SOURCE: Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. “Rise of the General Magazines” and “The Magazine as a Political and Cultural Influence.” In The Magazine in America: 1741-1990, pp. 8-13, 14-26. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

[In the following excerpt, Tebbel and Zuckerman highlight the ascent of general magazines in post-1825 America. The critics focus on the political impact of new periodicals such as Harper's and the Atlantic at mid-century.]

RISE OF THE GENERAL MAGAZINES

As the nineteenth century began, there was a new energy in the business of making magazines. Old problems remained, but they were not as frustrating as they had been, at least for the better publications. Between 1800 and 1825, there was a surge in the number of new periodicals, the first warnings of a veritable magazine tsunami between 1825 and 1850, induced by the technological breakthrough in printing with the invention of the cylinder press and the rapid growth of a highly literate population that was eager for knowledge and entertainment.

As magazines found their audiences in this expanding national market, the broad pattern of the future industry began to be established. Specialized audiences developed quickly, particularly those for religious journals, but the major event after 1825 was the rise of the general magazine, which would dominate the consumer field until our own time. During the first quarter-century, too, more attention was paid to politics in the magazines than to literature, in spite of a rising demand for a literature that Americans could call their own.

The most important of these early nineteenth-century periodicals was Joseph Dennie's Port Folio, one of the numerous weeklies that dominated the business. As was the case for most of the earlier periodicals, the Port Folio's success was due almost entirely to its publisher. Joseph Dennie announced in his first issue (from Philadelphia) on January 3, 1801, that his eight-page quarto was “not quite a Gazette, nor wholly a Magazine, with something of politics to interest Quidnuncs, and something of literature to engage Students.” Dennie was shrewdly aware of how necessary it was to harness politics with literature in order to succeed. In spite of his disclaimer, however, the Port Folio was unquestionably a magazine, not a newspaper.

Dennie's pen name in this anonymous era was “Oliver Oldschool,” although he was known also as the “Lay Preacher.” He had learned his craft on the Farmer's Museum, in Walpole, New Hampshire, after graduating from Harvard (rusticated, however, in his senior year) and making a half-hearted attempt to study law. He became editor of the Museum, wherein he wrote the “Lay Sermons” for which he is best known, and surrounded himself with such congenial spirits as Royall Tyler, America's first playwright. Offered a government job in 1799 as secretary to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, Dennie soon moved over to writing politics in a Philadelphia Federalist paper, Gazette of the United States, and two years later launched his magazine.

In spite of its strong Federalist leanings, the Port Folio was less devoted to politics than to literature, and Dennie's friends, who also became contributors, included Joseph Hopkinson, the composer of “Hail, Columbia”; Richard Rush, who became minister to England and France; John Quincy Adams; Charles Brockden Brown, sometimes called the first American novelist, though not without dispute; Alexander Wilson, the ornithologist; and Gouverneur Morris. Over the whole magazine, however, hovered the Spirit of Dennie himself, a writer of wit and incisiveness, a superb critic, and a man of taste—a charismatic figure.

For eight years, the magazine sparkled under its founder's direction, but then, like so may others, Dennie became ill and discouraged with the difficulties of keeping the Port Folio alive and sold it. Under others, it survived as a much less entertaining monthly until 1825, when it expired just before the great boom in magazines began.

Early nineteenth-century magazines proliferated until nearly every town of any consequence in America could boast a weekly literary miscellany of some kind, but nearly all of them were transitory, seldom lasting more than two or three years. Having no longer any need to steal entirely from British publications, they stole from each other.

There was also a continuing struggle with postal regulations. As a result of the Post Office Act of 1794, postmasters general were given the power to accept or refuse any magazine, with no reason required. These federal functionaries, in general, did not like magazines, arguing that they cluttered up mail sacks, which were already too large. If they had been able to get away with it, they would have given access only to religious publications. But some individual postmasters were much more lenient, and this enabled magazines to survive. More and more periodicals came to be accepted until, by 1825, most went through the mails unless there was a cheaper way. At the beginning of the century, there had been only a dozen American magazines; by 1825, there were nearly one hundred.

Among them were a few that stood out from the others. One was the Saturday Evening Post, evolved in a circuitous way from Franklin's old newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, thus providing the Post of our time with the claim, however dubious, that it had begun with Ben and so was the oldest magazine in America of continuous publication. One of its rivals was the New York Mirror, founded in 1823 by two poets, George Pope Morris and Samuel Woodworth. During its two decades of life, it was a prime factor in creating and sustaining the Knickerbocker literary school. Still another was the United States Literary Gazette, a Boston semiweekly, whose contributors included William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (still a student at Bowdoin), and other New England writers.

The first attempts to reach women as a particular audience were made soon after the turn of the century, but major efforts had to wait until the century's second quarter. From the beginning, however, clothes and their possible effect on female virtue interested male editors most. When French fashions arrived in America soon after 1800, one outraged contributor to the Monthly Anthology in 1804 wrote: “We have imported the worst of French corruptions, the want of female delicacy. The fair and innocent have borrowed the lewd arts of seduction. … I will not charge them with the design of kindling a lawless flame. They will shudder at the suggestion. But I warn them.”

Medical journals were beginning to proliferate, although few of them lasted more than a short time. From the beginning, both the scientific and general magazines regularly carried articles about agriculture, but in 1810 a periodical devoted solely to the subject appeared in Georgetown, the Agricultural Museum, forerunner of many others to be published before the century ended.

Among the special classes of magazines beginning to rise in the first quarter of the century were the theatrical reviews, testifying to the growth of American cultural interests. They were as ephemeral as the plays themselves, however, as were the comic periodicals, forerunners of the comic-book craze of our time as well as of general humor magazines. Many of them were highly political, and the humor was primitive.

Fiction in the magazines continued to be considered disreputable by many people, including editors. It had to struggle for general recognition in the magazine world, as it did with the public, because for so long it was lumped in with such amusements as theater, dancing, gambling, cockfighting, and horse racing. Nevertheless, fiction remained an irrepressible force.

An obstacle to the development of both fiction and articles was the paucity of Americans who thought of themselves as professional writers, at least for some time. The occupation not only was considered a little disreputable but was unprofitable as well. Often editors refused to pay for contributions, and they reserved the right to do anything they liked with manuscripts, even rewriting what did not please them. Payment, in fact, was rare in America until 1819. When the Atlantic at its founding in 1824 became the first to promise payment to contributors, its editors believed some might not accept it and urged them to take the money as an honorarium, “for the principle of the thing.”

Editors fared little better. Often there were no salaries at all, not even an honorarium, and on other periodicals, editors were paid in proportion to the magazine's financial condition, which was usually uncertain. That made magazine editing a part-time job in most cases.

After 1825, however, the face of magazine publishing began to change rapidly with the dawning of what was termed first by Mott as the “Golden Age of Magazines.” It was an age of upheaval everywhere in the world. American magazines recorded and discussed revolution in France, Belgian independence, the struggle of Spanish liberalism, the rise of Young Italy under Mazzini, the Metternich repression in Austria, and the emergence of Greece as a nation. At home, many Americans felt that even greater changes were taking place, and their thinking and feeling about what was happening were reflected in the great surge of new magazines, a development helped immeasurably by the arrival of the cylinder press, the first major change in the printing process since the fifteenth century. Obviously, an America was coming into being that required something more substantial than the kind of magazines known previously, with their many limitations. A new general audience was waiting for them.

To reach a new literate mass readership, an extraordinary explosion—no other word seems adequate—of magazines occurred between 1825 and 1850. Since then, there have been several other golden ages even more spectacular in some respects, but it remains true that this period represented a major turning point in the history of American periodical publishing.

Reliable statistics are difficult to come by, and even those we have must be suspect, but roughly, the number of magazines rose from about 100 in 1825 to about 600 in 1850. The figures do not reflect the number of starts made in the period, which Mott estimates at between 4,000 and 5,000—magazines whose average life was two years.

While weeklies had predominated before, the general monthly now took center stage, and several important magazines were created by a different kind of entrepreneur. One of them was George R. Graham, no part-time dilettante or follower of a particular pattern but a born magazine publisher, although he started out to be a cabinetmaker (meanwhile studying law to better himself). In 1839, Graham bought a dying magazine called the Casket (one of many by that name) and changed it from a cheap-looking anthology of trivia into a bright and attractive periodical. A year later he bought the Gentleman's Magazine, which had been edited by the noted actor William E. Burton, and combined the two under a new title, Graham's Magazine. It quickly became one of the nation's three or four most important periodicals, displaying “a brilliance which has seldom been matched in American magazine history,” as Mott described it.

For a short period in 1841-1842, Poe was Graham's literary and contributing editor, and the list of those who wrote for the magazine then and later was like a roll call of the best American writers and poets, accounting for a liveliness not common in the new crop of publications. Graham was the first publisher to understand that if contributors were paid well, there would never be a short supply of excellent writers in a magazine. One of the most frequent to appear was Nathaniel Parker Willis, usually considered to be the first “magazinist”; that is, one who makes a living by writing for magazines.

A rival of Graham's but of a different kind, was the Knickerbocker Magazine. After a faltering start in 1833, it acquired a new editor, Lewis Gaylord Clark, who made it one of the best general magazines in the country for the next quarter-century; the magazine was affectionately known as “Old Knick.” Most of those who wrote for Graham's also wrote for the Knickerbocker—Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Willis, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Whittier, among others.

There were all kinds of anomalies in the burgeoning magazine world of this period. One was the prevalence of the literary weeklies, springing up all over the country, two or three in a week on occasion. It took little more than faith and a hundred dollars to start one, but few survived.

Two of the longest-lived magazines were born in the decades before the Civil War, lingering into our own time as spectres from that other and far different world of the nineteenth century. One was the North American Review, begun in May 1815 and continuing into the late 1930s. Among its long list of editors was Jared Sparks, the noted Harvard historian; Edward T. Channing, a young lawyer and William Ellery's brother; Edward Everett, famous as scholar, orator, and writer; John Gorham Palfrey, professor of sacred literature at Harvard; James Russell Lowell; Charles Eliot Norton, president of Harvard; Henry Adams, and several lesser lights. Inclined to be dull for its first sixty years in spite of its brilliant contributors, the cream of New England intellectuals, the North American Review veered from dullness to brilliance and back again as time went on, but it was never an inconsiderable publication. Before it died, the Review had been for more than a century and a quarter, in Mott's words, “a remarkable repository, unmatched by that of any other magazine of American thought. …”

The second was the Youth's Companion, which became a part of the national memory, loved by generations of boys and girls. Beginning in 1827 as an improvement over the standard diet for young people of primarily religious and moral instruction, the Companion hoped to entertain as well as instruct; and so it did under the editorship of Nathaniel Willis and his partner, Asa Rand. Willis sold the magazine in 1857 (he was seventy-eight and weary), and in other hands the Companion lost something of its paste-pot character, along with its anonymous contributors, and began to print stories by such popular writers of the day as Harriet Beecher Stowe.

When the premium craze gripped the magazine business in the late 1860s, the Companion led the way and built its circulation to new heights with this kind of promotion. To that sort of marketing could be added the other ingredients of its success: continued stories with special appeal to young people, and the shrewd cultivation of interests affecting the whole family. In the 1880s, the Companion introduced its long series of articles by celebrities about their work: Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, Booker T. Washington, Henry M. Stanley, Robert Peary, Lillian Nordica, and Marcella Sembrich, among many others. After the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the magazine went into a slow decline, dropped to 300,000 in circulation, and was sold to the Atlantic Monthly Company in 1925. Four years later it was merged with another young people's favorite, the American Boy, yet leaves behind happy memories among former readers still alive.

All things considered, the magazine business had assumed by the 1850s much of the character it has today. Magazinists were now a distinct class, although many had other occupations as well, and there were a growing number of specialists writing for the fast-increasing number of specialized magazines. Among the new crop of contributors were women, writing under their own names and rapidly becoming great favorites with the mass-market audience through their paperback romances. The most prolific of them was Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southword, who became a veritable fiction factory before the war. Her books, most of them serialized in magazines, remained in print well into this century, dreadful as they were by modern standards.

Surprisingly, considering their continuing numerous problems, magazines carried as much illustration as they could afford, even though it was expensive, large plates costing as much as ＄1,000. Engraving on copper and steel was the method employed, and such work was essential to women's magazines using fashion plates. Other periodicals used them to illustrate city life, to depict actors and actresses, or to illustrate science and nature pieces. Later, during the Civil War, magazines like the two periodicals published by Harper's used illustration to cover the battles and civilian life, much as the picture-text magazines of our time do.

The period from 1825 to the guns of Fort Sumter was a time of significant beginnings, but of no really remarkable achievements until the 1850s and 1860s. The great explosion produced not only an astonishing flood of periodicals but broadened the industry into all kinds of specialization as well as tapping the mass market. For most entrepreneurs, it was still not a profitable business. Nevertheless, in spite of all caveats, American magazines were offering readers a comprehensive view of national life in the 1850s—a mirror held up to an expanding, struggling, chaotic country that was on the verge of postwar greatness.

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THE MAGAZINE AS A POLITICAL AND CULTURAL INFLUENCE

After 1835, with the advent of James Gordon Bennett and his New York Herald, newspapers devoted themselves more and more to coverage of the news. Before that, they had been little more than propaganda organs in the hands of political parties, on whose bounty they were largely dependent. At about the same time, magazines were becoming forums for public opinion in ways they had not been before, by their nature offering a more varied and more intellectual sounding board for political argument than the newspapers had been able to provide. There was some overlapping, of course; in certain cases it was hard to draw a line between what was newspapering and what was magazine making.

Reform of one kind or another (more often moral or religious in the early days) had always been a preoccupation of magazine editors, and they were not slow to take up the great question of the day—slavery. As early as 1819, the antislavery magazines began to bloom like spring flowers, particularly in the Northwest Territory. Quakers were the first builders of this political platform, soon to be a national stage. Charles Osborn began his Manumission Intelligencer in 1819 (it lasted only a year), and Elijah Embree launched his Emancipator in 1820, both of them in Jonesboro, Tennessee.

In 1821, the heroic figure of Benjamin Lundy emerged to start his Genius of Universal Emancipation in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio. Never was a periodical begun on such minimal terms. Lundy had no capital and initially only six subscriptions. Every month he took the copy for his magazine and walked twenty miles to Steubenville, where it was set and printed, after which he carried the copies to Mt. Pleasant on his back.

The next year he moved the magazine nearer to his Quaker friends in Jonesboro, settling in a northeastern Tennessee town called Greenville, but with an eye to better things, he decided two years later to move once again, this time to Baltimore. It was a long walk, through forests and over mountains, but Lundy did it with his knapsack on his back. Once settled, he went on promoting the cause of gradual abolition and colonization. Lundy was a pioneer in the colonization movement; that is, freeing the slaves, then settling them somewhere else, not in the nation's backyard. This became a national crusade, once favored by Lincoln, and resulted in the establishment of Liberia.

Lundy did so well in Baltimore that he made the Genius a weekly in 1826 and might have become even more influential there if he had not been set upon and nearly killed by a slave dealer. Undeterred, he went on walking tours through the northern states, preaching abolition wherever he stopped and continuing to issue his magazine spasmodically. Lundy suspended the Genius temporarily in 1829 and walked to Bennington, Vermont, where he invited William Lloyd Garrison, whom he had met earlier in Boston, to become assistant editor of his periodical, even though he knew Garrison wanted no part of colonization but demanded immediate and complete abolition.

In spite of this major difference, Garrison agreed to join Lundy. After working with him for about a year, he was arrested on a criminal libel charge for a story he had written that annoyed the owner of a vessel whose cargo was a profitable link in the slave trade. It was after this incident that Garrison, released from jail, went back to Boston and started the abolitionist paper that made him famous, the Liberator. Lundy moved too, down to Washington, where he began to issue the Genius again as a monthly. But Lundy was a restless man and before long moved for the last time to Lowell, Illinois, where he died. The Genius was taken over by other Quaker sympathizers and persisted both in Lowell and in Chicago until 1855.

The antislavery magazines of these early days were more or less religious, written often in an overly sentimental style, and offering a platform for humanitarians of all shades. The problem was that they were single issue periodicals and so tended to be overshadowed by more popular publications that dealt with the other seething controversies in antebellum America: states rights, so intimately involved with the slavery issue; squatter sovereignty, another ingredient in the slavery stew; the tariff, a perennial subject of debate in American politics; and what was later called “nativism,” the beginnings of “America for Americans” as a political test of patriotism in the eyes of its adherents.

By 1850, this cauldron was bubbling furiously, and it was stirred vigorously by a variety of political papers and periodicals. Looking back over the decade of the fifties, the superintendent of the eighth census, in 1862, reported that such magazines had greatly increased. In 1850, already 1,630 had fallen into that category, but by 1860 there were 3,242, nearly a 100 percent increase.

Large areas of the magazine business shunned politics, however, and did not open their pages to the great debates sweeping the nation. Such major general magazines as Harper's and Graham's, the women's magazines, and most of the religious quarterlies appeared to be operating on another planet, or at least well above the storm. This was all the more strange, since by the mid-fifties, the nation had turned into a tumultuous debating society, shot through with violence. On the eve of war, however, many of those magazines that had managed to stay aloof were embroiled in one way or another with the conflict that would be our greatest national tragedy.

On the highest level, the magazines became debating platforms for serious discussions of the issues—or partisan salvos, as the case might be. The newspapers were embroiled as well, of course, but by their nature they could not offer the same kind of broad-ranging, semi-national forums for political debate. It is in the magazines that we find not only discussion of slavery but also expression of personal and national feeling about the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the Dred Scott case—even John Brown's raid—not to mention the presidential campaigns themselves, which were fought out more thoroughly in the magazines than they were in the newspapers.

In light of present-day political controversies, it is worth noting that free trade was already established in the 1850s as an American shibboleth—what Francis Liebar called in a DeBow's Magazine article “one of the great subjects of national theology.” A few other magazines were also aware of the economic causes of the national upheaval over slavery, as the North American Review and the Atlantic testified with their articles on “King Cotton.”

Even the good gray poets of New England plunged into the emotional cauldron of the fifties. For the National Era, the Washington magazine in which Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared as a serial, Whittier wrote his “Ichabod,” a blistering attack on Daniel Webster for his part in the passage of the Compromise. Webster was later defended by the North American Review.

The differences between magazines and newspapers narrowed in the increasing violence of the slavery debate. The major papers were fiercely partisan on one side or the other, and they were more than equaled sometimes by equally partisan magazines. The difference was that few newspapers of any consequence kept apart from the struggle, while many specialized periodicals treated the issue tangentially, if at all. They were compensated for, however, by the virulence of Frederick Douglass' Paper, the personal organ of the great black activist, and Garrison's Liberator, while on the other side, DeBow's Magazine, the best in the South, was more dignified but no less fervent in arguing the slavery cause. Even such a relatively staid literary publication as Putnam's, a subsidiary venture of George Palmer Putnam's book publishing house, lent its voice to criticizing the Supreme Court after the Dred Scott decision in 1857.

In the Midwest, where the slavery issue was increasingly more a matter of bullets than words, there was a rash of purely political magazines, such as the Squatter Sovereign, founded at Atchison, Kansas, in 1855, and the Herald of Freedom, operating in Lawrence for two years until its enemies destroyed it, after which the proprietor donated his scattered type to be made into cannon balls (which were called “new editions” of the Herald when they were fired in the struggle for Kansas).

In 1856, for the first time, many magazines took an active part in the campaign that elected James Buchanan as president. Putnam's gave its readers an excellent report of a torchlight parade in New York and later covered the election itself as well as any newspaper. The new Harper's Weekly was also beginning its career as a reporter of national events, and the equally new Atlantic Monthly spoke on the same subjects with a New England accent. In these and other magazines, the debate on the slavery question boiled and bubbled during all of this fateful decade, as it had for so long. One of the solutions suggested was to annex Cuba, then beginning its long struggle against Spain, and in the Southern view, make the island an extension of the American slave system to compensate the South for the growing number of free-soil states. In its first number, and in its first article, Putnam's surveyed the pros and cons of this plan.

There was now an entire category of antislavery magazines, much of its existing among the North's church periodicals. Congregationalists and Methodists in New York led the way, followed by the Quakers. These magazines were not entirely devoted to the question, by any means, but there were others that were, including Garrison's Liberator, Gamaliel Bailey's National Era, and Frederick Douglass' Paper, as well as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. In Pittsburgh, there was the Saturday Visiter [sic], published by Mrs. Jan Grey Swisshelm, who had learned to hate slavery during a stay in Kentucky.

Among several others in the abolitionist chorus were those devoted to the notion of solving the problem by colonizing the slaves elsewhere. The Washington D.C., African Repository was the oldest of these periodicals, and there were others issued by the state organizations of the American Colonization Society. Aside from Frederick Douglass' passionate journal, the chief black voice in this chorus was New York's Anglo-African Magazine, edited by Thomas Hamilton, but its pages were more literary then political.

The only interruption in the gathering storm was the Panic of 1857, whose economic implications modern scholarship has identified more and more with the outbreak of war. Banks failed, stores went under, business in general sank into steep decline. This deep depression, which one journal, the National Magazine, believed had no precedent, persisted for at least two years. Its severe impact on American life can be studied in human terms today in the pages of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, really a weekly magazine despite its name. Harper's and other weeklies also covered these events.

Frank Leslie had introduced something new into the magazine business with his various publications. His real name was Henry Carter. He had used the pseudonym to protect himself from a father who sternly opposed this son who wanted to be an artist, signing “Frank Leslie” to the drawings he submitted surreptitiously to the Illustrated News of London. He later became foreman of that magazine's engraving room. Coming to America in 1848, Leslie worked for other periodicals before he started his own in 1854, Frank Leslie's Ladies' Gazette of Fashion and Fancy Needlework. It did so well that he launched the New York Journal of Romance a year later, both of these preliminary to fulfilling his dream of years, an American version of the London Illustrated News. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, later to be renamed Leslie's Weekly, met the criterion.

It began in 1855 with only sixteen pages, selling for ten cents and containing the seeds not only of Leslie's success but of modern picture-text magazines and news weeklies. Americans had never seen anything like this periodical. In it, they could find news stories illustrated graphically with engravings in a way the newspapers could not match. The pictures were large and striking, and the stories were seldom more than two weeks after the fact. But the little weekly did not confine itself to the news. It covered music, the theater, art, horse racing, and sports; reviewed new books; and published fiction serials. Fashions were added during the second year, and Leslie would have covered religious news, too, if fiction had not seemed more profitable and crowded it out. Leslie was no lover of organized religion.

Engravings often illustrated these other features in the magazine, although sometimes they were simply pictures of natural, historical, or home scenes. One at least still remains in American memory—“The Monarch of the Glen,” showing a magnificent elk sniffing the air in a wild setting. It was reproduced thousands of times, well into this century.

The news pictures for Leslie's periodical were frankly on the sensational side. Sometimes the news itself was sensational enough—William Walker's filibustering war in Nicaragua; the violent events in “bloody Kansas”—but often the stories and pictures covered titillating murders or sex scandals.

Leslie's struggled at first, and the publisher was almost ready to give up, but by its third year, it had more than 100,000 readers. The chief obstacle to even greater success was the arrival of Harper's Weekly in 1857, an event bitterly resented by Leslie. He countered the competition by reducing Leslie's price to six cents, two dollars a year, and this sent its circulation up to 164,000 before the war.

From that point, Leslie could not be stopped. He became the first magazine entrepreneur to establish a publishing empire: Frank Leslie's New Family Magazine (1857); Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun (1858), with others to be added after the war, when his career—a career nearly as sensational as the magazine—began to take off.

Both in its earlier and later versions, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper to Leslie's Weekly, this magazine introduced readers to such world events as Commodore Perry's historic visit to Japan, David Livingstone's explorations in Africa, the Crimean War, and the Austrian War of 1859. Nationally, it showed Americans marvelous pictures of the Great West now opening up and other scenes of a rapidly developing, strife-torn nation. But the magazine was at its best, or at least its most interesting, in its coverage of New York, the home base. Leslie's examined, for example, the fragrant career of Fernando Wood, the mayor who would lead the Copperhead opposition to Lincoln and the war. It provided vivid pictures of such events as Election Day 1850.

Remarkably foreshadowing the magazines of our time, Leslie's was present each week with pictures and text to tell readers about the laying of the Atlantic cable, early labor strife, the principals in the Dred Scott case, the Panic of 1857, and (with telling snapshots, so to speak) the multiplying incidents leading up to war. At the same time, the magazine covered many sports and was the first to feature a billiards department.

Leslie's from the beginning was also a crusading journal. It delivered a broadside attack against what it called the “swill milk” business, describing in a series the shockingly unsanitary conditions of the dairies supplying New York with milk and following a trail of corruption that led through the distilleries supplying the cows with feed, straight to the doors of New York's politicians, deeply involved with profits from the whole operation. Leslie's attacked head on and alone for some time, until other magazines took up the fight.

Here the idea of the picture magazine, used as a political weapon, came to flower for the first time. The publisher's hard-hitting editorials were supplemented by the far more effective pictures of filthy dairies, diseased and dying cows, and wagons carrying uncovered milk into the city. Municipal officials were forced to make an inquiry, but it was the old story of the criminals investigating the crime. Leslie's, even under threat of a criminal libel action, kept up the pressure, hiring private detectives to unearth new evidence.

As the magazine's all-out assault on the entire city administration came to a climax, the mayor was forced to appoint a committee from the New York Academy of Medicine to conduct an impartial investigation. The resulting report confirmed everything Leslie's had been saying, and even though it took two more years to clean up the mess, the magazine enjoyed not only a moral triumph but a sharply increased circulation. Frank Leslie himself was presented with a gold watch and chain, suitably inscribed by grateful citizens.

With that kind of crusading, people could easily forgive the way in which Leslie's frequently sensationalized crime news in words and pictures. Jealously criticized by the newspaper press, the magazine found it easy to sustain any attacks as its circulation reached 200,000 for a time.

In his politics and conceptions of morality, Frank Leslie was ambivalent and could sometimes be found on both sides, as in the case of prizefighting, illegal nearly everywhere, which his paper covered assiduously but was just as likely to condemn the next day. The publisher's enterprise was evident in his transatlantic coverage of a bout near London (also illegal) between the American hero “Benicia Boy” Heenan and a British fighter. A writer and an artist were sent to cover the bout, arrangements were made for engraving, and twenty-four hours after the fight, Leslie's was on the London streets with an illustrated extra, after which the plates and 20,000 copies were hurried to a New York-bound ship. The result was a clean beat on all of Leslie's competitors, both newspaper and magazine. The edition sold 347,000 copies.

Fervently against abolitionism, Leslie's approached the major events leading up to the war in the same enterprising spirit with which it approached prizefighting. Although it called John Brown a “maniac,” the magazine covered the famous raid and the subsequent hanging with sensational engravings and text. In fact, its graphic picture of Brown at the end of a rope did much to stir up further an already inflamed public.

In the end, Frank Leslie decided it was better business to appear nonpartisan, but he found that objectivity did not pay. Leslie's came under heavy fire from critical guns in both the South and the North. After Fort Sumter, Leslie saw that impartiality was not a feasible idea, and by mid-1861, the magazine was a strong supporter of the Union. He had come to this conclusion, perhaps, when he offered payment to soldiers on either side after Sumter was fired upon who could provide sketches from which the magazine's artists might make drawings. This offer was not well received by a war-frenzied readership, even though the result was a handsome four-page foldout depicting the bombardment, published only a week after the event.

Leslie represented a new breed of editor, considerably ahead of his time in some respects. The newspaper business was beginning to be dominated by the so-called “giants of journalism,” strong-minded men like Bennett, Greeley, and Charles Anderson Dana, who were personalities in their own right, known to a national audience. Magazines had had no such figures until Leslie; George Graham, Louis Godey, and Mrs. Hale were only notable editors, not personalities in the popular sense. Leslie, at a peak in the 1850s, was a striking figure. Short and broad but handsome, his heavy black beard thrusting out below a pair of penetrating eyes, he virtually radiated energy; he was a man who had to be noticed. Later, after the war, he became better known yet as a result of his scandalous divorce and remarriage to one of his editors, a woman who was an even more vivid personality. Ironically, it was Mrs. Leslie who has become the legendary figure, not her pioneering husband.

Leslie built his successful magazine and his small publishing empire on a simple precept: “Never shoot over the heads of the people.” That meant he was a mass-magazine publisher at heart and in practice. At a time when books (particularly paperbacks) and newspapers were just beginning to stretch out into that vast market, he was the first of the magazine entrepreneurs to do so in any comprehensive way, foreshadowing the future with his innovative ideas and techniques.

Yet he was not a national political influence because, in the end, he did far more to amuse and entertain than to inform and instruct. He presented a vivid picture of American life to his fellow Americans, but he did little to inspire them to think about it and to help shape national life. That was why two magazines of far different character, begun in the same decade and directed to relatively small audiences, not only had a great deal more influence, then and later, but laid a groundwork so firm that they survive today.

The first of these to appear was Harper's New Monthly, launched in June 1850 with a first printing of 7,500 copies, each one consisting of 144 two-column octavo pages, selling for twenty-five cents, three dollars a year. Its first editor was Henry J. Raymond, who would found a more important national institution, the New York Times, two years later. In the first issue were the first installments of two serials: Maurice Tiernay: Solider of Fortune, by Charles Lever; and Lettice Arnold, by Mrs. Anne Marsh. There were also three short stories, two of them by Dickens; a few biographical sketches, including one on Longfellow, who had been the first writer asked to contribute, during the previous October; a department called “The Monthly Record of Current Events,” written by the editor; a column reviewing new books, called “Literary Nuances”; and a section on women's fashions. There were a few pictures—of William H. Prescott, Archibald Alison (another lesser-known historian), and Thomas B. Macauley—along with woodcuts to illustrate fashions.

This magazine was the rather offhand inspiration of the five Harper brothers, proprietors of what was already the leading publishing house in New York. Speaking of their magazine venture years later, Fletcher Harper remarked: “If we were asked why we first started a monthly magazine, we would have to say that it was as a tender to our business, though it has grown into something quite beyond that.” By that he meant the magazine would draw freely on the firm's authors and books for its contents, and the traffic would be two-way—a formula successfully adopted later by the Appleton family, the Scribners, the Putnams, and other publishing houses.

Some of this plan could be seen in the initial announcement that the new magazine would “transfer to its pages as rapidly as they may be issued” the tales of Dickens, Bulwer, Lever, and a list of other writers then contributing to British periodicals. “The design,” said the opening announcement, “is to place within reach of the great mass of the American people the unbounded treasures of the Periodical Literature of the present day.” No mention was made that this literature was to be pirated; the magazine did not pay for reprints until the late 1850s.

The Harper brothers intended their magazine to reach a specific audience—educated and upper class. This was the audience that had the money to buy Harper books and the leisure time to read them. It was also the audience that would later be called “opinion makers.” Thus, the brothers were building not only a literary constituency that would be helpful to their publishing house but, less wittingly, a platform for the issues of the day to be discussed by serious people, readers (politicians, clergymen, civic leaders) who would have definite roles in shaping public opinion. It was, in short, a forum for the governing class—professionals, industrialists, those in public service—people who influenced decisions on issues and set standards. The brothers themselves belonged to this group. But they had also begun as printers, and the magazine was a way to keep their presses running when books were not on the cylinders.

The investment and the idea paid off immediately. Circulation increased to 50,000 in six months as readers discovered they could get in Harper's not only the latest fiction but news of developments in American culture and politics. Fiction may have been the biggest attraction. Where else could readers find in one magazine such writers as Thackeray, Trollope, Hardy, Twain, Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville, not to mention such anonymous tales as “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat” (an apocryphal story written by Twain). The illustrators were equally distinguished: Frederic Remington, Winslow Homer, C. S. Reinhart, and Edwin A. Abbey, among others.

Alfred H. Guernsey, a Greek and Hebrew scholar, succeeded Raymond as editor and guided the magazine through the Civil War. Guernsey was one of the great editors of his time, so technically skilled that he could extract the meat from a two-volume historical or biographical work and make an eight- or twelve-page article out of it.

In spite of its literary tone, Harper's was political from the first, since the brothers themselves were much interested in politics; one of them, James, was later to become mayor of New York. Raymond, a politician himself who later served in the House, edited his New York Times with one hand and Harper's with the other for five years. Thurlow Weed, later to become the political boss of New York State, had worked as an apprentice with James Harper on the same press and was a factor in the early life of the magazine. With such connections, it was not surprising that Harper's began to be a forum for public affairs early in its career, not only reflecting the growing conflict over slavery but also the growth of industry and the opening of the West.

No magazine of that time was so beloved by its readers. There were hundreds of subscribers who had their old copies bound up in leather and then took the volumes with them when they migrated across the plains as settlements spread westward. These collections were in the backpacks of hundreds of others who sailed around the dangerous Horn to the gold fields of California. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, thousands of families read their copies avidly by the uncertain light of whale-oil lamps. In a single decade, on the eve of the Civil War, Harper's had become the leading national monthly—more truly “a mirror of American life and ideas” than most other periodicals.

It was a diverse audience, even within its relatively limited socioeconomic boundaries. Some were poor scholars, some farmers with the advantage of an education, some rich and cultured people, but the one thing they all held in common was a passionate interest in culture, not only for themselves but for their children. Harper's made them feel that they were part of the growth of a great nation and inspired them to believe they could make it a model for the world if they took their responsibilities for it seriously. The magazine perfectly reflected their convictions about themselves and the country.

But the Monthly did not entirely satisfy Fletcher Harper, who was the heart if not the soul of his organization. The brothers had agreed that the magazine would be unavoidably political, but they did not want to emphasize it; their intent for the Monthly was primarily cultural. Fletcher, however, the youngest of the brothers (and the most attuned to the decade), understood that in the 1850s, with the strains between North and South increasing every day and strife in Kansas parading through the newspapers, it would be fatuous and unprofitable to ignore politics. In any case, he had become enamored of the magazine business and wanted a more direct voice in managing one. The launching of Harper's Weekly in 1857 was thus very much Fletcher's doing.

In some respects the Weekly was like its sister Monthly, but besides there being a greater accent on politics, there were more pictures; as in the Monthly, excellent fiction and essays rounded out the package. As Mott and others discovered, its files from 1857 to 1916 provide researchers with an invaluable illustrated history of the intervening periods. The Weekly was Fletcher Harper's “pet enterprise,” as his grandson J. Henry Harper was to write years later. Fletcher devoted most of his energies to it until he died, a factor that may have contributed to the bankruptcy of the publishing house in 1899.

The subtitle of the Weekly was A Journal of Civilization, and indeed it was. Fletcher borrowed a little from Leslie's pictorial techniques and at first advertised his product as a “family newspaper … before anything else, it is a first-class newspaper.” But it was a magazine for all practical purposes, and while it competed with the newspapers in its Civil War coverage, most of its contents was magazine-like in character. The line between the two media was sometimes fuzzy, though. The Weekly began by running front-page editorials, as a newspaper might have done in those days, but these were soon switched to the second page to make room for the pictures that would be the magazine's chief attraction. It printed light essays, some innocuous departments, two pages of domestic and foreign news in small print, miscellaneous contributions in the fields of travel, biography, and general information, a little poetry, a page or two of advertising, and the inevitable serials, which were of exceptionally good quality: Dickens's Tale of Two Cities and Willkie Collins's The Woman in White among them.

It was the pictorial display that attracted the most attention, however. In an early issue was a full-page engraving of President Buchanan and his Cabinet; and the following year, a double-page picture of the warship Leviathan. Winslow Homer was among the first-rate artists who began their careers in these pages.

In the early years the editor and his magazine were wholeheartedly Democratic, supporting Buchanan with a fervor this weak reed did not deserve. The noble object of the Weekly was to “unite rather than to separate the views and feelings of the different sections of our common country,” and it persisted in this optimistic endeavor nearly to the brink of war, in spite of the fierce sectional quarrels that the magazine covered so vividly and that were fast making armed conflict inevitable.

Such constant optimism brought sharp responses from jealous and more partisan rivals. Putnam's Monthly told its readers that “whoever believes in his country and its constant progress in developing human liberty will understand that he has no ally in Harper's Weekly,” and Greeley's New York Tribune referred to the magazine sarcastically as the “Weakly Journal of Civilization.”

These jibes failed to deter most readers, many of whom were weary of extreme views from either side. They supported the Weekly as they did Raymond's New York Times, which had promised that it would not “get into a passion” in those passionate times. The Weekly quickly had a circulation of 60,000 in 1857, which by November of the following year had risen to 75,000. On the eve of the war, which would mark its greatest early success, the figure was 90,000.

The Harper brothers did not have the market all to themselves, by any means. There were not only such competitors as Putnam's and Peterson's, but in 1857 there emerged from Boston a rival that would do battle with the Monthly from that day to this. The magazine was the Atlantic Monthly, and its first editor was James Russell Lowell, one of the most eminent of the New England sages.

Just as the Harper brothers' two magazines owed their existence and success to Fletcher, the Atlantic was forever indebted to Francis H. Underwood, whom Bliss Perry later called “the editor who was never the editor.” Underwood conceived the idea of the Atlantic in 1853, declaring it frankly to be a magazine that would “bring the literary influence of New England to aid the antislavery cause.” He began at once to look for capital and in 1854 thought he had the backing of John P. Jewett, the young Boston publisher who had issued Uncle Tom's Cabin. But Jewett went out of business in spite of his best-seller, and it was three years later before Underwood succeeded in getting enough seed money and a lineup of contributors to launch his magazine.

On two afternoons in the spring of 1857, May 5 and 6, Underwood met for dinner in Boston at the Parker House in company with Moses Dresser Phillips, a partner in the publishing house of Phillips, Sampson & Co. (of which Underwood was literary advisor) and with Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, the historian John L. Motley, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the architect James Elliot Cabot. It would be difficult to imagine a more distinguished set of sponsors and potential contributors.

Phillips wrote later: “We sat down at three p.m., and rose at eight. The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually by all odds that I have ever had.”

Underwood had not placed all his eggs even in so remarkable a basket. He also had assurances of contributions from Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whittier, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Prescott, James Freeman Clarke, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. No magazine to date could have boasted such a list. These were among the best writers in America, and they strengthened Underwood in his conviction that he could publish a magazine that would, at last, be truly American, with no vestiges of transatlantic culture clinging to its pages. With understandable modesty, Underwood also realized that it would be far better to have Lowell's name on the masthead as editor than his own; for himself he reserved the title of “office editor,” meaning assistant editor.

Over two splendid dinners of oysters, steak, Burgundy, and brandy, the founders made their fundamental decisions: an American magazine to be called the Atlantic Monthly (Holmes suggested the title), with no contribution to be signed and even the editor to remain anonymous. “The names of the contributors,” Emerson remarked dryly, “will be given out when the names are worth more than the articles.” The magazine would devote itself to literature, art, and politics, but no one could believe the founder's promise that it would be the “organ of no party or clique.” These men were all passionate abolitionists.

As the first number neared its final stage of makeup, Lowell apparently began to have second thoughts about his completely American magazine. Playing it safe, he sent a letter and bank draft to his friend and co-sponsor, Charles Eliot Norton, who was in London, asking him if he would shop around for an English serial and perhaps a few good short stories and poems that had not already been pirated.

This move had a tragicomic aftermath. Norton was successful and brought back with him several handwritten manuscripts in his trunk, which unfortunately disappeared on its way from the pier to his hotel in New York and was never recovered. The British authors involved were so angered by this loss, which was no fault of Norton's, that they refused to contribute again, and so the Atlantic appeared as pristinely American as the founders had planned originally.

It could not help being successful, given the quality of its writing. There were only 15,000 readers at the beginning and never more than 50,000 during the remainder of the century, but that was enough. Sheer quality carried it through the first year, when as its semi-rival Harper's Weekly wrote, “Not for many years—not in the lifetime of most men who read this paper—has there been so much grave and deep apprehension. In our own country there is universal commercial prostration and thousands of our poorest fellow-citizens are turned out against the approaching winter without employment. In France the political cauldron seethes and bubbles with uncertainty. Russia hangs like a cloud dark and silent upon the horizon of Europe; while all the energies, resources and influences of the British Empire are sorely tried … in coping with the vast and deadly Indian situation, and with disturbed relations in China.”

Neither Harper's nor the Atlantic could elicit much concern from readers about events abroad, however. The deepening gulf between North and South was on the minds of everyone at home, and it was this conflict that the Atlantic felt compelled to deal with while it was dispensing good literature. As Edward Weeks, one of its great editors, wrote on the magazine's hundredth anniversary, under the force of the drive for abolition “even the most objective of them, men like Emerson and Lowell, wrote at white heat.” The magazine, as Weeks observed, grew out of the aspirations and anxieties of the times, until eventually it came to contain “the heartbeat and anger, the tenderness and laughter, of Americans from all quarters.”

So, with the introduction of these two extraordinary magazines, the periodical business approached the Civil War, that watershed in American history. Most of the earlier editors still alive were growing old, and their magazines were beginning to fail—men like George Graham, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and Nathaniel Willis. Obviously, a changing of the guard was taking place. Lowell, Leslie, Alfred Guernsey, and Robert Bonner (of the Philadelphia Ledger) were the new leaders.

The Panic of 1857 had also reduced the number of magazines—from about 685 in 1850 to about 575 in 1860. An increase did not occur again until 1863, when wartime demands for information and entertainment proved to be a boost for periodicals and newspapers alike, and continued when the war was over.

Graham's was the chief victim of the Panic, suspending publication after thirty-two years. The Knickerbocker almost disappeared but managed to survive. Those less lucky included the Democratic Review, once a home for the best writers, and the New York Mirror. The South, much less affected by the Panic, saw little change in its barely thriving magazine business, which would soon be devastated by the war. A symptom of things to come was a rising interest in the art of advertising, which produced in 1851 the first magazine devoted to that subject, Pettengill's Reporter; it lasted until 1859.

Frank Leslie took note of this development in 1857. “The art of advertising,” he wrote, “is one of the arts most studied by our literary vendors of fancy soaps, philanthropic corn doctors, humanitarian pill-makers, and all the industrious professions which have an intense feeling for one's pockets. Every trick that can be resorted to for the purpose of inducing one to read an advertisement is practiced, and, it must be confessed, very often with complete success. How often have we been seduced into the reading of some witty or sentimental verse that finally led us, by slow degrees, to a knowledge that somebody sold cure-all pills or incomparable trousers.”

In their defense, it must be said that advertisers had to use such subterfuges to get attention, even as they do today, but in the 1850s the reason was the laudable desire on the part of publishers to protect their small advertisers, consequently refusing to let the larger ones use display type—except for the monthlies, of course, which did not carry small advertisements because they were not profitable.

Magazines entered the war years stronger than they had ever been, becoming potent politically, better written and edited, assuming the shape of the future. The war would test them, as it did every other aspect of American life.