently pushing maintenance of “the peculiar institution” into the public sphere. Over time, as northern states ended slavery, even pro-Jacksonian papers that ran ads about runaways began to vanish, further distinguishing northern and southern papers, and “free” and “slave” papers, all in stark contrast to what Van Buren had hoped would occur.

With the end of “King Caucus,” the elimination of restrictions on voter qualifications, and the erection of a massive network of newspapers supported by the federally funded postal system, Van Buren had constructed a political party that conceivably could restrain the trend toward disunion over slavery. It bears repeating: at every turn, Van Buren’s system was designed to
suppress
all political discussion of slavery. Of course, this proved impossible to enforce since virtually every debate involved sectional tensions, and sooner or later slavery became the unspoken topic. The stultification of free speech through the very newspapers established to spread the Democratic message was an inevitable by-product. Southern Democrats attempted to manipulate and control the press even more over time, seeking to stem the influx of hostile, abolitionist literature between 1820 and 1860. This affected the nature of news-gathering itself as editors depended less on “clipped news” (which fell from 54 percent of the stories in 1820 to just 30 percent by 1860) because of the potential for pro- or anti-slave views to surface in the text.
⁷⁴
Instead, reporter-generated stories doubled between 1820 and 1860, a trend that shifted the location of stories to a geographical area within the editor’s reach, allowing him to tell the slavery story as he saw fit.
⁷⁵

It was a futile effort. Even as news emanating from Washington, D.C., fell by 3 percent from 1820 to 1860 as a share of total news at a time when the federal government played an increasingly important role in the lives of ordinary people, over that same period discussion of sectional problems “increased steadily . . . from 5% of the coverage in the early years to 12%” by the election of Lincoln.
⁷⁶
Even that sharp increase in sectional issues did not adequately reflect the profound impact slavery had on the party system and the press, due to the understanding of a “gag” on all discussion of slavery on the part of southern editors. In essence, the increasingly sectional tone of newspaper discussions occurred even while a gag on debate over slavery was imposed in the South
.
It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that despite Van Buren’s grand design to push it onto the back burner, slavery had become the single most important topic in America.

At the same time that free speech was being stifled under the guise of preserving the Union, Van Buren’s scheme frayed at other edges. The requirement, for example, that to maintain a national party presence, the presidential candidate had to be a “northern man of southern principles” or a westerner meant that if a northern man of
northern
principles ever acceded to the highest office, it would constitute a threat of the most profound kind. So long as the Whigs remained the loyal opposition—winning only two presidential elections between 1836 and 1860, and both presidents died in office—little danger existed that they would raise the issue of slavery. Indeed, one reason Lynn Marshall labeled the party “stillborn” is that from its inception, the Whig Party’s chief components were irreconcilable. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, an ardent opponent of slavery, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (the first major politician to term slavery a “positive good” as opposed to a “necessary evil”) had virtually nothing in common, save their hatred of Jackson.

If, however, the Whigs faltered and another party took their place—a party whose chief issue was the restriction or elimination of slavery—then Van Buren’s presidential safeguard would likewise collapse. Such was the case in 1860 when a northern man of northern principles, Abraham Lincoln, explicitly campaigned on the principle that slavery should not be allowed into the western territories. While he promised repeatedly not to touch slavery where it then existed, as we will see keeping such a vow was an impossibility, as Lincoln himself had acknowledged with his “House Divided” speech.

Quickly, all supporting elements of Van Buren’s scheme fell apart. In 1836 Congress officially adopted the “gag rule” to prohibit all debate or discussion of slavery, which itself became the source of endless conflict and debate. Anti-slavery forces had begun inundating Congress with thousands of petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in 1831. The pro-slavery forces found support from, of all people, newly elected president Martin Van Buren, who urged them to find a compromise. The result came in the Twenty-fourth Congress, using the Pinckney Resolutions of 1836, which packaged all anti-slavery petitions together and referred them to a select committee.
⁷⁷
South Carolina representative Henry Laurens Pinckney’s committee concluded that Congress had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states, and therefore proposed to table all petitions so that none were brought up for discussion or debate. Attempts by Whigs to derail it were themselves gagged. Because this was a “resolution,” and not a House “rule,” every new session had to renew the gag rule. In both 1837 and 1838, new gag resolutions passed, but not without a backlash, which in part contributed to the first Whig majority in the Twenty-seventh Congress. Nevertheless, in 1840, the Twenty-first Rule was passed, which converted the resolution to permanent status and prohibited the Speaker from even receiving an anti-slavery petition. Far from ending debate, the gag rules by their very wording required that new and expanded language be added as new territories joined the Union as states.