American journalist, born in Newburyport, MA, on the 2nd of November 1820; was apprenticed to a printer, and from 1838 to 1840 edited the Southern Whig in Atlanta, GA; visited Europe (1841–48) as attaché of the American legation at Brussels, and was historical agent of the state of Massachusetts, for which he collected ten folio volumes of historical matter from the French archives, and also correspondent for the Boston Atlas; became editor and proprietor of the Sunday Sentinel in 1851; in 1854, Washington correspondent for the Boston Journal, and while there served as clerk on the Senate committee for printing records, and as secretary of the United States Agricultural Society; in 1867 became editor of the Congressional Directory. Among his numerous works are Rise and Fall of Louis Philippe (1848); Campaign Life of Zachary Taylor (1848), of which 800,000 copies were sold; Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of Abraham Lincoln (1865); Federal and State Charters (1877); and Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (1886). He compiled for the government Catalogue of Government Publications of the United States, 1774–1881 (1885). He died in Washington, DC, on the 30th of May 1887.
