Thomas’s views frequently got him in trouble with the royal authorities, and under the advisement of John Hancock (1737-93) and with the assistance of Timothy Bigelow (1739-90) and Joseph Warren (1741-75), Thomas smuggled his press out of Boston during the night of April 16, 1775. He removed it to the inland Whig stronghold of Worcester, where he set it up in Bigelow’s basement. When paper finally arrived in early May, he was able to publish this issue of the Spy, the first thing ever printed in Worcester.

As was customary with colonial newspapers, the breaking news appeared on the inside of the publication, and thus on page 3 in column 1 is Thomas’s account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Far from objective, Thomas’s partisanship shines through. He ends the introductory paragraph by claiming that the British troops had “wantonly, and in a most inhuman manner fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen, then robbed them of their provisions, ransacked, plundered and burnt their houses! nor could the tears of defenseless women, some of whom were in the pains of childbirth, the cries of helpless, babes, nor the prayers of old age, confined to beds of sickness, appease their thirst for blood!—or divert them from their DESIGN of MURDER and ROBBERY!”

Cincinnati was often at the center of struggles for racial equality in the nineteenth century. Situated just across the Ohio River from the slave-holding state of Kentucky, the city was the scene of three major race riots in 1829, 1834, and 1841. It was also the home of prominent abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame, who came to Ohio with her father, Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), when he became the first president of the city’s Lane Theological Seminary in 1832. In 1834 Lane was the scene of prominent “debates” on slavery that profoundly impacted the nation’s thinking about the issue. 

William Lloyd Garrison’s (1805-79) famous antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, was different. Garrison was often a prominent figure in antislavery and reform societies, but The Liberator was always entirely his own—and that’s what makes it an especially interesting form of journalism. Garrison believed that the role of a newspaper was two-fold: strident agitation and free discussion. He insisted on declaring, in his own sure voice, the truth as he understood it. “My confidence in the unconquerable energy of Truth is absolute,” he wrote. Yet he also made The Liberator an open forum for other voices, including those hostile to his own views. Thus, the paper was always filled with letters, speeches, statements, and rebuttals from all points of view. As Garrison grew to condemn all government as inherently coercive, he idealized journalism as a kind of democracy without coercion. And he believed that “slavery and freedom of the press cannot exist together.”

This issue of The Liberator offers a glimpse of the roles of journalism that Garrison championed: agitation and discussion. The nameplate banner was always one of the paper’s most provocative forms of agitation. It shows, graphically, two of the worst cruelties of slavery: brutal whippings of slaves and the sale of young children away from their parents. And both of those cruelties are shown happening in the nation’s capital. The stories on the front page include a speech by John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) on Texas and Mexico as well as a clever editing exercise in which Garrison turns a sermon on dueling by Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) into a sermon on slavery.

This broadside was printed in Boston in 1775 by John Howe (1754-1835) who, along with Margaret Draper (1727- ca.1804), published the Massachusetts Gazette; and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser. This paper frequently received commissions from the royal government for printing and was clearly sympathetic to the Crown and its officials in the colony.

A transcription of the broadside can be found here.

The Penfield Extra, subtitled “Little Nellie’s Little Paper,” was a weekly amateur newspaper published in Penfield, New York, between 1862 and 1866. Started by twelve-year-old Nellie Williams (1849-75), the paper boasted a circulation of more than three thousand copies at the height of its popularity. At a cost of two cents an issue and fifty cents for a yearly subscription, readers were treated to local news, a description of local weather, a robust advertising section, and puns and jokes. Nellie herself described the paper in its masthead as “Devoted to News and Literature and Neutral in Politics.”

Born in 1849, by the age of eight Nellie was working with a press. She began by distributing type after her older brother had finished printing a job on a press their father had won in a card game. When the Civil War broke out, Nellie’s brother enlisted, leaving her in charge of the press. Her first issue of the Penfield Extra was published in December 1861 and she described herself to her audience as “A little Lass not yet in her teens who is the sole Editress, and Compositor, and probably the youngest Publisher, and Editress in the world. The reader will of course over-look a little bad spelling and typo-graphical errors.” After the first year, the circulation of her paper increased tenfold, and the next year she doubled readership, in the process becoming something of a local celebrity.

Though most amateur newspapers were published for the enjoyment of its editor, publisher, and readers, Nellie also sought to make a profit. With her mother dead, a brother off to fight in the Civil War, and a sickly father, Nellie wanted her newspaper to be successful. An aggressive advertiser, Nellie campaigned locals to publicize their business in her paper: “You might ‘bout as well go a fishing without any bait, as to undertake to do a large paying business…without advertising in a local newspaper.” Taking advantage of the relatively new and cheap availability of photography, she included in her promotional package a nickel-sized tintype portrait of herself, attached to her business card.

Though Nellie mostly focused on local news, weather, jokes, and ads (the latter usually filling two to three pages), rather than the Civil War that was in many ways the impetus for her undertaking, her paper and her story clearly struck a chord with a war-weary public. Advertising, humor, connection to the community, and the success of a young girl editress provided hope and an underlying current of morale in difficult times. And Nellie did not ignore the war entirely; in this issue, she mentions the death of a former resident due to war wounds and includes a joke featuring a rebel sympathizer living in the county.

In 1866 Nellie closed her paper, citing that the price of newsprint was too costly. At age nineteen, she married Henry Braden, giving birth to two children before her death of consumption at age twenty-five.

Woodville, the painter, belonged to a prominent Baltimore family but left the United States for Europe at the age of twenty. There he spent several years studying under Karl Ferdinand Sohn (1805-67) in Düsseldorf, Germany. Woodville was known for painting contemporary interior scenes with exquisite detail and color. Many of his paintings, including Politics in an Oyster House, were exhibited in the United States, often at the American Art-Union. The painting was commissioned by a prominent Baltimore citizen named John H. B. Latrobe (1803-91), and it hung in his private residence after its exhibition at the union. Latrobe also loaned it out for the first annual exhibition of paintings at the Maryland Historical Society, and Woodville made a copy that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. The popularity of the painting led to its lithographic version, seen here, which was distributed by the New York branch of the famous French lithography company Goupil & Co.