91. Monitor (Concord: Albert Stacy, 1862) [bound volume containing complete run of this local periodical].
From the Thoreau Library of Alfred Winslow Hosmer, CFPL Concord Authors Collection.

No local newspapers were published in Concord in the period leading up to the Civil War, during the war itself, and for a decade following it.  In 1862, however, Albert Stacy published the Monitor here.  A short-lived periodical offering unsigned articles and poems by Concord people and others, it included some items on topics relating to the war.  The issue for April 26, 1862 featured pieces by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody ("The Contrabands of Port Royal"), Henry W. Frost, Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Ripley Bartlett, Albert Tolman, Carrie Pratt, May Alcott, George Tolman, and W. Wickersham.  (Identification of the writers is possible because several surviving copies—among them that of early Thoreauvian Alfred Winslow Hosmer—were annotated by their original owners with the names of the contributors.) 

Transcendentalist and reformer Elizabeth Peabody—a sometime Concord resident and the sister of Mary Mann (who lived on Sudbury Road in 1862) and Sophia Hawthorne—wrote for this issue about the education of southern blacks.  She referred specifically to Concord's contribution to this effort: "To make negro labor skilful and self-supporting in its present freedom under the protection of our government is conferring on the South a blessing, which, in the long run, will more than counterbalance all the havoc made by the dogs of war.  We are glad to present a letter from one of the missionaries sent out by the Boston Commission, containing a plan for the immediate self-support of the colored people [the letter from J.C. Zachos to Mary Peabody Mann is printed later in the article].  This excellent plan will give new life to all the efforts made in the cause.  Every town in Massachusetts ought to have an auxiliary society to send a teacher, as Concord has done; and advance money for materials that shall enable the negroes to be put into the position of supporting themselves."