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CINCINNATI

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Following its founding in 1788, expansive development characterized the first forty years of Cincinnati's history. Citizens, aware of their city's growing prosperity, began to refer to Cincinnati as the Athens of the West and as the Queen of the West or simply the Queen City. In 1819, commenting on this rapid expansion, an article in the Inquisitor and Cincinnati Advertiser stated, "The City is, indeed, justly styled the fair Queen of the West: distinquished [sic] for order, enterprise, public spirit, and liberality, she stands the wonder of an admiring world" (Cincinnati Museum). In much the same spirit, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem entitled "Catawba Wine" (1854) that honored the city's beautiful vineyards:

And this Song of the Vine,

This greeting of mine,

The winds and the birds shall deliver,

To the Queen of the West,

In her garlands dressed,

On the banks of the Beautiful River.

(Cincinnati Museum)

A CHARGED ARENA

Because of its importance as a river town and to the Underground Railroad movement, Cincinnati was seen as an economically and culturally diverse city. Just across the river from the slave state Kentucky, Cincinnati had such a large black community that a runaway slave could blend in without being noticed. White abolitionists, freed blacks, and others associated with the Underground Railroad could then provide them with food, shelter, and safety. Cincinnati's location also encouraged trade, increase in population, and real estate development. This increase in population was a result of the influx of immigrants into the city. In 1850 nearly half, or 51,171 out of the 115,438 Cincinnati residents, were foreigners (Hastings, p. 455). Plentiful work attracted many different ethnic and racial immigrants, the largest being Germans and freed African Americans.

The publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1851–1852 and passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 contributed to the domestically and internationally racially charged arena in which Cincinnati existed. According to James Walvin,

The Fugitive Slave Law stated that any federal marshal who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave could be fined __BODY__,000. People suspected of being a runaway slave could be arrested without warrant and turned over to a claimant on nothing more than his sworn testimony of ownership. A suspected black slave could not ask for a jury trial nor testify on his or her behalf. Any person aiding a runaway slave by providing shelter, food, or any other form of assistance was liable to six months' imprisonment and a __BODY__,000 fine. (P. 29)

This law especially affected Cincinnati due to the influx of runaway slaves to the city. As David F. Ericson has observed, dynamic political, social, and cultural transformations brought on by the impending sectional division of the Civil War—with Cincinnati very divided on slavery issues—prompted racial as well as moral issues (pp. 121–123).

LITERARY INTEREST AND ATTENTION

The appeal of Cincinnati often drew writers and orators. The attraction of authors to the area resulted in public lectures, some of which addressed the fiery issue of slavery from opposite sides of the question, with each side finding a receptive audience in Cincinnati. The proslavery apologist Alexander Kinmont (1799–1838) lectured in Cincinnati from 1837 to 1838; his ideology included what was called "romantic racialism," a patriarchal/familial model that sought to justify slavery as a benevolent institution for "civilizing" slaves (Hedrick, p. 9). Another established essayist and lecturer was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), whose visits in 1850 are recorded in the archives of the Literary Club of Cincinnati. Emerson's lectures were praised for his "high idealism and his fearless independence of thought" (Hastings, p. 445). By 1857 he had procured a place in Cincinnati cultural life and had become a strong intellectual force in the community. Emerson's last trip to Cincinnati was in 1867.

Moving to Cincinnati with her family in 1832 when her father became head of the Presbyterian Lane Theological Seminary (founded in 1830), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) became a literary force in the Queen City. In 1836 she married Calvin Stowe, a professor in her father's seminary. The seminary became known for a fierce disagreement between its board of directors and the student/faculty body when the university wanted to endorse abolition but the board of directors disagreed. The subsequent decline in enrollment caused severe financial hardship on the Beecher/Stowe family, and finances served as an additional impetus for the prodigious literary output of Stowe's author wife.

As Joan Hedrick notes, Stowe "used the written word as a vehicle for religious, social, and political purposes" (p. 1). Her topics ranged from domestic culture and politics to male debauchery and incest, resting finally on the issue of racism. Stowe's first stories were written for a group of Cincinnati's notable citizens called the Semi-Colon Club. Stowe transgressed the boundary between public and private spheres for women with the advent of "parlor writing," which when published reached a wide public and in turn promoted social change.

What promoted the most change and resulted in one of the most influential pieces of literature in American history was Uncle Tom's Cabin, a domestic fiction depicting the evil of slavery upon the moral conscience of the proslavery South, which Stowe wrote soon after she moved to Maine from Cincinnati in 1850. This book was published serially in the National Era for nearly a year, from 5 June 1851 to 1 April 1852. The impact of the book on the nation's conscience was astounding. When Stowe visited the White House in 1862, Abraham Lincoln is said to have greeted her by saying, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war" (Hedrick, pp. 7–8). Uncle Tom's Cabin affected not only American audiences but foreign observers as well. Even after Emancipation, Stowe's characterizations of black people continued to be an issue. Her "shrewd sketches of regional types" exposed existing stereotypes of African Americans, including generalizations describing their "childlike dependence" (Hedrick, p. 9).

Even though Uncle Tom's Cabin was not published until 1851, abolitionist writing was not new to the Cincinnati scene. In 1836 the office that housed the abolitionist paper The Philanthropist was broken into and vandalized. Stowe's brother, the Presbyterian minister Henry Ward Beecher, was acting as editor of the paper while James G. Birney was away. When Birney refused to cease publication, some of the most prominent residents of Cincinnati threatened to form a mob (Hedrick, p. 5). According to Peter H. Clark the abolitionist and lecturer Wendell Phillips was likewise threatened by a mob. These racist acts prompted Stowe to write some of her first public remarks regarding slavery in 1836 in a letter she wrote to the editor of the Cincinnati Journal and Western Luminary (Hedrick, p. 5).

Other literature, both pro- and antislavery, was catalyzed by the internationally riveting case of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave, who with her husband Robert and their children fled from Maplewood Farm and its adjacent plantation in Richwood, Kentucky, across the icy Ohio River into Ohio on 28 January 1856. Surrounded by a U.S. marshal's party, Margaret killed her daughter to keep her from slavery. She was put on trial in Cincinnati, not, ironically, for killing her child but for theft of her child—"property" under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law. After a month-long trial filled with contentious border politics involving governors of both Ohio and Kentucky, the Garners were remanded to their slaveholders and then sold to Mississippi. Margaret died of typhus in 1856. Her story was widely debated in proand antislavery journalism. The proslavery novel Abolitionism Unveiled; or, Its Origin, Progress, and Pernicious Tendency Fully Developed (1856) by the Kentuckian Henry Field James contained a version of Garner's murder (Weisenburger, p. 264), but the story soon disappeared from Southern consciousness. It became a legend in the North, spawning poems in The Liberator and including two ghost story versions (e.g., Chattanooga [1858] by John Jolliffe; Weisenburger, p. 272). More recently there has been a resurgence in southern consciousness—and controversy—about the story. The Nobel Prize–winner Toni Morrison based Beloved (1998) on the tale of Margaret Garner. The opera houses in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati commissioned the opera Margaret Garner, with Morrison as librettist and the grammy award–winning composer Richard Danielpour as composer. In 2005 it debuted in Cincinnati to full houses and battling editorials about the Margaret Garner story.

The citizens of Cincinnati also expressed their interest in art and music. The prodigality and regional qualities of Cincinnati's culture largely came from its accessible location on the Ohio River. With Ohio on one side and Kentucky on the other, Cincinnati conjoined the colloquial style of the frontier West with the aristocratic and proslavery attitudes of the South to produce a curious blend. In 1851, when a National Portrait Gallery was established, it contained "a collection of notable portraits of distinguished early Americans" (Hastings, pp. 451–452).With the true panache of the city, these portraits—including Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart—hung in the beer gardens across the canal.

JOURNALISM

To say that journalism during the antebellum years was a synonym for Cincinnati itself would not be to exaggerate. In 1834 the American Quarterly Review of Andover, Massachusetts, wrote: "Cincinnati now commands in a considerable measure the literary resources of the western valley. . . New York is too deeply imbued with the commercial spirit ever to become the literary center of the country . . . Boston is too far from the southern, western, and even central portions of the country" (Mott 1:386).

From 1820 to 1870 journalism established itself on the forefront of Cincinnati's literary scene. The increase of population and location of the city partially caused this rapid growth of journalism, but what predominantly spurred this emergence was the tumultuous nature of pre–Civil War Cincinnati. Home to both abolitionists and proslavery advocates, Cincinnati seeped with controversy. Given the religious, racial, and political tensions prevalent here, journalists and writers alike rose to the occasion.

Journalism gave Cincinnati, the Athens of the West, a voice to give back to the East. Local humor and regional color were displayed through journalistic endeavors. Numerous literary publications representing the regional character of Cincinnati appeared in the first third of the century. In early 1821 a semimonthly, the Olio, was founded. This newspaper contained "contributions of such industrious collectors of local history as Robert T. Lytle, Dennis McHenry, John H. James, Lewis Noble, and a number of other well-known writers of that time" (Nelson and Runk, p. 257). A year later the actor Sol Smith (1801–1869) established the Independent Press; the popularity of this newspaper can be attributed to its satirical drawings and humorous remarks. That same year John P. Foote (1783–1865) introduced the Cincinnati Literary Gazette. It also gained widespread attention as a result of its notable literature. As with the Olio, much of its information is related to local history, and historians to this day reference it. It also contains some of the first articles written by Benjanim Drake (1794–1841), "who proved himself one of the most industrious local writers of the time" (Nelson and Runk, p. 258).

Writers and journalists continued to undertake measures to demonstrate the flavor of Cincinnati through literature and journalism. In July 1827 the Western Monthly Review appeared with Reverend Timothy Flint (1780–1840) as editor. According to Frank Luther Mott, Flint wrote most of the magazine himself and was "a good interpreter of the West and gave it some literary and critical quality" (p. 387). Its success was short-lived, and it was eventually united with the Cincinnati Mirror, which was edited by a renowned writer of his time, W. D. Gallagher (1808–1894). Gallagher's nature poetry was collected in three volumes entitled Erato (1835–1837), and in 1841 he edited Selections from Poetical Literature of the West, a regional anthology. Gallagher also edited the Western Literary Journal and Monthly Review. According to S. B. Nelson and J. M. Runk, "It was a magazine of considerable pretension and real excellence—the largest, until then, established in the West" (p. 262). Almost a decade later, the Evening Post, a daily noted for its reviews of art, surfaced. Also advocating Cincinnati as the Athens of the West was a journal called the Great West. "The title was as captivating as it was suggestive of a wide field. . . . a strong corps of Cincinnati editors, and all prominent writers throughout the Mississippi Valley, were engaged as paid contributors" (Nelson and Runk, p. 264). The Genius of the West and the Gem, both edited by Howard Dunham and founded in the 1850s, focused on the music and literature of the time. Among those who contributed were the popular New England poet Alice Cary and Gallagher. All of these publications sought to establish Cincinnati as a cultural and political center of the West.

Cincinnati was a hotbed of politics and controversy in this period, so many of its publications were charged with political sentiment. In 1828 Truth's Advocate, a monthly, was published in the political interest of the Kentucky orator and statesman Henry Clay (1777–1852), whose compromise stances on slavery did much to shape pre–Civil War policy. The Democratic Intelligencer, which supported John McLean for president, was founded in 1834. The Chronicle was established in 1830 as "an anti-slavery Whig organ, but stopping short of abolitionism" (Nelson and Runk, p. 262). This newspaper published Harriet Beecher Stowe's first story in 1835. A few years later a Whig paper, the Republikaner, surfaced and became "for ten years the principal appendage of this party in the western States" (Nelson and Runk, p. 261). Its editor, Emil Klauprecht (1815–1896), also wrote several novels as well as a historical work on Ohio.

Because of the large influx of German immigrants to Cincinnati, German newspapers were prominent. The publishers, editors, and subscription lists consisted mostly of foreigners, but the turmoil of the time often directed their efforts toward politics. The Weltbürger, which appeared in 1834, was originally anti-Democratic, but it was eventually renamed Der Deutsche Franklin and encouraged what would turn out to be the successful presidential campaign of the Dutch descendant and Democrat Martin Van Buren. (Van Buren, who had been Andrew Jackson's vice president, would eventually leave the Democratic Party because of his antislavery sentiments.) Perhaps a better-written Democrat paper was the Volksblatt (1836–1840), which Nelson and Runk believe served as a basis for future high standards in Cincinnati journalism. In 1837 the views of the opposing Whig Party surfaced in Westlicher Merkur.

Religious publications were another important part of Cincinnati journalism. Because of Cincinnati's location and variance of opinions, many religious publications at that time capitalized on the political as well as religious tensions prevalent among its citizens. The Cincinnati Journal, an anti-Catholic and antislavery newspaper, was published in 1830. A year later the Baptist Weekly Journal of the Mississippi Valley was founded. It still exists today as the Journal and Messenger and is one of the six oldest remaining Baptist publications. The Book Concern, a publishing company associated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, founded the Western Christian Advocate in 1834. In 1841 the Ladies Repository was founded by the Book Concern. According to Mott, "Its material was highly moralized, and was written largely by ministers; the verse was furnished by the Cary sisters, the ubiquitous Mrs. Sigourney . . . with several ballads contributed by . . . Martin F. Tupper, S.C.L., F.R.S." (1:388). The Unitarians founded the Western Messenger in 1835 "under the patronage of the Unitarians of the West" (Nelson and Runk, p. 262). This paper printed contributions from the New England transcendentalists Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Jones Very, and other eastern authors, with a liberal inclusion of British writing (Mott 1:387–388). The first Catholic newspaper, the Wahrheits Freund, made its debut in 1837, and another German-language periodical, Der Protestant, was established shortly thereafter. The Methodist paper Der Christliche Apologete followed in 1838. Its editor, Wilhelm Nast, also founded the SonntagSchule Glocke, a juvenile paper.

Whether locally, politically, or religiously affiliated, the majority of Cincinnati's nineteenth-century newspapers ceased to exist or lost their individuality by being merged with other publications. Nonetheless the history of journalism in Cincinnati is important to its culture and helps to define a distinctive city and its people. As Mott explains:

Cincinnati's ambitious publication efforts grew not so much out of the difficulty of getting eastern periodicals, or the desire (so prominent in the South) to be independent of New York and Boston, as out of the aspiration to create, immediately and impressively, a full-blown civilization, with all its appurtenances and cultivation and refinement. Cincinnati, with its educational institutions, printing presses, churches, and libraries—Cincinnati, the Athens of the West—would lead the way to culture. (1:386)

See also Abolitionist Writing; Death; Periodicals; Political Parties; Proslavery Writing; Religion; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Underground Railroad

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Work

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader. Edited by Joan D. Hedrick. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Secondary Works

Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. Cincinnati Historical Society Library. http://www.cincymuseum.org/cmc/collection/.

Clark, Peter H. The Black Brigade of Cincinnati. 1864. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Ericson, David F. The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Hastings, Louise. "Emerson in Cincinnati." New England Quarterly 11 (1938): 443–469.

Hedrick, Joan D., ed. The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Johnston, John. "Ohio Was Free, Not Safe." (Cincinnati) Enquirer, 1 August 2004. Available at http://www.cincinnati.con/freetime/nurfc/slavery_urailroad.html.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. Vols. 1 and 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939.

Nelson, S. B., and J. M. Runk. The History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio. Cincinnati: S. B. Nelson, 1894. Available at www.heritagepursuit.com/Hamilton/HamiltonIndex.htm.

Walvin, James. The Slave Trade. New York: Sutton, 1999.

Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Media. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

LeAnne Garner