The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
4,801 issues from 1887 to 1900, published in Savannah, Georgia, digitised for Chronicling America.
Owner John M. Cooper and Editor William T. Thompson began circulating the four-page Daily Morning News in Savannah on January 15, 1850. The paper boasted a politically neutral voice for reporting the affairs of Georgia’s largest city, in contrast to the political leanings of Savannah’s two preexisting rival newspapers, the Georgian and the Republican. The Morning News differed from its competitors by following the penny-press model that offered readers journalism from a politically independent source at cheaper subscription rates. Uniquely, the paper also offered readers the opportunity to purchase single issues on the city streets. Within three weeks of its founding, the paper claimed the highest circulation rate in Savannah.
Despite claims of political neutrality, the Savannah Morning News gradually began espousing a conservative Democratic viewpoint, spurred largely by growing sectionalism in the United States in the 1850s. Within its pages, Thompson publicly sparred with the Whig-leaning Republican over the future of the South and its relationship with the North. By decade’s end, the paper was fiercely anti-abolitionist and a staunch supporter of Southern autonomy and later secession.
During the Civil War, the Morning News maintained continual publication as a shortened two-page daily until the owners and staff abandoned the paper in anticipation of the arrival of General William T. Sherman’s forces in December 1864. In its stead, Republican publisher Samuel W. Mason…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Savannah, Georgia, 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