Advocate (Pittsburgh)

On 13 August 1832,[1] The Pennsylvanian Advocate was started by James Wilson (paternal grandfather of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson), then of Steubenville, Ohio.[2] Wilson announced in his prospectus that as editor, he would promote protectionism, internal improvements, a sound currency, the independence of Congress and the preservation of the Union, which, at that time, was threatened by a faction in South Carolina and elsewhere in the South.[3] Important to all of these missions, Wilson believed, was to defeat the re-election of President Andrew Jackson.[4]

The first few issues were printed on a weekly basis at Steubenville and sent to Pittsburgh for distribution. Very soon, Wilson had a press set up in a Pittsburgh office and began turning out a tri-weekly edition.[2][4][5][1][6] According to William Bayard Hale, the press was the first west of the Allegheny Mountains that could print a double-page form (one side of a whole sheet) at one impression.[2]

Born during Andrew Jackson's Bank War, the paper met controversy early on when Jacksonian newspapers accused it of accepting payments from the United States Bank to publish pro-Bank propaganda.[7][8] It was reported that a letter intended for James Wilson was mistakenly received by another man of the same name, who opened it and found a $580 check from Nicholas Biddle, the Bank's president.[9] Wilson published an affidavit denying that he had been bribed or corrupted.[10]

With the Advocate about a year old and on its feet, Wilson left the paper to be carried on by his eldest son William Duane Wilson, at first in partnership with Alfred W. Marks.[2][11] Upon this change, the paper issued its first daily edition, under the name Pennsylvania Advocate and Pittsburgh Daily Advertiser.[3] This was the second daily newspaper published in Pittsburgh, debuting just nine weeks after the Pittsburgh Gazette went daily.[12][13]

In keeping with its founding political views, the Advocate became an organ of the newly formed Whig Party.[14] In 1836 it absorbed another Whig paper, the weekly Statesman,[15] which had been established over thirty years earlier as the Commonwealth.[16]

Control of the paper passed in 1837 to Robert M. Riddle,[17] who would later be Whig mayor of Pittsburgh and editor of the Commercial Journal. In 1839 George Parkin merged his weekly Western Emporium into the Advocate and joined Riddle as co-editor.[18] Parkin assumed sole editorship when Riddle left the following year.[19]

The last editor-proprietor of the Advocate, Judge Thomas H. Baird, who took over from Parkin in 1843,[20] sold the paper a year later to be merged with the Gazette.[21] The titles of the daily editions of the two papers, Pittsburgh Daily Gazette and Daily Advocate and Advertiser, were combined as Pittsburgh Daily Gazette and Advertiser (the word "Advocate" was dropped to avoid confusion with two religious papers known by that name).[22] In his farewell address, Baird wrote, "Thus two of the oldest papers in the Western country will be coalesced in the support of Henry Clay and the American system. This consummation has been desired for some time, by many leading Whigs of the District, and to their wishes I have yielded."[22]

The full title of the Advocate varied over time and between editions. Because of gaps in the survival of the newspaper, the following list is not necessarily complete.

 This article incorporates text from Standard History of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, by Erasmus Wilson (ed.), a publication from 1898, now in the public domain in the United States.