Elisha Bates and the Mt. Pleasant Printing Press 1817-1827

ELISHA BATES17 ELISHA BATES AND THE MT. PLEASANT PRINTING PRESS 1817-1827 By Robert J. Leach ELISHA BATES, a weighty Friend from Yorktown, Virginia , moved with his family to Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, in 1817. At that time Mt. Pleasant was the meeting place for Ohio Yearly Meeting. There Elisha Bates did not pursue his former occupation as a schoolteacher, but became a printer and publisher. He was selected Clerk of the Yearly Meeting in 1819 and in 1824, a position which he held almost continuously till 1834. Although Bates was the most significant Friend that Quakerism produced in Ohio in the nineteenth century, he has been neglected by historians of the Society till today. The following article is a chapter from a thesis presented to the Ohio State University in partial requirement of the degree of Master of Arts in 1939. This thesis is entitled "Elisha Bates, 1817-1827. The Influence of an Ohio Publisher upon Quaker Reform." ELISHA BATES may have found the prospect of opening a school unfavorable. What the family did for a living from July 1817 to October 1818 is unknown. Perhaps they possessed an independent income, for Bates complained in November 1821, after three years of publication work, that he was considering discontinuing it, because it was a financial burden ! 1 At any rate he became interested in newspapers and printing. In the fall of 1818 he purchased Charles Osborn's famous paper, the Philanthropist, since Osborn had in mind to move to the real frontier in western Ohio. Through this purchase Bates may have acquired both the printing press and the property which was known in town in after years as the home of Rebecca Bates. Elisha Bates supervised the raising of a house in Mt. Pleasant in 1816 when on a visit. Whether or not this was the house near the meeting house is not known.2 That brick structure, which has 1 Annetta C. Walsh, "Three Anti-Slavery Newspapers," The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, xxxi, 187. 2 Fairfax Harrison, Aris Sortis Focisque, Being a Memoir of an American Family the Harrisons of Skimino and particularly of Jesse Burton Harrison and Burton Norwell Harrison, 41. 18 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION since been destroyed, stood on a little rise just above and across the road from the meeting house, in some ways the most admirable situation in town. Near sunset time each evening the family could look across miles of vistas, past the meeting house in "grandeur" aloof from the town, toward an occasional farm breaking the "continuity of the waving forest" beyond; and could see, near the horizon, the '"blue vapour" rising from the Ohio River.3 From this delightful base of operations appeared, on October 18, Elisha Bates's first issue of the Philanthropist, a weekly newspaper of four pages (9%" ? 12%"), in form similar to that which Osborn had issued, but different in tenor. Osborn had devoted his paper largely to the immediate emancipation of the slave, but had included articles bearing upon temperance and peace.4 With him had been associated Benjamin Lundy of later abolitionist fame. Lundy was a birthright Friend, who, at the age of nineteen, moved to Mt. Pleasant (in 1807). The following year he was apprenticed in the saddlery business in Wheeling. He set up his own establishment in Mt. Pleasant in 1812, but soon removed to St. Clairsville, where trade was better.5 In the following year Lundy formed the "Union Humane Society" there, the first abolitionist society in Ohio.6 Publications of this society had interested Charles Osborn, who had come to Mt. Pleasant with slavery brooding on his mind.7 Osborn sought the literary assistance of young Lundy, promising him the assistant editorship of his paper. In the summer of 1818, the former decided to boat his business to St. Louis where he could get a good price for it, and then to devote himself to the Philanthropist. While he was in St. Louis the Missouri Compromise crisis broke. Lundy decided to remain a while to fight the proslavery forces through editorials.8 Meanwhile Osborn sold his paper. Lundy returned late in the year 1820, when he became associated with...