The statistics of 1835 show how remarkably this western territory had taken to journallsm. Even Missouri had seventeen papers with an annual circulation of 720,000 copies. Illinois, young state that it was, had eighteen, as many as Louisiana, where the first paper in French, La Moniteur de la Louisiane, had been printed in 1794, and the first one in English, the Gazette, in 1804. Indiana had twenty-three papers, while Ohio had one hundred and forty-'five, and was only exceeded by New York and Pennsylvania, with two hundred sixty and two hundred, respectively. Even Massachusetts, the home of American newspapers, came after this progressive state, while Virginia, oldest of colonies, had only forty papers, less than a fourth of Ohio's count.
In noting the manner in which these new northern states outstripped the southern states in the growth of newspapers it is well to remember that slavery was forbidden in the former by the Ordinance of 1787. To this resolution Webster traced much of the character of the people of this section.
"We are accustomed," he said, "to praise the lawgivers of antiquity; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and Lycurgus; but I doubt whether one single law of any law-giver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787. . . . It fixed forever the character of the population in the vast regions northwest of the Ohio, by excluding from them involuntary servitude. It impressed on the soil itself, while yet a wilderness, an incapacity to sustain any other than freemen. It laid the interdict against personal servitude, in original compact, not only deeper than all local law, but deeper also than all local constitutions."[1]
- ↑ Rhodes, History of the United States, i, 16.
