Nicholas Marshall | The Rural Newspaper and the Circulation of Information and Culture in New York and the Antebellum North | New York History, 88.2

The Rural Newspaper and the Circulation of Information and Culture in New York and the Antebellum North

Nicholas Marshall, Department of History, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Emily Chubbuck, who grew up in rural Madison County, New York, maintained in the 1840s that "one thing is certain—nowhere will you find better informed people—that is, those who better understand all the principal movements of the day, whether political, moral or religious, than the readers of a country newspaper." The Freeman's Journal, one of these country newspapers published in Otsego County, concurred. The paper advised its readers in 1847 that a "farmer should be sure to take a newspaper" or his children would "grow up in ignorance of what is passing around them at home and abroad." There is, this rural weekly grandly pronounced, "a vast amount of intelligence condensed within the limits of a well-conducted paper." Self-promotions like this one were frequent in antebellum rural newspapers, as were broad endorsements such as Emily Chubbuck's, yet such statements contain an essential truth. Weekly papers like the Freeman's Journal were indeed packed with information and by midcentury performed a significant educational function for a predominantly rural society. They contributed to a process of cultural diffusion throughout the northern states, and historians could well pay local newspapers more heed.¹

This essay makes use of an unusual combination of historical sources that speak directly to the question of the significance of local newspapers. In the collection of the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown there exists a subscription list for the Freeman's Journal for the year 1849. The list names the individual subscribers and, of special note, the community to which delivery of each newspaper was to be made. For the present purposes, the fortunate proximity in date to the 1850 federal census means that the subscribers to the paper may be cross-referenced with personal data collected for the census. Thus, a social and geographic profile of the readership is possible. Furthermore, copies of the paper itself have been preserved. It began its run in 1808 and continued throughout the antebellum period. This makes achievable an accurate description of the paper's contents over time, and these findings may be compared with other rural papers. In fact, when used in combination with other sources, the case study of the Freeman's Journal can be used to comment on the workings of more general reading patterns in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the growing literature on the expansion of reading in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, rural newspapers have not been given their due. Most research has focused on the broadening interest of the reading public in book culture. Estate inventories that list the titles of books held by a family, and records such as the production runs of publishers, demonstrate the growing range of literary materials produced for Americans in this period. The uncertain position of newspapers in this history of American print culture is made clear in the vibrant works within what is called the "history of the book." In an early and influential exposition of its main tenets, Robert Darnton offered the following definition: the history of books is the "social and cultural history of communication by print ... how these ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind during the last five hundred years." This definition clearly would include the study of newspapers, and Darnton notes this, but he then adds, "for the most part, it concerns books since the time of Gutenberg." Other influential statements within this historical field echo Darnton's view. If the great majority of Americans in the antebellum period spent much of their reading time with newspapers, however, then the "history of the book" slights much of their print culture.²

The historiography of American journalism emphasizes an aspect of print history different from that of the "history of the book." Newspapers, of course, are the central actors in this historiography. The focus of much of journalism history, however, has been on tracing the roots of current standards and practices. Big-city newspapers occupy the central position here, and especially important in the antebellum period is the rise of the daily paper and its attendant emphases on local sensational reporting, cash sales, technological improvement in printing presses, and expansion of circulation. Rural weeklies have little to contribute to a history looking forward to twentieth- or twenty-first-century journalistic modes. The antebellum local papers, moreover, do not prefigure in content the small community journals that have come to represent the standard for local reporting in towns and rural areas.³

Though newspapers in general play a minor role in the "history of the book," and local papers are bit players in the history of journalism, they are central to the discussion of the circulation of information in the early republic found in analyses of the post office. Richard John and Richard Kielbowicz have demonstrated how the Post Office Act of 1792 galvanized communications without the benefit of technological change. The Act made into law the practice of free exchange of newspapers among printers. This meant that the United States mail system would, at no cost, supply producers of newspapers with copies of any paper printed within the nation, so long as its editor desired a connection. This practice virtually guaranteed a well-informed circle of printers, editors, and publishers. Rural printers of local papers, these historians note, benefited from this policy as much or more than any others. The 1792 Act also set the rates for sending non-exchange newspapers through the mail at extremely low levels, a half cent for those within one hundred miles, and a penny for further distances. While John and Kielbowicz emphasize how significant these policies were for the spread of information in the early republic, they do not discuss in detail the last link in the information chain for many, the local newspaper. Furthermore, Michael S. Foley, in disputing the claims of Kielbowicz and John as they relate to the northern countryside, has neglected the local newspaper as a source of evidence for reading patterns of rural inhabitants. By comparing his own thorough analysis of post office records in New Hampshire with those from other areas of the North, all of which show a small portion of the population subscribing to newspapers through the mail (roughly 9 percent of adults), Foley suggests that the great majority of rural Americans were not interested in, and were perhaps even hostile to, extralocal news and influences. Foley's analysis, however, does not take into account the possibility that locally printed papers, those that were not sent through the mail, linked the residents of the countryside to regional, national, and international events and ideologies. If contact with outside sources of information is at issue, then two important questions should be answered. What in fact were the contents of the rural weeklies, and how many people read them?⁴

Rural newspapers might also help us to understand the complex story of class formation in the United States. Historians have neglected the countryside when describing the rise of a middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century, and a clearer picture of the intellectual world of rural people could broaden our definitions of what it meant to be "middle class" and deepen our knowledge of how broad-based social movements developed. At the least, we must recognize that urban growth was not sui generis. The countryside provided much of the material for the cities' expansion, and a better understanding of the role played by rural newspapers suggests how closely the countryside was tied to the cities.⁵

Grand pronouncements about the importance of rural newspapers, however, may beg questions about the substance of the papers and the extent of their circulation. For example, if these publications were filled merely with local gossip, plus the wild political rants of a highly partisan editor, and were distributed only to village centers, then any claims for broad social significance must be forfeited.

Like almost all rural papers, the Freeman's Journal was really only one large sheet of paper, but printed front and back and folded in half it made a four-page newspaper. The first two pages were usually an eclectic mix of material. The second almost always contained the editorial column. Somewhere on the third page the advertisements started, and they filled the rest of the issue. In 1849 advertisements made up 39 percent of the paper, a proportion that had not varied much over the preceding thirty years. In 1819, for example, ads accounted for 36 percent.

What had changed in this period, however, was the volume of information on the four pages. In 1819 the Freeman's Journal printed five columns per page of loosely packed type. The average issue contained roughly twenty-two thousand words. By 1835, each page held seven columns and the average issue offered forty-three thousand words. By further squeezing, the editor managed by 1849 to print forty-nine thousand words per week. As anyone who has actually read through an entire issue of one of these mid-nineteenth-century papers knows, the amount of information contained therein is astonishingly large. Advances in printing technology do not explain this shift; throughout this period small presses used the same equipment as in years past, a simple hand press. By midcentury, the editors, on the one hand, simply had much more written text to choose from due to the general explosion of available printed matter, and the public, on the other hand, apparently had developed a taste for more and more of a wide variety of reading material.⁶

But with what did the editor fill these columns? A content analysis of randomly selected issues from 1849 reveals the type of information published, though over the course of a year widely divergent emphases altered the newspaper's composition. For example, near the spring and fall election cycles, the newspaper filled with political commentary, while during the middle of the summer the volume of literature and history increased. It must be noted here that nearly all newspapers were avowedly partisan. This meant that the overwhelming majority of political stories slanted in one direction, a point of honor for most editors, who did not believe it was possible to be unbiased. Despite the seasonal variation and emphasis placed on political issues, overall averages in column inches devoted to subject areas in the Freeman's Journal give a clear picture of what subscribers read. Table 1 summarizes the data.

Table 1 Freeman's Journal Content Analysis, 1849.

Percentage of column inches devoted to each category, excluding advertisements.

	Foreign	12.0%
	National	39.1
	State	15.3
	Local	8.0
	Literature	17.8
	Advice/Morality	7.8
		100.0%

	Editorial	7.2%
	Political	32.9
	Reprinted from other papers	48.6

Note: the last three categories overlap with others and therefore should not add to 100.

The figures show some surprising results. Of special note here is the dearth of local news. Nearly all of this category comes from two sources: announcements and editorials regarding local political races, and a catalogue of marriages and deaths. The lack of local material is so complete that, for those interested in community history, the advertisements are the best place to find useful information. The designation "foreign" does not adequately describe this category, for nearly all of it comes from Europe and a major proportion from Great Britain. Much like today, wars, famine, and political intrigue make up the majority of the foreign news summaries. Nearly two-fifths of the material is national in origin. Governmental news, national politics, and reporting of news from other states provide the bulk of this category. The literature category encompasses three main types of material. Each issue usually contained three poems. These were either selected from nationally known poets such as John Greenleaf Whittier, culled from other newspapers, or produced locally. The papers frequently published a long and detailed historical description. These chronicled great events in European or American history. Napoleon was a favorite subject. The literature category also includes fiction; short stories regularly appeared, sometimes serialized over several issues. Each issue also usually carried several advice articles or moral entreaties directed at specific targets. In one issue, for example, young men were instructed among other things to "aim high," "cultivate largeness of soul," and not to "give up for trifles." These advice articles were usually copied from national journals or published speeches. The figures also reveal a small but significant amount of editorial material, almost all of which was political. Furthermore, they illustrate the amount of attention given to politics: almost a third of the news section of the paper.

Overall, the figures demonstrate the breadth of material presented to subscribers of the Freeman's Journal, and support the statements made in the self-promotions by editors extolling the vast knowledge to be found in "well-conducted" papers. In fact, regular readers could not help but be firmly connected to a national marketplace of political and cultural ideas. The amount of news directly copied from other newspapers highlights the realities of producing a rural paper, called "paste-pot and scissors editing" by some, and the consequences for its contents. Nearly one half of the paper was simply reprinted from papers exchanged around the country, and this figure severely underrepresents the actual practice, since it only accounts for attributed reprints. The editor many times simply summarized pieces gleaned from outside sources, without attribution, a common and perfectly legal practice. Editors had responsibility for much of the operations of the paper and could not be expected to produce much original copy. The figure for local news, 8 percent, probably closely approximates the extent of their own writing. It is true that the reprints were chosen by the editor and therefore in some way represent his own interests and proclivities, but the actual substance of the vast majority of the paper came from sources around the nation. This massive borrowing also guaranteed that the accuracy of the news in rural papers was comparable to that of most other papers of the period.

If the contents of the Freeman's Journal were not narrowly focused or provincial, can the same be said for the circulation? In other words, did more than the editor's friends in Cooperstown read the paper? The subscription list for 1849 shows that indeed the readers of the Freeman's Journal were a geographically and socially varied lot. Five hundred seventy-two names from the list, about 65 percent of the subscribers, could be linked to the manuscript census returns from 1850. Data recorded on this census included names of all residents, age, sex, occupation, value of real estate owned, place of birth, town of residence, whether attending school, whether illiterate, and color. Simple statistics culled from the subscribers' census returns were then compared to a random sample (every twentieth return) of the general population of the county to establish the representativeness of the subscribing public.

It turns out that subscribers were a varied lot. Residents of all twenty-three towns in Otsego County received the paper. Moreover, for most towns, the percentage of the total subscribers living within its borders roughly approximated the town's proportion of the general population. For example, the town of Exeter contained 3 percent of Otsego County's population, and 4 percent of the Freeman's Journal's subscribers. There were a few notable exceptions. The Town of Otsego, which included the Village of Cooperstown, accounted for close to 20 percent of the subscribers though only 8 percent of the population lived there. Cherry Valley, on the other hand, with 9 percent of the county's population, was underrepresented; only 3 percent of the subscribers resided there. Some of the variation in these statistics may be accounted for by an understanding of county political leanings. The Freeman's Journal was a Democratic paper, and the Town of Otsego voted Democratic in the 1849 elections, while Cherry Valley supported Whig candidates. In addition, Cherry Valley had its own local paper, the Gazette, which probably undermined patronage of the Freeman's Journal within that community. No figures specific to the Village of Cooperstown were collected for the 1850 census, but an educated guess puts the village's population at about 4 percent of the total for the county while these folks accounted for 9 percent of the subscribers to the paper. Thus, the figures provide some evidence for the supposition that village residents were more likely to read the newspapers than those living outside the village's immediate vicinity. Overall, however, the reach of the paper into all the towns indicates that newspaper reading had become a general rather than peculiar phenomenon in Otsego County.⁷

Like the geography of subscriptions, the social profile of the Freeman's Journal's readers demonstrates the broad spectrum of newspaper patronage. Table 2 displays information taken from the 1850 census for subscribers and the general population in Otsego County.


Table 2 Proportion of population in occupational groupings,Otsego County, 1850.

	Freeman's Journal subscribers	general population

Farmers	63.8%	65.5%
Manual Laborers	21.0	26.5
Nonmanual Workers	15.2	8.0
	100.0	100.0

In 1850, mainly farmers and their families inhabited Otsego County. They composed roughly 65 percent of the overall population, while manual laborers (unskilled as well as those such as carpenters and shoemakers) made up 26 percent, and nonmanual occupations (lawyers, physicians, merchants, etc.) 8 percent. The sample of Freeman's Journal subscribers was 64 percent farmers, 21 percent manual laborers, and 15 percent nonmanual laborers. The nonmanual category, mainly what we would call professionals today, clearly read the paper out of proportion to their numbers, but without dominating the overall readership. In most of the other categories delineated on the census, the newspaper readers closely matched the general population. They had slightly more family members on average (6.0 to 5.7) and children attending school (1.67 per family to 1.51). They were also slightly older, averaging forty-six years compared to forty-four for the general population.

The most obvious difference between the subscribers and the average Otsego County resident lay in the value of real estate owned. The readers of the newspaper clearly stood higher on the ladder of achievement. The data in Table 3 demonstrates this point.


Table 3 Real Property Owned, Otsego County, 1850.

	Freeman's Journal subscribers	general population

Farmers	$3029	$2096
Manual Laborers	610	411
Nonmanual Workers	3129	2950
Overall	$2487	$1682

On average, subscribers owned roughly twenty-five hundred dollars worth of property compared to seventeen hundred for the general population. This is nearly one-half again more. Broken down by occupation, the distinction holds true except for the professional class, where the average values were nearly equal. Subscribing farmers, though, held approximately three thousand dollars of real estate as opposed to only twenty-one hundred for the general population of farmers. Newspaper-reading manual laborers averaged six hundred dollars in real property compared to four hundred for manual laborers in general. It seems the wealthier elements of the occupational categories were more likely to subscribe to the paper, though the editors would probably have reversed the causation and suggested that the useful knowledge taken from the paper created wealthy subscribers. Along these lines, the Freeman's Journal claimed that a newspaper would "put ten dollars in the pocket of the farmer for every one it draws out." The figures also point out the relative poverty, in terms of real estate, of manual laborers of all kinds.

The content analysis and social profile of the readership tell us something about what type of person read the paper and what they were reading, but the subscription book can also be used to help determine what proportion of the rural population actually had the opportunity to read a newspaper. Using careful extrapolation we may speculate about the total figures. The census of 1850 lists four newspapers for Otsego County, and gives the Freeman's Journal's circulation as the largest at 1,650. This corresponds very closely with the total number of names on the subscription list. Of these, however, only 1,066 were residents of the county. If this same proportion holds true for the other newspapers listed in the census, then there were roughly 3,016 subscribing households in the county. Yet this figure underestimates readership. In the Freeman's Journal list were 268 names from the immediately surrounding counties, frequently from towns very close to the Otsego border. If an assumption is made that in similar fashion Otsego residents subscribed to newspapers published in adjacent counties, then the total for newspaper readers as a whole would rise to 3,771. This is 42 percent of the total households in the county. Yet we still might be undercounting readers. Newspaper publishers were constantly bemoaning the practice of sharing subscriptions and we must assume that neighbors borrowed papers frequently and businesses allowed customers to read their copies. If one-third of the papers made it into hands other than the subscriber's family, then our percentage of households in the county with access to a paper climbs to 56. That is, more than half the population had the opportunity to read a local newspaper. Furthermore, as Michael Foley has shown, rural Americans subscribed to extralocal newspapers through the mail, perhaps as many as 15 percent of rural households so doing. Allowing for overlap in subscriptions, that is, that some households subscribed to more than one paper, and the borrowing of these papers printed outside the local community, the total proportion of rural households with access to a paper probably approaches two-thirds.⁸

The data collected for Otsego County and from the Freeman's Journal suggests that rural newspapers played an important role in educating the great mass of the American population—those that lived in the countryside. Could this case study, however, be unusual, that is, not representative of trends in the larger society? On the surface, there is little reason to doubt Otsego as a typical rural example. The county was not geographically close to an urban center, and was not in the midst of economic development or urbanization in the late 1840s and 1850s. Its population had grown rapidly in the first decade of the century as new land was cleared for farming, but remained nearly constant from about 1820. Other rural counties in New York experienced similar population patterns. Farther west, Madison County stabilized by 1830 or so, and Allegany County by 1840. These areas maintained a settled, rural/agricultural social organization well into the twentieth century and sometimes beyond.

One might also ask whether the Freeman's Journal resembled other rural newspapers. My own survey of fifteen papers from central New York in the antebellum era indicates that indeed the basic make-up of every one of them closely resembled the Freeman's Journal. Other sources corroborate these findings. In The Country Printer, Milton Hamilton performed a content analysis on a wide range of rural newspapers across the state of New York. He used a slightly different set of categories, but the results are compatible with those presented above. David J. Russo, in a seminal article entitled "The Origins of Local News in the U.S. Country Press, 1840s–1870s," surveys a national sample from the period. He notes that local news only became common in rural newspapers after the Civil War. (The Freeman's Journal was ahead of this trend as it began to print local news in the 1850s under the editorship of Samuel Shaw.) The weekly papers before the war

contained commercial and legal notices or advertisements; foreign, domestic, local and commercial news; national, state, county or local government documents (if the journal were an "official" organ and thus paid to print such material); editorial writing that blended fact and opinion; letters from readers and subscribers, and varied "literary" matter, including verse, serialized fiction and assorted essays concerning religion, ethics, politics, agriculture, science, geography, history, and biography.

In sum, Russo identifies the newspapers as "a library-like digest for 'everyman.' " As to the question of what proportion of people read a newspaper, William J. Gilmore estimates that in a rural section of Vermont more than half the population read a newspaper by the 1830s.⁹

While estimates of readership and descriptions of newspaper contents reveal much about the reading experience, personal accounts from the period point to a level of enthusiasm for newspapers that has little parallel in more recent times. The dearth of new reading material in these areas created an intense focus on the weekly paper as a purveyor of fresh news, information, and culture. This was a fundamentally different context than either before this period, when the desire for news was less intense, and later, when a range of media could be used to link the individual with the society at large.

Levi Beardsley recalled how impoverished his rural youth was for lack of news in remote Otsego County in the early years of the nineteenth century. In those days the Otsego Herald was the only paper in the county, and later in life Beardsley remarked that "it is difficult to imagine with what avidity the little weekly messenger was sought after, and how thoroughly it was read among the neighbors." The paper was left at a neighbor's house about a mile away on Saturday afternoons, and Levi ran through the woods over the hill to get it. "I generally read the part containing the news, before reaching home," he remembered. As the number of newspapers increased in rural New York, access to the news became easier. Thayer Gauss's experience in January of 1827, however, shows both the continuing difficulties in receiving publications and the determination to have them. That month a major snowstorm enveloped Gauss's farm in Bloomfield, Ontario County. Snowdrifts rendered the roads nearly impassable. Gauss, however, spent an entire afternoon breaking through the snow in making his way to Canandaigua to get his newspaper.¹⁰

The eagerness for news in the countryside is also made clear in the reminiscences of an antebellum post rider who conveyed papers to subscribers. Wesley Beaman delivered local newspapers in Otsego County as a teenager. His uncle owned a newspaper route that ran southwest from Cooperstown in the 1840s, and Beaman remembered the fall of 1844 as an especially exciting time due to the presidential campaign pitting Henry Clay against James Polk. Beaman collected the papers on Saturday mornings from the Cooperstown printing offices of the two rival publications (one of which supported the Democrats, the other the Whigs), and set off on horseback with saddlebags loaded down with 325 papers. His route, past farmhouses and tanneries, stores and post offices, was punctuated by the frequent blasts of his horn, "to let the people know I was coming." Dr. Wing was one subscriber who kept an ear cocked for the horn. "I was always heartily welcomed by the old doctor," recalled Beaman, "who was eagerly awaiting my coming with his paper." Beaman remembered the "roughly constructed mail boxes" that were set up for the post rider by rural households. Often, however, the family members, notified by the carrier's horn, "were out to the road, anxious to get their paper, for its weekly visit brought to them about all the news they got of the outside world, and often also the continuing chapter of an interesting serial story."¹¹

Diaries also show how anxious rural New Yorkers were to get their newspapers. Sarah Fairman lived in Butternuts, Otsego County. As a nineteen-year-old in 1820, she eagerly awaited the arrival of the mail on Fridays. One summer day, Fairman described waiting for the post to arrive and finally, in impatience, running out to meet the deliverer. "We got as far as the gate and saw the post chaise driving up—we waited for the papers and then flew like birds to our home—And now with eager expectations we drew out the papers from the wrapper."¹²

New Yorkers like Sarah Fairman were not unusual in their habits. A variety of anecdotal sources show how widespread the reading of newspapers was in antebellum America. Foreign observers found the sheer number of papers printed to be overwhelming, but also commented on the broad range of people who seemed to read these sheets. F. A. Cox, a British Baptist on a tour of America, was surprised that the wheelwrights who worked on his broken wagon in rural New York knew of his trip through newspaper coverage. "The newspapers penetrate everywhere," he noted, "and convey an immense mass of general information and knowledge through every corner of the land." Alexis De Tocqueville famously commented on the importance of newspapers in America. He claimed that "nothing is easier than to set up a newspaper" in America, and thus "the number of periodical and semi-periodical publications in the United States is almost incredibly large," which meant that "there is scarcely a hamlet that has not its newspaper." When describing a typical pioneer in a backwoods log cabin, Tocqueville identified the "primitive and wild" characteristics of this type of life, but he also noted that the pioneer wears

the dress and speaks the language of cities; he is acquainted with the past, curious about the future, and ready for argument about the present; he is, in short, a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wild of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers. It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought circulates in the midst of these deserts. I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France.

In a footnote to this analysis, Tocqueville marveled at the volume of information flowing into rural areas. On a midnight ride through wild country he witnessed the dropping of "enormous" bundles of mail at the door of isolated dwellings that doubled as post offices, "leaving the inhabitants of the neighboring log houses to send for their share of the treasure."¹³

Frances Grund called Americans, "as a nation, the most reading people on the face of the earth." Grund tried to calculate how many newspapers were published in the United States. The fact that there was "hardly a village or a settlement of a dozen houses in any part of the country without a printing establishment and a paper ... baffles all attempts at computation." The general attitude of foreign visitors in the antebellum era may be summed up by Alexander Mackay's comments:

In the connection with American newspapers, the first thing that strikes the stranger is their extraordinary number. They meet him at every turn in all sizes, shapes, characters, prices, and appellations. On board the steamer and on the rail, in the countinghouse and hotel, in the street and the private dwelling, in the crowded thoroughfare and in the remotest rural district, he is ever sure of finding a newspaper ... the number of their readers is nearly coextensive with that of the population.

Sentiments like these may be found in nearly all analyses of America written by foreign observers.¹⁴

Americans, on the other hand, lived within this cultural world, and thus may be expected not to recognize the exceptional nature of their nation's communications system. They too, however, understood how hungry for news ordinary Americans were and the significance of the widespread knowledge that newspapers provided. A letter to an uncle from a North Carolinian who had moved to Illinois shows how desperate many people were for the latest information. He wrote that some of his neighbors were "so hard pressed for news that if a fellow were to ... fart they would send the report without delay." The policies of the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution in rural Madison County, New York (later to become Colgate University) also indicate the intensity of desire for current periodicals. This institution established a reading room for its students in the 1820s, but the managers were forced to put locks on the tables where papers were kept to deter theft. In addition, the reading room officers were able to sell their used papers and magazines for a profit. Samuel Goodrich, author of the Peter Parley books, looked back from the 1850s upon the changes wrought in his lifetime. In contrast to the late eighteenth century, books and newspapers were now "diffused even among the ordinary country towns, so as to be in the hands of all, young and old." Goodrich criticized the new patterns of reading, claiming that reading materials were treated as "toys and pastimes, taken up every day, and by everybody, in the short intervals of labor, and then hastily dismissed, like waste paper." His objections, however, demonstrate that the volume of information available to the ordinary citizen had mushroomed alongside a desire to assimilate as much of it as possible.¹⁵

"Nothing but a newspaper," Tocqueville wrote, "can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment." Americans recognized this point and used the newspapers to reach a mass audience for everything from political rhetoric to patent medicines. Lewis Tappan understood that the cause of antislavery still faced an uphill battle in 1849, yet he found grounds for hope in the press. "Newspapers throughout the country now contain facts, arguments &c against the extension of slavery & very many of them against slavery itself," he noted in a letter to Joseph Story. Joseph Parker, an agent for a New York State Baptist missionary convention, had his faith in the power of the press confirmed upon a visit to a brother in fellowship who subscribed to the New York Baptist Register. Soon after a post boy left the paper in the house, a young daughter in the family pressed a quarter dollar into Parker's hands, and, while "bathed in tears" and "trembling," asked that the money be sent to Burma in support of the Baptist mission. The girl was too overwhelmed to speak to the source of her grief, but when pressed pointed to a letter printed in the Register before turning away to continue her weeping. Further evidence of the power of information may be found in a letter to the editor of the Emancipator. A reader wrote in 1834 that he "must cease reading, or become an abolitionist." Manufacturers of patent medicines also exploited the opportunity to reach a mass of consumers through newspaper advertising. By the mid-1840s, their pitches for patent medicines occupied more than half the advertising space in the rural papers of central New York, representing one of the first successful attempts at a national marketing campaign.¹⁶

The coming of the steam-driven press and the development of the daily newspaper in the great cities of the antebellum United States have occupied a prominent place in the history of American journalism. It must be remembered, however, that the great majority of the population lived in rural areas that did not experience these new forms of communication first hand. The rural weekly was the medium of transmission for many, perhaps most, Americans. This essay has shown that by the mid-nineteenth century, rural newspapers, on a weekly basis, provided a sizeable volume of information covering a diverse range of subjects to readers across the American countryside. Almost all of the wide-ranging content in these papers derived from extralocal sources. Subscribers to the paper were spread both across the social spectrum and throughout rural counties, yet they tended to be wealthier than those within their occupational group that did not subscribe to newspapers. Overall, more people than not probably had access to these newspapers. What are some implications of these findings? First, the local newspapers must be accorded a prominent place when analyzing the developing reading culture of the northern states before the Civil War. Second, the countryside represents an untapped source for fully understanding social movements of the period. Participation in regional and national economic markets connected rural and urban areas in new ways. Common cultural sensibilities, however, were forged primarily by the expansion of communications, mainly the written word, but also stemmed from developments in education, migration, and associations such as lyceums. As rural people increasingly became enmeshed in the extralocal world through culture, politics, and economics, they made themselves into a broad-based potential constituency for the great social movements of the period.¹⁷

^1.� Emily Chubbuck, Alderbrook: A Collection of Fanny Forester's Village Sketches, Poems, etc. (Boston, Mass., 1849), 1: 265; Freeman's Journal, Sept. 4, 1847. Another example of this type of self-boosterism in the press: the Yankee Blade, on January 10, 1852, encouraged children to read a newspaper because "the stimulus furnished to their minds by the Newspaper,—the many avenues of thought it opens,—its faithful picture of the great world, its ready sympathy with the ideas and sentiments of to-day—all combine to render it an educator more efficient and more permanent in its effects, whether for good or evil, than any other single agency whatever." Quoted in Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York, 1993), 126–27.

^2.� Robert Darnton, "What is the History of Books?" in Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore, Md., 1989), 27. In the introduction to the collection of essays in Reading in America (1989), Davidson discusses the broad possibilities in the history of print culture, yet similarly phrases all her discussion in terms of books. David Hall also considers books to be of central importance in his Cultures of Print (1996). "The better we understand the production and consumption of books," Hall says, "the closer we come to a social history of culture." See Cathy N. Davidson, "Toward a History of Books and Readers," in Reading in America, 1–26; David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, Mass., 1996), 1. In Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1989), William J. Gilmore provides the best description and analysis of changing reading patterns in the rural North. Unlike many other historians, Gilmore recognizes the importance of newspapers, though his research focuses on more durable reading material.

^3.� Emphasis on urban developments may be found in William E. Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833–1865 (Westport, Conn., 1999); Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960 (New York, 1962); Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1984); Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of the American Newspaper (New York, 1978). Works with broader purviews include Thomas C. Leonard, News For All: America's Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York, 1995); Carole Sue Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 1783–1833 (Westport, Conn., 1996); John Nerone, The Culture of the Press in the Early Republic: Cincinnati, 1793–1848 (New York, 1989). Nerone's introduction includes a useful critical discussion of journalism history. John L. Brooke, "To be 'Read by the Whole People': Press, Party, and Public Sphere in the United States, 1789–1840," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 110 (2000): 41–118, also surveys the historiography of newspapers while discussing links between political activity and information circulation. David J. Russo, "The Origins of Local News in the U.S. Country Press, 1840s–1870s," Journalism Monographs 65 (February 1980), documents the reorientation of rural newspapers during the mid-nineteenth century.

^4.� Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860s (Westport, Conn., 1989); Michael S. Foley, "A Mission Unfulfilled: The Post Office and the Distribution of Information in Rural New England, 1821–1835," Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Winter 1997): 611–50.

^5.� Examples include Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York, 1989); John S. Gilkeson, Middle-class Providence, 1820–1940 (Princeton, N.J., 1986); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn., 1982); Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York, 1981); Richard L. Bushman, in The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), focuses on material culture rather than class development per se, and provides evidence for rural participation in the changing culture.

^6.� As a point of comparison, a recent number of New York History contains approximately twenty thousand words. See Milton W. Hamilton, The Country Printer: New York State, 1785–1830 (New York, 1936), for a detailed discussion of the experience of producing papers for the rural editor/publisher/printer. Also, Frederick Follett, History of the Press in Western New York (New York, 1920).

^7.� On the culture of villages, see David Jaffee's three articles: "The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760–1820," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 47 (July 1990): 327–46; "Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–1860," Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 511–35; "One of the Primitive Sort: Portrait Makers of the Rural North, 1760–1860," in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 103–38. See also Richard D. Brown, "The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760–1820," Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 29–51; Jack Larkin, "The Merriams of Brookfield: Printing in the Economy and Culture of Rural Massachusetts in the Early Nineteenth Century," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 96 (1986): 39–73; Robert A. Gross, "Much Instruction from Little Reading: Books and Libraries in Thoreau's Concord," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 97 (1987): 129–88.

^8.� On the common practice of borrowing and shared subscriptions, see Nerone, Culture of the Press, 43–45; Humphrey, Press of the Young Republic, 145; Foley, "A Mission Unfulfilled," 636.

^9.� Russo, "Origins of Local News," 2; Hamilton, Country Printer, Appendix 2; Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, 193.

^10.� Levi Beardsley, Reminiscences; Personal and Other Incidents; Early Settlement of Otsego County; Notices and Anecdotes of Public Men; Judicial, Legal and Legislative Matters; Field Sports; Dissertations and Discussions (New York, 1852), 65, 66; Diary of Thayer Gauss, January 3, 1827, Rare Book and Manuscript Department, Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

^11.� Wesley A. Beaman, "How Newspapers Were Distributed," Morris Chronicle, Jan. 8, 1908, in Carpenter Family Papers, New York State Historical Association (NYSHA), Cooperstown, N.Y.

^12.� Diary of Sarah Amelia Fairman, April 1, June 30, 1820, NYSHA.

^13.� Quoted in Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of Adoniram Judson, The Dramatic Events of the First American Foreign Mission, and the Course of Evangelical Religion in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1980), 66–67; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (New York, 1945), 2: 186, 317.

^14.� Frances J. Grund, The Americans, in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (Boston, 1837) 112, 117–18; quoted in Zboray, Fictive People, 128–29.

^15.� Quoted in Lewis O. Saum, The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America (Westport, Conn., 1980), xiii; Brumberg, Mission for Life, 66, quoted in Hall, Cultures of Print, 54.

^16.� Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1: 111, quoted in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (New York, 1971), 287; Brumberg, Mission for Life, 63–64; Emancipator, March 4, 1834. My own analysis of four newspapers from central New York in the mid-1840s revealed that an average of 54 percent of the advertising space was devoted to patent medicines. For more on the significance of patent medicine advertising, see James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton, N.J., 1961).

^17.� Other works that emphasize the increasing cultural connections throughout the nation in this period include Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life; Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850 (New York, 1987); Daniel Walker Howe, "Victorian Culture in America," in Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia, Pa., 1976), 3–28; Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950). See also the works cited in note 7 on the cultural life in villages.

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