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For one year, Fort Wayne had a radical paper. The Fort Wayne Standard, published weekly from June 1854 to June 1855 by Daniel W. Burroughs — a New England-born former abolitionist pastor from Ohio — editorialized for Free Soil politics, for temperance, and for the abolition of slavery, in a state whose 1851 constitution barred Black settlement and in a city whose established papers counseled caution. The Standard ran frequent stories on enslaved people who had escaped, on the conditions they fled, and on the brutality of the slave catchers who pursued them; it was, in the words of its modern historian, an effort to educate its readers into abolitionism. The response was the era's customary one: the paper's office was egged and Burroughs threatened by slavery's supporters, as the News-Sentinel's timeline records.
The Standard folded after a year, and Burroughs faded from local prominence. Two of the men in its orbit, Charles Case and Isaac Julian, carried its politics forward through the decade and the Civil War. The paper's importance to this record is that it is documented at all: Peggy Seigel's study in the Indiana Magazine of History recovered the Standard from near-oblivion, and it stands in the antebellum press record beside the Sentinel and the Times as proof that the slavery argument was made, in print, in Fort Wayne itself. The Underground Railroad record is in its own chapter; the Standard is the press's part of that story.
Sources: Peggy Seigel, "The Fort Wayne Standard: A Reform Newspaper in the 1850s Storm," Indiana Magazine of History 97 (September 2001), summarized by Indiana Public Media, "A Pocket of Abolitionism in Fort Wayne" (2013); News-Sentinel city timeline (the egging of the Standard's office).