Staunton Vindicator (Staunton, Va.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,665 issues from 1860 to 1896, published in Staunton, Virginia, digitised for Chronicling America.
Residents of Staunton and Augusta County started 1845 with a new choice of weekly newspapers. The Augusta Democrat was perhaps a welcome relief to readers who didn’t appreciate the Whig perspectives of the existing Staunton Spectator. Through 51 years, four names, and a rotating cast of editors, the paper maintained its commitment to Democrat party perspectives as well as to the economic well-being of Staunton and the counties of central western Virginia.
Henry Wartmann, the paper’s founder, sold it to Vincent Geiger in June 1845. Geiger assured readers the Democrat favored a state constitutional convention to extend suffrage and opposed the establishment of a national bank. For seven years, the paper was edited at times by Geiger and at other times by F. J. Alfred, both of whom also sometimes held joint or sole proprietorship. When the paper became the Republican Vindicator in January 1849, Geiger explained the change as a way to keep accounts straight under yet another new joint proprietorship. The paper kept its motto of “Truth fears nothing but concealment,” but by January 1854, when the paper was being run by an entirely new team, it was “A Democratic Journal—Devoted to Politics, Literature, Agriculture, and the Diffusion of General Intelligence, the Markets, &c.”
This mouthful has the mark of Samuel McPherson Yost, an Augusta County native born in 1829 who had been trying to start his own paper since at least February 1849, when he advertised a prospectus for “The…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Staunton, Virginia, 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