Henry Van Pelt

The Weekly Appeal was founded in 1841 by Henry Van Pelt who was both printer and editor. Memphis was still quite small at the time and Mr. Van Pelt had few readers. Most of the readers he did have bought a less expensive weekly version of the paper. During the 1840’s reporters commonly took sides openly in political races. The predominant party in Memphis was the Whigs. Henry Van Pelt was a democrat. For that reason the Appeal’s circulation was much lower than the leading Whig paper, The Eagle and another Whig paper, The Enquirer commanded about a fourth of the readership with about a third going to Van Pelt’s Appeal.

Although the papers spoke out strongly against each other they also viewed themselves as a local industry. They tended to actually help their competition during emergencies and often joined forces to deride the US Post Office (the post office delivered news papers at that time) in an attempt to give their customers faster deliveries.

Many of these early newspapers were large, one page affairs with 9 or more columns. News was mainly cut and pasted from other newspapers. The Weekly Appeal was always working to obtain newspapers from larger cities quickly. Often news from places as close as New Orleans would not appear in the Appeal for two or three weeks. The papers were peppered with advertisements sold by the square inch. While the news consisted almost entirely of politics and salacious violence from the larger cities, the advertisements were local and dominated by the “patent medicines” so popular in the middle and late 1800s.

On April 21, 1851 the Appeal announced its 10th birthday. Two days later the paper used black borders to report the death of their founder Henry Van Pelt. After Van Pelt’s death Benjamin F. Dill and John R. McClanahan took the paper through the most traumatic period of our nations history.

Although the Appeal had strongly worded its opposition to the southern states secession from the union, it never spoke directly on the moral question of slavery. Given the environment of the time one is hardly surprised. Increasingly the northern states and southern states were seeing themselves as different and opposed. In the north there were moral objections to slavery. On the other hand the north made no money from slavery. In the south an end to slavery meant not only the loss of valuable “property” to moneyed southerners it also meant plunging the slaves into a refugee, or even revolutionary status.

It is clear that slavery underpinned the Civil War, but the rhetoric of the time does not always mention the subject. The Appeal seldom did, opting rather for a concentration on “states rights” and the strain of “northern aggression”. While the south was right to point out that states had commonly been considered voluntary members of the union, they underestimated the resolve of the north to retain that union.

The site of this war was the state of Kansas. Seeking to be admitted to the union there was a question of admitting Kansas as a “slave state” or a “free state”. The election of Abraham Lincoln caused at least 5 states to determine that this conclusion was forgone. Very quickly state after state seceded from the union. Tennessee, a border state was torn. Memphis was not a place with many slave owners. Most of the slaves in this urban area were “house slaves”. On the other hand Memphis was replete with cotton merchants whose livelihood was tied closely to the slave-intensive cotton industry in Northern Mississippi and rural West Tennessee.