Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas, oil on canvas by Ethan Allen Greenwood in 1818

For people with the same or similar name, see Isiah Thomas (disambiguation)

Isaiah Thomas (January 8, 1749 - April 4, 1831), was an American newspaper publisher and author. He performed the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Worcester, Massachusetts and reported the first account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. He was the founder of the American Antiquarian Society

Biography

Early life and career

Thomas was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was apprenticed on July 7, 1756 to Zechariah Fowle, a Boston printer, with whom, after working as a printer in Halifax, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Charleston, South Carolina, he formed a partnership in 1770.^[1]

In Boston, in 1774, Thomas published the Royal American Magazine, which was continued for a short time by Joseph Greenleaf, and which contained many engravings by Paul Revere.

The Massachusetts Spy

Masthead of July 7, 1774 issue

He issued in Boston the Massachusetts Spy three times each week, then (under his sole ownership) as a semi-weekly, and beginning in 1771, as a weekly which soon espoused the Whig cause and which the government tried to suppress.

Escape to Worcester

On the April 16, 1775 (three days before the Battle of Concord, in which he took part), Thomas took his presses from Boston and set them up in Worcester, where he was also postmaster for a time. There he published and sold books, built a paper-mill and bindery, and continued the paper until 1802 save for gaps in 1776-1778 and in 1786-1788. The Spy supported Washington and the Federalist Party.

Thomas Married Mary Fowle, described as a "half-cousin", on May 26, 1779.^[2] Around 1802, Thomas gave his Worcester business over to his son, including the control of the Spy.

Later life

Thomas set up printing houses and book stores in various parts of the country.

From 1775 until 1803, Thomas published the New England Almanac, continued until 1819 by his son, Isaiah Thomas, Jr. In Boston he published the monthly Massachusetts Magazine, with Ebenezer T. Andrews, from 1789 to 1793. At Walpole, New Hampshire, he also published the Farmer's Museum. His ambition throughout his life was to write an extensive book on the history of publishing. He began what would become History of Printing in America in 1808.^[3] Fully titled History of Printing in America, with a Biography of Printers, and an Account of Newspapers, it was published in two volumes in 1810. A second edition, published in 1874, was prepared by his grandson Benjamin Franklin Thomas and included a catalog of American publications previous to 1776 and a memoir of Isaiah Thomas.

In November 1812, Thomas founded the American Society of Antiquaries, now known as the American Antiquarian Society, partly to take care of the extensive library he had accumulated in preparing his history of publishing. At its first meeting, Thomas was elected president, a role he held until his death.^[3]

Thomas spent his final days in Worcester. Upon his death in 1831, he bequeathed his entire library, his collection of early American newspapers, as well as his personal papers and records to the American Antiquarian Society.^[3]

Legacy

Thomas's grandson B. F. Thomas noted his grandfather's importance in founding the American Antiquarian Society. "He saw and understood, no man better, from what infinitely varied and minute sources the history of a nation's life was to be drawn; that the only safe rule was to gather up all the fragments so that nothing be lost."^[4] In 1943, Publishers Weekly created the Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing, naming it honor of Mathew Carey and Isaiah Thomas.^[5]

Sources

• unsourced biography from the University of Delaware
•  "Thomas, Isaiah". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 

References

External links

• A Brief History of the American Antiquarian Society
• WorldCat

• Media related to Isaiah Thomas at Wikimedia Commons