Our first newspaper was published in southwestern Ohio, but after a
series of varying fortunes, which I need not dwell upon, we found
ourselves in possession of an office in the northeastern corner of the
State, where the prevalent political feeling promised a prosperity
to one of my father’s anti-slavery opinions which he had never yet
enjoyed. He had no money, but in those days it was an easy matter to
get an interest in a country paper on credit, and we all went gladly
to work to help him pay for the share that he acquired in one by this
means. An office which gave a fair enough living, as living was then,
could be bought for twelve or fifteen hundred dollars; but this was an
uncommonly good office, and I suppose the half of it which my father
took was worth one sum or the other. Afterward, within a few months,
when it was arranged to remove the paper from the village where it had
always been published to the county-seat, a sort of joint-stock company
was formed, and the value of his moiety increased so much, nominally at
least, that he was nearly ten years paying for it. By this time I was
long out of the story, but at the beginning I was very vividly in it,
and before the world began to call me with that voice which the heart
of youth cannot resist, it was very interesting; I felt its charm
then, and now, as I turn back to it, I feel its charm again, though it
was always a story of steady work, if not hard work.
The county-seat, where it had been judged best to transfer the paper
lest some other paper of like politics should be established there, was
a village of only six or seven hundred inhabitants. But, as the United
States Senator who was one of its citizens used to say, it was “a place
of great political privileges.” The dauntless man who represented
the district in the House for twenty years, and who had fought the
anti-slavery battle from the first, was his fellow-villager, and more
than compeer in distinction; and besides these, there was nearly always
a State Senator or Representative among us. The county officers, of
course, lived at the county-seat, and the leading lawyers, who were
the leading politicians, made their homes in the shadow of the court
house, where one of them was presently elected to preside as Judge of
the Common Pleas. In politics, the county was already overwhelmingly
Freesoil, as the forerunner of the Republican party was then called;
the Whigs had hardly gathered themselves together since the defeat of
General Scott for the Presidency; the Democrats, though dominant in
state and nation, and faithful to slavery at every election, did not
greatly outnumber among us the zealots called Comeouters, who would
not vote at all under a constitution recognizing the right of men to
own men. Our paper was Freesoil, and its field was large among that
vast majority of the people who believed that slavery would finally
perish if kept out of the territories, and confined to the old Slave
States. With the removal of the press to the county-seat there was a
hope that this field could be widened, till every Freesoil voter became
a subscriber. It did not fall out so; even of those who subscribed
in the ardor of their political sympathies, many never paid; but our
list was nevertheless handsomely increased, and numbered fifteen or
sixteen hundred. I do not know how it may be now, but then most country
papers had a list of four or five hundred subscribers; a few had a
thousand, a very few twelve hundred, and these were fairly decimated
by delinquents. We were so flown with hope that I remember there was
serious talk of risking the loss of the delinquents on our list by
exacting payment in advance; but the measure was thought too bold,
and we compromised by demanding two dollars a year for the paper, and
taking a dollar and a half if paid in advance. Twenty-five years later
my brother, who had followed my father in the business, discovered
that a man who never meant to pay for his paper would as lief owe
two dollars as any less sum, and he at last risked the loss of the
delinquents by requiring advance payment; it was an heroic venture, but
it was perhaps time to make it.
The people of the county were mostly farmers, and of these nearly all
were dairymen. The few manufactures were on a small scale, except
perhaps the making of oars, which were shipped all over the world from
the heart of the primeval forests densely wooding the vast levels of
the region. The portable steam sawmills dropped down on the borders of
the woods have long since eaten their way through and through them,
and devoured every stick of timber in most places, and drunk up the
watercourses that the woods once kept full; but at that time half the
land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars and hickories, elms and
chestnuts, ashes and hemlocks; and the meadows that pastured the herds
of red cattle were dotted with stumps as thick as harvest stubble. Now
there are not even stumps; the woods are gone, and the watercourses
are torrents in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. The meadows
themselves have vanished, for it has been found that the strong yellow
soil will produce more in grain than in milk. There is more money in
the hands of the farmers there, though there is still so little that
by any city scale it would seem comically little, pathetically little;
but forty years ago there was so much less that fifty dollars seldom
passed through a farmer’s hands in a year. Payment was made in kind
rather than in coin, and every sort of farm produce was legal tender
at the printing-office. Wood was welcome in any quantity, for the huge
box-stove consumed it with inappeasable voracity, and then did not heat
the wide, low room which was at once editorial-room, composing-room,
and press-room. Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as
of the building. In that cold lake-shore country the people dwelt in
wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the
first winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the water which
the compositor put on it when he wished to distribute his case; the
inking rollers had to be thawed before they could be used on the press;
and if the current of the editor’s soul had not been the most genial
that ever flowed in this rough world, it must have been congealed at
its source. The cases of type had to be placed very near the windows
so as to get all the light there was, and they got all the cold there
was, too. From time to time, the compositor’s fingers became so stiff
that blowing on them would not avail; he passed the time in excursions
between his stand and the stove; in very cold weather, he practiced
the device of warming his whole case of types by the fire, and when it
lost heat, warming it again. The man at the press-wheel was then the
enviable man; those who handled the chill damp sheets of paper were no
more fortunate than the compositors.