ABSTRACT
I. Before the advent of electronic media, there were few better ways of building a movement than through the press. Indeed, the press, then as now, provides a vital link between leaders and members. It serves as an invaluable recruiting tool. It is a powerful reinforcer of convictions, whether Whig, Democrat, abolitionist, Republican or socialist. It educates, informs and even entertains, all the while laying out the party line. Given these obvious advantages, it is no wonder that the rise and expansion of the press in nineteenth-century America was inextricably linked to partisan politics. e press was its lifeline, a fact not lost on astute cultural observer Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote that the American press ‘is the power which impels the circulation of political life through all the districts of that vast territory’, making it a power ‘second only to that of the people’.3
