NEWS ON THE RUN

AMERICA’S HISTORY HAS BEEN frequently marked by contentious relations between the government and the press. Nothing, however, compares with the saga of the Memphis Daily Appeal, initially a local Tennessee newspaper that so strongly supported the Confederacy its staff was forced to move from city to city, hauling along a printing press, one step ahead of Union Army pursuers.

The newspaper made its appearance as the in 1841, the only Democratic newspaper in a near-total Whig community. When it became a daily paper six years later, its founder, Henry Van Pelt, changed its name to the . Van Pelt died in early 1851,