About the Commonwealth
The Commonwealth (1862-96) was a weekly antislavery newspaper published in Boston beginning in September 1862, a few weeks before the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Commonwealth demanded the immediate emancipation of the enslaved, and the Emancipation Proclamation did not go far enough for its editors, who pushed for more immediate and extensive reform of American systems of power. The Commonwealth committed to securing the rights of people of color, rights that the paper’s first editor Moncure Conway argued in an early editorial had always belonged to everyone before proslavery legions co-opted the Constitution.
The Commonwealth was published by James M. Stone, secretary of the Emancipation League and distributor of the League’s publications (which could be picked up at the office of the Commonwealth). The paper was printed by the Press of Commercial Printing House for the first half of its inaugural volume and by James Redpath for the rest of the first volume. The paper was edited first by Moncure Daniel Conway, former editor of Cincinnati’s The Dial and the Virginia-born son of slaveholders, from September 1862 to April 1863 when Conway departed for London. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the John Brown conspirator who would go on to edit the Springfield Republican and who was arrested and released for his knowledge of Harper’s Ferry, edited the Commonwealth for the rest of its inaugural year before being appointed Secretary of Massachusetts’s Board of State Charities.
Under Sanborn’s editorship, the pages of the Commonwealth contain various writings and speeches by John Brown’s closest allies, known as the Secret Six, including the enlistment letters from Stearns and speeches by Gerrit Smith, and Sanborn’s own contributions. This deep and sustained buttressing of John Brown’s legacy by his most prominent supporters, while present in a lighter form during Conway’s editorship, made John Brown’s cause a feature of the Commonwealth under Sanborn.
Both Conway and Sanborn desired a literary focus for the Commonwealth in addition to a radical politics, and they sought work written for the Commonwealth from leading Massachusetts authors including poet Caroline A. Mason, transcendentalist Rev. David Atwood Wasson, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Julia Ward Howe. Conway and Sanborn contributed poems, as well. The most valued and enduring of the Commonwealth’s literary works proved to be Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, a series of letters credited with starting Alcott’s lucrative career that was published as a book by James Redpath, printer of the Commonwealth, only a few months after its serialization. The Louisa May Alcott collection includes images of Hospital Sketches as it appeared in the Commonwealth, detailed ads for Hospital Sketches that were printed in the Commonwealth, and other contributions by Alcott to the paper.
Starting the Commonwealth
Conway credits a group of politically connected and powerful Bostonians, members of the Bird Club named after political operative Frank William Bird, with the idea for an immediate emancipation paper. One Bird Club member in particular, George Luther Stearns, brought Conway from Cincinatti to Boston to edit the paper. By the end of July 1862, Stearns wrote to Conway that he was ready to “‘furnish the means for the present publication of a weekly newspaper which will fearlessly tell the truth about this war’" (qtd. in Conway 364).
The paper printed its first issue on September 6, 1862. Conway was the editor of record, but he was advised by Stearns, publisher Stone, and the abolitionist mathematician Elizur Wright, and Frank Sanborn, Conway's friend from Harvard. The group agreed on a lot, but they also disagreed over Conway's radicalism. More about these interpersonal clashes over Conway’s editorializing can be found on the forthcoming Moncure D. Conway page.
Subscribers, Sellers, and Audience
In its first issue on September 6, 1862, twenty thousand copies of the Commonwealth were printed, and the paper ambitiously predicted need for fifty or a hundred thousand copies the next week. Of these initial twenty thousand copies, several hundred went to subscribers who had already paid the $2 for a year’s subscription and others were sent out, unbidden, to encourage subscriptions. Subscribers could arrange delivery for 50 cents. Copies of the paper could also be bought at several establishments between Boston Common and the Old State House, at the Boston & Worcester Railroad’s terminus in south Boston, and in Manhattan. A map of sellers, printers, and the paper’s offices, can be found here.
It’s difficult to say with certainty who, in addition to editors of papers in major northeastern cities, was reading the Commonwealth. A list of locations in Boston that sold the Commonwealth was printed often in 1863, and the retort to the New York Leader identifies two retailers in Manhattan that carried the paper. The locations of these retailers suggests that individual copies of the paper were most available to downtown professionals, those who lived downtown or travelled there regularly. Correspondence printed in the Commonwealth suggests a more dynamic readership, not geographically bound, of committed abolitionists. In 1862 and 1863, the paper printed letters from famed abolitionists including Sojourner Truth and Harriett Tubman in addition to Stearns and Alcott. There were letters from anti-slavery Union soldiers and teachers working to educate freed people, too.