Western Sentinel (Winston [i.e. Winston-Salem], N.C.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
690 issues from 1857 to 1886, published in Winston, North Carolina, digitised for Chronicling America.
Francis Eugene Boner (1835-1859) and James Collins established the Western Sentinel in 1856 as a weekly Democratic newspaper serving western North Carolina. Published in Winston, the Forsyth County seat and one of the two towns later combined to form Winston-Salem, the Western Sentinel billed itself as “devoted to national and state politics, literature, foreign and domestic news.”
Collins’s involvement with the Sentinel was brief. His name had disappeared from the masthead by May 1857. Boner brought several years of experience to the newspaper, having joined The People’s Press of neighboring Salem, N.C. as a 16-year-old apprentice in 1851. With Collins’s departure from the Sentinel, Boner found a new partner in John Wesley Alspaugh (1859-1912). Alspaugh was a lawyer in Winston and, like Boner, was listed on the masthead as editor and proprietor.
Within two years of partnering in the Sentinel, Alspaugh was the sole owner and editor. On June 24, 1859, the Sentinel carried news of Boner’s death from “consumption.” Under Alspaugh’s leadership, the newspaper supported Southern secession in 1861 and championed the Confederacy during the Civil War.
In the November 22, 1866 Sentinel, Alspaugh announced the newspaper’s sale to George M. Mathes (1842-?). In the same issue, Mathes wrote that the Sentinel would support the Conservative Party, a coalition of Democrats who repudiated Confederate ideas and supported limited civil rights, though not voting rights, for Blacks.
Mathes…
- Genres
- Westerns, News
- Published in
- Winston, North Carolina, 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