An Old Newspaper Rookery—Reactionary Sectionalism in Cincinnati and Louisville—The Courier-Journal

I

My dream of wealth through my commission on the Confederate cotton I was to sell to English buyers was quickly shattered. The cotton was burned and I found myself in the early spring of 1865 in the little village of Glendale, a suburb of Cincinnati, where the future Justice Stanley Matthews had his home. His wife was a younger sister of my mother. My grandmother was still alive and lived with her daughter and son-in-law.

I was received with open arms. A few days later the dear old lady said to me: “I suppose, my son, you are rather a picked bird after your adventures in the South. You certainly need better clothing. I have some money in bank and it is freely yours.”

I knew that my Uncle Stanley had put her up to this, and out of sheer curiosity I asked her how much she could let me have. She named what seemed to me a stupendous sum. I thanked her, told her I had quite a sufficiency for the time being, slipped into town and pawned my watch; that is, as I made light of it afterward in order to escape the humiliation of borrowing from an uncle whose politics I did not approve, I went with my collateral to an uncle who had no politics at all and got fifty dollars on it! Before the money was gone I had found, through Judge Matthews, congenial work.

There was in Cincinnati but one afternoon newspaper—the Evening Times—owned by Calvin W. Starbuck. He had been a practical printer but was grown very rich. He received me kindly, said the editorial force was quite full—must always be, on a daily newspaper—“but,” he added, “my brother, Alexander Starbuck, who has been running the amusements, wants to go a-fishing in Canada—to be gone a month—and, if you wish, you can during his absence sub for him.”

It was just to my hand and liking. Before Alexander Starbuck returned the leading editor of the paper fell from a ferryboat crossing the Ohio River and was drowned. The next day General Starbuck sent for me and offered me the vacant place.

“Why, general,” I said, “I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with your politics. I do not see how I can undertake a place so conspicuous and responsible.”

He replied: “I propose to engage you as an editorial manager. It is as if building a house you should be head carpenter, I the architect. The difference in salary will be seventy-five dollars a week against fifteen dollars a week.”

I took the place.

II

The office of the Evening Times was a queer old curiosity shop. I set to and turned it inside out. I had very pronounced journalistic notions of my own and applied them in every department of the sleepy old money-maker. One afternoon a week later I put forth a paper whose oldest reader could not have recognized it. The next morning’s Cincinnati Commercial contained a flock of paragraphs to which the Chattanooga-Cincinnati-Rebel Evening Times furnished the keynote.

They made funny reading, but they threw a dangerous flare upon my “past” and put me at a serious disadvantage. It happened that when Artemus Ward had been in town a fortnight before he gave me a dinner and had some of his friends to meet me. Among these was a young fellow of the name of Halstead, who, I was told, was the coming man on the Commercial.

Round to the Commercial office I sped, and being conducted to this person, who received me very blandly, I said: “Mr. Halstead, I am a journeyman day laborer in your city—the merest bird of passage, with my watch at the pawnbroker’s. As soon as I am able to get out of town I mean to go—and I came to ask if you can think the personal allusions to me in to-day’s paper, which may lose me my job but can nowise hurt the Times, are quite fair—even—since I am without defense—quite manly.”

He looked at me with that quizzical, serio-comic stare which so became him, and with great heartiness replied: “No—they were damned mean—though I did not realize how mean. The mark was so obvious and tempting I could not resist, but—there shall be no more of them. Come, let us go and have a drink.”

That was the beginning of a friendship which brought happiness to both of us and lasted nearly half a century, to the hour of his death, when, going from Louisville to Cincinnati, I helped to lay him away in Spring Grove Cemetery.

I had no thought of remaining in Cincinnati. My objective was Nashville, where the young woman who was to become my wife, and whom I had not seen for nearly two years, was living with her family. During the summer Mr. Francisco, the business manager of the Evening Times, had a scheme to buy the Toledo Commercial, in conjunction with Mr. Comly, of Columbus, and to engage me as editor conjointly with Mr. Harrison Gray Otis as publisher. It looked very good. Toledo threatened Cleveland and Detroit as a lake port. But nothing could divert me. As soon as Parson Brownlow, who was governor of Tennessee and making things lively for the returning rebels, would allow, I was going to Nashville.

About the time the way was cleared my two pals, or bunkies, of the Confederacy, Albert Roberts and George Purvis, friends from boyhood, put in an appearance. They were on their way to the capital of Tennessee. The father of Albert Roberts was chief owner of the Republican Banner, an old and highly respectable newspaper, which had for nearly four years lain in a state of suspension. Their plan now was to revive its publication, Purvis to be business manager, and Albert and I to be editors. We had no cash. Nobody on our side of the line had any cash. But John Roberts owned a farm he could mortgage for money enough to start us. What had I to say?

Less than a week later saw us back at home winnowing the town for subscribers and advertising. We divided it into districts, each taking a specified territory. The way we boys hustled was a sight to see. But the way the community warmed to us was another. When the familiar headline, The Republican Banner, made its appearance there was a popular hallelujah, albeit there were five other dailies ahead of us. A year later there was only one, and it was nowise a competitor.

Albert Roberts had left his girl, Edith Scott, the niece of Huxley, whom I have before mentioned, in Montgomery, Alabama. Purvis’ girl, Sophie Searcy, was in Selma. Their hope was to have enough money by Christmas each to pay a visit to those distant places. My girl was on the spot, and we had resolved, money or no money, to be married without delay. Before New Year’s the three of us were wedded and comfortably settled, with funds galore, for the paper had thrived consumingly. It had thrived so consumingly that after a little I was able to achieve the wish of my heart and to go to London, taking my wife and my “great American novel” with me. I have related elsewhere what came of this and what happened to me.

III

That bread cast upon the waters—“‘dough’ put out at usance,” as Joseph Jefferson used to phrase it—shall return after many days has been I dare say discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of kindness, conscious or unconscious. There was a poor, broken-down English actor with a passion for Chaucer, whom I was wont to encounter in the Library of Congress. His voice was quite gone. Now and again I had him join me in a square meal. Once in a while I paid his room rent. I was loath to leave him when the break came in 1861, though he declared he had “expectations,” and made sure he would not starve.

I was passing through Regent Street in London, when a smart brougham drove up to the curb and a wheezy voice called after me. It was my old friend, Newton. His “expectations” had not failed him, he had come into a property and was living in affluence.

He knew London as only a Bohemian native and to the manner born could know it. His sense of bygone obligation knew no bounds. Between him and John Mahoney and Artemus Ward I was made at home in what might be called the mysteries and eccentricities of differing phases of life in the British metropolis not commonly accessible to the foreign casual. In many after visits this familiar knowledge has served me well. But Newton did not live to know of some good fortune that came to me and to feel my gratitude to him, as dear old John Mahoney did. When I was next in London he was gone.

It was not, however, the actor, Newton, whom I had in mind in offering a bread-upon-the-water moral, but a certain John Hatcher, the memory of whom in my case illustrates it much better. He was a wit and a poet. He had been State Librarian of Tennessee. Nothing could keep him out of the service, though he was a sad cripple and wholly unequal to its requirements. He fell ill. I had the opportunity to care for him. When the war was over his old friend, George D. Prentice, called him to Louisville to take an editorial place on the Journal.

About the same time Mr. Walter Haldeman returned from the South and resumed the suspended publication of the Louisville Courier. He was in the prime of life, a man of surpassing energy, enterprise and industry, and had with him the popular sympathy. Mr. Prentice was nearly three score and ten. The stream had passed him by. The Journal was not only beginning to feel the strain but was losing ground. In this emergency Hatcher came to the rescue. I was just back from London and was doing noticeable work on the Nashville Banner.

“Here is your man,” said Hatcher to Mr. Prentice and Mr. Henderson, the owners of the Journal; and I was invited to come to Louisville.

After I had looked over the field and inspected the Journal’s books I was satisfied that a union with the Courier was the wisest solution of the newspaper situation, and told them so. Meanwhile Mr. Haldeman, whom I had known in the Confederacy, sent for me. He offered me the same terms for part ownership and sole editorship of the Courier, which the Journal people had offered me. This I could not accept, but proposed as an alternative the consolidation of the two on an equal basis. He was willing enough for the consolidation, but not on equal terms. There was nothing for it but a fight. I took the Journal and began to hammer the Courier.

A dead summer was before us, but Mr. Henderson had plenty of money and was willing to spend it. During the contest not an unkind word was printed on either side. After stripping the Journal to its heels it had very little to go on or to show for what had once been a prosperous business. But circulation flowed in. From eighteen hundred daily it quickly mounted to ten thousand; from fifteen hundred weekly to fifty thousand. The middle of October it looked as if we had a straight road before us.

But I knew better. I had discovered that the field, no matter how worked, was not big enough to support two rival dailies. There was toward the last of October on the edge of town a real-estate sale which Mr. Haldeman and I attended. Here was my chance for a play. I must have bid up to a hundred thousand dollars and did actually buy nearly ten thousand dollars of the lots put up at auction, relying upon some money presently coming to my wife.

I could see that it made an impression on Mr. Haldeman. Returning in the carriage which had brought us out I said: “Mr. Haldeman, I am going to ruin you. But I am going to run up a money obligation to Isham Henderson I shall never be able to discharge. You need an editor. I need a publisher. Let us put these two newspapers together, buy the Democrat, and, instead of cutting one another’s throats, go after Cincinnati and St. Louis. You will recall that I proposed this to you in the beginning. What is the matter with it now?”

Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at once. The details were soon adjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city in place of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger, calling itself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the field thus acquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that at least the appearance of competition was indispensable and willingly accepted an offer from a proposed Republican organ for a division of the Press dispatches which we controlled. Then and there the real prosperity of the Courier-Journal began, the paper having made no money out of its monopoly.

IV

Reconstruction, as it was called—ruin were a fitter name for it—had just begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The Constitution of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal Union faced the threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was martial law. The gospel of proscription ruled in Congress. Radicalism, vitalized by the murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the inadequate effort of Andrew Johnson to carry out the policies of Lincoln, was in the saddle riding furiously toward a carpetbag Poland and a negroized Ireland.

The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have interposed, lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the Border States, which had not been embraced by the military agencies and federalized machinery erected over the Gulf States, were seriously menaced. Never did newspaper enterprise set out under gloomier auspices.

There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, claiming to be Democratic, playing to the lead of the party of repression at the North. It refused to admit that the head of the South was in the lion’s mouth and that the first essential was to get it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to stroke the mane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it stood between two fires. There arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic monopoly created by the consolidation of the three former dailies into a single newspaper, carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline. Touching its policy of sectional conciliation it picked its way perilously through the cross currents of public opinion. There was scarcely a sinister purpose that was not alleged against it by its enemies; scarcely a hostile device that was not undertaken to put it down and drive it out.

Its constituency represented an unknown quantity. In any event it had to be created. Meanwhile, it must rely upon its own resources, sustained by the courage of the venture, by the integrity of its convictions and aims, and by faith in the future of the city, the state and the country.

Still, to be precise, it was the morning of Sunday, November 8,1868. The night before the good people of Louisville had gone to bed expecting nothing unusual to happen. They awoke to encounter an uninvited guest arrived a little before the dawn. No hint of its coming had got abroad; and thus the surprise was the greater. Truth to say, it was not a pleased surprise, because, as it flared before the eye of the startled citizen in big Gothic letters, The Courier-Journal, there issued thence an aggressive self-confidence which affronted the amour propre of the sleepy villagers. They were used to a very different style of newspaper approach.

Nor was the absence of a timorous demeanor its only offense. The Courier had its partisans, the Journal and the Democrat had their friends. The trio stood as ancient landmarks, as recognized and familiar institutions. Here was a double-headed monster which, without saying “by your leave” or “blast your eyes” or any other politeness, had taken possession of each man’s doorstep, looking very like it had brought its knitting and was come to stay.

The Journal established by Mr. Prentice, the Courier by Mr. Haldeman and the Democrat by Mr. Harney, had been according to the standards of those days successful newspapers. But the War of Sections had made many changes. At its close new conditions appeared on every side. A revolution had come into the business and the spirit of American journalism.

In Louisville three daily newspapers had for a generation struggled for the right of way. Yet Louisville was a city of the tenth or twelfth class, having hardly enough patronage to sustain one daily newspaper of the first or second class. The idea of consolidating the three thus contending to divide a patronage so insufficient, naturally suggested itself during the years immediately succeeding the war. But it did not take definite shape until 1868.

Mr. Haldeman had returned from a somewhat picturesque and not altogether profitable pursuit of his “rights in the territories” and had resumed the suspended publication of the Courier with encouraging prospects. I had succeeded Mr. Prentice in the editorship and part ownership of the Journal. Both Mr. Haldeman and I were newspaper men to the manner born and bred; old and good friends; and after our rivalry of six months maintained with activity on both sides, but without the publication of an unkind word on either, a union of forces seemed exigent. To practical men the need of this was not a debatable question. All that was required was an adjustment of the details. Beginning with the simple project of joining the Courier and the Journal, it ended by the purchase of the Democrat, which it did not seem safe to leave outside.

V

The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican Party had not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs, who had held to the Government—to save their slaves—resenting Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the before-the-war Democrats had gone with the Confederacy. The party in power called itself Democratic, but was in fact a body of reactionary nondescripts claiming to be Unionists and clinging, or pretending to cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of other days.

The situation may be the better understood when I add that “negro testimony”—the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made freedmen as witnesses—barred by the state constitution, was the burning issue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could not be lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake of soap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skin happened to be black.

Mr. Watterson’s Editorial Staff in 1868 When the Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the Courier-Journal. Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center

To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery. The North will never know how many people at the South did so. I could not go with the Republican Party, however, because after the death of Abraham Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of Southern men. The attempt to form a third party had shown no strength and had broken down. There was nothing for me, and the Confederates who were with me, but the ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff of opportunists, Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But I proposed to lead and reform it, not to follow and fall in behind the selfish and short-sighted time servers who thought the people had learned nothing and forgot nothing; and instant upon finding myself in the saddle I sought to ride down the mass of ignorance which was at least for the time being mainly what I had to look to for a constituency.

Mr. Prentice, who knew the lay of the ground better than I did, advised against it. The personal risk counted for something. Very early in the action I made a direct fighting issue, which—the combat interdicted—gave me the opportunity to declare—with something of the bully in the tone—that I might not be able to hit a barn door at ten paces, but could shoot with any man in Kentucky across a pocket handkerchief, holding myself at all times answerable and accessible. I had a fairly good fighting record in the army and it was not doubted that I meant what I said.

But it proved a bitter, hard, uphill struggle, for a long while against odds, before negro testimony was carried. A generation of politicians were sent to the rear. Finally, in 1876, a Democratic State Convention put its mark upon me as a Democrat by appointing me a Delegate at large to the National Democratic Convention of that year called to meet at St. Louis to put a Presidential ticket in the field.

The Courier-Journal having come to represent all three of the English dailies of the city the public began to rebel. It could not see that instead of three newspapers of the third or fourth class Louisville was given one newspaper of the first class; that instead of dividing the local patronage in three inadequate portions, wasted upon a triple competition, this patronage was combined, enabling the one newspaper to engage in a more equal competition with the newspapers of such rival and larger cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis; and that one of the contracting parties needing an editor, the other a publisher, in coming together the two were able to put their trained faculties to the best account.

Nevertheless, during thirty-five years Mr. Haldeman and I labored side by side, not the least difference having arisen between us. The attacks to which we were subjected from time to time drew us together the closer. These attacks were sometimes irritating and sometimes comical, but they had one characteristic feature: Each started out apparently under a high state of excitement. Each seemed to have some profound cause of grief, to be animated by implacable hate and to aim at nothing short of annihilation. Frequently the assailants would lie in wait to see how the Courier-Journal’s cat was going to jump, in order that they might take the other side; and invariably, even if the Courier-Journal stood for the reforms they affected to stand for, they began a system of misrepresentation and abuse. In no instance did they attain any success.

Only once, during the Free Silver craze of 1896, and the dark and tragic days that followed it the three or four succeeding years, the paper having stood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, for sound money, was the property in danger. It cost more of labor and patience to save it from destruction than it had cost to create it thirty years before. Happily Mr. Haldeman lived to see the rescue complete, the tide turned and the future safe.

VI

A newspaper, like a woman, must not only be honest, but must seem to be honest; acts of levity, loose unbecoming expressions or behavior—though never so innocent—tending in the one and in the other to lower reputation and discredit character. During my career I have proceeded under a confident belief in this principle of newspaper ethics and an unfailing recognition of its mandates. I truly believe that next after business integrity in newspaper management comes disinterestedness in the public service, and next after disinterestedness come moderation and intelligence, cleanliness and good feeling, in dealing with affairs and its readers.

From that blessed Sunday morning, November 8, 1868, to this good day, I have known no other life and had no other aim. Those were indeed parlous times. It was an era of transition. Upon the field of battle, after four years of deadly but unequal combat, the North had vanquished the South. The victor stood like a giant, with blood aflame, eyes dilate and hands uplifted again to strike. The victim lay prostrate. Save self-respect and manhood all was lost. Clasping its memories to its bosom the South sank helpless amid the wreck of its fortunes, whilst the North, the benign influence of the great Lincoln withdrawn, proceeded to decide its fate. To this ghastly end had come slavery and secession, and all the pomp, pride and circumstance of the Confederacy. To this bitter end had come the soldiership of Lee and Jackson and Johnston and the myriads of brave men who followed them.

The single Constitutional barrier that had stood between the people of the stricken section and political extinction was about to be removed by the exit of Andrew Johnson from the White House. In his place a man of blood and iron—for such was the estimate at that time placed upon Grant—had been elected President. The Republicans in Congress, checked for a time by Johnson, were at length to have entire sway under Thaddeus Stevens. Reconstruction was to be thorough and merciless. To meet these conditions was the first requirement of the Courier-Journal, a newspaper conducted by outlawed rebels and published on the sectional border line. The task was not an easy one.

There is never a cause so weak that it does not stir into ill-timed activity some wild, unpractical zealots who imagine it strong. There is never a cause so just but that the malevolent and the mercenary will seek to trade upon it. The South was helpless; the one thing needful was to get it on its feet, and though the bravest and the wisest saw this plainly enough there came to the front—particularly in Kentucky—a small but noisy body of politicians who had only worked themselves into a state of war when it was too late, and who with more or less of aggression, insisted that “the states lately in rebellion” still had rights, which they were able to maintain and which the North could be forced to respect.

I was of a different opinion. It seemed to me that whatever of right might exist the South was at the mercy of the North; that the radical party led by Stevens and Wade dominated the North and could dictate its own terms; and that the shortest way round lay in that course which was best calculated to disarm radicalism by an intelligent appeal to the business interests and conservative elements of Northern society, supported by a domestic policy of justice alike to whites and blacks.

Though the institution of African slavery was gone the negro continued the subject of savage contention. I urged that he be taken out of the arena of agitation, and my way of taking him out was to concede him his legal and civil rights. The lately ratified Constitutional Amendments, I contended, were the real Treaty of Peace between the North and South. The recognition of these Amendments in good faith by the white people of the South was indispensable to that perfect peace which was desired by the best people of both sections. The political emancipation of the blacks was essential to the moral emancipation of the whites. With the disappearance of the negro question as cause of agitation, I argued, radicalism of the intense, proscriptive sort would die out; the liberty-loving, patriotic people of the North would assert themselves; and, this one obstacle to a better understanding removed, the restoration of Constitutional Government would follow, being a matter of momentous concern to the body of the people both North and South.

Such a policy of conciliation suited the Southern extremists as little as it suited the Northern extremists. It took from the politicians their best card. South no less than North, “the bloody shirt” was trumps. It could always be played. It was easy to play it and it never failed to catch the unthinking and to arouse the excitable. What cared the perennial candidate so he got votes enough? What cared the professional agitator so his appeals to passion brought him his audience?

It is a fact that until Lamar delivered his eulogy on Sumner not a Southern man of prominence used language calculated to placate the North, and between Lamar and Grady there was an interval of fifteen years. There was not a Democratic press worthy the name either North or South. During those evil days the Courier-Journal stood alone, having no party or organized following. At length it was joined on the Northern side by Greeley. Then Schurz raised his mighty voice. Then came the great liberal movement of 1871-72, with its brilliant but ill-starred campaign and its tragic finale; and then there set in what, for a season, seemed the deluge.

But the cause of Constitutional Government was not dead. It had been merely dormant. Champions began to appear in unexpected quarters. New men spoke up, North and South. In spite of the Republican landslide of 1872, in 1874 the Democrats swept the Empire State. They carried the popular branch of Congress by an overwhelming majority. In the Senate they had a respectable minority, with Thurman and Bayard to lead it. In the House Randall and Kerr and Cox, Lamar, Beck and Knott were about to be reËnforced by Hill and Tucker and Mills and Gibson. The logic of events was at length subduing the rodomontade of soap-box oratory. Empty rant was to yield to reason. For all its mischances and melancholy ending the Greeley campaign had shortened the distance across the bloody chasm.