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About the Brooklyn Daily Times

The Brooklyn Daily Times began as the Williamsburgh Daily Times in 1848, a local newspaper for residents of the town of Williamsburgh, along the East River across from the Lower East Side of New York City. When Williamsburgh was incorporated into the city of Brooklyn in 1854, the paper changed its name to the Brooklyn Daily Times.

Upon Williamsburgh's incorporation into Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Daily Times became one of the three daily papers for the city, alongside the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a Democratic newspaper, and the Brooklyn Evening Star, a Whig paper. The decline of the Whig Party after 1854 meant that the Daily Times soon became the rival paper to the larger Daily Eagle, and positioned itself within the burgeoning Republican politics of the late 1850s.

But the rivalry between the Eagle and the Daily Times proved uneven as Brooklyn was, like New York City, dominated by the Democratic Party. By 1860, the Eagle, according to its own reckoning, had a circulation of 6,200 daily readers, while the Daily Times, in its own estimation, reached 3,500 readers. Nevertheless, soon after its rebranding, the Daily Times won a city contract to serve as the official printer of Brooklyn and the primary source for reports from the Common Council. This put the Daily Times close to the action of local politics.

The proprietor of the Daily Times throughout this period (and until 1875), George C. Bennett, reflected the moderate strain of Republican politics of the 1850s. Before the demise of the Whig Party in the mid-1850s, Bennet's brand of anti-slavery politics inclined toward free-soilism, an ideology focused on the economic rights of independent white artisans and farmers, rather than the more strident abolitionism of other party members. In this regard, Bennett echoed the rhetoric of Republican politicos like Abraham Lincoln, also a former Whig, who returned to politics as a Republican in 1858 as a moderate, Western candidate for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas. Bennett's moderate Republicanism likewise matched Walt Whitman's own free-soil politics, which had alienated him from the Democratic Party since the late 1840s.

Whitman described himself in 1885 as having served as an "editorial writer" for the Daily Times, yet his name never appeared in this capacity in its pages, and research suggests that there were several people employed in some sort of editorial capacity at the paper. Whitman therefore likely wrote editorials on topics within his ideological or personal wheelhouse. For example, Whitman Archive editors believe that many of the free-soil-inflected articles in the Daily Times that explicitly appealed to disaffected Democratic voters during the elections of 1858 were likely by Whitman. Likewise, most of the articles in favor of completion of the Brooklyn Waterworks were likely by Whitman, especially since he claimed as much in later years, and his brother, Jeff, served as an assistant engineer on the project. Whitman likely began with sporadic contributions to the paper in late 1856, was heavily involved throughout all of 1857 and 1858 and the first several months of 1859, with his involvement slowly fading out by mid-1859. During these years, he likely authored more than 800 editorials for the paper.

The Daily Times continued publication until the 1930s. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the paper often published retrospectives that featured Whitman as a former editor of the paper, especially as the poet's estimation rose among American readers.

Bibliography

I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times, ed. Holloway, Emory, and Vernolian Schwartz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932).

Karbiener, Karen, "Reconstructing Whitman's Desk at the Brooklyn Daily Times," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33.1 (2015): 21–50.

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