Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.22.2004

1829. Jackson's State of the Union speech relayed to Providence in record time

In 2004, anyone could just flip on the television and watch as the president delivered the annual State of the Union address.

But in 1829, when The Providence Daily Journal first covered a State of the Union, it took a marathon effort to bring the president's words to the people of Providence.

Andrew Jackson addressed Congress at noon on Tuesday, Dec. 8. Immediately, the text of his speech went out by an early version of the Pony Express.

The text traveled through New York and Hartford, before arriving in Boston on the evening of the next day, having covered almost 500 miles in 31 hours and 27 minutes. It then went by regular mail from Boston to The Providence Journal, which received it at 2 p.m. the next day, Thursday.

Photo courtesy of Library of Congress

A daguerreotype of Andrew Jackson, the irascible seventh president of the United States, who created the "era of the common man."

By Friday morning, The Journal's printers had set the 10,000-word address in type and published it for Providence readers. The address was so long, it pushed out most of the other news and many of the ads that had been prepared for that day.

By the end of The Journal's first decade in 1839, news would travel much more quickly. By then, Providence was a stop on the railroad network that had linked the cities of the East Coast and had started pushing westward into the continent's interior.