GALVESTON DAILY COURIER. The Daily Courier, edited at Galveston by Joel Titus Case, appeared between April 1840 and May 1841, when it was merged with the Galveston People's Advocate. The paper was founded by Samuel Bangs and George H. French.qqv When the Courier published barbs that outraged Judge Anthony B. Shelby, who presided over the district court of Galveston and Houston, Shelby had French arrested, sentenced to a year in jail, and fined $1,000. The editor at the time, named Edmunds, was fined $200 and sentenced to ten days in jail. Infringement of freedom of the press aroused citizens in both cities and led Judge Thomas Johnsonqv to help the editors, who purged themselves of contempt and had their sentences remanded. Case, in association with printer D. E. Smith, became publisher as well as editor of the Courier in May 1840, when Bangs and French left Galveston for Houston.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Joe B. Frantz, Newspapers of the Republic of Texas (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1940). Marilyn M. Sibley, Lone Stars and State Gazettes: Texas Newspapers before the Civil War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983). John Melton Wallace, Gaceta to Gazette: A Checklist of Texas Newspapers, 1813–1846 (Austin: University of Texas Department of Journalism, 1966). WPA Historical Records Survey Program, Texas Newspapers (Houston: San Jacinto Museum of History Association, 1941).
