A Brief History of Newspaper Publishing in Tennessee

The history of newspaper publishing in Tennessee is mainly a story of printers who established papers in the new territory. Of the early group, the following five stand out: George Roulstone, Benjamin Bradford, Frederick Heiskell, Elihu Embree, and William Brownlow.

George Roulstone was Tennessee's first printer. He was brought to Rogersville by the new governor of the Territory South of the Ohio, William Blount, who was sensitive to the fact that government could not exist without printing. Blount knew that the legislature could make laws at will, but these laws would have little impact until they were propagated among the residents. Thus Roulstone immediately became the state printer. As Knoxville, the intended seat of the new government, did not exist yet, he set up shop in the courthouse in Rogersville in upper east Tennessee. However, laws are seasonal, and because Roulstone could not exist on the revenues he derived from their printing, he began a newspaper, the Knoxville Gazette, on November 5, 1791. In October of the next year he moved his press to Knoxville, where he continued to publish the Gazette as well as other papers until his death in 1804. His wife, the former Elizabeth Gilliam, continued the shop under her own name, then carried on the business with her next husband, William Moore, until 1808, when they discontinued the Knoxville Gazette and moved to Carthage to begin the Carthage Gazette.

Tennessee's second printer was John McLaughlin, who began issuing the Rights of Man, Or, Nashville Intelligencer in Nashville in 1799, but he quickly passed from the stage. The third printer, however, was a man of some importance in the publishing history of Tennessee and the Old Southwest, or at least his father was. He was Benjamin Bradford, son of John Bradford, the first printer in Kentucky and the patriarch of a whole clan of printers. Benjamin started the Tennessee Gazette in Nashville in 1800, then the Clarion in 1808, and then the Nashville Examiner in 1812. J. and T.G. Bradford took over the Clarion in 1808, and Theodorick F. Bradford started the United States Herald in Clarksville in 1810.

The third printer of importance to appear was Frederick Heiskell, who with Hugh Brown started the Knoxville Register in 1816. He married Brown's sister and founded his own dynasty of printers (two of his grandsons published and edited the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock). Heiskell continued the Register until 1837, when he sold his interest. Throughout most of this time he and Brown were printers for the state, and numerous well- known Tennessee imprints bear their names, John Heywood's The Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee being one prominent example.

Elihu Embree was not the first printer in Jonesboro, only the most important. Embree, who was a Quaker, established what is probably the country's first anti-slavery paper in 1819, the Manumission Intelligencer, of which only one copy exists. This was followed, by the Emancipator in 1820, a complete run of which exists at the Tennessee State Library. (The Emancipator is more of a journal than a newspaper and is, therefore, not within the scope of this project.) It is common knowledge that East Tennessee was unionist during the Civil War, but few realize that the area's sympathies began so early.

By far the best known and most infamous anti-slavery editor and printer was William Gannaway Brownlow, whose gubernatorial likeness, known as the spitting portrait because of the post-war legislators' habit of anointing it with tobacco juice as they descended the stairs in the Capitol, was removed to the safer confines of the Tennessee State Museum in 1987. Brownlow was a man of strong opinions, and one never had to wonder which side of an issue he favored. He began the Tennessee Whig in Elizabethton in 1839, then moved it to Jonesboro in 1840 as simply the Whig. In 1851, he changed the name to Brownlow's Whig and moved the paper to Knoxville, where it was published until 1861, when the Civil War made it both inconvenient and imprudent to remain in Tennessee any longer. At this time Brownlow moved his family north, then returned in 1863 to revive the Whig. From 1865 until 1869, he took a hiatus from publishing to become the state's Reconstruction governor.

Knoxville, Nashville, and Jonesboro were the important printing centers in the first two thirds of the 19th century. Newspaper printing moved across the state in a more or less westward migration as follows. It came to Columbia in 1810, Murfreesboro and Rogersville in 1814, Gallatin in 1815, McMinnville and Shelbyville in 1816, Sparta in 1818, Fayetteville and finally Memphis in 1827 (Parron and Pheobus' Advocate and Western District Intelligencer). Newspaper publishing in Memphis, however, soon came to be the purview of S. C. Toof, who saved the Memphis Appeal (later the Commercial Appeal) during the Civil War and went on to found still another dynasty of printers, some of whom are still printing in Atlanta today. Tennessee thus has a long and rich history of newspaper publishing, the issues of which must be preserved and made available for future generations.

By James B. Lloyd