Newspaper Palladium of Virginia and the Pacific Monitor (Lewisburg, Va. [W. Va.]) 1823-1831 Pacific monitor

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About Palladium of Virginia and the Pacific Monitor (Lewisburg, Va. [W. Va.]) 1823-1831

The United States was part of a booming market revolution in the 1820s, a move towards a cash economy, motivated by profit, rather than subsistence. Democratic-Republican and future Whig politician Henry Clay championed the American System, a federal policy based on the market economy. The American System encouraged different regions of the country to produce specific commodities for a national market connected by roads, railways, and canals. Editors and publishers printed information pertinent to the market and the modes of transportation that facilitated it in their local newspapers. One such printer was Joseph Cunningham Waggoner. He introduced the people of Lewisburg, Virginia (now West Virginia) to Greenbrier County’s first newspaper on November 7, 1823: the Palladium of Virginia and the Pacific Monitor. Waggoner’s editor, Joseph F. Caldwell, ensured the Palladium would enjoy state-wide popularity.

Caldwell filled the Palladium with articles documenting recent developments in state, local, and national politics, as well as international affairs. Reports from the St. Petersburg Journal appeared next to advice columns about grape cultivation and grafting cherry trees (July 4, 1829). Caldwell printed poems on the fourth page of every issue and usually included other works of literary miscellany. Amidst advertisements for medicine and millinery, Caldwell seldom missed an opportunity to advertise his own business. In addition to selling “a tract of good Land 32 miles west of Lewisburg,” Caldwell promoted his stage service (April 3, 1830). He announced on May 30, 1829, that Spring’s Stage would “hereafter run twice each week to and from Flukes, where it connects with the line from Lynchburg to Nashville, &c. and Lewisburg.” Caldwell promised there would be “good and careful drivers, and the best horses in Virginia.”

Caldwell’s association with stagecoaches endeared him to the politics of internal improvements. He addressed the “Overseers or surveyors of Roads, and Magistrates in the counties of Greenbrier, Monroe, Alleghany & Botetourt” asking them to repair the local roads because “a failure in your duties, makes it difficult to perform mine, which I am bound under heavy penalties to perform” (November 14, 1829). Caldwell’s position was consistent with the new National Republican Party, which favored Clay’s American System and protective tariffs. Caldwell even printed a speech in favor of the Tariff of 1828, the same tariff Southerners called an abomination. “If the benefits of the tariff policy were confined to any one section of the Union and were manifestly injurious to every other portion of it, it would be highly selfish in such section to desire its continuance,” the speaker asserted. “But it is not believed to be true, that its operation is, upon the whole, injurious to any part of our country” (October 3, 1829).

Caldwell paired his charitable attitude toward the Tariff of 1828 with criticism of President Jackson’s Indigenous policies. He shared an article from the Massachusetts Journal that condemned Jackson for flattering the Cherokee people while “they [were] literally made game of” and “hunted [off of] their own hunting grounds like the bears and wolves which they themselves have pursued” (August 1, 1829). Caldwell published an equally scathing speech delivered by Speckled Snake, a Creek Indian, who denounced Jackson for his hypocrisy. “Our great father [Jackson] says our bad men have made his heart bleed, for the murder of one of his white children,” he proclaimed. “Yet where are the red men which he loves, once as numerous as the leaves of the forest! How many have been murdered by his warriors” (August 8, 1829).

Although Caldwell fancied the Palladium an independent paper, one that was “open to all parties” and “influenced by none,” according to its tagline, at least one reader accused him of political favoritism. This reader, Milburn Hughes, believed “there was a very heavy bearing against John Baxter in [Caldwell’s] papers” (June 20, 1829). Baxter was a local politician and a recent candidate for representing the combined counties of Bath, Alleghany, Botetourt, Monroe, Greenbrier, Nicholas, and Pocahontas at Virginia’s upcoming constitutional convention. Hughes told Caldwell he intended to cancel his Palladium subscription if he was “right in choosing Jackson and Baxter, the only two subjects in which we have differed” (June 20, 1829). Caldwell did not take offence to Baxter’s words. He continued to edit and distribute the Palladium until the paper’s discontinuation in 1830 or 1831.