Upon the whole, our paper was an attempt at conscientious and
self-respecting journalism; it addressed itself seriously to the minds
of its readers; it sought to form their tastes and opinions. I do not
know how much it influenced them, if it influenced them at all, and
as to any effect beyond the circle of its subscribers, that cannot
be imagined, even in a fond retrospect. But since no good effort is
altogether lost, I am sure that this endeavor must have had some
tacit effect; and I am sure that no one got harm from a sincerity of
conviction that devoted itself to the highest interest of the reader,
that appealed to nothing base, and flattered nothing foolish in him. It
went from our home to the homes of the people in a very literal sense,
for my father usually brought his exchanges from the office at the end
of his day there, and made his selections or wrote his editorials while
the household work went on around him, and his children gathered about
the same lamp, with their books or their jokes; there were apt to be a
good many of both.
Our county was the most characteristic of that remarkable group of
counties in northern Ohio called the Western Reserve, and forty years
ago the population was almost purely New England in origin, either by
direct settlement from Connecticut, or indirectly after the sojourn
of a generation in New York State. We were ourselves from southern
Ohio, where the life was then strongly tinged by the adjoining life of
Kentucky and Virginia, and we found these transplanted Yankees cold and
blunt in their manners; but we did not undervalue their virtues. They
formed in that day a leaven of right thinking and feeling which was to
leaven the whole lump of the otherwise proslavery or indifferent state;
and I suppose that outside of the antislavery circles of Boston there
was nowhere in the country a population so resolute and so intelligent
in its political opinions. They were very radical in every way, and
hospitable to novelty of all kinds. I imagine that they tested more
new religions and new patents than have been even heard of in less
inquiring communities. When we came among them they had lately been
swept by the fires of spiritualism, which left behind a great deal of
smoke and ashes where the inherited New England orthodoxy had been. A
belief in the saving efficacy of spirit phenomena still exists among
them, but not, I fancy, at all in the former measure, when nearly every
household had its medium, and the tables that tipped outnumbered the
tables that did not tip. The old New York Tribune, which was circulated
in the country almost as widely as our own paper, had deeply schooled
the people in the economics of Horace Greeley, and they were ready
for any sort of millennium, religious or industrial, that should
arrive, while they looked very wisely after the main chance in the
meantime. They were temperate, hard-working, hard-thinking folks, who
dwelt on their scattered farms, and came up to the County Fair once
a year, when they were apt to visit the printing-office and pay for
their papers. In spite of the English superstition to the contrary,
the average American is not very curious, if one may judge from his
reticence in the presence of things strange enough to excite question;
and if our craft surprised these witnesses they rarely confessed it.
They thought it droll, as people of the simpler occupations are apt to
think all the more complex arts; and one of them once went so far in
expression of his humorous conception as to say, after a long stare at
one of the compositors dodging and pecking at the type in his case,
“Like an old hen pickin’ up millet.” This sort of silence, and this
sort of comment, both exasperated the printers, who took their revenge
as they could. They fed it full, once, when a country subscriber’s
horse, tied before the office, crossed his hind-legs and sat down in
his harness like a tired man, and they proposed to go out and offer him
a chair, to take him a glass of water, and ask him to come inside. But
fate did not often give them such innings; they mostly had to create
their chances of reprisal, but they did not mind that.
There was always a good deal of talk going on, but although we were
very ardent politicians, the talk was not political. When it was not
mere banter, it was mostly literary; we disputed about authors among
ourselves, and with the village wits who dropped in. There were several
of these who were readers, and they liked to stand with their backs to
our stove and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and
Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare.
It was Shakespeare who was oftenest on our tongues; indeed, the
printing-office of former days had so much affinity with the theatre
that compositors and comedians were easily convertible; and I have seen
our printers engaged in hand-to-hand combats with column-rules, two up
and two down, quite like the real bouts on the stage. Religion entered
a good deal into our discussions, which my father, the most tolerant
of men, would not suffer to become irreverent, even on the lips of law
students bathing themselves in the fiery spirit of Tom Paine. He was
willing to meet any one in debate of moral, religious, or political
questions, and the wildest-haired Comeouter, the most ruthless
sceptic, the most credulous spiritualist, found him ready to take them
seriously, even when it was hard not to take them in joke.
It was part of his duty, as publisher of the paper, to bear patiently
with another kind of frequenter: the type of farmer who thought he
wished to discontinue his paper, and really wished to be talked into
continuing it. I think he rather enjoyed letting the subscriber talk
himself out, and carrying him from point to point in his argument,
always consenting that he knew best what he wanted to do, but skilfully
persuading him at last that a home-paper was more suited to his needs
than any city substitute. Once I could have given the heads of his
reasoning, but they are gone from me now. The editor was especially
interested in the farming of the region, and I think it was partly
owing to the attention he called to the question that its character was
so largely changed. It is still a dairy country, but now it exports
grain, and formerly the farmers had to buy their flour.
He did not neglect any real local interest in his purpose of keeping
his readers alive to matters of more general importance, but he was
fortunate in addressing himself to people who cared for the larger,
if remoter, themes he loved. In fact, as long as slavery remained a
question in our politics, they had a seriousness and dignity which the
present generation can hardly imagine; and men of all callings felt
themselves uplifted by the appeal this question made to their reason
and conscience. My father constantly taught in his paper that if
slavery could be kept out of the territories it would perish, and, as
I have said, this was the belief of the vast majority of his readers.
They were more or less fervid in it, according to their personal
temperaments; some of them were fierce in their convictions, and some
humorous, but they were all in earnest. The editor sympathized more
with those who took the true faith gayly. All were agreed that the
Fugitive Slave Law was to be violated at any risk; it would not have
been possible to take an escaping slave out of that county without
bloodshed, but the people would have enjoyed outwitting his captors
more than destroying them. Even in the great John Brown times, when it
was known that there was a deposit of his impracticable pikes somewhere
in our woods, and he and his followers came and went among us on some
mysterious business of insurrectionary aim, the affair had its droll
aspects which none appreciated more keenly than the Quaker-born editor.
With his cheerful scepticism, he could never have believed that any
harm or danger would come of it all; and I think he would have been
hardly surprised to wake up any morning and find that slavery had died
suddenly during the night, of its own iniquity.
He was like all country editors then, and I dare say now, in being
a printer as well as an editor, and he took a full share in the
mechanical labors. These were formerly much more burdensome, for
twice or thrice the present type-setting was then done in the country
offices. At the present day the country printer buys of a city agency
his paper already printed on one side, and he gets it for the cost of
the blank paper, the agency finding its account in the advertisements
it puts in. Besides this patent inside, as it is called, the printer
buys stereotyped selections of other agencies, which offer him almost
as wide a range of matter as the exchange newspapers he used to choose
from. The few columns left for local gossip and general news, and for
whatever editorial comment he cares to make on passing events, can
be easily filled up by two compositors. But in my time we had three
journeymen at work and two or three girl-compositors, and commonly a
boy-apprentice besides. The paper was richer in a personal quality,
and the printing-office was unquestionably more of a school. After we
began to take girl-apprentices it became coeducative, as far as they
cared to profit by it; but I think it did not serve to widen their
thoughts or quicken their wits as it did those of the men. They looked
to their craft as a living, not as a life, and they had no pride in
it. They did not learn the whole trade, as the journeymen had done,
and served only such apprenticeship as fitted them to set type. They
were then paid by the thousand ems, and their earnings were usually as
great at the end of a month as at the end of a year. But the boy who
came up from his father’s farm, with the wish to be a printer because
Franklin had been one, and with the intent of making the office his
university, began by sweeping it out, by hewing wood and carrying water
for it. He became a roller-boy, and served long behind the press before
he was promoted to the case, where he learned slowly and painfully to
set type. His wage was forty dollars a year and two suits of clothes,
for three years, when his apprenticeship ended, and his wander-years
(too often literally) began. He was glad of being inky and stained
with the marks of his trade; he wore a four-cornered paper cap, in the
earlier stages of his service, and even an apron. When he became a
journeyman, he clothed himself in black doeskin and broadcloth, and put
on a silk hat and the thinnest-soled fine boots that could be found,
and comported himself as much like a man of the world as he knew how to
do. His work brought him acquainted with a vast variety of interests,
and kept his mind as well as hands employed; he could not help thinking
about them, and he did not fail to talk about them. His comments had
generally a slightly acid flavor, and his constant survey of the
world, in the “map of busy life” always under his eye, bred in him
the contempt of familiarity. He was none the less agreeable for that,
and the jokes that flew about from case to case in our office were
something the editor would have been the last man to interfere with.
He read or wrote on through them all, and now and then turned from his
papers to join in them.