The Country Printer by William Dean Howells

My earliest memories, or those which I can make sure are not the sort / of early hearsay that we mistake for remembrance later in life, concern / a country newspaper, or, rather, a country printing-office. The office / was in my childish consciousness some years before the paper was; / the compositors rhythmically swaying before their cases of type; the / pressman flinging himself back on the bar that made the impression, / with a swirl of his long hair; the apprentice rolling the forms, and / the foreman bending over the imposing-stone, were familiar to me when I / could not grasp the notion of any effect from their labors. In due time / I came to know all about it, and to understand that these activities / went to the making of the Whig newspaper which my father edited to / the confusion of the Locofocos, and in the especial interest of Henry / Clay; I myself supported this leader so vigorously for the Presidency / in my seventh year that it was long before I could realize that the / election of 1844 had resulted in his defeat. My father had already been / a printer for a good many years, and some time in the early thirties / he had led a literary forlorn hope, in a West Virginian town, with a / monthly magazine, which he printed himself and edited with the help of / his sister.

As long as he remained in business he remained a country editor and a / country printer; he began to study medicine when he was a young man, / but he abandoned it for the calling of his life without regret, and / though with his speculative and inventive temperament he was tempted to / experiment in other things, I do not think he would ever have lastingly / forsaken his newspaper for them. In fact, the art of printing was in / our blood; it never brought us great honor or profit; and we were / always planning and dreaming to get out of it, or get it out of us; / but we are all in some sort bound up with it still. To me it is now so / endeared by the associations of childhood that I cannot breathe the / familiar odor of types and presses without emotion; and I should not be / surprised if I found myself trying to cast a halo of romance about the / old-fashioned country office in what I shall have to say of it here.

I.

Our first newspaper was published in southwestern Ohio, but after a / series of varying fortunes, which I need not dwell upon, we found / ourselves in possession of an office in the northeastern corner of the / State, where the prevalent political feeling promised a prosperity / to one of my father's anti-slavery opinions which he had never yet / enjoyed. He had no money, but in those days it was an easy matter to / get an interest in a country paper on credit, and we all went gladly / to work to help him pay for the share that he acquired in one by this / means. An office which gave a fair enough living, as living was then, / could be bought for twelve or fifteen hundred dollars; but this was an / uncommonly good office, and I suppose the half of it which my father / took was worth one sum or the other. Afterward, within a few months, / when it was arranged to remove the paper from the village where it had / always been published to the county-seat, a sort of joint-stock company / was formed, and the value of his moiety increased so much, nominally at / least, that he was nearly ten years paying for it. By this time I was / long out of the story, but at the beginning I was very vividly in it, / and before the world began to call me with that voice which the heart / of youth cannot resist, it was very interesting; I felt its charm / then, and now, as I turn back to it, I feel its charm again, though it / was always a story of steady work, if not hard work.

The county-seat, where it had been judged best to transfer the paper / lest some other paper of like politics should be established there, was / a village of only six or seven hundred inhabitants. But, as the United / States Senator who was one of its citizens used to say, it was "a place / of great political privileges. " The dauntless man who represented / the district in the House for twenty years, and who had fought the / anti-slavery battle from the first, was his fellow-villager, and more / than compeer in distinction; and besides these, there was nearly always / a State Senator or Representative among us. The county officers, of / course, lived at the county-seat, and the leading lawyers, who were / the leading politicians, made their homes in the shadow of the court / house, where one of them was presently elected to preside as Judge of / the Common Pleas. In politics, the county was already overwhelmingly / Freesoil, as the forerunner of the Republican party was then called; / the Whigs had hardly gathered themselves together since the defeat of / General Scott for the Presidency; the Democrats, though dominant in / state and nation, and faithful to slavery at every election, did not / greatly outnumber among us the zealots called Comeouters, who would / not vote at all under a constitution recognizing the right of men to / own men. Our paper was Freesoil, and its field was large among that / vast majority of the people who believed that slavery would finally / perish if kept out of the territories, and confined to the old Slave / States.