{"id":176,"date":"2010-08-07T21:12:54","date_gmt":"2010-08-08T01:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/?p=176"},"modified":"2010-08-07T21:12:54","modified_gmt":"2010-08-08T01:12:54","slug":"dickinson-college-1860-commencement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/dickinson-college-1860-commencement\/","title":{"rendered":"Dickinson College 1860 Commencement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/33397\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2718\" style=\"margin: 10px\" src=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/files\/2010\/07\/1860herald-300x176.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"176\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/17946\" target=\"_blank\">Dickinson College<\/a>&#8216;s 1860 commencement exercises occurred on Saturday evening, July 7, 1860.\u00a0 Two local papers\u2019 contrasting reports on the evening demonstrate the partisan nature of nineteenth century newspapers.\u00a0 The Carlisle paper, <em>The Herald<\/em>, founded by Ekuries Beatty in 1799 originally supported the Whig party, but by 1860 printed articles with a strong Republican bias. In contrast the <em>American Volunteer <\/em>(another Carlisle paper) founded by William B. and James Underwood in 1814, reported the Democrat Party\u2019s view of the news.\u00a0 The <em>Volunteer<\/em> charged Dickinson\u2019s commencement speakers with attacking the \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/33399\" target=\"_blank\">vulnerable<\/a>\u201d democratic president <a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/5252\" target=\"_blank\">James Buchanan<\/a>, himself a Dickinson alum from \u201cwhen the institution was worthy of the name of a college.\u201d According to the <em>Volunteer<\/em> many of the commencement speeches were full of dangerous \u201cAbolitionist preaching\u201d which must \u201cbe stopped.\u201d Mr. George A. Coffey, of Philadelphia, spoke at an alumni gathering on the Wednesday before commencement and particularly offended the writers of the <em>Volunteer<\/em> who labeled his speech as \u201cfierce and outrageous.\u201d\u00a0 While the <em>Herald<\/em> admitted that Mr. Coffey introduced \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu\/node\/33397\" target=\"_blank\">topics<\/a> which were offensive to many in the audience,\u201d the paper concluded \u201cit was a masterly speech.\u201d Overall, the <em>Herald <\/em>presented a very different picture of the commencement exercises, carefully listing the names of the student speakers followed by a brief, usually complimentary, analysis of their speeches.\u00a0 The two Carlisle papers\u2019 distinctly partisan accounts of Dickinson\u2019s 1860 commencement reflect the political spin of the press throughout the Civil War era.<\/p>\n<p>For modern scholarship on the subject of partisanship and the press see David T. Z. Minchin\u2019s<em> Just the Facts: How &#8220;Objectivity&#8221; Came to Define American Journalism<\/em> (1998). The Library of Congress also provides an <a href=\"http:\/\/chroniclingamerica.loc.gov\/search\/titles\/\" target=\"_blank\">online newspaper directory<\/a> to find more information on newspapers from across the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dickinson College&#8216;s 1860 commencement exercises occurred on Saturday evening, July 7, 1860.\u00a0 Two local papers\u2019 contrasting reports on the evening demonstrate the partisan nature of nineteenth century newspapers.\u00a0 The Carlisle paper, The Herald, founded by Ekuries Beatty in 1799 originally &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/dickinson-college-1860-commencement\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Dickinson College 1860 Commencement<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antebellum-1840-1861"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}