When, soon after, he
began to employ it, he rapidly became an excellent reporter; and
eventually, when he had grown thoroughly versed in public affairs,
confessedly the best reporter that we ever had.
He was now well-prepared to join in the manly strife of business or
politics. His father chose, therefore, at once to commit him to
himself. He judged him mature enough in principles, strong enough in
sense; and feared lest, by being kept too long under guidance and the
easy life of home, he should fall into inertness. He first sent him to
Philadelphia, therefore, to serve as a workman with Birch and Small;
after which, he made for him an engagement on the "National
Intelligencer," as a reporter, and sent him to Washington, in October,
1807.
To that place, changing its name to the one just mentioned, the
father's former paper, "The Gazetteer," had been transferred by his
old associate, Samuel Harrison Smith. Its first issue there
(tri-weekly) was on the 31st of October, 1800, under the double title
of "The National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser." The latter
half of the title seems to have been dropped in 1810, when its present
senior came, for a time, into its sole proprietorship.
More than twice the age of any other journal now extant there,--for
the "Globe" came some thirty, the "Union" some forty-five years
later,--the "Intelligencer" has long stood, in every worthy sense, the
patriarch of our metropolitan press. It has witnessed the rise and
fall around it of full a hundred competitors,--many of them declared
enemies; not a few, what was more dangerous far, professed friends.
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