Benjamin Edes

Benjamin Edes
A 1786 Newspaper clip with Benjamin Edes name on it.
Personal details
Born	(1732-10-14)October 14, 1732 Charlestown, Province of Massachusetts
Died	December 11, 1803(1803-12-11) (aged 71) Boston, Massachusetts
Spouse	Martha Starr (1729-1806)
Occupation	editor; agitator

Benjamin Edes (October 15, 1732 – December 11, 1803) was a journalist newspaper publisher and revolutionary advocate before and during the American Revolution. He is best known, along with John Gill, as the publisher of the Boston Gazette, a colonial newspaper which sparked and financed the Boston Tea Party and was influential during the American Revolutionary War.

Early life

He was born on October 14, 1732 in Charlestown, Province of Massachusetts. He was one of seven children of Peter Edes and Esther Hall. His great-grandfather was John Edes. He was born in England, March 31. 1651, son of Rev. John Edes, rector of Lanford, Essex and a graduate of St. Johns College, Cambridge, England. He relocated to Charlestown in 1674. John was a ship carpenter and lived in Charlestown; by wife Mary Tufts, the daughter of Peter Tufts, a prominent early citizen of Medford, he had the following children: John, Edward, Mary, Peter, Jonathan and Sarah Edes.

Benjamin received a modest education in Charleston, public schools before moving to Boston, Massachusetts in 1754.

Marriage

He married about 1754, at Boston, Massachusetts, Martha Starr, who was christened on June 22, 1729 at the Brattle Street Church in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of Joseph Starr and Margaret Bulman. She was the great great granddaughter of Dr. Comfort Starr of Boston, a founder of Harvard College and a surgeon who emigrated from Ashford, Kent, England. He is buried on Tremont Street in Boston, Massachusetts at King's Chapel Burying Ground, the oldest cemetery in the city, established in 1630. Benjamin and Martha were the parents of ten children.

Career

Edes established a partnership with Gill and together they became the proprietors of The Boston Gazette and Country Journal on April 7, 1755. The Gazette was established on December 21, 1719 by William Brooker. Edes made the paper a leading voice favoring American independence. Edes was part of The Sons of Liberty, a secret society of American patriots in Revolutionary America. Edes and Gill worked closely with Samuel Adams who employed the Boston Gazette in the publication of Adams' many revolutionary essays and letters. Andrew Oliver said, "The temper of the people may be surely learned from that infamous paper". Governor Bernard advised the arrest of both Edes and Gill as publishers of sedition. Edes, as a member of the Loyall Nine, the directing group behind the Sons of Liberty, filled the columns of the Gazette with numerous articles criticizing the Stamp Act. He fought British policy overall through written attacks on other taxes, including the tea tax, the Townshend Acts, and other such measures he deemed as oppressive. The two editions of the poems of Martha Wadsworth Brewster were printed by Edes and Gill in 1757 and 1758. She was a poet and writer, and one of the earliest American female literary figures as well as the first American-born woman to publish under her own name.

Edes and his partner also published an Almanac for 1769 which opened with a satire on Bernard, which appealed to Americans to hold to the non-importation agreement. Edes, relied on the advice and encouragement of Samuel Adams, Warren, Otis, Quincy inasmuch as his contentious spirit often lacked the intellectual capacity to articulate his outspoken and revolutionary ideas in a manner suited for publication.

On February 29, 1768, the Gazette printed an article written by Joseph Warren, but signed "A True Patriot" Though it referred to an unnamed official, it was an obvious and acrimonious attack on Governor Bernard. Bernard, already the subject of numerous insults, immediately sent a message to the Council and to the House of Representatives stating that the Gazette had now endangered "the existence of the Government". The Council unanimously agreed with the Bernard and called the attack "insolent," "licentious," and "subversive of all order and decorum." While they assured the Governor that it would always defend his honor, the House, however, did not go along with such assurances. By a vote of 39 to 30, it informed the Governor that his apprehension of danger was an unfounded conclusion, as no actual person was named in the article. articles. In June, 1769, Bernard demanded that Edes and Gill be arrested for seditious libel, no such action was ever taken. Within three months, upon demand of the Council, he was recalled as Governor.

During the Siege of Boston, Edes escaped to Watertown, Massachusetts where he continued to publish the Gazette until 1798, 43 years after he started.

Death and memorials

He died on December 11, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. He is supposedly buried at Copp's Hill Burying Ground located on Copp's Hill in Boston. There is an memorial stone with 'Edes' on it, but cemetery records do not attribute it to anyone in particular. There are headstones to other members of this family at Copp's Hill as well.

The Printing Office of Edes & Gill is a living history museum that attempts to replicate the original print shop of Benjamin Edes and John Gill. The office opened in 2011 and is now located on the Freedom Trail, at Faneuil Hall.

Sources

Further information:  Bibliography of Early American publishers and printers

• Alexander, John K. (2002). Samuel Adams: America's Revolutionary Politician. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 249. ISBN 0-7425-2115-X. https://books.google.com/books?id=H39E42RWP18C. 

• Maier, Pauline (1980). The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. pp. 309. ISBN 0-394-51096-8. https://archive.org/details/oldrevolutionari0000maie. 

• Church in Brattle Square. The Manifesto church: Records of the church in Brattle square, Boston, with lists of communicants, baptisms, marriages and funerals, 1699-1872. Publisher: The Benevolent fraternity of churches, 1902.

• Cutter, W.R. Genealogical and personal memoirs relating to the families of the state of Massachusetts. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1910.

• NEHGS. New England historical and genealogical register, Volume 16. Author New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1862.

• Silver, Rollo G. (Third Quarter 1953). "Benjamin Edes, Trumpeter of Sedition". The University of Chicago Press / Bibliographical Society of America. pp. 248-268. JSTOR 24299601. 

• Schmidt, Gary D. A passionate usefulness: the life and literary labors of Hannah Adams. University of Virginia Press, 2004 ISBN 0-8139-2272-0

• Wilson, James Grant;  Fiske, John (1900). Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography. II. New York, D. Appleton. https://archive.org/details/appletonscyclopa02wils.