The Political World of the Antebellum Presidents

The Electric Telegraph, News Coverage and Political Participation

“…2 At the beginning of the 1840s, almost 90 percent of Americans were still living in rural areas (US Census, 1840), where access to external information was limited. States had extended su↵rage to almost all adult white males by 1840 and citizens demonstrated a strong interest in politics (Silbey, 2014;Altschuler and Blumin, 1997). The primary source of political information during this era were newspapers, and newspaper content was predominantly 2 A precursor of the electric telegraph was the semaphore telegraph, which conveyed information through visual signals, using towers with pivoting shutters that could form into di↵erent positions to encode messages.…”