Edes, Benjamin

▪ American publisher

born October 14, 1732, Charlestown, Massachusetts

died December 11, 1803, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

      founder and co-owner with John Gill (Gill, John) of the New England newspaper the Boston Gazette and Country Journal. As editor and publisher of the Gazette, Edes made the paper a leading voice favouring American independence.

      Edes was 23 and had received only a modest education when he joined with Gill, a young Boston printer, to found the Gazette as a patriots' voice in 1755. It was an immediate success. It is said that the rebellious colonists who took part in the Boston Tea Party (1773) assembled at Edes's home and then donned their Indian costumes and paint at the Gazette's office.

      From mid-1774 to April 1775, Edes circulated some 2,000 copies of the Gazette each week—more copies than any other colonial paper. British authorities offered a bounty for his arrest, intending to execute him for Gazette stories about alleged British atrocities. To avoid arrest Edes moved his press out of Boston in April 1775, resuming publication later in Watertown.

      As British-colonial relations worsened, Edes began to carry articles by such famous proponents of independence as Samuel Adams (Adams, Samuel), John Adams (Adams, John), and John Hancock (Hancock, John). Edes thus played an important role in the Revolutionary War by fostering the increasingly independent American identity and anticolonial sentiment. His newspaper, which lost popularity after the war, ceased publication in 1798. Edes died in poverty.

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