Gazette, wrote: “It is no wonder that a darling so carefully guarded and powerfully supported, should sometimes grow wanton and luxurious, and misuse an indulgence granted it, merely to preserve its just freedom inviolate: It has been tho’t safer to suffer it to go beyond the bounds that might strictly be justified by reason.”12
But early American newspapers did not have long shelf lives, even in a city as hyperliterate and news-hungry as Hartford. Of the eight newspapers started in the capital city in the 1780s, only two, including the Mercury, were still publishing twenty years later.
The Mercury did not survive by being tepid. Babcock’s paper was outspoken enough to offend a Federalist member of the clergy in Litchfield, Conn. In 1806 the Reverend Dan Huntington sued Babcock for “willful falsehood.” Despite multiple witnesses who testified in his favor, Babcock was found guilty and fined one thousand dollars. He pouted in the Mercury, “We live in a conquered country.”
Furthermore, Babcock wrote, anxious to guard the freedom of the press (all spellings are his): “It does not hurt character nor feelings nor the Law to declare of certain republican clergy-men that they are ideots and apastates, nor to charge other republicans with swingling, forger, burglary, murder. So far from it law and religion are glorified by the very slanders. But turn the tables and a federal court and jury will discover that society is on the precipice of anarchy.”13
Boldfaced names from American history frequently graced the Mercury’s pages. On May 10, 1790, Benjamin Franklin wrote in its pages to Noah Webster that he was surprised to find several new words had been introduced into “our parliamentary language.” Franklin was not amused. He wrote: “For example, I find a verb formed from the substantive notice: ‘I should not have noticed this, were it not,’ etc … If you should happen to be of my opinion with respect to these innovations, you will use your authority in reprobating them. The Latin language, long they have used in distributing knowledge among the different nations of Europe, is daily more and more neglected.”14
Thomas Paine wrote Babcock in 1805, asking him to print a letter he’d sent earlier: “My last letter (the 8th) is the most important of any I have published. I have been disappointed in not seeing it in your paper. I have reason to believe the matters therein stated will be taken up at the next meeting of Congress, and the inquiry at that time, will not be sufficiently understood by those who had not an opportunity of seeing that letter. I know the feds want to keep that letter out of sight.”
The Mercury also published a January 1, 1795, essay, “A News-Boy’s Address to the Readers of the Mercury,” which included:
For this, I tript it, o’er the Town
And fpread the Mercury, up and down.15
The newspaper particularly opposed what Babcock thought was a growing theocracy in the new country. To one writer’s suggestion that the preamble of the Constitution include a mention of the country’s belief in “the one living and true God,” a letter signed simply “Elihu,” he responded: “A low-minded man may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think Himself slighted and dishonored if not complimented.”16
In addition, the Mercury was home to two-fisted political satire. The newspaper published works such as “The Echo,” pugnacious couplet poetry written mostly by Richard Alsop, a member of the Connecticut Wits, a group of mostly Yale graduates that included Babcock’s early business partner, Joel Barlow.17 Over pints at the downtown Black Horse Tavern, the men helped form the myth that would be America—though as a body of work, their poetry was too infused with optimism to survive subsequent ages.18 (Maybe they would have been perfectly at home reading, or writing, the hopeful Epic of America.) The Wits were mostly Federalists, Calvinists, and neoclassicists for whom poetry was an “elegant avocation.”19
The Mercury was not the first Babcock newspaper. Before moving to the Hartford area, Elisha published a paper in Massachusetts. The family came to Connecticut so Elisha could run a paper mill that sat at what is now near the border of East Hartford and Manchester, Conn., along the Hockanum River.20
At first it looked as if the family had made a huge mistake leaving their Massachusetts home. In 1778 their mill burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances, at a loss of more than five thousand pounds. Even worse, reams of paper and rags were destroyed in the fire. Mills could be rebuilt, but rags, which were used to make paper, were in short supply. A paper mill could not run without a rag delivery system.21 The publisher of the Courant, the widow Hannah Bunce Watson, petitioned the state assembly for a lottery to raise money to rebuild the mill. The assembly approved it, the lottery was a success, the mill was rebuilt, and—rag collection system back in place—the mill came under the management of Babcock.22 The family then moved to the capital city at the urging of Barlow, an acerbic writer who on his graduation from Yale College wrote a friend, “We are not the first men in the world to have broke loose from college without fortune to puff us into public notice, [but] if ever virtue [and merit] are to be rewarded, it is in America.”23
Hannah Bunce Watson.
Both the Courant and the Mercury surged ahead in 1792, when Congress passed the Post Office Act. The law not only transformed the postal service into what was arguably the “central administrative apparatus of an independent state,” but it helped transform newspapers into something viable and influential.24 Before the act, postal carriers were not required to deliver newspapers. Carriers were happy to deliver newspapers from one printer to the other, but home delivery was rare. Readers of newspapers mostly purchased them on the street, or they went to the newspaper offices to buy a copy.
Once people could enjoy home delivery by mail, readership exploded.25 No one could have predicted the effect that would have on newspaper circulation, and newspapers’ influence.26 Suddenly, printers could ship newspapers for pennies, and they did. By 1830 the postal service was delivering two million more newspapers than letters.27
But even that boost wasn’t enough to make newspapers lucrative. One historian estimates that just 5 percent of families subscribed to newspapers. So in addition to bookselling, to supplement their income Babcock and Barlow sold an almanac whose content was lifted from a similar publication by Isaac Bickerstaff, a London astrologer. With no copyright laws to dissuade them, the duo largely plagiarized Bickerstaff, and for that they were chided in the pages of their competitor, the Courant.
Printed admonishments between newspaper publishers were common in the early American press. In one 1817 brief, the Courant called a story that ran earlier that week in the Mercury a “base and malignant falsehood.”28 The Mercury gave as good as it got, but most of the carping was for show. Each newspaper tended to reprint the other’s stories, and a letter to the editor in the Courant might just as often take to task something that had run in the Mercury.
Babcock continued to expand his printing empire. He printed the almanac, poetry, and hymnals, including a popular revamping of hymns from Isaac Watts. He printed work by his friend Noah Webster.29 He sold books wholesale from New York to buyers in Louisiana, South Carolina, and the West Indies.
Babcock also participated in civic goings-on, as would any self-respecting newspaper publisher. He served on a committee to improve the town’s schools. He gave speeches. He hawked his paper. Between the farm, the well, the newspapers, and the bookselling, the family thrived.
The Babcock family had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood. That was about the average family size
