Early Register just one of owners' business ventures

James Lyon’s dream of making The Mobile Gazette part of a national network of newspapers evaporated with the end of the War of 1812. Lyon sought to create a national chain of newspapers that would speak as one voice for Thomas Jefferson’s Democrat-Republican Party. But issues raised during the war destroyed national party alignments.

So when Jonathan Battelle and John W. Townsend decided to start a newspaper in Mobile in 1821, they gave it a business name rather than a political name, The Mobile Commercial Register.

The Register was not their first newspaper in Alabama. Jonathan and his older brother, Nathaniel, tired of being merchants in Savannah and decided to move to Alabama shortly after it became a state to try their hand at city building. They bought stock in the Alabama Co. and Nathaniel moved to Montgomery to look after their interests and to help in the laying out of the new town.

Jonathan, meanwhile, remained in Savannah and ordered printing equipment from the North to be shipped to the Georgia port. He began placing ads in The Mobile Gazette in the summer of 1820 announcing his plan to start a newspaper in Montgomery to be called the Republican and asking for subscribers.

After the printing equipment arrived in Savannah, Jonathan had it hauled the 400 miles overland to Montgomery, and in January 1821 the two Battelle brothers published the first edition of The Republican. 

Looking for other opportunities, Jonathan spent part of the summer and fall of 1821 preparing to come to Mobile and to start another newspaper, The Mobile Commercial Register, in partnership with John W. Townsend.

The men had decided to embark into publishing the Register, as they explained in the first issue of Dec. 10, 1821, because of: “The rising importance of the State of Alabama; its progress in wealth and respectability, in which its sea ports so largely participate . . . its consequent increasing weight in the great national scale. . .”

Unspoken, but anticipated, was their hope that the newspaper would aid the men in accumulating wealth from their other business interests, especially real estate speculation.

Newspaper owners rarely made a profit from their publications. Owners made money from other ventures and investments, which is why they were such town boosters in the newspaper columns.

What motivated the start of Press Register 200 years ago?

James Lyon published the first newspaper in Mobile, The Mobile Gazette, sometime around late April 1813. Because the owners of The Mobile Commercial Register acquired his newspaper in 1822, The Mobile Press Register this month celebrates 200 years of publication.

Viewed in isolation, the issuing of the Gazette by a wandering American printer was an event of little significance to anyone except perhaps to Lyon and a handful of others in the town of fewer than 500 souls.

More than half of these inhabitants were slaves or free blacks. Whites comprised the remainder. Any observer would have concluded that the town did not offer much of a potential newspaper subscriber or advertiser base.

What motivated Lyon to start a newspaper in Mobile with such unlikely prospects?

Newspaper Politics

The answer lies in the fact that the birth the Gazette was a product of broad political currents and personal alliances taking place in early 19^th century America.

By the time of Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800, newspapers had become the Republic’s central political organizations. Editors didn’t just comment on the party system, they ran it. Editors acted as the chief party spokesmen and newspaper offices often served as local party headquarters. For good reason, historian Jeffrey L. Pasley has dubbed this party system as newspaper politics.

When Jefferson bought Louisiana in 1803 for the United States, Secretary of State James Madison

Gen. James Wilkinson

sent commissions to Mississippi Territory Gov. William C.C. Claiborne and General James Wilkinson, the ranking Army officer on the frontier, to go to New Orleans and accept the province on behalf of the United States.

Secretary of War Henry Dearborn entrusted delivery of his orders for Claiborne and Wilkinson to a loyal Republican newspaperman—James Lyon. It may have been purely coincidental, but probably was not, that in 1799, Lyon began publishing a campaign newspaper in Georgetown, Virginia, in support of Thomas Jefferson.

With Jefferson’s election as president, Lyon became public printer to Congress. Additionally, Republicans revered Lyon’s father, Matthew Lyon, who had been imprisoned during the Adams administration for violating the Sedition Law. The senior Lyon also had served in the Revolution, was acquainted with Wilkinson and had been elected to Congress in 1796. In his first attempt at office a few years earlier, Matthew Lyon had employed his then 17-year-old son James as editor of the Rutland, Vermont, Farmers’ Library to support his campaign.

First English Language Newspaper in Louisiana

It may have been purely coincidental, but again probably was not, that Lyon followed Claiborne and Wilkinson to New Orleans. On December 13, 1803, seven days before Claiborne and Wilkinson officially received Louisiana for the United States in the Place d’Armes, James Lyon began publication in New Orleans of his Union, the first English language newspaper in Louisiana.

Certainly, New Orleans offered Lyon a chance for financial gain. Nearly 25,000 people lived in the Crescent City, making it the largest city west of the Appalachian Mountains. As the main outlet for western commodities, millions of dollars in produce flowed through the port.

Nevertheless, the substantial hurdles Lyon faced in publishing the Union make it unlikely that he decided to start the newspaper by chance as the territory passed into American hands. The high cost and difficulty of transporting basic printing equipment to New Orleans and the likely shortages of paper make such a coincidence improbable.

Since subscribers and advertisers for the Union did not yet exist, at least not in any number, turning a profit from the publication also seems an unlikely motivation, or just plain unlikely, at least for a time.

Plans for Newspaper Chain

Moreover, James Lyon had a plan. He wanted to create a national chain of newspapers that would speak as one voice for the Republicans. He founded seven of them in 1800 alone. Through these papers, Lyon believed Republicans would be able to tailor uniformly their messages throughout the country.

To found so many newspapers, Lyon must have had the backing of wealthy members of the Republican Party. Just 27 years old in 1803, Lyon had operated many businesses including a sawmill, ironworks, papermill, shipbuilding, bookstore and lottery. But he was not known for making money.

Lyon pursued his ambition in New Orleans for nearly a year before selling the Union to James M. Bradford and leaving New Orleans for Carthage, Tennessee, in December 1804. Lyon probably never intended to stay long in New Orleans. His wife and children had remained in Tennessee.

We don’t know how Lyon came to be in Mobile in 1813. But it seems likely that Madison, now president, once again entrusted his loyal newspaper editor to deliver orders to Gen. Wilkinson to take possession of the city for the United States.

The Spanish surrendered Mobile to Wilkinson on April 13 and Lyon shortly afterward started publication of The Mobile Gazette. As he had in New Orleans, Lyon soon sold the newspaper and returned to his family. Lyon died in poverty on April 13, 1824, in Cheraw, South Carolina.

When society news became dangerous

Frances Ruffin Durham

Frances Ruffin Durham’s job of Society Editor on The Mobile Press Register ordinarily didn’t require any of the toughness she had to draw on as police reporter at The New Orleans States.

On at least one occasion, however, she found herself threatened for a feature carried on the society news pages.

A society reporter had been sent to interview the eccentric and possibly insane Mary Eoline Eilands, whose last name was pronounced “island.” She was known as “Floating Island” because she walked with a short, quick, floating step.

She had once been quite pretty, but in the 1930s she was an elderly woman who always dressed in a full black skirt and a dingy white blouse. On her head she wore a small, flat, black hat with ribbons tied under her chin, and on her feet she wore low-heeled, black shoes. Her father, Alexander William Eilands, had been a compositor for the Register in 1872.

To see the only known photo
of Mary Eoline Eilands,
see page 34 in the fall 2009 issue
of Longleaf magazine.

All Southern port cities had a legend about a woman such as Floating Island. The Mobile legend held that she was once a young bride-to-be. Her betrothed supposedly was a sailor who never returned from a voyage.

Legend held that each day during her life she went down to the docks hoping that would be the day her lover would return from the sea.

The old woman didn’t mind a reporter from the Press Register interviewing her. But when the story came out in the newspaper, Floating Island came to the Press Register office, threatening to thrash Durham with her parasol for printing it.

The staff had Durham climb through the second story window and hide on the roof of the adjoining building until Eilands could be persuaded to leave.