the immediate influence of the government, no national journals, such as those associated with the names of Hammond, Medill, Greeley, Bowles or Bennett, were ever developed at the capital.
Furthermore, Washington journals having little or no influence on the home constituents of the legislators, the editors were not men whom it became customary to take into the party councils. As in the case of Gales and Seaton, however, a few of the editors showed themselves to be such conspicuously able citizens that the leading statesmen of the country were glad and proud of their friendship.
As early as 1796, before the capital was located at Washington, a weekly paper had been printed there, under the auspices of Benjamin More. The year previous an unsuccessful attempt had been made by T. Wilson, who had founded the Impartial Observer, which lasted but a short time.[1]
Jefferson, for the benefit of the party, induced Samuel Harrison Smith, then the proprietor of the Philadelphia Universal Gazette, to move to Washington when that city became the capital. Smith had recently purchased the paper from Joseph Gales, one of the aliens at whom the Alien and Sedition laws had been aimed. Gales had been a conspicuous journalist in England and had fled because of threatened prosecution for political articles which had appeared in his paper, the Sheffield Register. It was said that he studied stenography during the long voyage to this country; one can readily believe that he might have mastered many sciences in the time such a voyage occupied in those days. He worked as a printer on the Philadelphia papers and was one of the first to report Congressional debates by stenography. In 1797 he
- ↑ Bryan, History of the National Capital, i, 264.
