Davis became advocate for press, speech and abolition

Bill Knight column for 6-6, 7 or 8, 2019

An Illinois innovator and advocate in journalism died 170 years ago this week, ending a life influencing freedom of speech and for the press, and freedom for slaves.

Born in 1793, Samuel H. Davis was a native New Yorker who’d worked at newspapers in Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore, met fellow journalist Horace Greeley and took his advice to “go west.” Intending to move to Wisconsin and start a newspaper there, Davis was delayed by ice at Oquawka, Ill., where he heard that Peoria was without a paper. So, he backtracked 100 miles to buy equipment and founded the Peoria Register and North-Western Gazetteer on April 1, 1837, creating a new model for newspapers in the Midwest -- then America’s frontier.

Unlike many Midwestern papers then, which mostly reprinted miscellaneous and sometimes sensational material from Eastern publications, Davis wanted local news, reliable information, and accountable contributors.

“I would rather chronicle the shingling of a barn in my own town, than to publish the most thrilling incident from abroad,” he wrote.

Peoria’s early 19^th century population was about 1,200, and it seemed to welcome Davis’ four-page newspaper, which featured local news, poetry, woodcut illustrations and advertising -- particularly from lawyers, such as Springfield attorney Stephen A. Douglass (not yet dubbed the “Little Giant”).

The nationally known Greeley described Davis paper as the best newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains, in 1841 writing a Lewistown, Ill., acquaintance saying, “Isn’t Sam Davis of the Peoria Register a first-rate fellow?”

The Register supported the Whig Party, endorsing William Henry Harrison for President in 1840, and 31-year-old Abraham Lincoln as an Illinois delegate to the Electoral College. Besides politics, Davis took part in social causes, including the abolition of slavery.

Initially respected as a moderate in the nation’s heated debate about slavery – admitted to having once owned slaves “in another state” – Davis changed. The year Davis established the Register, St. Louis/Alton newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a mob attacking him for his abolitionist views. Davis vehemently criticized anti-press mobs. And he began to sympathize, then champion, anti-slavery actions. He printed proceedings from the 1838 “Friends of Emancipation” held at Hennepin, Ill. His wife Mary Davis apparently contributed to noted abolitionist Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation,” writing a piece titled “The Cruelty of Slavery.” And by 1847, Samuel and Mary Davis both signed a petition to the Illinois General Assembly to repeal the state’s “black laws” discriminating against African Americans.

Years later, the Monmouth Atlas complimented Davis, writing, “Davis was an early pioneer in the editorial corps, and for many years published the Peoria Register with distinguished zeal and ability. The force and candor of his editorials, together with the neatness and accuracy with which his sheet was characterized, gave his Register a more extended circulation than any other journal in the state at the time. Davis was highly respected.”

Davis sold his paper and retired to a farm in 1842, but a near-riot a year later at Peoria’s Main Street Presbyterian Church, where pro-slavery advocates broke up a meeting of abolitionists, angered him, and he published a pamphlet, “Free Discussion Suppressed in Peoria.”

“Offense was taken [by slavery supporters] and the simple notice of a public meeting was the cause of prostrating the freedom of speech and of the press in Peoria, and giving up the town to the tender mercies of a mob.”

He denounced the ‘slaveocracy’ of the cotton states and the “white slaves of the north fawning around their southern masters.”

Speaking at a March 8, 1843, anti-slavery meeting in Farmington, Davis criticized foes of free speech, both pro-slavery Democrats and Whigs exploiting the issue to gain advantage over opponents in their own political party.

“They ran together like drops of water,” he wrote, “and if these so-called Whigs represent the principles of Whig-ism, then I want nothing more to do with it.”

Davis remained a part-time printer, and six years later contracted cholera and died on June 8, 1849. He’s buried in Springdale Cemetery in an unmarked grave on Masonic Hill. (He’d been the first lodge master of Peoria Lodge No. 15, A.F. & A.M., founded in 1843.)

“Davis is one of Peoria’s forgotten strong men,” wrote Ernest Edward East, a past president of the Illinois State Historical Society, in 1942. “For talent, for moral and civic virtue, and for courage and patriotism, Davis has seldom been equaled in more than a century of Peoria journalism.”

Longtime Peoria newspaperman Thomas Pickett, who partnered with Davis’ son Henry, eulogized the pioneer journalist, saying, “As long as I am able to lift a pen, I hope I shall never cease to revere the memory of Samuel H. Davis.”