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Hidden gems within Niles’ Weekly Registers…
October 16, 2020 by GuyHeilenman · 4 Comments
Approximately a dozen years ago, shortly after the History’s Newsstand Blog was birthed, we ran a series of posts which focused on the joy of finding hidden gems within Rare & Early Newspapers. The introduction to this series, in part, stated:
“What do gold prospectors, pirates, treasure hunters, archeologists, and rare newspaper collectors have in common? They all share the thrill of the hunt and the reward of discovery. When it comes to rare newspapers, finding the unexpected, in contrast to other collectibles, is often a good thing – and at times can even be quite valuable. Since the inception of the History’s Newsstand Blog, a number of posts have focused on this intrinsic pleasure of the hobby, and several readers have responded with ‘discoveries’ of their own.”
Twelve years later we are revisiting this theme once again – but with a specific focus on one title: The Niles’ Register. If you have ever obtained a Niles’ Register (Weekly Register) and discovered within its pages content which was undisclosed – i.e., a “hidden gem”, you are invited to respond to this post with a comment describing your “find”. Please include the exact date of the issue and the page number(s) were the content is located. Feel free to include additional information either about the content itself, or why you found it compelling. Every now and then we will pull a few responses and post them for others to see.
If you would like to learn more about Niles’ Registers, you can read additional posts about this intriguing title HERE.
I’m New Here: Week Thirty (gasp!)
September 13, 2019 by Stephanie Williams · Leave a Comment
Even eight months into my first year here, I still have important job skills to acquire. This week Guy introduced me to The Weekly Register, also known as the Niles’ Weekly Register. He actually didn’t provide much of an introduction as there was new inventory to pick up, but he mentioned the title and left me to find my way to the back wall of the annex.
Before I started the metaphorical digging in, I tried to get my bearings first by looking into the background of this publication that stretched from 1811 until 1848. Our own item description mentions “significant coverage of the War of 1812”, so I extracted an issue from the title year, settling on December 5, 1812. Just below the town and date, a centered, italicized quote from Virgil’s “The Aeneid” assured me I would appreciate this new acquaintance.
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit, “Maybe someday you will rejoice to recall even this.” I wonder if it was intended to bolster the staff or the new country. At any rate, the printing address on the following line is a cheery thing. “Printed and published by H. Niles, South-st. next door to the Merchants’ Coffee House”.
The issue I borrowed from the racks covers the legislatures of New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina, where (if the reports are accurate) the members were busily balancing affairs of their individual states with decisions concerning the authority of the president to call out a state’s militia. I was struck by the measured, pragmatic way one William Plumer attempted to persuade the governing body of New Hampshire. My pile of recommended reading for current politicians is growing taller every day.
A list of the “excellent toasts drank at New York, in commemoration of the evacuation of that city by the British” lauds the particular prowess of American sloops of war and the late Captain Jones, resting “on the bosom of the Atlantic.”
There is a four page section devoted to “Events of the War” packed with locations of ships, letters from various regiments, descriptions of force strength, and even a transcription of a Brigadier-General’s stirring call to arms.
“Rewards and honors await the brave. Infamy and contempt are reserved for cowards.
Companions in arms! — You came to vanquish a valiant foe. I know the choice you will make. Come on, my heroes!”
I can’t help but think that if we continued to work at bringing forth great words we might encourage heroic ideals in a culture so untethered to traditions of excellence in speech and conduct. Then again, I am only seeing the parts of 1812 that made it into print.
Anyway, if you don’t know The Weekly Register, I hope you too have opportunity to become acquainted. It has certainly been my pleasure.
Niles’ Weekly Register, a newspaper rich in history…
May 12, 2014 by TimHughes · 2 Comments
This post is taken almost entirely from the work by Bill Earle at www.nilesregister.com, whose database of the entire run of this notable newspaper provides a very inclusive perspective of life not only in America but the world for much of the first half of the 19th century. But this post offers insight beyond the Niles’ Register. It provides a perspective of the broader scope of newspaper publishing from this significant era.
The national and international newsweekly Niles’ Register is well known today primarily to collectors & those and genealogists who have sampled its treasures. But in the first half of the 19th century, the Register was as well known as the New York Times and Washington Post are known today. From 1811 to 1849, it was the principal window through which many Americans looked out on their country and the world. The scope of the work was immense, its circulation was large (the largest in the United States, by some accounts), and its influence was reflected in generous compliments from such readers of the publication as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson.
The Register was founded by Hezekiah Niles in Baltimore in 1811. A printer and journalist of Quaker background from the Wilmington-Brandywine-Philadelphia area, Niles had worked in Philadelphia and Wilmington before moving to Baltimore in 1805 as editor of the “Baltimore Evening Post”. When that paper was sold in 1811, he launched his “The Weekly Register“. The editor had large ambitions: he intended to be “an honest chronicler” who “registered” events not just for his contemporaries but for posterity as well. Although politics would be covered extensively, the Register would eschew any partisan slant — “electioneering,” as the editor called it. Furthermore, the paper would ignore local news in favor of national and international news. The paper would cost $5 per year, a premium price in an era when a dollar might constitute a generous day’s wages.
Niles had secured some subscribers before his first issue appeared on September 7, 1811, but those initial subscribers would be able to cancel after 13 weeks if the work did not meet their expectations. After six months, however, Niles was able to boast that few initial subscribers had withdrawn. Furthermore, so many new subscribers had signed on that the editor had had to produce three printings of some early issues to supply those who wanted complete sets of the new publication. Niles would never get rich producing the Register–his published complaints about slow subscription payments are a recurring theme throughout his career–but the paper was clearly well established almost from the outset.
The value that subscribers saw in the publication is easy to understand. It was exceptionally dense with material: there was no advertising, and only a handful of illustrations ever appeared (desired issues by collectors); consequently, the pages were packed with text. Furthermore, Niles frequently added extra value to the basic publication. He would occasionally reduce the type size if momentous events left him with important material that he needed to “get in,” or he would extend the regular 16-page length of the paper by adding extra pages. On a number of occasions, special supplemental volumes on topics of particular interest — occasionally amounting to hundreds of pages — were sent gratis to subscribers. One such supplement carried a very early printing of the Star Spangled Banner.
In addition to the sheer volume of material, there were two other outstanding aspects of the Register which distinguished it. First was its scope. While The Register emphasized political, commercial, agricultural, and industrial news, and paid only limited attention to cultural or social issues, it reported on events worldwide. Foreign coverage was more abbreviated than domestic reporting, but major events abroad were routinely summarized. Furthermore, Niles drew both domestic and foreign news from a host of sources — his own reporting and extensive correspondence, foreign newspapers and domestic “exchange papers,” commercial correspondence received in the major international port of Baltimore, and private correspondence passed on to him by friends and acquaintances. Finally, he emphasized “getting in” texts of major documents — texts of treaties, laws, and court decisions, transcripts of speeches, official reports, and records of Congressional proceedings (perhaps a quarter of the 30,000 pages that the Register eventually contained were given over to proceedings in Congress). Collectors love that Niles included within its pages the declaration of War for the War of 1812, the constitutions of many states as they entered the Union, inaugural addresses of Presidents of the era as well as their annual state-of-the-union addresses, the Monroe Doctrine, and virtually every other national document of note. For any significant national event “Niles Register” can be counted on to provide a detailed account.
Second was its even handedness. Niles’ pledge in the first issue of The Register to avoid party politics distinguished the paper from much of the American journalism of the era. Many newspapers in that day represented parties, or factions within parties, or even particular candidates, and political reportage was usually one-sided and strident. The Register, however, ignored the petty disputes between “the ins and the outs.” As a result, there is a balanced quality to the Register that gave it an authority no other publication of its time could match.
One other great advantage favored the Register: the richness of events in the era. The Napoleonic Wars were still going on when the Register first appeared, and its pages were soon thereafter crowded with the events of the War of 1812, reporting in fine detail all major battles both on land & the sea. The Texas war for independence including a nice account of the Battle of the Alamo can be found within its pages. Indian wars and foreign revolutions erupted periodically, and the war between Mexico and the United States occurred late in the period. Domestic debates about major national issues–the tariff, public land policy, slavery, internal improvements–continued ceaselessly. Industrial and technological developments abounded (the steam engine, the building of the Erie Canal & other canals and railroads, introduction of the telegraph), and an ample cast of larger-than-life characters was readily available–Napoleon Bonaparte, Tsar Alexander, the Duke of Wellington, Queen Victoria, Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, John C. Calhoun, and so many others. It was an accident of history that the Register had all these fascinating developments and personalities to cover, but Niles made the most of it.
Hezekiah Niles’ editorship of the Register lasted 25 years. In 1836, advancing age and declining health obliged him to turn the paper over to his son, William Ogden Niles. William Niles had been raised as a printer/journalist, and was involved with other newspapers both before and after his term at the Register. His first editorial showed him to be his father’s son: he expressed himself determined to “maintain the well-earned reputation of the Register” and to “record facts and events without fear or favor, partiality or affection, — in brief, to preserve its national character.” However, he quickly showed that he had his own ideas, too. His first issue expanded the traditional format of the paper, he changed the paper’s name to “Niles’ National Register”, and he soon moved the paper to Washington, D,C., evidently hoping to extend the paper’s national political influence.
However, the move to Washington failed. The paper returned to Baltimore in 1839 and William Ogden’s tenure as editor ended that same year. During his editorship, legal title to The Register apparently remained with Hezekiah. When Hezekiah died in 1839, William Ogden’s step-mother, Hezekiah’s second wife, sold the property and William Ogden was out.
Jeremiah Hughes bought the franchise. A long-time resident of Annapolis (he was in his mid-fifties when he acquired the Register), Hughes was cut from the same cloth as his long-time friend, Hezekiah Niles. Both had served in the militia in the War of 1812. Most importantly, however, Hughes was a journalist, having been publisher of the Maryland Republican at Annapolis for many years. Thus, although the Whig partisanship of the Register increased notably during Hughes’ tenure, its essential news-reporting function was unimpaired.
Hughes’ editorship lasted until 1848 when business difficulties and declining health persuaded him that he could no longer publish The Register. It was suspended in March. The cause of the Register’s suspension is not clear. It may have resulted from nothing more than the ordinary ebb and flow of fortune in the publishing business. In a broader sense, however, the Register was clearly losing its special place in American journalism. The paper’s cachet had always been two-fold — its concise news summaries from around the United States and the world, and the relatively non-partisan tone of its political coverage — but the uniqueness of both these characteristics was being eroded by the late 1840s.
First, improved communications were making it easier for daily newspapers to offer the coverage from elsewhere that Hezekiah Niles had originally had to cull out of ship letters and exchange papers. By the 1840s, faster mail service via steamboats and railroads, as well as spreading telegraph lines, had deprived the Register of its exclusive franchise on this kind of reportage. Second, partisanship in American journalism was declining. By the 1840s, the newspaper business was established as an industry in its own right.
Rising literacy rates were giving the newspapers a growing market at the same time that improved printing processes were yielding a more affordable product to that market. The newly independent newspapers began to replace their former dependence on political ideology with a developing journalistic ideology, “objective” journalism, journalism without an obvious partisan slant. It is ironic that the Register missed this development in journalistic style. Hezekiah Niles had pioneered “objective” journalism–indeed, he is sometimes called its progenitor–but Jeremiah Hughes’ Register of the 1840s was much more clearly a partisan Whig publication than it had been in earlier years. Any partisan alliance would have hurt a paper such as Niles’ Register at a time when partisan journalism was waning, but an alliance with the divided and dying Whigs was particularly unfortunate.
Whatever caused the paper’s decline, it remained suspended until July, 1848. It then reappeared under the editorship of George Beatty from new headquarters in Philadelphia. Little is known about Beatty, but he apparently was a novice at publishing when the opportunity to acquire the Register arose. However, he made a serious effort to revive the franchise, and ran it for a year. But it was too little, too late. Beatty’s journalistic inexperience showed too clearly in the paper’s pages, and the Register’s place in the marketplace disappeared. The last regular issue appeared in June, 1849. Three abbreviated issues appeared in September, 1849, but they were the last.
In one sense, however, the publication never died. The full 38 years of the Register’s run is a common holding in libraries (either in paper or in 20th-century-produced microform), and bound volume commonly turn up in library deaccessionings. They are often found on booksellers shelves as well. Collectors relish the wealth of content while acknowledging its small size (some argue it was a magazine and not a newspaper) does not fit the expectation of a newspaper. But if any collector wished for a single-title collection of major events from 1811-1849, Niles’ Register would be the undisputed choice.
Consequently, it remains available for historians, genealogists, and certainly collectors of old newspapers. As one historian has said, “Probably no day passes without some researcher digging into the information supplied with so much care and responsibility by Hezekiah Niles.” The statement was made several decades ago — and Niles would be delighted to know it is still true.