About Philadelphia Press

Philadelphia Press

The Philadelphia Press, generally known simply as The Press, was a daily newspaper published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from August 1, 1857, until October 1, 1920. It was founded by John Weiss Forney, one of the most politically connected journalists of the Civil War era, and for much of its life it was regarded as Abraham Lincoln's Philadelphia organ. Charles Emory Smith edited the paper and held an ownership stake from 1880 until his death in 1908. In 1920 Cyrus H. K. Curtis bought the Press and merged it into the Public Ledger, ending sixty-three years of publication.

The Press mattered in American culture well beyond Philadelphia politics. Its Civil War correspondents reported the Army of the Potomac, its weekly war edition reached soldiers in camp, it printed Walt Whitman's poems and Lincoln speech, it exposed a medical-school body-snatching ring in 1882, it serialised Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage in 1894, and its art department employed the four illustrators who became known as the Philadelphia Four. Few defunct dailies left fingerprints on so many different parts of nineteenth-century American life.

John Weiss Forney and the Founding

John Weiss Forney founded the Press on August 1, 1857, after a career that had already made him a significant figure in Pennsylvania journalism and Democratic politics. Forney had risen in the newspaper world first as a supporter of James Buchanan, then shifted in the late 1850s toward Stephen A. Douglas, and finally, in 1860, toward Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans. That political journey, from Buchanan's camp to Lincoln's, carried the young Press with it and fixed the paper's wartime identity.

The Press published daily except Sunday, a standard pattern for the period, and Forney ran it from offices at 417 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Bibliographic records for the paper show the range of editions a successful nineteenth-century daily maintained alongside its main issue: a weekly Press, a triweekly edition in the 1870s, and even a steamer edition called the California Press around 1860, produced for readers travelling or sending news west.

Lincoln's Philadelphia Organ

During the Civil War the Press was known, in the words of later scholarship, as Lincoln's Philadelphia organ. Forney himself spent most of the war in Washington, where he had been appointed Secretary of the United States Senate in 1861. From the capital he contributed letters to his Philadelphia daily under the pen name Occasional, and his political connections made those letters essential reading: a Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune once advised his own managing editor to read the Press daily, or at least the Occasional letters, as a guide to administration thinking.

The connection produced genuine news value before the Gettysburg ceremonies in November 1863. In a letter published two days before the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, Forney, plainly drawing on information supplied by the White House, explained that Lincoln's attendance at Gettysburg would be his first visit to the free states since becoming president, and that preparation of his annual message to Congress would compel his immediate return to Washington afterwards. The Press then covered the dedication and the Gettysburg Address itself, and its editorial writer recognised the quality of Lincoln's short speech at a moment when many papers treated it as a minor part of the day.

Forney's War Press and the Field Correspondents

For the weekly audience the Press appeared during the war as Forney's War Press, a paper built for soldiers in camp and for families at the fireside at home. The edition ran from 1861 to 1865 and carried full accounts of the fighting on the Potomac, in western Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, the seacoast and elsewhere. Surviving issues in the Lincoln collections included Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation in October 1863, coverage of the Gettysburg dedication and address in November 1863, and casualty lists, including the killed and wounded of General Geary's division after Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge and Ringgold.

The daily Press supported that war coverage with correspondents of real distinction. John Russell Young served as its chief Civil War correspondent, Joel Cook reported with the Army of the Potomac, and Thomas Morris Chester, an African American journalist, covered the war for the paper, one of the earliest such assignments for a Black correspondent with a major American daily. George Alfred Townsend later worked at the paper as city editor and drama critic. The Press's war staff gave Philadelphia readers a report of the conflict that was closely tied to the administration yet produced by reporters in the field rather than copied from official bulletins.

Forney's Washington Ventures

Forney's ambitions were never confined to Philadelphia. In the same year, 1861, in which he became Secretary of the Senate, he started the Sunday Morning Chronicle in Washington, and in November 1862, reportedly at Lincoln's own suggestion, he began publishing a daily edition of the Chronicle in the capital. He retained control of the Philadelphia Press throughout, moving between the two cities and the two roles of senator's officer and newspaper proprietor in a way that would be impossible under modern conflict-of-interest expectations.

That dual position explained both the Press's influence and the suspicion it attracted. A newspaper whose owner drafted Senate business by day and wrote Occasional letters by night was an administration voice in the most literal sense. After the war the weekly edition continued as Forney's Weekly Press from 1865 to 1877, and Forney remained the paper's presiding figure until his death in 1881, on the eve of the Press's next era.

The Charles Emory Smith Era

From 1880 Charles Emory Smith became the dominant figure at the Press, serving as editor and holding an ownership stake until his death in 1908. Smith's twenty-eight years gave the paper a long editorial continuity second only to Forney's, and under him the Press settled into its mature identity as one of Philadelphia's major dailies, influential in Republican politics and attentive, in the judgement of the Walt Whitman Archive's summary, to local issues that larger questions sometimes crowded out, such as the inadequate water mains that posed serious problems for the city's firefighters.

The Smith-era Press also maintained a serious information legacy. The Free Library of Philadelphia preserved the paper as one of the city's oldest major newspapers and kept a Philadelphia Press index, originally maintained on paper by library staff from 1898 through 1912, which directed researchers to citations for specific articles. That an index of the paper's contents was worth a dozen years of library labour testified to how heavily Philadelphia lawyers, officials and historians relied on the Press as a record of the city's life.

The Lebanon Cemetery Exposé of 1882

The Press's most sensational investigation came in 1882, when one of its journalists caught body snatchers from Jefferson Medical College in the act of stealing corpses from Lebanon Cemetery, a Black burial ground in Philadelphia, for use as cadavers by medical students. The resulting newspaper story sparked a sensational trial that exposed the trade in stolen bodies on which anatomy teaching then depended.

The case became one of the most notorious episodes in Philadelphia's medical history, retold in modern accounts of the city's past. For the Press it demonstrated a function quite different from its wartime role as an administration organ: the metropolitan daily as investigator, using a reporter's surveillance of a cemetery at night to force a respectable institution, a medical college, into public account for where its teaching material came from.

Walt Whitman in the Press

From late 1879 through late 1887 the poet Walt Whitman published nineteen works in the Press, including poems, articles and letters, and a version of the speech on Abraham Lincoln that he delivered in Philadelphia on April 15, 1880, recounting his personal recollections of the martyred president. The Press thus became one of the regular outlets of Whitman's later career, when the poet, living across the river in Camden, depended on newspaper and magazine publication.

The poems Whitman placed in the Press celebrated people and public events. One honoured General Ulysses S. Grant, another honoured the Iroquois leader Red Jacket, another celebrated national elections, and another commemorated the completion and dedication of the Washington Monument on February 22, 1885. Whitman's final appearance in the paper came a few months after his death, when on October 23, 1892, the Press published his early story The Tomb Blossoms, which had first appeared fifty years earlier, in 1842. The association linked the Press permanently to the Whitman bibliography maintained by scholars.

Fiction Serials: Stevenson and Crane

Like other metropolitan dailies, the Press drew readers with serialised fiction, and two of its serials became landmarks. In 1888 Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Black Arrow appeared in the paper in serial form under the title The Outlaws of Tunstall Forest, with illustrations by Alfred Brennan, before its first hardcover book publication by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Six years later the Press achieved the more famous coup. Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage, now regarded as one of the classic American novels of war, was serialised in The Philadelphia Press in 1894, before its publication in book form in 1895. That the defining Civil War novel of the 1890s reached its first wide audience in the pages of a Philadelphia daily that had itself reported the real war thirty years earlier closed a neat historical circle, and the Press's serialisation remained a standard fact in Crane scholarship.

The Philadelphia Four

The Press's contribution to American art came through its illustration staff. Four illustrators who worked for the newspaper, each a member of the Charcoal Club founded by the artist Robert Henri, became known collectively as the Philadelphia Four: William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn and John French Sloan.

All four went on to major careers in American painting, and Sloan, Luks, Glackens and Shinn became central figures in the Ashcan School's depiction of modern city life. Their newspaper work taught speed, observation and the compression of a scene into a single legible image, skills visible in their later canvases of streets, theatres, boxing matches and tenements. The Press's art department in the 1890s therefore functioned, unintentionally, as one of the seedbeds of twentieth-century American realism, and art historians recorded the four men's shared employment at the paper as the origin of the group's name.

Beyond the Philadelphia Four, the Press employed a broad staff of nineteenth-century journalists. Emily Pomona Edson Briggs wrote as a columnist and stood among the notable early women journalists in the United States. Benjamin De Casseres worked at the paper as a proofreader, theatrical critic and editorial writer before his later career as an author. Elisha Jay Edwards worked there as an investigative journalist. Together with its war correspondents and its illustrators, these staff made the Press a recognised staging post in American journalistic careers for more than half a century.

That breadth reflected the paper's market position. It was never the only Philadelphia daily a reader could choose, and it competed with the Ledger, the Inquirer, the North American, the Record and the Times. Its distinction lay in the range of its contents and connections: Senate politics, battlefield reporting, poetry, serial fiction, medical exposés and newspaper art all passed through the same Chestnut Street office.

Purchase by Curtis and Closure in 1920

Charles Emory Smith died in 1908, and the paper continued for twelve more years without the editor who had defined its mature period. In 1920 the Press was purchased by Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the publisher of the Public Ledger, as part of the same consolidation strategy by which he later bought and closed the North American in 1925. Curtis merged the Press into the Public Ledger, and The Philadelphia Press ceased publication on October 1, 1920.

The manner of its death was characteristic of the period. The Press was not destroyed by a strike, a libel judgement or a collapse in readership; it was absorbed by a stronger neighbour whose owner believed Philadelphia supported more daily titles than its advertising market justified. Its readers, features and value were folded into the Ledger, and a name that had reported the Civil War from inside the Lincoln administration disappeared from Philadelphia newsstands after sixty-three years.

Legacy

The Press survived in the records it left. Its Civil War issues were collected and sold to historians and collectors; its Gettysburg coverage was studied by scholars of the Address; Whitman's nineteen contributions were catalogued in the Walt Whitman Archive; and its index remained a research tool at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Crane bibliographies recorded its 1894 serial, Stevenson bibliographies recorded its 1888 serial, and art histories recorded its Philadelphia Four.

Few American newspapers connected so many histories at once. The Philadelphia Press was a party organ and a war paper, a poetry publisher and a fiction market, an exposer of body snatchers and an employer of future Ashcan painters. Its closure in 1920 removed from Philadelphia not just a daily newspaper but one of the working institutions through which the city had argued, reported and imagined itself since before the Civil War.