Liberty Advocate (Liberty, Miss.)

• 1837–1866
• Newspaper

Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.

292 issues from 1837 to 1866, published in Liberty, Mississippi, digitised for Chronicling America.

Situated on the Louisiana border in the southwest corner of Mississippi, Amite County was created in 1809 in the Mississippi Territory, before statehood in 1817. With flat to hilly terrain and sandy and silt loam soil, the area was a rich agricultural and timber-growing region, forested with longleaf yellow pine. Cotton reigned supreme as the antebellum cash crop. The establishment of a seat of government to be known as Liberty was also authorized in 1809 and the town, near a branch of the Amite River, was incorporated in 1828.

Before the Civil War the Liberty Advocate (1835-66) was emphatically “Whig all over,” as proclaimed in a January 10, 1846 article addressed to the newspaper’s patrons. Its motto by 1846 was “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable”; by 1862 it had changed to “In native arms, and native ranks, The [sic] only hope of freedom dwells,” reflecting the paper’s support of the Southern cause once the Civil War started. Although not its founder, Augustus W. Forsythe published the Advocate by January 1837 and, according to George P. Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory, was still the editor/publisher in 1869 of the then Democratic newspaper. By 1870, Forsythe’s daughter, Piney Woods Forsythe, was the publisher; the Advocate‘s last entry in Rowell’s Directory was in 1877. Except for a time during the Civil War when the paper was reduced to two columns on two pages, the Advocate was a four-page, weekly although the day of publication varied…

Genres

News

Published in

Liberty, 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