About The New era. [volume] (Martinsburg, W. Va.) 1865-1871
Martinsburg, W. Va. (1865-1871)

The New era

Historians of the United States call the post-war period that commenced in 1865 "Reconstruction." H. E. Nichols of Martinsburg, West Virginia, lacking the privilege of hindsight, called it something else. "The civil war which has just ended has ushered in a NEW ERA in the history of this county," he wrote in September 1865; "Of this fact we have a profound conviction. No National commotion in the annals of the world … has in so short a time produced so marked a change in the thoughts, opinions, social condition, and destiny of a people." In honor of this transformation, Nichols called his newspaper the New Era. The year Nichols spent as publisher and proprietor established the New Era's Democratic character.

Nichols and his successors, E. W. Andrews, who ran the paper from January to December 1866, and Shaffer and Logan, which published it from December 1866 to July 1871, deplored Radical Republicans and the changes they wrought. The most abhorrent changes, in their views, concerned the implementation of political restrictions on ex-Confederates in order to establish political rights for African Americans.

Nichols, an avowed Unionist, announced in the New Era's prospectus "[that] he abandoned the home of his childhood to engage in 'the Civil War' with no purpose to degrade, disenfranchise and enslave his brave, but misguided fellow-citizens, but solely to restore the National authority." It was his belief that Radical Republicans were enslaving the South by elevating African Americans to a semblance of political equality. The editors of the New Era promoted the National Union Party and unabashedly defended President Johnson during his impeachment. Republicans called themselves the National Union Party in 1864 to attract War Democrats, who supported the war effort, and people living in the Border States of Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Nichols and Andrews supported the Union but differentiated themselves from Radical Republicans with their endorsement of conservative thinking and policies. Nichols, in the paper's prospectus, wished "to see the Constitution of the United States with all its precious and inestimable rights and privileges, extended alike to States and to individuals" with "a National Government not combined of States" and despotisms, "but such a Union as the Fathers of the Republic framed for the benefit of mankind." He feared Radical Republicans would tyrannize the South and make slaves of southern white men. His professed admiration for liberty extended no further. By 1867, the New Era was openly Democratic, a proud supporter of "the white man's party."

E. W. Andrews shared Nichols's disdain for black equality and suffrage. His final publication as editor reprinted a letter from a "plain man" encapsulating the New Era's racism. Black suffrage will let a man "vote who don't know his A-B-C's," he complained. "It means to give him the same voice in administering the government that the smartest and best learned white man has." Shaffer and Logan also denounced perceived black privileges when they exhorted foreigners to reject the Radicals in Congress who extended the right to vote to black men "over the white citizens of foreign birth." For conservative Democrats, white skin took precedence over country of birth. Shaffer and Logan would not accept a "new era" that changed the basis of citizenship and racial hierarchy.

Provided by: West Virginia University