Publisher, born in Ireland on the 28th of January 1760; died in Philadelphia, PA, on the 16th of September 1839. He was well educated, and selected as his life-work the printing and bookselling business. Among his first pamphlets was an inflammatory address to Irish Catholics, which obliged him to flee to Paris to escape trouble. Here he made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin. He returned after a year to Ireland, where he established the Volunteer’s Journal, a newspaper very bold in tone, which became a political power. In 1784 an attack on Parliament brought on a suit for libel, and he was imprisoned. He sailed to the United States after his liberation, and within two months had started a newspaper, The Pennsylvania Herald; in this first appeared accurate reports of legislative deliberations. For six years he published The American Museum. He founded the Hibernian Society, and assisted in the formation of the first American Sunday school society. He published, in 1814, the Olive Branch; or, Faults on Both Sides, Federal and Democratic, a work designed to conciliate the different factions in the United States which disagreed on the subject of the War of 1812. He issued, in 1820, the New Olive Branch, and two years later appeared his well-known work, Essays on Political Economy, which was followed by a series of tracts advocating the protective system, as necessary for the good of all classes.
