Robert Hugh Miller
Robert Hugh Miller, founder and publisher of the Liberty Tribune, one of the oldest newspapers of continuous publication west of the Mississippi, was born in Richmond, Virginia on November 27, 1826. Mr. Miller, a gentleman of a wide range of information and extended experience, whose life for nearly forty years was devoted to chronicling the events of the world for the instruction and advancement of the people, established the Tribune in 1846 and edited continuously until 1886.
Robert Miller, age 44 in 1870, typified the inhabitants of Clay County, Missouri in lineage. His family migrated from Virginia to Kentucky when he was six, and to Missouri when he was 12. As a teenager he was apprenticed first to the Columbia Patriot and then to the Missouri Statesman and in April 1846, with support from John B. Williams of the Fulton Telegraph and encouraged by Dr. William Jewell of Columbia, Miller ventured to Liberty on Missouri's western fringe.
Miller, gifted with rare business acumen, was one of the rare few who made a fortune in the printing office.
Early life and education
Robert Hugh Miller was born November 27, 1826, in the City of Richmond, Virginia, a son of John E. and Mary A. Miller, the father a planter of Scotch descent and a kinsman of Hugh Miller, the eminent Scottish geologist and writer, author of "Old Red Sandstone," and the mother a native of the Old Dominion, her parents Achilles and Mary Rogers of Albemarle County, Virginia being patriots of the Revolution. Mary Miller's parents were first cousins, both grandchildren of John Rogers and Mary Bird/Byrd, and her father a first cousin to surveyor and militia officer George Rogers Clark and his brother William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. After her marriage and the death of her husband in Virginia, Miller's mother removed with her family to Southern Kentucky and thence to Missouri in 1838. They were the parents of two children, Robert H. and Edmund, the latter of whom died in 1859.Miller's first years were spent on his father's plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia. When his father was killed by a slave fleeing from another plantation who mistook the identity of his father, his mother moved to Glasgow, Barren County, Kentucky to stay with relatives. Here, living with Edmund P. Rogers, patriarch of the Rogers family of Virginia, and military surveyor of the Green River country, young Miller absorbed the political, Revolutionary War veteran atmosphere which colored his later thinking. Subsequently, the mother with her children, removed to Paris, Monroe County, Missouri and there she taught school. She remarried in Missouri and died in 1870.
Robert H. Miller was reared and educated under the influences of the old school Presbyterian church. His educational advantages were such as could be obtained in his youth in the common schools of the country, and this he supplemented by research and observation. He passed his youth at Columbia, Missouri, going from the schoolroom to the printing-office. In 1840, when fourteen years of age, Mr. Miller was apprenticed to the printer's trade in the office of the Patriot, a newspaper published at Columbia, Missouri, and when that sheet was discontinued Mr. Miller joined the force of the Statesman, where, under the editorship of Col. William P. Switzler, he gained experience which was invaluable to him in later years.
Marriage and Family
Robert H. Miller was twice happily married. He was married first June 27, 1846, to Miss Enna F. Peters, of Liberty, Missouri, a daughter of John R. Peters, a noted pioneer of Missouri, born in Kentucky. She died December 3, 1867 at the age of 37, leaving four children. On May 3, 1871, Mr. Miller married Miss Louise "Lulu" Wilson, daughter of one of Missouri's foremost criminal lawyers of that day and a law partner of Col. Alexander William Doniphan, Hon. John W. Wilson, of Platte City, Missouri. Of this union, five children were born.Miller's second wife Louise was a member of a distinguished American family; her grandfather Robert Patterson Clark was a member of the committee that drew up the first Missouri state laws; her great-grandfather was Col. Stephen Trigg, son of John Johns Trigg of Virginia; a great-uncle, James Clark, was a governor of Kentucky; another great-uncle, John Bullock Clark, was a national representative from Cooper County and a general in the Confederate army. She lived at Forest Hill, the antebellum mansion built by her husband Robert H. Miller in 1857, since going there as a bride sixty-two years before her death in 1933 at the age of 85.
Miller opened the grounds of Forest Hill to Indians on their way to and from buffalo hunting grounds. You could usually find a few teepees on the north side of the property in the summer and the south side in the winter, seemingly not to bother Miller that genteel Liberty had to work its way through camp groups on their way to Forest Hill, which was for many years a center of social activity in the county.
Career
On March 20, 1846, a young man stepped from the gangplank of the steamboat "Tobacco Plant," looked over the little outpost of civilization, and congratulated himself on his choice of Liberty for the start of his career as editor and publisher. This 19-year-old journalist was to make a remarkable impact on this community, and with John B. Williams started the Tribune, the latter retiring at the end of the year, leaving Mr. Miller sole proprietor. Dr. William Jewell, whose college bears his name, lent Robert H. Miller $5,000 to go to Liberty, Missouri, to found a newspaper and in five years Miller, the founder of the Liberty Tribune had paid back this sum with interest.The Tribune was started as a Whig paper, but after the extinction of that party drifted in the Democratic party and continued as such as long as he conducted it and under his faithful management it attained a wide circulation and was noted for its plain statement of facts and its fearless vindication of the right, as well as for its denunciation of wrong. In an early editorial, Miller told of his nearly unlimited dreams for Liberty:
"The day will come, if good colleges are erected speedily, when Liberty will be to western Missouri what Lexington is to Kentucky–the focus of intelligence and literature. His pride was in the mechanical neatness and beauty of the Tribune.
Mr. Miller's reverence for the past and his keen sense of historic values led him to fill his paper with the most valuable data and in the files of the Tribune we are able to find the facts which go to make up the history of Clay County, socially, educationally, and politically. He was a public spirited citizen of high ideals and no man had greater influence on his generation. Miller became friends with another newspaperman, William Rockhill Nelson, founder of The Star, who offered to buy the Tribune. Miller later said he didn't want to sell at the time because he didn't realize he was getting old. Miller sold the Tribune to John Dougherty in 1885.
In an article written by a lifelong friend, D.C. Allen, which was published in the Tribune at the time of Mr. Miller's death, Mr. Allen says, in part: "As can be understood, the Tribune remained staunchly Whig until in 1852, when the Whig party went down in defeat under Scott and Graham, leaving 'trailing clouds of glory' all over its past. With the characteristic devotion of old Whigs to the names of Clay, Webster, Crittenden and their compeers, it declined to support the democracy in 1856 and 1860, but in those years gave its countenance respectively to Fillmore and Donelson, and Bell and Everett. After 1860, it gave its adherence to the democratic party, and remained one of the truest democratic newspapers in Missouri."