The Press: Older Than the Country

The news from Boston was sketchy and unconfirmed. Still, no newspaper that took pride in its independence could ignore it. So the Connecticut Courant, in Hartford, boldly displayed the item: "We hear from Boston that last Thursday evening, between 300 and 400 Boxes of the celebrated East India TEA, by some ACCIDENT! which happened in an attempt to get it on Shore, fell overboard—That the Boxes burst open and the Tea was swallowed up by the vast Abyss!"

When that historical incident from America's past appeared in the Courant in the issue of Dec. 21, 1773, the paper was already a veteran of nine years. It had staked a proud and exclusive claim to a title that it still holds. This year the Hartford Courant observes its 200th anniversary, a chronological fact that makes it the oldest newspaper in the U.S.* — an institution some twelve years senior to the nation itself.

Farms for Lease. Today, American schoolchildren commit to memory the names, dates and events that the Courant once committed to print. In 1765 the paper published a wrathful editorial ("The most arbitrary monarchs in the universe") and suspended publication for five weeks to protest the Stamp Act just enforced by England. Thomas Paine's revolutionary tracts were carried in full in the Courant; so was the Declaration of Independence—on an inside page, and under the mildest of headlines: A DECLARATION BY THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

George Washington was not only the subject of Courant stories, he was a reader and advertiser. On March 14, 1796, he bought half a page in the paper to offer some of his Virginia farm land for lease to "real farmers of good reputation, and none others need apply." Thomas Jefferson sued the paper for libel after an 1806 Courant accusation that he had secretly bribed France to win its support. He lost his case in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Courant's founder, a traveling printer named Thomas Green, piloted his paper for only three years. Then he rejoined a brother in New Haven, surrendering command of the Courant to Ebenezer Watson, one of his own printers. Young Watson enlisted the Courant in the cause of independence, but he did not live to see the dream come true or his paper prosper. Smallpox killed him during the Revolutionary War, leaving his young widow Hannah, mother of five, to manage the shop. She managed well. In 1778, when the Courant's paper mill burned to the ground, Hannah talked the Connecticut general assembly into sponsoring a statewide lottery, and from the proceeds ($31,000) she was given $5,000 to rebuild the mill.

The Courant continued to prosper, but in a diminishing corner of a rapidly expanding national map. As soon as the Republican Party was founded in 1854, the Courant joined it, and has never left. The paper has since broken ranks to endorse only one Democrat for any office. It urged Hartford to elect Thomas Spellacy for mayor in 1935. The Courant's influence in its own bailiwick can be measured by the fact that Spellacy was elected.