Joseph T. Buckingham
Joseph Tinker Buckingham (December 21, 1779[1][2] – April 10, 1861[2]) was an American journalist and politician in New England. He rose from humble beginnings to become an influential conservative intellectual in Boston.
Family and early life[edit]
Buckingham was born Joseph Buckingham Tinker[3] but christened Joseph Buckingham, with his mother's mother's surname, which he adopted legally in 1804.[4] He was the youngest of nine surviving children of Nehemiah Tinker, a tavern-keeper in Windham, Connecticut, descended from Thomas Tinker, one of the Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower.[1] Nehemiah died in 1783, ruined by the devaluing of the Continental currency he received for supplying the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.[1] Tinker's widow, Mary née Huntington, soon became destitute, until friends offered the family a home in Worthington, Massachusetts.[1]
Joseph was indentured to a farmer named Welsh, where he was kindly treated and got a basic education.[1] After his term, he worked briefly as a printer's devil at the Farmer's Museum in Walpole, New Hampshire,[1][5] before become an apprentice compositor and copy-editor at the Gazette in Greenfield, Massachusetts.[1] In 1800 he moved to Boston as a journeyman at Thomas & Andrews.[3] In 1803 he played summer stock in Salem, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island.[1] In 1805, he married Melinda Alvord; they had thirteen children.[3]
Journalism[edit]
While setting up as a master printer in Boston, Buckingham started and edited two publications: The Polyanthos, an illustrated monthly magazine, which ran from 1806 till September 1807, and 1812 to 1814;[1][6] and The Ordeal, which ran weekly from January 1809 for six months.[1] These sided with the Federalist Party.[1] He joined the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association and became chairman in 1812;[6] he was vice-president in 1830 and president in 1832.[7] In 1815, he went bankrupt, both his publishing and printing businesses being hit by the War of 1812.[6][8] The New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, started in 1817, was popular among the growing number of Freemasons in Boston.[1][9] The reference to Freemasonry was dropped by 1820 after a backlash.[9] The magazine supported Josiah Quincy from 1821,[10] as part of the "Middling Interest" coalition after the Panic of 1819.[11] In 1822, Quincy presided over a libel suit brought against Buckingham by John Newland Maffitt.[12][13]
On 2 March 1824, Buckingham founded the Boston Courier,[1] a daily newspaper which supported protectionism.[1] He sold his interest in the Galaxy in 1828,[1] and edited the Courier till selling out in 1848.[1] It supported the National Republicans, and later the Whig Party.[14] In 1831, he started the monthly The New-England Magazine with his son Edwin.[1] Now considered "one of antebellum America's few worthwhile literary journals",[15] its contributors included Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edward Everett, Samuel Gridley Howe,[7] and Oliver Wendell Holmes.[16] Edwin Buckingham died in 1833, aged 23, on a voyage to Smyrna to relieve his tuberculosis.[1][15] Joseph sold the magazine in 1834 to Howe and John O. Sargent.[1] He had to mortgage his property in 1836 when business turned bad.[17]
Politics[edit]
Buckingham served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for Boston and Cambridge[2] in 1828, 1831–1833, 1836, and 1838–39,[1] as a National Republican,[7] and later a Whig. He introduced a report in 1833 in favor of the suppression of lotteries.[1][18] He denounced the Tariff of 1833, switching his allegiance from Henry Clay to Daniel Webster.[19]
He represented Middlesex County[2] in the Massachusetts Senate in 1847–48 and 1850–51.[1] He leaned towards the Conscience Whigs but was not an outright abolitionist, though he did oppose the Fugitive Slave Law in the Compromise of 1850.[20]