Thomas Paine wrote Babcock in 1805, asking him to print a letter he’d sent earlier: “My last letter (the 8th) is the most important of any I have published. I have been disappointed in not seeing it in your paper. I have reason to believe the matters therein stated will be taken up at the next meeting of Congress, and the inquiry at that time, will not be sufficiently understood by those who had not an opportunity of seeing that letter. I know the feds want to keep that letter out of sight.”
The Mercury also published a January 1, 1795, essay, “A News-Boy’s Address to the Readers of the Mercury,” which included:
For this, I tript it, o’er the Town
And fpread the Mercury, up and down.15
The newspaper particularly opposed what Babcock thought was a growing theocracy in the new country. To one writer’s suggestion that the preamble of the Constitution include a mention of the country’s belief in “the one living and true God,” a letter signed simply “Elihu,” he responded: “A low-minded man may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think Himself slighted and dishonored if not complimented.”16
In addition, the Mercury was home to two-fisted political satire. The newspaper published works such as “The Echo,” pugnacious couplet poetry written mostly by Richard Alsop, a member of the Connecticut Wits, a group of mostly Yale graduates that included Babcock’s early business partner, Joel Barlow.17 Over pints at the downtown Black Horse Tavern, the men helped form the myth that would be America—though as a body of work, their poetry was too infused with optimism to survive subsequent ages.18 (Maybe they would have been perfectly at home reading, or writing, the hopeful Epic of America.) The Wits were mostly Federalists, Calvinists, and neoclassicists for whom poetry was an “elegant avocation.”19
The Mercury was not the first Babcock newspaper. Before moving to the Hartford area, Elisha published a paper in Massachusetts. The family came to Connecticut so Elisha could run a paper mill that sat at what is now near the border of East Hartford and Manchester, Conn., along the Hockanum River.20
At first it looked as if the family had made a huge mistake leaving their Massachusetts home. In 1778 their mill burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances, at a loss of more than five thousand pounds. Even worse, reams of paper and rags were destroyed in the fire. Mills could be rebuilt, but rags, which were used to make paper, were in short supply. A paper mill could not run without a rag delivery system.21 The publisher of the Courant, the widow Hannah Bunce Watson, petitioned the state assembly for a lottery to raise money to rebuild the mill. The assembly approved it, the lottery was a success, the mill was rebuilt, and—rag collection system back in place—the mill came under the management of Babcock.22 The family then moved to the capital city at the urging of Barlow, an acerbic writer who on his graduation from Yale College wrote a friend, “We are not the first men in the world to have broke loose from college without fortune to puff us into public notice, [but] if ever virtue [and merit] are to be rewarded, it is in America.”23
Hannah Bunce Watson.
Both the Courant and the Mercury surged ahead in 1792, when Congress passed the Post Office Act. The law not only transformed the postal service into what was arguably the “central administrative apparatus of an independent state,” but it helped transform newspapers into something viable and influential.24 Before the act, postal carriers were not required to deliver newspapers. Carriers were happy to deliver newspapers from one printer to the other, but home delivery was rare. Readers of newspapers mostly purchased them on the street, or they went to the newspaper offices to buy a copy.
Once people could enjoy home delivery by mail, readership exploded.25 No one could have predicted the effect that would have on newspaper circulation, and newspapers’ influence.26 Suddenly, printers could ship newspapers for pennies, and they did. By 1830 the postal service was delivering two million more newspapers than letters.27
But even that boost wasn’t enough to make newspapers lucrative. One historian estimates that just 5 percent of families subscribed to newspapers. So in addition to bookselling, to supplement their income Babcock and Barlow sold an almanac whose content was lifted from a similar publication by Isaac Bickerstaff, a London astrologer. With no copyright laws to dissuade them, the duo largely plagiarized Bickerstaff, and for that they were chided in the pages of their competitor, the Courant.
Printed admonishments between newspaper publishers were common in the early American press. In one 1817 brief, the Courant called a story that ran earlier that week in the Mercury a “base and malignant falsehood.”28 The Mercury gave as good as it got, but most of the carping was for show. Each newspaper tended to reprint the other’s stories, and a letter to the editor in the Courant might just as often take to task something that had run in the Mercury.
Babcock continued to expand his printing empire. He printed the almanac, poetry, and hymnals, including a popular revamping of hymns from Isaac Watts. He printed work by his friend Noah Webster.29 He sold books wholesale from New York to buyers in Louisiana, South Carolina, and the West Indies.
Babcock also participated in civic goings-on, as would any self-respecting newspaper publisher. He served on a committee to improve the town’s schools. He gave speeches. He hawked his paper. Between the farm, the well, the newspapers, and the bookselling, the family thrived.
The Babcock family had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood. That was about the average family size at the time.30 For the most part, colonial and early American (white) women believed their duty was to bear as many children as possible—preferably sons, who could help with the family business, which was often farming. Only as the new country gave birth to itself, (white) women began to push for a kind of equal footing with their menfolk that included a say in family size.31 In early Hartford, this option was not available to most African American women, 90 percent of whom lived in slavery.32
The Babcocks are listed in the country’s first census in 1790 as free and white. They owned no slaves, though slavery was present in the state (more on that later). When Elisha Babcock died of pneumonia at age sixty-eight on April 7, 1821, he was buried in the Old South Cemetery of Hartford’s Second Congregational Church, now known as South Church. The Mercury continued publishing, though it is unclear who conducted the actual business. Some speculate the Babcock family—Dolly among them, until her death in 1832—kept the press rolling until the paper’s demise in 1833.
The family saltbox became home for an unmarried son and daughter, Col. James and Dolly, named for her mother. James Babcock was a sales agent for a man named Ira Todd, who sold among other goods French burr millstones, considered the best stones for milling flour and grain.33 Col. Babcock also served on a committee to raise money to aid people injured in a fire in Virginia. His business was frequently mentioned in Courant ads selling Sicily lemons and wax calf-skins of the highest quality, and asking for donations of long hair that would be used to stuff mattresses.34 (Hair mattresses were considered a step up from a stack of hemlock boughs.) When Miss Dolly Babcock, the daughter, joined her parents in death in 1871, the Courant erroneously trumpeted that she was, at age ninety, the oldest Hartford resident to die that year. In fact, that honor fell to Mrs. Tabitha Camp, who bested Dolly Babcock’s time on earth by a year and a half.35
An 1877 real estate notice offered—“for sale cheap”—“the property known as the Dolly Babcock homestead,” situated south of the home of a professor on a lot that was roughly two hundred by three hundred feet.36 The simple, high-pitched roofs of Hartford (the