Alternative and Underground Newspapers

Origins: Labor and Abolition

After the American Revolution, most commercial newspapers continued to represent white, middle-to upper-class male readers. Most ignored the plight of laborers, slaves, other people of color, immigrants, and women. In reaction, alternative newspapers appeared during the first half of the nineteenth century. Most used journalism as an agent for social change.

The country's first successful labor newspaper, the Mechanic's Free Press, was launched in 1827 in Philadelphia by shoemaker William Heighton. Between then and 1832, 50 to 60 labor weeklies were published around the country. The commercial press overreacted to the new labor press, and the two groups soon traded insults in print. Labor newspapers promoted eliminating child labor, subsidizing education for poor children, closing debtors' prisons, and instituting a 10-hour workday. Their most important goal was to transform the working class into a political force and elect labor candidates to public office. By the 1830s, there were early successes. Most early union members were skilled artisans. Later in the century factory workers, including so-called factory girls, began unionizing and publishing their own newspapers.

During the early nineteenth century, abolitionists, both black and white, founded antislavery newspapers. The first abolitionist newspaper, Charles Osborn's The Philanthropist, was printed in Ohio in 1817, and fellow Quaker Elihu Embree began printing Manumission Intelligencer (later renamed the Emancipator) in Tennessee in 1819. Some publishers advocated gradual emancipation; others argued for the immediate abolition of slavery. Some wanted slaves to be assimilated; others, such as Benjamin Lundy of the Genius of Universal Emancipation (1821), advocated colonizing slaves in Africa. The first black newspaper, Samuel Cornish and John Russworm's Freedom's Journal, was founded in New York City in 1827. With a readership of 1,000, the anticolonization paper focused on improving the lot of free blacks, emancipating slaves, and eliminating lynching. The same year in Philadelphia, The African Observer began publishing articles about the evils of slavery.

In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison, who had worked with Genius editor Lundy, began printing the Liberator from Boston. Garrison had ceased supporting Lundy's gradual approach to ending slavery. His newspaper, printed for 35 years, was the longest-lived abolitionist newspaper.

The abolitionist movement reached its peak between 1830 and 1860. Cornish edited The Colored American (1837), which ran articles about freed slaves' achievements and their involvement in the abolitionist movement. In 1840, Lydia Maria Child and David Lee Child established the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the official weekly of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In early 1847, Willis Hodges founded The Ram's Horn in New York. John Brown (later of Harper's Ferry fame) and Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a celebrated antislavery speaker and writer, were two of Hodges's contributors. Douglass started his own paper, the North Star, in Rochester, New York, in December 1847. It reached more than 4,000 readers, including many whites, in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. The North Star merged with the Emancipator in 1851, and continued as Frederick Douglass' Paper until he began Douglass' Monthly, an abolitionist magazine in 1860. The pages of Douglass's publications served as forums for women and other marginalized people. The North Star's motto was “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.”

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