With the American victory at Yorktown, however, the tide had shifted. The British “have seen one great and prosperous effort overcast all their shining prospects, and dissolve the gay air castle they have been so long employed in building….Conquest, their beloved object, although long viewed by us, and by other nations, as a dream, with which none but a sleeping country could amuse itself, will now probably awake them also; when they will perceive, that all the alluring scenes it presented, all the golden mountains it promised, are…removed forever beyond the power of recovery.” And though Dwight had great hopes for progress and freedom of thought and religion in the establishment of America, he warns his congregation that “Sins of the deepest dye, and of an inconceivable multitude, blacken our character also, and provoke the vengeance of Heaven.” While there was reason for hope, there should also be repentance and caution of repeating the same mistakes. The news of the victory was cause for joy, but also for reflection as to what might come next.

Dwight became a prominent author, preacher, educator, and theologian. He served two terms in the Massachusetts legislature and over twenty years as the president of Yale University, and was an influential force in the Second Great Awakening.

In one particularly graphic engraving, an enslaved woman holds a knife over the heads of her sleeping children, about to kill them. Accompanying the engraving is a dialogue between a young girl living in Massachusetts and her uncle that explains the engraving’s gruesome subject. The child asks the older man why the woman would be so hateful as to kill her own children. The uncle explains that the woman’s life as a slave was wretched, with the one exception of being reunited each day with her children. On that particular night, the mother learned that her children were to be sold the next day to another farm over six hundred miles away. Heartbroken that they would be separated from her and thinking of the years of misery and toil that they would face as slaves, she chose to kill them, thinking that even death by her own hands was a better fate. When the girl asks how murder—even in those extreme circumstances—can be excused, the uncle answers that the mother has never had the opportunity to learn to read and study the Bible, and can therefore be forgiven because of her ignorance. Through this dialogue not only is the fictional young girl educated about the evils of slavery, but so are the real readers of the almanac.

Though this particular story was fictional, there were several real cases involving slave infanticide. One of the most sensational cases took place almost twenty years later in January 1856, when a fugitive slave woman named Margaret Garner from Boone County, Kentucky, finding herself surrounded by slave catchers and U.S. Marshals, tried to kill her children and herself rather than be sent back into slavery. She succeeded in killing one of her children before being stopped.

In this 1835 issue of the Temperance Family Almanac, the cover image foreshadows the admonitions found within. Entitled “The Pillars of a Grog-Shop,” the image depicts a cautionary tale. An inebriated mother and father lean against opposing pillars, each with a glass in hand, while their children are left to their own devices. The daughter huddled at her mother’s feet and the son bearing a pained expression at his father’s side provide a stark visual representation of drunkenness’s filial perils. Moreover, a devil can be found lurking in the background of the image, warming itself by the still’s flame—a reference to liquor’s transgressive appeal and also likely intended to remind the viewer that alcohol abuse is not only a moral failing, but a sin as well.

From a nineteenth-century viewer’s perspective, the implications of this illustration would be glaringly clear. Not only has the father forsaken his role as provider and protector, a common trope in print materials of this kind, but the mother has also failed to perform her maternal and civic duties of raising her children to be virtuous citizens of the republic. The sins of the parents will be visited on the children and, what is more, society will be made to bear the costs as well.

In dialogues, poems, scientific data, and various other forms, this refrain repeats throughout the almanac.

From the beginning, the newspaper sought a wide audience. It served first as an advocate for the Cherokee Nation, fighting especially against its removal from the eastern states. By 1829 its coverage had broadened to other Native American issues, prompting a title change to Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate. The paper ceased publication on May 31, 1834. There were thoughts of reviving it the next year, but the Georgia Guard confiscated the press and threw out the type.

Here we see an example of a very popular daily newspaper, the New York Sun, the first so-called “penny paper” in America. The Sun was established in 1833 and targeted the middle and lower classes, who could afford only a penny a day for a newspaper rather than the six cents charged by most dailies. Because of the low price of these papers, a large circulation was required, and the quest for circulation encouraged news scoops, “extra” editions, and newsboys hawking the papers on the streets. Though the penny papers were usually partisan in politics, they were not subservient to parties. Their economic base was advertising, and so they focused on news that would attract a wide variety of readers. The Sun was very successful and inspired other penny papers, including the New York Herald and New York Tribune. By 1842 New York City had nine one-penny and two-penny dailies and seven traditional six-penny dailies.

The success of the Sun and other daily newspapers led to another media institution: the press association. As penny papers competed with established papers and with one another, they sought the most current news, and their news gathering methods became increasingly aggressive. To “beat” their rivals, New York newspapers used fast harbor sloops, special pony expresses, and even carrier pigeons to shave a few hours off the time needed to get news from Europe and Washington, D.C. In 1846, with the start of the Mexican-American War and the early development of the telegraph, timely information became significantly more costly, and the highly competitive newspapers were drawn into something new: cooperation. The proprietor of the Sun, Moses Yale Beach (1800-1868),organized the leading newspaper publishers of New York to pool their resources to get the war news. The original members included, in addition to the Sun, the Herald, the Tribune, the Courier and Enquirer, the Journal of Commerce, and the Express. This informal group gradually evolved into the New York Associated Press (NYAP), which became a formidable news monopoly in the late nineteenth century. The power of the NYAP was eventually broken by a rival group of Chicago newspaper publishers known as the Western Associated Press. Under their leadership, a new national press cooperative was formed in 1892, known simply as the Associated Press. 

The paper lasted only three issues before Mead was arrested for libel. During the trial it came out that while the paper claimed to be published in Greenwich, Connecticut, the paper was actually printed in New York and quietly shipped to Greenwich for distribution.

Chinese newspapers were also periodically published, but the character-based rather than letter-based language proved particularly challenging to printers. Whereas all of the other languages listed above could use common letterpress type, the same would not work for Chinese, with its thousands of characters. The solution for early Chinese papers was lithography, which used grease pencils on special stones to print instead of individual pieces of type.

Seen here is the second Chinese-language newspaper established in the United States, The Oriental; or, Tung-Ngai San-Luk, first published in January 4, 1855, and edited by the Reverend William Speer (1822-1904), a Presbyterian minister. Though its publication schedule was often inconsistent, it was initially intended to be published triweekly in Chinese and weekly in English. This was later changed to weekly in Chinese, monthly in English. It lasted just two years, folding in 1857. (The first Chinese-language newspaper, the Chin Shan Jih Hsin Ju; or, Golden Hill’s News, published in San Francisco in 1854, lasted for only a few months.) No Chinese newspapers were attempted again until the 1870s when a number of titles began in San Francisco.