The Role of the Business Press in the Commercial Life of Cincinnati, 1831–1912

Richard Smith, a teenaged Irish immigrant who arrived in New York City in December 1841, was an exceptionally industrious young man. Along with his mother, he immediately made his way to Cincinnati, a bustling city full of promise, and apprenticed himself to a carpenter. But his future lay in the news business. In 1844, Andrew Peabody hired him to collect commercial information, such as commodity prices in the city, which Peabody then published in the weekly he had started that year, Peabody’s Price Current and Commercial Chronicle. And in 1846, when Peabody became the first superintendent of the Cincinnati Merchants’ Exchange, he took Smith with him to work at the exchange, again as a news gatherer.¹

In January 1849, Smith took over for Peabody as superintendent of the exchange and also bought Peabody’s publication, renaming it the Cincinnati Price Current, Commercial Intelligencer and Merchants’ Transcript; and in large bold type, in the first column of page one, he placed this line: “Issued from the Merchants’ Exchange.”² This transfer of newspaper ownership at the same time that Smith took over as superintendent was no coincidence: the Current served in part as an in-house chronicle of the exchange, and it only made sense for the head of the exchange to also run the publication, because the exchange and the Price Current reinforced each other: the greater the activity at the exchange, the more interest there would be in the Price Current, and the greater its circulation, the more interest there would be in the exchange.

The Cincinnati Price Current was by no means unique in nineteenth-century America. At least sixteen different newspaper-like price currents preceded Cincinnati’s, and about half a dozen more followed its 1844 founding. In addition, no fewer than thirty smaller, letter-sheet price currents (including two in Cincinnati in the 1830s) were published. The Cincinnati Price Current and others of its type looked very much like the general-interest newspapers of their day: they generally were four-page broadsheets filled with advertising and business-related information such as shipping news, market reports, and of course, the selling prices of goods. These papers were the forerunners of current business publications such as the Wall Street Journal, which got its start in 1889. But while the Journal would go on to become the nation’s foremost business newspaper, the currents would all fade away or fundamentally change into different kinds of publications by the early twentieth century, and most disappeared much sooner.³

Why did America’s price currents appear when they did? What role did they play in the economic lives of the cities they served? And why did they fade away? Only a few scholars have addressed those questions, and generally in little depth. To answer those questions, this essay delves deeply into records of institutions that interacted with Cincinnati’s price currents, like the Cincinnati Merchants’ Exchange, to gain insights into the forces that shaped the publications. It also relies on the writings of contemporary observers. But more than that, this study examines how changes in the Price Current mirrored, and to some degree helped bring about, changes in Cincinnati itself and how those changes affected Cincinnati’s role in inter-regional trade and in the nation’s system of cities. This study reveals that the Cincinnati Price Current and related publications helped merchants and others engaged in commerce manage the high uncertainty and risk of conducting business in the nineteenth century—and that in doing so, these publications helped boost Cincinnati’s growth. Before examining how that happened, we begin with an overview of the history of commercial publications before they appeared in Cincinnati.

Historian John J. McCusker, who places the first known price current at around 1540 in Antwerp, wrote that these publications initially came about to broadly disseminate price information about goods at a city’s marketplace, or exchange. Currents let distant merchants, tradesmen, and others know what was available at an exchange, and at what prices, helping them judge if traveling there...