[In the essay below, Admari provides an overview of publisher, writer, and editor Maturin Murray Ballou's career and his contribution to American literature and periodicals in the nineteenth century.]

In the years to come when the popular literature of the United States shall have been thoroughly explored many disputes will arise as to whom should go the credit for having brought about the dime novel. As early as 1872, Frederic Hudson in his remarkable history of Journalism stated that Park Benjamin, who was responsible for the first sensational weekly or story paper (1839) and the first cheap book (12[frac12]¢) paper binding same year, was the father of cheap literature. This was more than five years before the dime novel became an important function in the cultural advance of the masses. The Englishman, Bracebridge Hemyng, author of the enduring Jack Harkaway (1869) introduced the action minus description and sacrificed everything to the story itself. Another claimant, Norman L. Munro publisher, was the first to issue crude blood and thunder stories for children about 1875. But the one to whom all now give most of the laurels is Erastus F. Beadle who issued the name of a series from which the dime novel got its name, Beadle's Dime Novels (1860). Still another is Orville J. Victor, editor for the House of Beadle, who is credited with having given the idea of the dime paper books to Beadle. This article is concerned only with Maturin Murray Ballou who solidified cheap literature and periodicals at a time when European domination threatened our cultural progress.¹

Ballou was born in Boston, 1820, and was the youngest child of Hosea Ballou, the leading minister of New England. In those early days most of the Ballou family were so concerned with religion that they issued magazines, pamphlets and books on the absorbing subject. Naturally young Maturin grew up in a publishing environment that was to develop into one of the most powerful figures in the world of cheap literature. Young Ballou was sent to Harvard but did not graduate due to ill-health, a curse that followed him all his life. To cure himself he took to travelling and this brought on a subtle disease, wanderitis, which he never got out of his system. From the time he left Harvard to his death he could be found in some remote spot of the world. During the interim when he stayed at home he accomplished so much that it is a mystery how he did it.

His literary career started at the age of eighteen when he wrote editorials for the famous Boston family story paper, The Olive Branch. To this paper he contributed sketches, poems and short stories. After leaving Harvard he got a job in the Boston Customs house but kept up his literary efforts. When he was twenty-five, Frederick Gleason, another youthful writer, got him to publish three novels (Fanny Campbell, Red Ruppert, The Naval Officer) all of which achieved sensational successes, the first selling 80,000 copies within a few months. Together with Gleason they continued this series of books by hiring J. H. Ingraham, Mrs. Ann Stephens and Justin Jones (Harry Hazel) to write novelettes for them. This was the first series of sensational stories ever issued in America. They were started by Gleason in 1844 and were called shilling novelettes because that was a coin famous in the 30's and 40's when the dime was unknown. A shilling was valued at 12[frac12]¢ or half a quarter and by some was called a York shilling, a derisive term, to show that it came from New York. The sizes of these paper books were 8[frac12] x 5 inches; they contained fifty pages and were illustrated, in most cases, by a lurid hand-colored wood cut. In the latter part of 1846 the novels were increased in size to 9[frac12] x 6 and 25¢ in price, and contained one hundred pages or more.

When Ballou joined hands with Gleason in 1845, they established a unique company known as the United States Publishing Co., whose purpose was to spread their publications all over the United States, having various dealers and publishers as agents in the various large cities. This was really the first attempt to distribute books scientifically over the United States. They had agencies in New York, Buffalo, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Detroit. The New York agent was Samuel French, who is still in business today publishing his plays without interruption.

Deciding to branch out more the two youngsters put out in January 24, 1846, the family paper Flag of Our Union, which became within a year, under the editorial genius of Ballou, the most powerful story paper of the period. Although it had strong competitors, in Boston Notions, Olive Branch and the famed New World, a New York mammoth paper that claimed the largest size of sheet ever printed, it soon crowded them off the map. The “Flag” kept this lead until New York, ever jealous of its Hub rival, began coming out with stiffer opposition, such as the New York Ledger (1851), and New York Weekly (1855). The “Flag” declined when the New York story papers took all its writers away, luring them with juicier contracts. The “Flag” went through various changes, at first it was a mammoth four-page paper² the size of a double bed when unfolded. In the 50's it was reduced in size, but its pages increased to eight, until finally it merely imitated the papers then being issued, going out in January 1, 1871, when it merged with the American Union.

Not content with this step Ballou got hold of one Robert Carter who later became known to the world as Frank Leslie, a young Englishman who had just landed from London and they conspired together to put out the first illustrated weekly in America. This was in May, 1851; it was called Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion as Gleason had put up the “dough.” It was a frank imitation of the London Illustrated News which had taught Frank Leslie all he knew about publishing.

The firm which was called Gleason's Publishing Hall, grew prosperous steadily but all due to Ballou's guiding hand. Gleason had done very little except to put up money for the first two ventures. By the time 1854 rolled in Ballou was determined to have no entangling alliances. In November of that year he forced Gleason out by an old trick in publishing, that is he threatened Gleason with two rival weeklies unless he sold out his half to Ballou. It was a low foul but Gleason swallowed his defeat and walked off leaving the business to Ballou. The next year, January, the name of the “Pictorial” was changed to Ballou's Pictorial. The same month he launched what turned out to be the first all fiction monthly ever issued in the United States. It was Ballou's Dollar Monthly and it was widely advertised as the cheapest magazine in the world. This was a quarto affair of a hundred pages. It contained mostly short stories, an article or two, some illustrations, and editorial comment.

Continuing his experiments Ballou placed on sale a series entitled The Weekly Novelette, containing part of a special story reprinted from his magazines. Each part consisted of one-fifth of the story. It was completed in five issues, each part being four cents, the complete novel costing twenty cents. The size of the weekly paper was 9″ × 12″ inches and it contained sixteen pages. There had been attempts in this fashion before but only popular authors like Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo had been considered. This attempt started April, 1857, was a pioneer one so far as native sensational literature was concerned. There was a kind of dignity with Ballou's efforts to corral the popular literature in Boston. So long as he hung on and kept fighting the New York publishers, Boston really put out the best paper books. In fact the Hub city did not yield its lead until the Civil War. Then New York emerged triumphant and has never lost its eminence. Had Ballou held on to his most important authors the tale might have been different, for he was constantly seeking new and fresher talent and the eyes of the literary world were on Boston in those days. True to form Ballou had never deviated one iota from one principle of his early days as editor and publisher. This was that no article other than American be printed in his pages. Look over his papers and you will see how closely he stuck to this resolution. There is not a single article or sketch composed by foreign brains, in any one of his papers. When we consider that all New England was a second-hand England, Ballou's achievement is too heroic to be talked about calmly.

Nor was this great revolt due to any puritanical effort to overcome old world culture. It simply meant that the Democratic elements, the worker, the common housewife and the lad and girl (the latter after the Civil War) demanded their fiction based on rough adventure and homely love. These elements had been submerged since the Revolution. The fact is that except for an occasional bawdy ballad or poem the lower classes never found their articulate artists in the New World until the newspapers became established, and such early great humorists as George W. Arnold, Seba Smith and others came along with the great Jackson administration.

In 1857 the publications of Ballou, which now dominated the field, had the following circulations: Flag of Our Union, 80,000 weekly; Dollar Magazine, 100,000 monthly; the Pictorial, 140,000 weekly.³ Thus with a few half-baked ideas, two youths, starting in 1844, had by 1857 established a great publishing house and made fortunes for all those associated with them. But Ballou, whose initiative and progressive spirit had advanced the firm to its domination of cheap publications, really did more than merely make money. He had, without being aware of it, literally crushed foreign domination of proletarian culture here. The masses after Ballou's advent sought for its hero and heroine in fiction in their native land and demanded a vigorous, racy literature containing the breath of the New World. This was a peculiar country in many ways. Where the snobs in Europe had dominated the culture of their respective countries and demanded easy mushy fiction and poetry, the American, free, independent and aware that he was just a sweating worker, sought a literature that had a different breath from old world decayed art. Nationalism was beginning to come to the fore in literature as well as in politics.

In various years Ballou had gathered under his banner the most formidable group of sensational and popular writers ever assembled in the publishing field. The sensational writers were Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., H. W. Herbert (Frank Forester), Justin B. Jones (Harry Hazel), Dr. J. H. Robinson, J. H. Ingraham, A. J. H. Duganne, Harry Hazleton, E. C. Z. Judson (Ned Buntline), and Edward S. Ellis. The writers of the more restrained type were William T. Adams (Oliver Optic), Horatio Alger, Jr., Park Benjamin, Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, Rev. F. W. Holland, T. S. Arthur, who inflicted our literature with that midsummer's nightmare, Ten Nights in a Barroom, and Thomas Bullfinch whose Fables From Antiquity, published in the “Pictorial” are still used in our schools. The Carey sisters contributed most of their poetry to his periodicals. Ballou also wrote for the periodicals under his pseudonym Lieutenant Murray, composing various stories of the west and of the sea, and historical romances.

It is obvious to all who read about his life that giving this sickly man credit for having changed the course of native literature is no exaggeration. Ballou contributed the following services to native literature:

1. He was the first to give more than one nom-de-plume to a popular writer of fiction, Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.⁴

2. He was the first to employ native talent exclusively for stories, articles, poetry, and illustrations.

3. He was the first to build up a popular publishing house that lasted long enough to influence others in the same direction.

4. He was the first editor to formulate an editorial policy as regards construction of stories, type of plots, mostly having to do with the frontier as a background.

5. He established the first illustrated weekly⁵ and the first “all fiction” magazine and contributed largely to the success of the first series of American blood and thunder tales of the west and early frontier, which had been started by Gleason.

6. He was the first editor-publisher to write blood and thunder tales (under his nom-de-plume Lieutenant Murray).

7. He was the first to actually encourage his writers and to take an interest in them, to pay fair prices, and to consistently use their efforts.

At the time Ballou came on the scene in 1845, the various editors of the country looked to Europe to fill up their columns. Whatever was published by an American was hidden in some corner and apologized for. The Brother Jonathan, the first sensational story paper (1839) stated that American writers were few and far between and whatever there were of them were incompetent. A. Gallenga, famous Italian exile, visiting this country in the 30's and 40's, stated that American ideas were swiped from English books that came over in batches. In other words our culture was secondhand; it had no dignity; it was cheap, vulgar, because it camped on the doorstep of another culture, older and thoroughly its own. Every time a ship came in from Europe there would follow a mad scramble by every tin-horn publisher to get the first English book and magazine and republish it as its own. It was shameful. While American writers walked from editor to editor with seedy clothes and while Poe and Emerson bitterly railed at the American bourgeoisie for its European culture, the country had not backbone enough to overthrow the shackles of foreign thought. We had won political freedom but that was all. At this time, about 1830, a new audience was being born for the public schools became a power in the land and about fifteen years later this audience demanded a new deal.

Ballou changed everything like magic. As an editor he might be compared with Mencken although unlike Mencken he took absolutely no interest in politics. This was of vast importance to his success for this neutrality brought him readers who also felt as he did. This red herring of politics had strung a line of corpses in its path.⁶

When he took hold of popular publishing it was in the hands of half-wits, charlatans and other lice. The conservative magazines published the efforts of only those un-American authors such as Hawthorne, Mellville, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell and others who lickspittled to everything outside of America. Harper's Magazine, Putnam's, Graham's, all grabbed foreign illustrations and discouraged the boisterous native artist who came to their doors. After Ballou's debut it was a different story. As early as 1847 William T. Porter, editor of Spirit of the Times, decided not to reprint foreign articles. Ballou had been making a success of his policy to print only American stories and material. The other editors began joining the bandwagon one after another. Only the conservative magazines stuck up their noses to the masses. In fact he became a model for other young hopefuls, one of them, his writer Jones (Harry Hazel), quitting him and starting a new paper, Harry Hazel's Yankee Blade, which lasted to 1895. This new spirit in popular literature reached its climax when the House of Beadle in June, 1860, issued a ten-cent novel, the series of which would employ exclusively American talent. Then came the flood.

The times needed a stern one-track mind like that of Ballou. He had only one love, publishing and writing sensational books and issuing like periodicals. The environment in which he was born, surrounded by God-fearing parents and brothers—puritanical but austerely just and honest, while not calculated to develop a humorous, happy lad nevertheless gave him qualities of mind and intellectual independence that were vital for the pioneer work he accomplished alone and unaided. No mamma's boy could have kept his goal, under such trying times, as Ballou had done. His work was heroic as much so as any general had accomplished in the Revolution and more so because it was spiritual and aimed at hidden enemies. There was something grave, thoughtful about his face. He never smiled. It was the face of a man who had known all of life and was now resigned to living it peacefully and without great rumpus. Ballou loved work for the sake of it. He was not only a publisher, editor and writer, but he was a traveler, lecturer, playwright, builder, and journalist. However he could make mistakes too, for on December 27, 1859, he put out a new mammoth paper, The Welcome Guest, which lasted a very short time. This failure seems to have hit him hard for two years after 1861 he sold his great publishing house to Elliot, Thomes & Talbot, which firm continued his publications but were content to imitate other rivals, putting out, in November 10, 1863, the first of a series of dime novels competing with those of Beadle.

Ballou was not through with publishing. Unable to get periodicals out of his blood he decided on a new venture, a daily newspaper. He established the famous Boston Globe March 4, 1872. This proved a costly undertaking and ruined him for in seventeen months he and his backers lost $300,000 when he relinquished control to Taylor. One reason for the failure was Ballou's dislike of politics. It was a notorious fact that whenever a political controversy came up he would ignore it. Instead he actually printed an editorial on Jute and Jute making or How Palm Trees sway gently ’neath the moon! Not that Ballou was a coward but politics left him cold. He hated the breed. He could get away with periodicals and magazines but newspapers, even in those days, demanded dirt and political squabbles.

How was Ballou as a man? Very little is known about him. He was too retiring, too austere. There is no doubt that his soul was crushed in early youth by the stern upbringing imparted by his religious parents. Perhaps his search for health was also a seeking for certain elements in his soul, dormant all his life. He was essentially a business man, not an artist, though now and then there were flashes in his work which show that if he had been encouraged in early youth he might have contributed something personal to literature. He was a passionate lover of liberty, in the real sense. The Anglo-Saxon ideal of personal liberty was a part of his soul. His controversial editorials or books are on this subject, liberty for all. He championed the negro and the Cuban, and wrote a book on Cuba in 1854, and was one of the pioneers believing in the liberation of Cuba from Spanish domination. One of the finest pieces of poetry he wrote was on Cuba.⁷ He was a hard worker when illness did not interfere. He lectured, he wrote plays, and he built hotels, but his attempts out of his real life work were all failures. From the time he quit the field where he had made a marvelous success hard luck dogged him. So he became a wanderer. He wrote, under his own name, many books on the lands he visited. He died, almost without making a ripple in his former world, in Cairo, Egypt, March 27, 1895. He had lived to see the declining fortunes of the dime novel which was being edged aside by the pulpwood magazines coming into favor under the guiding hands of William R. Hearst and Frank A. Munsey and which he had anticipated more than forty years before. He died just a year before the debut of Frank Merriwell, saga of American literature.

In his writings Ballou never showed his real soul. It is hard to judge the man from them. They are so colorless and dull. In one of his travel books, The Pearl of India, 1894, he tells about the Indians of Ceylon and outlying places but in the whole book fails to mention a single fact about their life under the British. It is an aimless childish book. Why he chose to ignore the people is a mystery. In the other books of travel he commits the same crime. His sensational writings are as dull as his travel books. They were written in his early youth from 1844 to 1858, but they were influenced by the times. It was an era when the most independent of them frankly imitated the pioneer of Indian stories, James Fenimore Cooper. This chap who had struck on a brilliant idea but who had spoiled it by vulgarly imitating Scott, so much so that every character in his books is a fifth-rate Englishman, completely dominated American fiction until the dime novelists came along to overthrow his influence. Why did Ballou give up writing fiction? One good reasons that may be advanced is that in youth a man is more or less free from family shackles and his ideals are mostly radical. Public Opinion leaves him cold. Most of these early or pre-dime-novelists wrote their sensational fiction until they either married of settled down. Then remorse would come. Nearly every one of them felt that they had written naughty books and so they forgot completely about their early careers. In the case of the youthful fire-eater, J. H. Ingraham, who had written at least one hundred books of sensational fiction before 1855, his son relates that when he J. H., had become a minister in Mississippi his wife influenced him to spend a large fortune buying up his old books and burning them. Judson (Ned Buntline) frankly confessed to Venable, one of the first of the radical historians, that he had written nothing but trash. If you will note the cases of the two, they had only recently been married.

When Ballou took over the publishing house in 1854 he got slightly highbrow and arranged with Samuel French of New York to take over his blood and thunder paper books. At the same time he harped more than ever that his publications were so piously pure that even a church mouse could read them without blushing. This idiotic course did not get him many readers. As he got older he became more conservative and naturally other young publishers, not so finicky as he, began taking away his best writers. Beadle took Harry Hazleton, Edward S. Ellis, and A. J. H. Duganne; Bonner of the New York Ledger, grabbed Dr. J. H. Robinson and Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. (by taking away the latter, 1856, Bonner practically scuttled the House of Ballou for Cobb was the most popular writer of fiction before the Civil War, writing more than two hundred novels, all of them immensely successful) and Street of New York Weekly pirated Ned Buntline.

Ballou's influence therefore came in his early youth. His pioneer work in the cheap publishing field cannot be dimmed by his later mistakes. He gave the worker, the farmer and the humble housewife something they never had before, books and magazines written and published solely for their benefit and pleasure. In doing this he accomplished a vast step in art and culture in the United States and for this service he deserves a monument, next to Whitman.

The following is a list of all published books written by Ballou. Those issued under his pseudonym Lieutenant Murray are marked L. M., those not so marked were issued under his own name. Where no place of publication is mentioned Boston is meant. Dates signify when book was first issued except otherwise specified. Ballou's novels received many changes in titles when rival publishers got hold of them; in fact he himself was guilty of the same offense. For instance he published the Sea Witch, 1855, later reprinted 1859 as Sea Lark; Turkish Spies becomes Turkish Slave; Evert H. Long takes The Naval Officer and reprints it as Captain Lovell (1860) as a dime novel; Fanny Campbell is disguised as the Pirate Queen and so on.

Red Rupert, The American Bucanier by L. M., 1845, paper.

Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain, by L. M., 1845, paper.

The Naval Officer or The Pirate's Cave by L. M. 1845, paper.

The Child of the Sea or the Smuggler of Colonial Times (together with another short novel, The Love Test) by L. M. 1846, paper.

The Spanish Musketeer by L. M. 1847, paper.

The Gipsey or the Robbers of Naples by L. M. 1847, paper.

The Adventurers or The Wreck in the Indian Ocean by L. M. 1848, paper.

The Circassian Slave by L. M. 1851, paper.

The Heart's Secret or The Fortunes of a Soldier by L. M. 1852, paper.

Biography of the Reverend Hosea Ballou, 1852, cloth.

History of Cuba, 1854, cloth.

The Magician of Naples: A Tale of Fortune's Freaks and Fancies by L. M. New York, 1854, paper.

The Duke's Prize: A Story of Art and Heart in Florence. New York, (by L. M.), 1854, paper.

The Sea Witch or The Africa Quadroon by L. M. New York, 1855, paper.

The Turkish Spies: A True History of the Russo-Turkish War by L. M. Baltimore, 1855, paper.

The Greek Adventurer or The Soldier and The Spy by L. M. New York, 1856, paper.

The Arkansas Ranger or Dingle, the Backwoodsman, by L. M. 1858, paper, (reprint first edition not known).

Miralda or The Justice of Tacon (a play), 1858, paper.

The Cabin Boy or Life on the Wing by L. M. 1858, paper.

Roderick the Rover or The Spirit of the Wave by L. M. New York, 1858, paper.

The Outlaw or The Female Bandit. A Story of the Robbers of the Apennines. New York, 1859, paper.

A Treasury of Thought, An Encyclopedia of Quotations. Edited by Ballou, 1875, cloth.

Notable Thoughts About Women, edited by Ballou, 1882, cloth.

Pearls of Thought, edited by Ballou, 1884, cloth.

Due West or Round the World in Ten Months, 1884, cloth.

Due South or Cuba, Past and Present, 1885, cloth.

Edge-Tools of Speech, edited by Ballou, 1886, cloth.

Due North or Glimpses of Scandinavia and Russia, 1887, cloth.

Genius in Sunshine and Shadow, 1887, cloth.

Under the Southern Cross or Travels in Australasia, 1888, cloth.

The New Eldorado. A Summer Journey in Alaska, 1889, cloth.

Footprints of Travel or Journeyings in Many Lands, 1889, cloth.

The Dog Detective and His Young Master by L. M. New York, 1889, paper, (Reprint, no first edition available.).

Aztec Land, 1890, cloth.

Equatorial Africa, 1892, cloth.

The Story of Malta, 1893, cloth.

The Pearl of India, 1894, cloth.

The above list is as complete as possible considering that Ballou's earlier works, being contemporary with those of Poe, are almost impossible to get. The age in which both Ballou and Poe wrote was careless of paper books. They were destroyed upon being read hence the vast prices that Poe's first editions bring. Poe in his time was considered a sensational writer and his books were printed as such. He had the same complex that all the sensational writers of his period held to their breasts, shame of their craft. When Poe sent several of his poems to Ballou to be printed in the Flag of Our Union he felt that he had bandied with a lot of cheap hacks, yet he was one himself and it wasn’t until Europe discovered him that his genius was appreciated here.

Again speaking of this complex, which seemed abundant only in the psychology of the American artist in the early years, Ballou never even let any one know what he had done in his youth. He never mentioned his connections with cheap paper books and periodicals in his last books. Anyone looking over the bibliography of his works would be forced to believe that they were the work of two men. This shame seemed peculiar only to the native artists. By some illogical process, deeply imbedded in the past, the artist came to feel that creation of literature for the masses was a deplorable and sinful task. Their idea seemed to be to get the money and get the hell out of such literature as fast as they became independent. It never occurred to any one of them that the mob, against whom Poe shot his bitter targets and who practically supported him when his more intelligent confreres ignored him, could appreciate a masterpiece as much as the highbrow public had appreciated the works of Shakespeare during the Elizabethan era.

Not so with the English and French popular writers like Dumas, Marryat, Hugo, Sue, Dickens (the latter is a dime novelist of the extravagant type), Charles Knight (editor, author, publisher and conceded to be father of cheap literature in England) and others, who not only wrote for the washerwoman, coal miner, and the servant but who actually felt proud of their niche in life. Most of them wrote memoirs about their early struggles, their first hack novels, and gloried in them. Thus many of them wrote masterpieces that even a Shakespeare might well envy.

Notes

1. In Living Authors of America by Thomas Powell, (an English scholar), published in 1850, the following statement is made; “The salvation of America lies in the possession of Republican Literature. The literature of England is slowly sapping the foundations of her institutions. England does all her thinking. … Nay, even worse, she openly discourages them in their attempt, and tacitly confesses that it is hopeless to compete with the writers of England and France.” This statement was made when Poe (an American writer in a begrudging way) Bryant, Longfellow, Melville, Hawthorne, Lowell, Irving and many others had already become famous abroad. In fact more credit to the English they thought more of such artists as Whitman, Twain, Seba Smith, (and other early humorists) than they did of the others above mentioned with the exception of Poe.

2. When Brother Jonathan was issued, 1839, it was a large mammoth sheet so large that it had to be folded up half a dozen times before it could be conveniently carried under the arm. This craze for jumbo papers lasted til about 1860, when paper became very expensive, the size as a result growing smaller and smaller. A rough estimate of these papers amounts to about 200 different kinds issued in two decades. Some wit claimed that one of the causes of the Civil War was due to these papers which were used in place of cotton as bed sheets.

3. It must be remembered that in pre-Civil-War times a circulation of 100,000 was sensational. In proportion it tallied with the million circulation of today. A paper of that much circulation in those days was an institution of power and influence.

4. For more details about this prolific writer see “Memoir of Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.”, by Ella W. Cobb.

5. The illustrated magazine had long been established here. As early as 1845, two monthlies were started, the N. Y. Illustrated Magazine, and the Pictorial World. Both soon gave up the ghost. Another came out the first week of January, 1846, and was issued fort-nightly about every 12 days. It was a folio of 16 pages and a frank imitation of the Illustrated London News. It was called Hewet's Excelsior and N. Y. Illustrated Times, edited by Charles Fenno Hoffman. However these early pioneers added nothing to cheap periodicals. Their attempts were doomed from the first issue.

6. Antonio Gallenga in Episodes of My Second Life shrewdly notes this phenomenon in American art. He states that our intellectuals were too interested in politics to pay attention to art. Too much democracy allowed room for nothing else but political talk. Thus every editor whatever his views, published his newspapers, weeklies and magazines from the standpoint of some political party. Before Ballou's time editors and publishers were not interested in developing a genuine American literature but were devoted, heart and soul, in some dubious cause to advance their interests either in their state or in Washington. Ballou was therefore an innovator. He excluded from his papers everything of a controversial nature, making them strictly literary magazines.

7.                                                                       Queen of the Antilles (1851)
   Bright Gem of the Ocean, the Antilles' queen,
   The fairest, the richest the tropics have seen,
   With shores softly fanned by the trade winds, so free.
   And sweet zephyrs breathing o’er upland and lea.
   Alas! that with beauties so lavishly blessed,
   The homes of thy children should be so oppressed.
   So nearly thou liest in the Caribee sea,
   To the rock-bound shores of the land of the free,
   That thy children look hopeful, its influence
   feel,
   While they frown at the yoke of distant Castile.
   Then gird thee for freedom, ay, gird for the fight,
   Thy lone star has risen, may God bless the right!