The Ouachita Telegraph (Monroe, La.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,055 issues from 1869 to 1889, published in Monroe, Louisiana, digitised for Chronicling America.
On September 18, 1865, George William McCranie (1838-1895), a former Confederate army captain, published the first issue of the Weekly Telegraph in Monroe, Louisiana. Located along the Ouachita River in the fertile farm country of northeast Louisiana, Monroe (the seat of Ouachita Parish) was then in a period of growth following its connection to Vicksburg, Mississippi, a key cotton port, by rail in 1855, and then to Shreveport and areas farther west in 1860. Cotton and timber formed the basis of the local economy.
McCranie expanded the Weekly Telegraph from two pages to four in December 1865 and changed its title to the Ouachita Telegraph. Publication of an additional four-page daily version, the Daily Telegraph, commenced in 1870. As Democratic newspapers, the Ouachita Telegraph and Daily Telegraph opposed Radical Republican rule and the empowerment of black voters in Louisiana. In the months leading up to the presidential election of 1868, McCranie published a series of original cartoons in the Ouachita Telegraph ridiculing presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant, Republican officeholders, and their supporters, especially African Americans. He frequently spoke out against the most prominent Republican newspaper in north Louisiana, William Jasper Blackburn’s Homer Iliad. In July 1868, McCranie announced that he would publish a Democratic campaign paper, the Bastrop Saxon, in neighboring Morehouse Parish. He then briefly turned over editorship of the Ouachita Telegraph to…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Monroe, Louisiana, 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