Scene at the Journal Office. 325 against all loyal men who came in contact with them. The Journal office had long been floating a United States flag from a staff on the roof, but the staff being too short for the flag, a carpenter had been sent for early in the day to put up a longer one. He arrived at the time quite a threatening demonstration was being made in front. The Courier office, which was on the opposite side of the same street, was intensely rebel, and it was bruited about that a Confederate flag would be hoisted upon it during the day. The crowd between the two offices was clamorous for the raising of one flag and the lowering of the other. At this juncture, Mr. Prentice was informed by an excited employé from the counting-room that somebody was on the roof pulling down the flag. The old man's eyes flashed fire. "Then, by G-," said he, "go up there and throw the scoundrel down among the mob." Up rushed the willing employé. The flag was already half-masted, and the carpenter, intent mainly on earning his wages, though not insensible to the cries of the admiring crowd beneath, was busily engaged in untying it from the halyards. To his infinite disgust, however, before his work was completed, he found himself hurled back by a strong hand, which in the next breath flirted the flag again to the peak and tied the halyards in an insoluble knot to the staff. The honest carpenter was then lustily kicked down the skylight, and thrust the rest of the way down two pair of stairs to the street door, where he received an energetic parting salute, and found himself landed among his late admirers, without having a single chance to receive or tender an explanation. This bold stroke touched the generous impulses of the mob, if they had any, and all demonstrations against the Journal and its flag ceased. The crowd, in fact, turned its ridicule on the unoffending carpenter, who with difficulty made his way to his shop with unbroken bones. The Southern subscribers of the Journal withdrew in large numbers when they saw the course of the paper on the question of coercion. He did not spare them, as the following specimen shows: TO THE EDITOR. UNIV. VIRGINIA, May 17, 1861. PRENTICE: to be. LAKE: Yours, etc., I think it a great pity that a young man should go to a university to graduate a traitor and a blackguard—and so ignorant as to spell abolition with two b's. G.D. P. The Journal, under the fostering influence of its old editor, has been the means of developing a good deal of the fresh poetic genius of the West, many of the sweetest productions of that fertile region first appearing in the columns of that paper. It was the custom of Prentice to rise early in the morning and begin at once the labors of the day. He would first overhaul the exchanges, looking over every paper, tearing out any suggestive article or witticism, rarely using the scissors for this purpose. He would be prepared by ten o'clock for his amanuensis. Then he would throw off his editorials and sparks of wit for the next morning's journal. Mr. Prentice died in 1870, aged 67 years. He had been an invalid during the later years of his life. The Courier and Journal were united in 1868, and now published under that double name. It is edited by Henry Watterson, and its old reputation for wit and humor "hangs round it still." One of the correspondents of the Cincinnati Commercial in 1871 interviewed the new editor, and developed the following information: Going up two flights of stairs, I knocked at the door of Mr. Henry Watterson's room, and was told to come in. Mr. Watterson is the head and front of the Courier-Journal. He is part owner, managing editor, editor-in-chief, and all that sort of thing. In short, he is the Courier-Journal. He was bent over a voluminous pile of manuscript, working like a Trojan, for he lives and flourishes by work. I came near saying that he grows fat by work, but this would not be strictly true, as he is lean and slender. In stature he is small, not weighing, I should think, over a hundred and twenty-five pounds. He has the misfortune to be entirely blind in one eye, and partially so in the other. To see the work that he gets through with in a day, half blind as he is, is enough to make most men with good eyes ashamed. I had an interesting conversation with Mr. Watterson about the newspaper business, past and present, in Louisville. "I claim to have done some very hard and ungrateful work," said he, "since I came to Louisville. When came here I found the press of the city as thoroughly infected with the prevailing malady of Southern journalism as it well could be. It either puffed every body and every thing beyond reason, or it blackguarded every body and every thing. Each of the offices was stocked with the riff-raffs of dead-beats and drunkards." "They were not all dead-beats and drunkards, were they, Mr. Watterson?" "Oh no. Of course there were exceptions. I am speaking of them in the main. It was the time-honored habit of most of them to get drunk every day. There was one on the press then who is on the press now who was sober all the year round." "Who is that?" "Walter Haldeman. He is one of the best men in the newspaper business any where. He deserves a great deal from the commerce of Louisville, and much more from the Democratic party than he has ever got." "What sort of a set of journalists have you in Louisville now?" I inquired. "I don't mean the Courier-Journal particularly, but all the papers." "We have got a good set-an excellent set. There is not a drunkard on the press of Louisville, so far as I know. On our paper we have got a lot of young fellows, boys picked up at random, and out of the composing-room. They are all sober, and they, together with those at work on other papers in the city, would compare with the employés of any bank institution or members of any learned profession in the country. They don't wear swallow-tailed coats and spend their time and money in drinking saloons and gambling dens." John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet, it is said, was the editor of a Boston paper in 1829, and that it had a small circulation. It is also said that he was associated with George D. Prentice and Gideon Welles in the editorial management of the New England Review in 1830. In an interview, one or two years ago, with a correspondent of the Commercial, he thus corrects one or two of these on dits: Mr. Whittier said many things pleasant and interesting for me to recall, but I do not know that I should be pardonable in making his friendly private talk public. One or two things I may be allowed to repeat, in my own language, howev er. I spoke to him of a paragraph I had seen in the newspapers some time ago, stating that he intended to write his recollections of my old friend, Mr. George D. Prentice, for a proposed volume of his poems. Mr. Whittier said he had himself seen such a paragraph, but that it was a mistake; he had never really known Mr. Prentice, and had never seen him. He then related to me, with a good deal of genial humor, the history of his succession to Mr. Prentice long ago as editor of the New England Review, at Hartford. As this may be said to have been the John G. Whittier and George D. Prentice. 327 beginning of Mr. Whittier's public literary life, his account was very interesting to me. He said that he was spending a year at school in the academy at Haverhill, and while there happened to see a copy of the New England Review, edited by Mr. Prentice, which had struck him with its brightness and sprightliness as distinguished from the ordinary newspapers of the time, and, feeling interested in it, he had ventured to send its editor two or three of his "compositions," as he called them, which, to his great astonishment, had been published with commendatory remarks. They had induced him to send other contributions, and so he continued to do until his year at the Haverhill Academy had come to an end, when he returned to his father's farm. Here one day, a short time afterward, while he was at work in the field, hoeing, perhaps, a letter was brought him from the publishers of the Hartford paper, saying that they had been requested by Mr. Prentice to invite him to become editor of the paper during Mr. Prentice's absence in Kentucky, whither he had gone to write a campaign life of Henry Clay. "I could not have been more utterly astonished," said Mr. Whittier, “if I had been told that I was appointed prime minister to the Great Khan of Tartary." Then he described the struggle between his boyish ambition and his sense of experience and unfitness. He felt entirely unprepared-knew nothing about public affairs, but could not bring himself to think the opportunity was one to be put by, and so his ambition got the better of his timidity, and, having accepted the call, he finally set off for Hartford to take possession. This was then a long journey, he said; even to go to Boston was not a slight undertaking. Mr. Whittier then described, pleasantly, his interview with his publishers, "not letting on," he said, how little he knew of editorial duties and political affairs, but they did not "find him out," and so he continued for two years as editor of the Review. His greatest trial, he told me, was when the leading party men came to see him and discuss the political course of the paper. Then he found his policy was to maintain a judicious silence, allowing them to do all the talking, which was quite successful, and left him in their good graces at the end of each interview. What was especially charming to me in the poet's account of this little far-gone experience was the pleasant way in which he seemed to realize his boyish feeling again in its recital. Mr. Whittier spoke kindly of Mr. Prentice, always having regarded him, he said, as a man of good and generous impulses, and, during the recent war of the Rebellion, a true Union man, but, perhaps, unfortunately placed. Not remaining long in any one place, we find Whittier a member of the State Legislature representing his own town. After this, or in 1836, he is chosen Secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and links his fate to that cause till the emancipation of slaves in the United States. About 1837 he was editor of the Freeman, an abolition paper published in Philadelphia. Again changing his location, he settles in Amesbury, Massachusetts, in 1840, and that village has been his residence from that year. In nearly all this time he has been engaged in throwing off his poetic sketches for the admiration of the world-" Mogg Megore," "The Bridal of Pennacook," "New Wife and the Old," "Mary Garvin," "and Maud Muller." "For all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: It might have been !'" Still having faith in the Newspaper Press, on which he commenced his career, many of these attractive little poetic sketches found their way to the public eye and heart through the National Era of Washington, which printed so much to live, and yet could not itself survive the general fate of newspapers. Whittier's effusions now find vent in the Atlantic Monthly, and other publications of the day. Whittier still occasionally leaves the field of poetry to dabble in politics. It was not long since that he wrote a long article for the Amesbury Villager, urging upon Grant the selection of Charles Sumner for the State Department. Most of our poets have been, or are, editors and reporters. Percival, Bryant, Poe, Prentiss, Wallis, Whittier, English, Gaylord Clark, Lewis Gaylord Clark, Freneau, Drake, Fitz Green Halleck, Leggett, Willis, Arnold, Pike, Park Benjamin, Dawes, Halpine, have all been connected with the Newspaper Press. Nearly every one of these whose names we have mentioned have been political editors, engaged, during their lives, in mixing in equal proportions the muse of Parnassus with the mud of politics. The Charleston (S. C.) City Gazette was a paper of some note in its day. It was prominent in the early part of this century. E. S. Thomas owned and edited it for a time. Then Major M. M. Noah had the management of its columns. This was in 1810. After Noah it was conducted by William Gilmore Simms, the Southern poet, and author of Guy Rivers and other reputable work in literature. It was the first journal in South Carolina that opposed the principle of nullification. The Old Colony Memorial celebrated its fiftieth anniversary on the 2d of May, 1872. Its present proprietor, George F. Andrews, gave a banquet in honor of the event. On the 10th of December, 1822, seven months after the commencement of its publication, John Adams thus alluded to the paper in a letter to Elkanah Watson: I hope you received the Old Colony Memorial, a newspaper instituted at Plymouth, and edited by William Thomas, Esquire—a paper which deserves to be read and encouraged by all America. Among other writers for the Memorial was Daniel Webster. Adams no doubt was a contributor. Class Journalism. 329 CHAPTER XXI. SPECIAL OR CLASS JOURNALISM. THE AGRICULTURAL PRESS. THE FIRST ORGAN OF THE FARMERS.-NUMBER OF AGRICULTURAL NEWSPAPERS.-THE COMMERCIAL AND FINANCIAL PRESS. THE COMMERCIAL BULLETIN.-ITS CHARACTER AND VALUE.THE SUNDAY PRESS. WHAT IS IT?-THE SPORTING PRESS. WHAT IT HAS DONE FOR SPORT AND STOCK, THE TURF AND THE FIELD.-THE TELEGRAPH ORGANS. OUR SOCIETY, ETC. SPECIAL journalism is so rapidly increasing in the United States. that it deserves special notice. Newspapers of this character give. the freshest and fullest information on the particular interest they represent, and are therefore newspapers. They are the religious, the medical, the scientific, the agricultural, the sporting, the financial, the railroad, the commercial, the shipping, the telegraph, the mining, the art, the musical, the yachting, the Sunday, the army, and the navy press. What a field of operations! Special or class journalism originated in England. Such papers are common there. They are published, too, in France. They are of recent date in this country, but they are successful, and prosperous, and increasing. Some of them are splendid specimens of typography. We are inclined to think that this sort of journalism originated in the needs of the agricultural interests, and afterwards in the commercial and financial circulars that were years ago issued by merchants, and then expanded into Bicknell's Bank-note Reporter and Sylvester's Prices Current. The first of these trade circulars appeared half a century ago, and since then Commercial Lists have been issued weekly and semi-weekly every where. The Banker's Circular, printed in London in 1836-7-8, and longer, was devoted to financial intelligence, and became an oracle in money centres. Newspapers in the United States, in that period of commercial distraction, extensively copied the leading articles of the Circular, signed H. B., and his views were deemed of value by the operators and bankers of Wall Street. Out of the old Prices Current and Bankers' Circulars have sprung innumerable sheets as the special organs of special classes. We now have the Commercial Bulletin, the Dry Goods Reporter, the Tobacco Leaf, the Wool Circular, the Cotton Buyer, the Architectural Review and Builders' Journal, the Scalpel, the Art Review, the Scientific American, the Phrenological Journal, the Hide and Leather Reporter, |