Reading Nineteenth Century Newspapers
The Nineteenth Century newspaper differed in key respects from its modern counterpart. To begin with, it was significantly shorter -- most dailies ran 4 pages or so, amounting to a couple of pages of news and several pages of advertisements and announcements. Outside of the largest cities, newspaper offices were one- or two-man operations. Few deployed teams of reporters; most relied instead on more informal communications via letters (hence the term "correspondent"). In order to generate material, editors regularly clipped news items from other papers and ran them verbatim. So for example the vivid account of the Amistad 's arrival in New London first appeared in the New London Gazette, then travelled more-or-less intact to a number of other papers in other cities.
What was considered newsworthy differed too -- though the Amistad made great copy, generally speaking, and was prominently featured, especially in the northern press.
Most importantly, the antebellum newspapers did not clearly or cleanly draw our modern distinction between editorial opinion and objective reportage. Most of the papers of the era were rabidly partisan. All of them sprinkled commentary and advocacy throughout their pages. Thus coverage of the Amistad Revolt divided sharply: some papers openly supported the Africans' bid for freedom (the Journal of Commerce, for example), others as openly attacked them (the New York Herald). Some were militantly abolitionist (see the Colored American, an African-American paper), others unapologetically racist.
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