Staunton Vindicator: Feb. 3, 1860, Page 1

Columns 1-2: Below the Vindicator's masthead, which announced that it "published every Friday morning, on Main Street, two doors below B. Crawford's Corner," small advertisements appeared. As on page 1, column 1, of the Spectator, these ads were almost entirely from local individuals offering their professional services or announcing that their stores had received new goods for sale. There was some overlap among these ads--one lawyer or grocer might purchase the same ad in both the Spectator and the Vindicator. Not every advertiser, however, purchased an ad in both papers. This may speak to a lack of funds on the part of an advertiser, or possibly to an advertiser's politics. A staunch Democrat might not wish to give his money to a Whig paper like the Spectator, preferring instead to support the Vindicator exclusively (and perhaps draw more exclusively Democratic customers in turn). Still, although the ads in the Vindicator and Spectator were not precisely identical, it was from the local advertisements generally--with their common names of sponsors, streets, and landmarks--that one could recognize that the papers also shared a population. As we shall see, the Spectator and Vindicator rarely were concerned with the same national or international issues, but the advertisements precluded their having entirely divergent content.

Column 2 carried ads as well, though in 1860 the Baltimore Lock Hospital, founded by a Dr. Johnston (who also seemed to be the hospital's only physician), purchased all of column 2 for nearly the entire year.

Columns 3-7: The head of column 3 almost always carried one or two short poems, sometimes with attribution to an author or journal, sometimes published anonymously. Much of the remainder of page 1 was filled with articles. These could be short (perhaps one-quarter of a column) or long (more than one column). Unlike the Spectator, however, which most frequently devoted article space on page 1 to human interest stories and strange happenings around the nation, the Vindicator seems to have been more likely to combine these pieces with political articles. Page 1 on February 3, for example, did carry an article about a large wedding in St. Louis, but also printed both a long piece from the New York Express rebuking author Victor Hugo for having praised John Brown, and a letter to the editor addressing the question of free blacks in the South. Short jokes, moral aphorisms, and the like ran at the bottoms of columns 3-7 on page 1, just as they did in the Spectator.