Newspaper editors served as the eyes and ears of their communities. The editors knew everyone in town and wanted their patronage, but they also spoke for specific political, business, family, and even religious interests. They had to be neutral and partisan at the same time, cheerful boosters of the community at large and vigilant advocates of particular people within that community. The two newspapers of Augusta struggled, with uneven success, to contain these conflicting impulses.

The Staunton Spectator was the older and better established of the two papers in town. It had been founded back in 1823 and had long carried the banner of the Whig Party. It claimed to have as wide a readership as any Virginia paper west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and spoke with the authority of a paper associated with some of the most prominent families of the Valley. The Waddell family, a respected and educated family of Staunton that included four physicians and six teachers, three of them women, published the Spectator.

Lyttleton Waddell, sixty-nine years old and the patriarch of the family, had edited the paper for years, but by 1859 two of his sons had taken over the job. Joseph, in his early 40s, was a doctor as well as editor and had a small family; Lyttleton, Jr., 31, was married as well and had two small sons. Each man owned about ten thousand dollars worth of property and both owned slaves. Lyttleton, Jr. held only one female slave but Joseph possessed three. Altogether, various members of the family owned 38 slaves.

The Waddells, of Scots-Irish background, had long been members of the First Presbyterian Church of Staunton. Lyttleton had joined back in 1811, Joseph in 1841, and Lyttleton, Jr. in 1848. All the women of the family belonged to the church as well and sustained religion at the schools where they worked as mistresses and teachers. Various members of the Waddells appeared in the Staunton newspapers for ministering to an Irish mine worker injured in an accident, marching in the militia, and organizing the Fourth of July celebration.

Most of the time, however, the Waddells appeared in the paper as active members of the Opposition Party. That awkward name belied the status of the party in Augusta, where the organization commanded the allegiance of most men. In earlier years, the Opposition had been known as both the Whig party and the Know-Nothing, or American, party. With the collapse of those organizations in the mid-1850s, the men who detested the Democrats, the only existing national party, defined themselves by what they were not. The Waddells worked as hard as they could to sustain an alternative to, and opposition to, the Democrats.

The Vindicator, the other paper in Staunton, flew the Democrats' banner. The Vindicator had neither the age nor the standing of the Spectator, for it had been founded in 1849 by German immigrant Frederick J. Alfred. After Alfred left Augusta in 1856 several other Germans tried their hand at the Vindicator. In 1858, however, the Michie family took control of the paper, with Henry in the editorship. The Michies, like the Waddells, were prominent in Augusta. The head of the family, Thomas, was sixty three years old. He owned $32,000 worth of property, including eighteen slaves and seven lots in Staunton. His son Henry, who actually edited the Vindicator, was only 21 years old, living at home with his parents and two sisters. His youthful voice sometimes comes through in the Vindicator; it is easy to imagine him as the correspondent bored with hearing the Declaration of Independence read in its entirety on the Fourth of July and as the person grumpy about being awakened by drum and fife music when he wanted to sleep in on a February morning. While his father and mother, along with his sisters Lalla and Margaret, belonged to Trinity Episcopal Church, Henry had not joined by the time he took over the editorship of the Vindicator.

The editors of the two papers of Augusta County, then, bore considerable similarities to one another. Both the younger Waddells and the young Michie were scions of established families in their counties, both were active in their community, and both belonged to church-going families that valued education and advancement. The editors certainly knew one another socially and even kidded one another in their papers. When Lyttleton Waddell, Jr., announced that he was opening a real estate agency, his competitor at the Vindicator could not resist the temptation: "Mr. Waddell is well known as the junior editor of the 'Spectator.' We feel great hesitation in recommending a Know Nothing editor to the public, but we will venture the assertion that the one in question has reached the highest stage of honesty and intelligence to which Know Nothingism is capable."

By the time of this jibe in 1859 the Know-Nothings had been defunct for years, the victim of their own internal divisions and the half-heartedness nativism met in Virginia. But the editors of the two newspapers, and their readers, did not forget old allegiances. Political grudges ran for generations. Partisans continually searched for new vehicles for their animosity; they always found reason to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. The newspapers did all they could to cement the loyalty of their readers to their parties, whether that involved printing notices of meetings or promoting insults and character assassination.

The newspapers existed in large part as political vehicles. Much of their income came from the publication of the official business of the county; supporting successful candidates for mayor, judge, sheriff, and tax assessor was the surest route to publishing income. The papers also received funding from candidates eager to win the support of the major disseminators of information and opinion in their counties and districts. Even businesses took sides, with some advertising only in the paper of their political allies. The most apparently benign announcements of meetings, socials, and picnics often bore political meanings. Anyone reading the two papers of Augusta side by side would have been struck at how different community life appeared in the Spectator and the Vindicator.

The newspapers attested to how integrated Augusta and Staunton had become into the networks of trade and information by the 1850s. One issue of the Spectator, for example, advertised, in addition to the usual assortment of local doctors, dentists, music professors, grocers, and the like, hotels in Alexandria and the District of Columbia and brandies, coffees, and hams from New York. It sold religious books from Boston (The Limits of Religious Thought, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, and the Life of John Milton) and sewing machines from Richmond and Norfolk. The paper contained an entire column of advertisements from Baltimore and several from Richmond. That issue of the Spectator told, too, that not only Staunton but even Waynesboro enjoyed a place on the entertainment circuit. The following week residents of both towns could look forward to seeing "Yankee Robinson's Double Show Circus and Theatre," displaying six lady performers and five clowns, a great moral drama on the "Days of '76!," and the "Longest Train of Arabian Horses Ever Driven in America!" When a blizzard stopped the trains, an editor of the Spectator nearly despaired. "No cars yet!--none since Saturday evening, so that we are in total ignorance [of] what is going on in the great world." Two days later, the tracks remained blocked. "No cars yet. Just a week since we heard from Richmond, Washington, etc! A few minutes ago we thought we heard the whistle, and ran to the door, but it seems to have been a mistake." When, six days later, the train finally did arrive it brought thirty bags of mail and eighty newspapers.

Staunton was a cultured place for a relatively small town. It welcomed visitors such as Edward Everett, who rode the train down from the nation's capital. Everett spoke on George Washington "to an appreciative and crowded house. The oration was eminently classical and learned, and fully came up to the distinguished author's reputation as the most elegant and accomplished scholar in America." A local group met regularly for their own lyceum in a local school and the town sustained a "Silver Concert Band, Orchestra, and Glee Club." Large audiences gathered to hear the young ladies of the female institutes recite compositions and perform music at their commencement exercises.

Augusta, like the rest of Virginia, maintained a tenuous system of public schools. The state required that counties maintain boards of school commissioners and that these boards elect a superintendent of schools. In Augusta, thirty two men served their neighborhoods as commissioners, dispersing about a hundred dollars each to poorer families with children to send to nearby primary schools. Neighboring families put up schools wherever enough students might be found. The small buildings were scattered over much of Augusta, in remote coves as well as among prosperous farms. Teacher, and funds, were often scarce for such places. Sixty six people identified teaching as their profession in Augusta, including twenty five women. Like their counterparts throughout the United States, teachers tended to be young, often in their late teens or early twenties. They had relatively little wealth and only one or two owned a slave.

Augusta prided itself on the fine schools it sustained for those with the means to pay. The county gathered within itself prominent schools for girls. "The fact is," announced an entirely unbiased local reporter, "that Staunton is, of all places in Virginia, the best suited for female schools. Geographically it is near the centre of the State; the cars, stages and telegraph reach here from all sections; the health of the whole surrounding country is undoubted, and the morality of the population unimpeached." The Wesleyan Female Institute offered young women a challenging curriculum. "We do not expect or desire that our women should become statesmen or jurists, but we do wish to see them prepared to take the position, that so well becomes them, of guides and teachers to future Senators," the paper enthused. "The energetic efforts of our friends of the Methodist-Episcopal Church, have almost brought to perfection the system of female education." Indeed, the paper judged that the Institute offered a curriculum and facilities that "will compare with those of most of the male colleges in the State."

The diary of a young woman at the Virginia Female Institute recorded her responses to such stimulating fare. Sarah Cordelia Wright, who worried about her academic performance, expressed great enthusiasm for learning the latest science. "After school we were told by our teacher that we were going to attend a lecture on electro biology delivered by Prof. Hall at the town hall: accordingly after tea we started, 21 of us in number," she recorded. Wright, sixteen years old, thought the lecture "very interesting indeed, as most of the experiments." The science came accompanied by religion, which Sarah welcomed but worried over. One of the teachers, following the death of a member of the school community, warned the girls "to ask ourselves the question am I prepared to die? and to fix upon some definite period when we would begin to prepare." Sarah determined that "I will try and fix mine Now & not defer it until a more convenient season, for that may never come."

Churches filled the Augusta countryside. The county, like many in the Valley, was quite heavily churched, nurturing 54 different congregations. The profile of denominations resembled that of many American communities. The Methodists dominated, with 21 churches and room for over five thousand congregants. The Presbyterians, however, reflected their greater wealth: their 12 churches held more people than the Methodists' 21. The First Presbyterian Church, where Woodrow Wilson's father served as pastor in 1857 when the future president was born in Staunton, was especially impressive. Augusta had two Episcopal churches, including the lovely Trinity Episcopal in the heart of Staunton, and one Catholic church. As in other Valley counties, the most distinctive churches were those of German background: the Mennonites maintained one church, the Tunkers four, the German Lutherans 5, and the Lutherans 7. Together, these churches constituted a major religious force in the county, with space for 4,700 worshippers, nearly as many as the powerful Methodists and Presbyterians. No one denomination controlled the religious life of Augusta's spacious countryside.