About The Spirit of the Times

The Spirit of the Times

The Spirit of the Times was a New York weekly newspaper devoted to sport, the turf, agriculture, field sports, literature and the stage, first issued in December 1831 by William T. Porter and his brothers. Modelled on the English sporting paper Bell's Life in London, it became by 1839 the most popular sporting journal in the United States, and its name survived, through splits, sales and rival editions all claiming the same title, until the surviving Wilkes line of the paper was merged away in the opening years of the twentieth century.

Few American papers had a more complicated genealogy. The original Spirit failed quickly, was sold and combined with another paper, was bought back and revived, was sold again while its editor stayed in his chair, then divided into two and briefly three competing Spirits before the Civil War settled the contest. Understanding the paper means following that chain of titles, because each change marked a real struggle over who owned the audience Porter had created.

William T. Porter and the First Issue

William Trotter Porter had worked in print shops and on small newspapers after leaving school, had attended Dartmouth College, and arrived in New York City in the early 1830s after his family, which had moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, broke up following his mother's death in 1825. In New York he edited the Constellation, a newspaper that published humorous stories, and acquired the nickname of York's Tall Son. Journalism of humour and journalism of sport were, for Porter, adjoining trades.

In December 1831 Porter published the first issue of the Spirit of the Times, concentrating on the emerging field of sports journalism and on recreational pursuits that established newspapers treated as marginal. He imitated Bell's Life in London, a contemporary English publication covering the same subjects for a fashionable readership. During the brief first run of the Spirit, Porter employed a young Horace Greeley as a typesetter, an early link between the sporting press and the man who would become one of the century's dominant editors.

Failure, Sale and Revival

The first attempt at the Spirit failed quickly. Porter sold the paper to C. J. B. Fisher, who merged it into his publication the Traveller, and for a time the combined paper appeared as the Traveller and Spirit of the Times. Porter meanwhile went to work at the New-Yorker, which Greeley then edited. The disposal looked final, but the title's value lay in Porter himself, and in January 1835 he purchased the Traveller and Spirit of the Times and restored the name Spirit of the Times, returning to its editorial chair.

The revived weekly survived, although with initial financial difficulties. Porter aimed it deliberately at readers in the South and West of the United States and emphasised subjects of practical use to them, such as cattle breeding and farm methods, alongside books of interest and sport. That southern and western orientation, commercially shrewd in the 1830s and 1840s, would later become the original paper's fatal weakness when civil war cut it off from its subscribers.

An Upper-Class Readership and a No-Politics Rule

Porter and his brothers sought an upper-class readership and said so plainly, describing the Spirit in one issue as designed for the interests of only a small division of the classes composing the mass of society. The subscription price embodied that strategy: it rose from two dollars to five dollars in 1836 and rose again in 1839, to ten dollars. A paper that doubled and then doubled again its price within eight years was not chasing the penny-press crowd; it was selling exclusivity to gentlemen sportsmen.

Editorial policy forbade discussion of politics in the paper, so as to avoid alienating any potential reader in a divided market. The rule was not perfectly kept. Some writers managed to print material showing favouritism, typically toward the Whigs, and the largest breach came in 1842, after the publication of Charles Dickens's American Notes, when a wave of anti-British articles followed. Sport, the turf and the stage were supposed to be neutral ground, and the Spirit's prosperity depended on readers in rival political camps continuing to believe that they were.

Horse Racing, the Turf Register and the Panic of 1837

By 1839 the Spirit was the most popular sporting journal in the United States, a position strong enough for the Porters to buy their main rival, the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine. Porter edited the Turf Register as well, continuing its annual stallion lists and its lists of horses owned by breeders, until that magazine ceased publication in 1844, when readers who wanted pedigrees of blood stock were directed to the columns of the Spirit.

The purchase came at a cost. The Panic of 1837 had already hurt the Spirit's circulation, and buying the Turf Register strained Porter's finances further, until he sold the Spirit to another printer, John Richards, who retained Porter as editor. The pattern of the paper's middle years was thus set early: the title changed owners while the editorship, and the audience's loyalty, remained Porter's. In 1845 Porter also served as secretary of the New York Jockey Club during the famous match race between the fillies Fashion and Peytona at the Union Course on May 15 of that year, a role that placed the editor of the leading turf paper at the administrative centre of the sport he covered.

Writers: Frank Forester and the Sporting Correspondents

The Spirit's most celebrated contributor was Henry William Herbert, who wrote on sport under the pen name Frank Forester and whose books on field sports grew out of the sporting journalism the paper fostered. Porter also encouraged the career of Johnson Hooper, the humourist of the old Southwest, whose work fitted the paper's blend of sporting life and comic writing inherited from Porter's days on the Constellation.

Porter's own chief sporting interest, despite his paper's fame for horse racing, was fishing. The breadth of the contents reflected that range of tastes: racing intelligence and pedigrees occupied the paper alongside agriculture, cattle breeding, field sports, literature and the stage, as the later full subtitle of the paper, a chronicle of the turf, agriculture, field sports and the stage, made explicit. The Spirit treated sport as a department of a gentleman's whole outdoor and cultural life, not as results alone.

Division into Two, Then Three, Spirits

The prosperous 1840s gave way to difficulties in the 1850s. By 1856 all the Porter brothers except William were dead. Around 1855 Porter left Richards's paper, and in 1856 George Wilkes, founder of the National Police Gazette, began a new sporting newspaper called Porter's Spirit of the Times, employing Porter as its editor, with the first issue dated September 6, 1856. In October 1856 it was announced that, owing to peculiar circumstances, Porter would surrender ownership of the original Spirit to John Richards and branch off into the new venture with Wilkes.

Porter died of consumption in New York City on July 19, 1858, after catching a cold, leaving unfinished a biography of his friend Herbert, who had died two months earlier. Porter's share in the second Spirit then passed to a New York lawyer, with whom Wilkes did not get along, so in September 1859 Wilkes established his own journal, Wilkes' Spirit of the Times. For a short time three papers bearing the Spirit name were published simultaneously: the original, Porter's and Wilkes's.

Civil War and the Survival of the Wilkes Line

The contest was resolved by war rather than by the market. The original Spirit had a large portion of its subscribers in the South, the very readership Porter had cultivated since 1835, and the Civil War sealed its fate. Porter's Spirit also went out of business, and after the rival papers were brought to an end in June 1861 Wilkes's paper remained as the sole survivor. George Wilkes bought the surviving enterprise and tried to keep it profitable, publishing and editing his Spirit from 1859 to 1879.

Across its various incarnations the Spirit averaged a circulation of about twenty-two thousand, with a peak of about forty thousand subscribers, figures that made it a substantial specialist weekly rather than a mass paper. Its influence exceeded those numbers, because its readers were the owners, breeders, editors and officials who organised American sport, and because its files preserved the pedigrees and results on which the turf depended.

Curtis, Amateurism and the Later Paper

In 1878 William B. Curtis became editor of the surviving paper and reinforced its elitism, refusing to cover sporting events that were not sanctioned by amateur organisations with rigid admission requirements. The policy carried Porter's original appeal to an exclusive readership to a late and stricter conclusion: where Porter had priced the paper for gentlemen, Curtis policed its columns so that only the sport of gentlemen, as the amateur bodies defined it, would be reported.

That stance defined the paper's final decades, as professional sport grew around it and other journals took the wider audience. One line of the title ceased publication in 1892, while reference accounts of the Wilkes succession state that Wilkes's Spirit continued until it was merged with The Horseman in 1902, the date at which the batch record for the Spirit of the Times also closes. The discrepancy between those dates reflects the paper's divided history: there was never, after 1856, a single Spirit whose ending could be dated once.

Legacy in American Sports Journalism

The historian Frank Luther Mott judged that Porter undoubtedly did much to give American sports a respectable standing. That verdict summarised the paper's real achievement. Before the Spirit, sporting intelligence in the United States was scattered through general newspapers and turf registers; Porter made it the subject of a durable weekly with standards, records and a national corps of correspondents, and he did so while insisting that the subject belonged in respectable company.

The paper also demonstrated how personal an editorial brand could be in the nineteenth-century press. Owners bought and sold the Spirit, printers merged it and rivals copied its name, yet readers and competitors alike continued to identify it with Porter, whose name Wilkes kept in his competing title even after buying the right to publish a Spirit of his own. The Spirit of the Times ended as it had begun in 1831, as a name whose value lay in the trust of sportsmen, a trust created by one editor and fought over by his successors for forty years after his death.