Benjamin Edes (1732-1803)

Source

Newspaper editor

Significance. For forty-three years Benjamin Edes and his partner, John Gill, published the Boston Gazette and Country Journal. During the years preceding the Revolutionary War their paper served as the mouthpiece of the Patriot cause in Boston, and other colonial newspapers frequently reprinted stories from the Boston Gazette. Royal authorities continuously tried to silence the “trumpeters of sedition” but were never successful.

Beginnings. Edes was born on 14 October 1732 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the son of Peter and Esther Hall Edes. As a boy he received some schooling. In 1754 he married Martha Starr, and in April of the next year Edes and Gill took over the Boston Gazette. The paper, established in December 1719 by William Brooker, had five other owners before Edes and Gill.

Political Commitment. The two young printers set up a shop at the corner of Court Street and Franklin Avenue. In 1765 they became embroiled in politics when they purposely violated the Stamp Act. This statute placed a tax of from a halfpenny to a penny on newspapers, depending on size. While some colonial papers ceased publication, others published issues without paying the tax and printing the publisher’s name. Edes and Gill did not pay the tax and circulated the Boston Gazette with a skull and crossbones on the front page.

A Son of Liberty. The printers were not penalized for two reasons. First they conveniently did not use stamped paper in printing the Boston Gazette. (They had cut off the stamps in a cutter’s binder.) Second, Edes’s membership in the “Loyal Nine,” a secret group of leading Bostonians who controlled the Sons of Liberty, intimidated the stamp distributor, Andrew Oliver. Frequent visitors to the printing shop of Edes and Gill included Samuel Adams, John Adams, Joseph Warren, Josiah Quincy, James Otis, and John Hancock, all of whom contributed articles to the Boston Gazette. In 1768 and 1769 the paper criticized Gov. Francis Bernard as a “scourge” and “plague” to the province. Bernard was recalled by Whitehall soon afterward.

Angry Bostonians. Between 1764 and 1776 Edes and Gill led colonial printers in the production of political pamphlets; indeed until 1783 their firm was the leading printer in America. The Boston Gazette had a record-breaking weekly circulation of two thousand papers between 1774 and 1775, evidence of its popularity among the mechanics, dockworkers, and other laborers of Boston. Seven days after the Boston Massacre in March 1770 the newspaper appeared with heavy black borders to mourn those killed. On the second page Paul Revere drew four large coffins with the initials of the deceased. The account of the event began “The Town of Boston affords a recent and melancholy Demonstration of the destructive Consequences of quartering Troops among citizens in a Time of Peace.” A special report covered the death of a fifth rioter several days later.

Tea Party. The coverage of the Boston Massacre aroused the Sons of Liberty to a fever pitch. Edes’s home became the focal point of the next crisis, and it was here that the Boston Tea Party was conceived and organized. When the first tea ships arrived on November 1773, the Boston Gazette ran a protest, and Edes and Gill recruited armed men to patrol the docks twenty-four hours a day to ensure the cargo was not unloaded. Edes himself served on the guard. Governor Thomas Hutchinson remained steadfast that the tea be unloaded, and on 16 December leading Patriots met at Edes’s house on Brattle Street. That night they disguised themselves as Indians and, joining others at the meetinghouse, boarded the ships and destroyed the tea.

Fallout. Neither the Patriot nor Loyalist press identified Edes as one of the participants. In fact the Boston Gazette published a warning that Edes and Gill were not to be arrested or the authorities would fall “into the pit they are digging for others.” Nevertheless the threat of arrest remained, especially after Loyalists in the city requested that Gen. Thomas Gage apprehend certain individuals. Edes escaped from Boston with an old press and types, but his son Peter and Gill were arrested and jailed for several weeks. On 5 June 1775 the Boston Gazette resumed publication in Watertown.

Mission Accomplished. After the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, Edes returned to the city, but without the same popularity among readers and financial support of patrons; apparently the Boston Gazette had served its purpose. Gill started his own paper in May; the Constitutional Journal ran until 1787. The last issue of the Boston Gazette appeared on 17 September 1798. Edes spent his last years in ill health and poverty and died on 11 December 1803.

Source

Sallie A. Whelan, “Benjamin Edes,” in American Newspaper Journalists, 1690–1872, Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 43, edited by Perry J. Ashley (Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark/Detroit: Gale Research, 1985), pp. 178–183.