[Mississippi]
Mississippi's first printer was Andrew Marschalk of New York, an Army lieutenant stationed at Walnut Hills, close to the eventual site of Vicksburg.[55] There, probably in 1798, he attracted attention by printing a ballad on a small press he had acquired in London. At the request of Governor Winthrop Sargent, Marschalk undertook in 1799 to print the laws of Mississippi Territory, and for that purpose he built a larger press at Natchez. Late in 1799 a second printer, Ben M. Stokes, purchased this press from Marschalk and soon commenced a weekly paper, The Mississippi Gazette. On May 5, 1800, James Green, a printer from Baltimore, introduced a rival paper at Natchez, Green's Impartial Observer.
The Library of Congress earliest Mississippi imprint was designed to controvert remarks by "The Friend of the People" in Green's Impartial Observer for November 1, 1800. It is a small broadside "From the Office of J. Green" that would seem to corroborate the printer's impartiality, at least in this particular dispute. Captioned "To the Public," dated November 8, 1800, and signed by eight members of the new Territorial House of Representatives, it refers to "an exaggerated estimate of the supposed expence attending the second grade of Government"; and it continues, "We therefore consider it our duty to counteract the nefarious and factious designs of the persons concerned" in the anonymous article. Mississippi's second grade of Territorial government had come about in 1800 with the creation of a legislature to enact the laws, theretofore enacted by the Governor and three judges. The authors of this broadside itemize the maximum annual expenses for operating the legislature, concluding with a comparison of the total estimates: their $2,870 as opposed to the $15,050 of "The Friend of the People."
("To the Public," dated November 8, 1800)
In addition the Library of Congress has a lengthy rebuttal to the November 8 statement on a broadside also captioned "To the Public," dated at Natchez "November 15th, 1809" (a misprint for 1800), and signed "The Friend of the People." The writer begins:
Fellow-Citizens,
Of all the extraordinary performances I ever beheld, the late hand-bill, signed by eight members of our house of representatives, is the most extraordinary—and I doubt not that it will be considered by the country at large as the legitimate offspring of the subscribers; being replete with that unauthorized assumption of power, and those round assertions so truly characteristic—propagated for the avowed purpose of 'undeceiving the people' in a matter of the first moment, and yet not containing one authenticated fact for them to found an opinion on—but resting all upon their mere dictum, penetrating into future events, and proclaiming what shall be the decisions of legislators not yet elected.