“the Bardstown Repository”

Date

5-27-1812

Newspaper

The Palladium

Page and Column

Page 3, Column 1

Newspaper Location

Frankfort, Kentucky

Serial Number

253

Abstract

Editorial about the content of the Bardstown Repository, source for one of the New Madrid primary accounts.

Transcript

FOR THE PALLADIUM THE BARDSTOWN REPOSITORY In committing the following observations to the Press, the writer distinctly feels and avows, that he is as strongly influenced by concern for the personal happiness, as for the public usefulness, of the individual to whom they relate. Justice never imposes a more painful task, than when it exacts the performance of a duty, that has even the remotest tendency to violate the feelings of genuine personal attachment. In the present instance, no such sacrifice is required. In submitting the following observations to the public eye, the writer feels an animating assurance, that friendship stimulates the performance of the act which justice enjoins. To those who have the happiness to be intimately acquainted with JAMES M'ALLISTER, few circumstances could have afforded more solid satisfaction, than the knowledge of his intentions to issue a weekly paper. The rare endowments of this extraordinary man; the sobriety, impartiality and disinterestedness of his temper; his various and profound knowledge; his prompitude, perspicuity and energy in communicating his ideas; his unsullied character; his singular exemption from the influence of every vicious and visionary passion, united to excite an expectation in the minds of his friends, and made it their duty to excite and diffuse a public expectation, that the paper he announced, would probably circulate as much original and valuable intelligence, as any paper (under the same, or similar local disadvantages) that had issued from the American press. No intelligen citizen, no friend to liberality and liberty, no real patriot, could learn, without some degree of exultation, that such a man, in the prime of his life and the maturity of his mind, had deliberately announced his intention of communicating at short intervals through the medium of the press his sentiments and views on the most interesting subjects that can exercise the ingenuity of an enlightened mind, or attract the curiosity of an intelligent public. This expectation was further encouraged by the character, and fortified by the concluding assurance of the Prospectus of the Repository. That Prospectus, brief as it was, probably contained as luminous a statement of elementary political truths, as has ever been compressed into so small a space and chosen with an assurance "that the Editor's more unremitted and asidious efforts would be exerted to render the paper interesting and useful." By those to whom the character of the Editor was thoroughly known, this assurance was, and could but be, construed, as a pledge and guarantee of future devotion to his editorial duties, as deliberatel, sacred and inviolable as such a man, could offer to the public. To say, in language sufficiently explicit and emphatic, how totally the just expectations of the public of the Repository have been dissapointed, by every succesive number that has appeared for nearly three months, in a task from which the feelings of the writer unconquerably sank. Even if he were capable of expressing in language sufficeintly emphatic, the disappointment he has himself experienced in perusing the vapid and vacant columns of the Repository, his knowledge that the Editor's apparently ingnonmous desertion of his duties, has been occasioned by unfavorable impediments, which will be speedily removed, would render his reserve not less the dictate of propriety than of inclination. He still cherishes an expectation, in his judgment as well founded as any expectation depending for its fulfillment on the integrity and capacity of any human being can be; an expectation to which the retrospect of the preceding numbers of the Repository only imparts livlier hope and more unshaken confidence, that the future exertions of the Editor will redeem the pledge, he has given, amply atone for his involuntary inactivity, and rigorously execute the united dictates of his personal and social duties: he still cherishes and avows his expectation, that the solar intellect of the Editor will speedily irradiate the columns of the Repository. AMICUS.

Link to Full Text

Share

 
COinS