'EtaoinShrdlu' once a part of newspapering life

A short penny paper sidebar to the career of a partisan political editor

The Mobile Ledger founded in 1841

John Forsyth, called by his biographer “a key figure in the golden age of partisan newspapers,” took one of the oddest steps in his journalism career in late 1841. After four years as one of the Democrat Party’s most vocal partisan editors, Forsyth announced he was no longer going to be a party man.

Forsyth and his editorial partner Hamilton Ballentyne launched the independent Mobile Daily Ledger on December 6, 1841. They told readers the paper was “neither devoted to the support of any particular political party . . .  nor yet confined to a strait-laced neutrality.”

Since 1837, Forsyth had been co-owner of the daily Mobile Commercial Register and Patriot, which supported the Democrat Party. Starting the Ledger raises a lot of questions such as:

• Why did Forsyth start the Ledger when he still owed for the purchase of the Register?
• Where did the money come from to start the new publication?
• Did he intend the Ledger to be an additional paper, or did he intend to sell the Register?
• The Ledger must have been in the planning for several months, so was there some significance to the timing?
• Forsyth and the Democrats had just come through the bruising 1840 election against the Whigs, why abandon the partisan path now?

Answers to some of those questions may be found in Forsyth’s and Ballentyne’s plan to conduct the

John Forsyth Jr., Courtesy of Library of Congress

Ledger on “what is known in the Northern cities as ‘the penny system.’” The two men said the penny system reaps “harvests of rich rewards” for newspaper owners, the “best evidence of its utility and favor with the public.” Forsyth and Ballentyne were looking to make money.

Forsyth and Ballentyne wrote that their new publication’s “chief aim . . . will be to become a sprightly, and useful newspaper—to avoid heavy matter and long articles, to afford a compendium of news, foreign and domestic political, religious and literary, and to promote the instruction and amusement of all classes of readers.” This style of content was characteristic of the New York penny papers the editors referred to.

Benjamin Day launched his New York Sun in 1833 and sent newsboys out on the city’s streets to sell them to the public for a penny. At a time when most conventional dailies sold for 6 cents, Day’s cheap paper not only proved successful but seemed revolutionary. Other publishers followed his lead.

Since then, penny papers, especially those in New York, have achieved mythical status among most journalism historians. These historians have claimed that penny paper publishers essentially created the first modern commercial papers, independent from politically parties. They also credit penny papers with inventing the modern concept of news, and then of using newsboys to hawk it on the streets when most papers relied on yearly subscriptions.

The trouble with this portrayal is that it is misleading and occasionally flat wrong. As journalism historian Julie Hedgepeth Williams pointed out, Benjamin Mecom produced the first penny paper in America, the Penny Post of Philadelphia, in 1769. The Post was not a long-term success. Other attempts at selling newspapers for a penny followed: The Cent of Philadelphia, the Bostonian, and the New York Morning Post, which started out at two cents a copy and quickly went to a penny. None of these papers proved successful in the long term, either. So it is accurate to say that Day’s Sun proved more successful than the earlier penny papers.

Most historians also credit penny papers with adopting new technologies, such as the telegraph and high-speed presses. They also claim that the penny papers introduced new jobs such as reporters and new sources of income from advertising.

Again, there are flaws in this depiction. Earlier newspapers, including the Mobile Register until about 1834, exercised neutrality and objectivity in presenting information. The Register and other conventional newspapers also used reporters, took steps to speed up transmitting news by mail on land and water, as well as rapidly acquiring faster presses.

The penny papers were just one class of newspapers in New York, Mobile, and elsewhere. Mobile had nonpartisan papers, political party papers, commercial papers, agricultural papers, literary papers, humor papers, and others. They published as weeklies, bi-weeklies, tri-weeklies, and dailies. Dailies were not the most common form of newspapers. These publications experienced varying degrees of success, especially in Mobile, still a frontier town in the 1820s and 1830s.

Communications researcher John C. Nerone has pointed out that the rise of popular partisan politics and the market economy in the early 1800s affected every class of newspaper in different ways. Cheaper prices and growing circulation, faster presses, street sellers, reporters, and newsy content can be found in all newspapers to one degree or another. Penny papers also adopted existing newspaper formats and some of them printed on antiquated hand presses.

Both Richmond and New Orleans claim to have had penny papers before they appeared in Mobile. The accuracy of that claim depends on how you define a penny paper. Defining a penny paper would seem to be simple and straightforward. It cost a reader one cent. But contemporaries seemed to define penny papers more by their business practices and content than by their street price.

The Library of Virginia asserts that James A. Cowardin and William H. Davis published the first penny paper south of Baltimore, the four-page Daily Dispatch of Richmond, on October 19, 1850. And it was priced at one cent and had content typically found in penny papers.

Francis Asbury Lumsden and George Wilkins Kendall, a former typesetter on the Mobile Register in 1833, began the New Orleans Picayune on January 25,1837. New Orleans’ historians say that it was patterned after the penny press. The Picayune took its name from a Spanish half-real silver coin then in circulation, a picayune, worth about 6 ¼ cents. At 6 ¼ cents, the Picayune was 5 ¼ cents too much to be a penny paper pricewise.

A picayune

For the Picayune, being patterned after the penny papers seems to refer to its business and news practices. This includes contracting with newsboys for street sales, hiring reporters, and setting up a pony express system to get news faster from the East.

Back in Mobile, Solomon Child published the Mobile Times “upon the plan of the Penny Papers” in July 1837. Child also said the Times would be Democrat and mercantile. The Times sold for 6 ¼ cents a copy, the same single-issue price as the Picayune and the Ledger.

What the Ledger, Times, and the Picayune seem to have meant by being patterned after the penny press was not their single-issue price, but a cash system of circulation. The newspapers sold their editions for cash to distributors who then sold the papers to readers however they deemed best, either subscription or street sales.

Subscriptions for the Mobile papers brought their single-issue cost down. The Ledger didn’t take subscriptions for longer than a month at 75 cents. That brought the single-issue price down to about 3 cents. A subscription for one week cost 25 cents, or about 3.5 cents a copy. The Times sold three-month subscriptions for $2.50, about 3.5 cents a copy.

The Ledger contracted with about 10 carriers, or newsboys, “to serve customers in every part of the City.” But a focus on street sales is misleading. Even in New York, carriers sold the overwhelming number of penny newspapers by subscription. Carriers sold only about one out of every 10 papers on the street. Not surprisingly, newsboys who bought their papers in bulk in cash from the publisher preferred to sell to regular customers by subscription. And any start-up newspaper needed a subscription list to begin publishing and selling advertising.

The penny system was significant not for single-issue street sales but because it eliminated the common newspaper problem of unpaid subscriptions. “It will be perceived at once that the cheapness of the Ledger and its system of distribution and sales by a large corps of active news boys,” Forsyth and Ballentyne said, “will give it a wide circulation and render it the best medium of public advertising. Circulation will be the great object to which the study and industry of the undersigned will be directed; and to render it agreeable to the tastes, and useful to the pursuits of all classes, other pens and other talents than those of the editors will be pressed into the service.”

The real barrier to a large circulation for the Ledger or any other paper in Mobile was the city’s slim population. In 1840, Mobile had just 12,672 people and nearly half them were slaves, who couldn’t buy newspapers.

Even before the Ledger published its first issue, Forsyth suffered a personal setback that affected his ambitions for the new paper. His father died unexpectedly on October 21, 1841, in Washington, D.C. Forsyth left Mobile for Columbus, Georgia, to settle his father’s estate.

Forsyth had apparently planned to return to Mobile and the Ledger, but legal issues dragged on. In 1842, the owners’ names on the Ledger masthead changed from Forsyth and Ballentyne to Ballentyne and Company. In 1845, Forsyth retuned to Mobile to sell his Summerville home. He had decided to stay in Columbus and it would take him until 1850 to settle his father’s estate.

Because Forsyth still owed Thaddeus Sanford for the purchase of the Register, Sanford resumed ownership of the paper as the easiest means of settling accounts. The change in owners may have been in the works before Forsyth’s father died and before the Ledger began publication.

Upon returning to the helm of the Mobile Daily Commercial Register and Patriot, Sanford combined it with his former partner S.F. Wilson’s Merchants & Planters Journal, begun just three years before. Sanford changed the combined papers’ name to the Mobile Register and Journal on December 1, 1841.

Without Forsyth’s guiding hand, the Ledger eventually failed and so ended its experiment with the penny paper system. Little is known about the Times, but it also proved short-lived.

NOTES

Lonnie A. Burnett, The Pen Makes a Good Sword: Joh Forsyth of the Mobile Register. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 2; 34

“Prospectus,” The Mobile Daily Ledger, December 8, 1841 1:1

Julie Hedgepeth Williams, “The Founding of the Penny Press: Nothing New Under The Sun, The Herald, or The Tribune.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association (Salt Lake City, Utah, October 6-9, 1993)

John C. Nerone, “The Mythology of the Penny Press.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 4:4 (1987), 376-404

“James Andrew Cowardin,” Library of Virginia. Online: https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/online_classroom/union_or_secession/people/james_cowardin; Accessed October 5, 2019

Mobile Daily Commercial Register and Patriot, August 9, 1837 2:6

“The Press,” Historical New Orleans. Online: http://www.storyvilledistrictnola.com/newspapers.html.