By: Debbie van Tuyll

Historians contend the Irish-American press started with the wave of Irish emigrants brought to the United States by the devastating famines of the 1840s, especially the on in 1848, An Gorta Mór. Cian McMahon, the only historian to date to produce a history of the Irish-American press, dates it to 1842 (McMahon 2009). However, research shows that somewhere around twenty Irish American newspapers were issued in the United States well before 1842. The earliest one found thus far dates to the 1810s. Dozens of Irish-American journalists plied their trade in America much earlier, as far back as 1704, if the American Antiquarian Society’s Printer File is correct, an Irish emigrant, John Campbell, became the second editor of the Boston Newsletter. Others would follow, including well-known eighteenth and nineteenth century editors Mathew Carey, John Daly Burk, and William Duan. It is this project to uncover the history of the earliest Irish-American press and the Irish-American journalists who helped create and build the American press that the McKerns grant to Debbie van Tuyll has supported. 

Specifically, the grant was used to obtain the business journal of Hugh Maxwell, editor of two Lancaster, Pennsylvania newspapers, the Gazette, and the Journal from the American Antiquarian Society. Maxwell was born in 1777 at Portaferry south of Belfast in what is today Northern Ireland. At age 12, he traveled to America where he became the ward and heir of a wealth uncle, Archibald Bingham, then in partnership with Mathew Carey who was editor of a Philadelphia literary magazine, the Port-Folio. Maxwell later published his own literary journal, the Maxwell Intelligencer and served as Port-Folio editor. Maxwell learned not only printing but also how to cast type and how to make wood cuts. He also patented a printer’s roller used to spread ink efficiently on lead type (J. I. Mombert, An authentic history of Lancaster County, in the state of Pennsylvania).

In 1817, he moved to Lancaster, about halfway between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, where he established the Lancaster Gazette and eventually purchased the Democratic Lancaster Journal, which he published until 1839, the same year the business journal is dated. He sold the paper in September 1839 to a young man who had been his apprentice, John W. Forney. One might be tempted to wonder if this business journal was prepared as part of the transfer of the business, but there are enough mark-throughs and marginal notes to indicate the journal predated the transfer by a good margin.

Business records are exceedingly rare, particularly business records that are a) detailed and b) accurate and that is why this the 130-page journal is so important. Some newspapers might print circulation figures but given there was not Audit Bureau of Circulation at the time, those are always suspect. This journal does not list circulation figures, but it lists not just individual subscribers but also the exchange papers Maxwell worked it, the taverns, post offices, and publications offices to which he sent newspapers, and individual subscribers and their locations. The journal also includes which days papers were sent to different locations—most see to have been mailed either on Wednesday or Thursday, accounts that had been sent for collection, and, perhaps most valuable, copies of letters Maxwell wrote regarding the running of his business. One of those letters was to Miss Louisa L. Johnson, who had apparently written to see what Maxwell knew about a Mr. Appleton, who, he reported in his return letter, was a drunkard who had left his family, fallen in love with a woman in York, Pennsylvania, and married her. This first wife discovered what he had done, and her relatives sought out Appleton for revenge. He fled but had since come back. Maxwell summarized what he had learned by writing, “Really it appears to me there is, to use a common phrase, more truth than poetry in the above description.”

Having only recently obtained this document, I am still perusing it and working out how to fit it into my current project. I suspect it will become part of the introduction where I explain how newspapers functioned in the early nineteenth century. This journal gives me evidence to back up distribution methods—the journal lists, for example, which subscribers received their papers by carrier and which by mail. The listing of taverns can be used to help explain how availability in public places extended the reach of newspapers. Lacking any further information about business operations, I do not see this making a chapter in-and-of-itself in this project. That said, this project is very likely going to lead to another that consists of a collection of short biographies of Irish-American journalists from the colonial period forward, and I can definitely see all the letters at the end of the journal being a very important component in Maxwell’s biograph. So, it appears this business journal will be used in two separate projects.

Debbie van Tuyll is a professor in the Department of Communication at Augusta University. She previously served as the president of AJHA.