American Citizen (Canton, Miss.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
654 issues from 1865 to 1881, published in Canton, Mississippi, digitised for Chronicling America.
Cotton was the primary crop in Madison County, one of the richest farming sections of antebellum Mississippi. An important railroad center, Canton, the county seat, was the northern terminus of the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern, and the southern terminus for the Mississippi Central lines. When fighting came during the Civil War, the railroads were the target. In 1874 the two lines were bought and reorganized by the Illinois Central. By the end of the 19th century, diversification added fruits and vegetables, shipped by rail to northern markets, as profitable agricultural products.
Canton’s long-running American Citizen (1851-63, 1864-90) had several preceding four-page, weekly titles that supported the Whig Party: Canton Herald and Mississippi Intelligencer (1836?-37); Canton Herald (1837-39); Madison Whig Advocate, also known as the Madison County Whig Advocate (1839-41); and the Mississippi Creole (1841-51). During the Civil War, the Tri-weekly Citizen (1863-64) was just two pages long. Shortly after the war, the American Citizen paper appeared on a semiweekly basis (1865-66) before returning to its pre-war format and frequency of four pages published weekly.
Although clearly Southern in sentiment, the political affiliation of the papers was not always proclaimed. John F. Bosworth, who joined Creole editor John N. Montgomery in 1851, was a member of the short-lived, moderate Constitutional Union Party after the Whig Party’s demise. The paper’s motto in the…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Canton, Mississippi, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress