Joseph Gales
Joseph Gales was an influential journalist and editor born in Eckington, England, in 1761. He began his career as an apprentice printer at the age of thirteen and later moved to Sheffield, where he founded the Sheffield Register in 1787. Gales was a strong proponent of various liberal causes, including labor rights, the abolition of slavery, and universal suffrage, which eventually led to his exile to Germany due to conflicts with the government. In 1795, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a reporter for the American Daily Advertiser and became one of the first to report verbatim on Congress sessions.
Gales later established the Raleigh Register in North Carolina, which supported Jeffersonian ideals and advocated for democratic principles. He served as the state printer for thirty years and was also active in the Unitarian movement. In his later years, Gales contributed to the compilation of the Annals of Congress and held various positions in organizations focused on peace and colonization efforts. He died in Raleigh in 1841 at the age of eighty, leaving a legacy as a champion of reform and a pioneer in journalistic practices.
Subject Terms
Joseph Gales
- Joseph Gales
- Born: February 4, 1761
- Died: August 24, 1841
Journalist and editor, was born in Eckington, England, the eldest son of Thomas Gales, a village schoolteacher. His formal education ended when he was apprenticed at thirteen, first to a printer in Manchester, then to another in Newark-on-Trent, where he became a master printer and binder. There he also met Winifred Marshall, a cousin of Lord Melbourne and author of the novel Lady Emma Malcombe. They were married on May 4, 1784. The intellectual Winifred Gales taught their children—Joseph, Weston Raleigh, and Sarah—to read Latin and the classics.
In 1786 Gales moved to Sheffield, where he established a stationer’s and printing shop, and on June 8, 1787, founded the weekly Sheffield Register. Soon the paper began to reflect the ideas of the liberal movements growing in England, and the Gales’s home became a friendly gathering place for reformers. Gales championed the causes of laboring people and befriended Thomas Paine, quoting The Rights of Man in his newspaper and reprinting it. He argued for abolition of slavery and debtors’ prison and for universal suffrage for men. His efforts for parliamentary reform brought him into conflict with the government and he had to flee to Germany in 1794.
Winifred Gales sold the Register and joined her husband. In 1795 the family sailed for the United States, arriving in Philadelphia, then the capital, on July 30.
Gales, who had learned a system of shorthand, found work as a printer and reporter for the American Daily Advertiser and became one of the first reporters covering sessions of Congress. Using his shorthand, he recorded the debates and proceedings verbatim—the first time this had ever been done.
The amiable and energetic Gales soon bought the Independent Gazetteer, and his first issue, as Gale’s Independent Gazetteer, appeared on September 16, 1796. As editor he pioneered in reporting the debates in Congress; he also printed articles attacking the slave trade, arguing against the evils of war, and urging tolerance and a liberal policy toward new immigrants.
Upon the urging of North Carolina congressmen and friends, he sold his paper and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and on October 22, 1799, founded the weekly Raleigh Register, a Jeffersonian paper. The next year Gales was elected state printer by the Republicans, a post he held for thirty years.
Gales lived in Raleigh until 1832 and became one of its leading citizens. He served as mayor for nineteen years and his newspaper spoke for democratic causes. Gales argued against slavery, but living in a slaveholding state, he did not strongly attack the institution, believing that abolition must be achieved gradually and that the individual states must be the agents of freedom.
During those years, Joseph and Winifred Gales were also leaders in the Unitarian movement in the South. Winifred wrote another novel, Mathilda Berkeley, or Family Anecdotes. published by her husband in 1804.
In 1832, when he was seventy-one years old. Gales took on an important new project. After turning over the Raleigh Register to their son Weston, Gales and his wife went to live with their elder son Joseph, owner and editor of the influential Washington, D.C., newspaper the National Intelligencer. The younger Gales and his partner, William Winston Seaton, who was married to Sarah Gales, continued the innovation of verbatim reporting of congressional proceedings, much of which would otherwise have been lost to posterity, including important speeches of Daniel Webster.
Joseph Gales Sr. compiled the first two volumes of the Annals of Congress, published in 1834 and beginning with the March 3, 1789. session. The annals of the First Congress to the Eighteenth were published by Gales and Seaton from 1834 to 1856 under the running title Gales & Seaton’s History of Congress.
During these years Gales was secretary of the American Peace Society and, for six years, secretary and treasurer of the American Colonization Society, which had as its aim the return of blacks to Africa. In 1839 criticisms of expenditures led to his ouster. He spent the remaining two years of his life in Raleigh, where he died at the age of eighty.
There is no full-scale biography of Joseph Gales, but biographical information about him and the newspapers with which he was associated can be found in F. L. Mott, American Journalism (1945). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1931); C. Eaton, “Winifred and Joseph Gales. Liberals in the Old South,” Journal of Southern History, October 1944; W. H. G. Armytage, “The Editorial Experiences of Joseph Gales 1786-1794,” North Carolina Historical Review, July 1951; and W. G. Briggs, “Joseph Gales. Editor of Raleigh’s First Newspaper,” North Carolina Booklet, October 1907. An obituary appeared in the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, August 27, 1841.