Benjamin Perley Poore
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Benjamin Perley Poore (2 November, 1820 - 30 May, 1887) was a widely popular American newspaper correspondent, editor, and author in the mid-1800s.
Poore was born near Newburyport, Massachusetts to parents Benjamin and Mary Perley (Dodge) Poore on the family estate, Indian Hill Farm. His father was of a long-time family in the area; his mother had been born in 1799 in Georgetown, a small incorporated community in the newly defined District of Columbia.
When Poore was seven, his parents took him to Washington, D.C. for the first time, during the tenure of another Massachusetts man, John Quincy Adams, as President. About this time, he enrolled in Governor Dummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts to prepare for a West Point appointment. When Perley was eleven years of age he was taken by his father to England, and there saw Sir Walter Scott, the Marquis de Lafayette, and other notables. Poore subsequently withdrew from Dummer Academy and apprenticed himself to a printer in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Poore's father purchased a paper in Athens, Georgia, the "Southern Whig," which Poore edited for two years before 1840. In 1841 he visited Europe again as attache of the American legation at Brussels, remaining abroad until 1848. During this period he was the foreign correspondent of the Boston "Atlas". After editing the Boston "Bee" and "Sunday Sentinel," Mr. Poore finally entered in 1854 upon his lifework, that of Washington correspondent. His letters to the Boston "Journal" over the signature of "Perley," and to other papers, gained him a national reputation.
He was one of the most popular persons of his time in Washington, DC, and evidently in his home town as well. One amusing anecdote concerns his support for Millard Fillmore in Massachusetts. Poore declared that he would wheel a barrel of apples from his home town of Newburyport to Boston if Fillmore failed to carry Massachusetts in the Presidential election of 1856 - a promise he fulfilled in a two-day journey to the delight of cheering crowds who lined the streets.
For several years Poore served as clerk of the committee of the United States Senate on printing records. About the same time he organized a battalion of riflemen at Newbury that formed the nucleus of a company in the 8th Massachusetts volunteers, of which organization Mr. Poore served as major for a short time during the civil war. He was also in 1874 commander of the Ancient and honorable artillery company of Boston, and had made a collection of materials for its projected history.
Among his publications were Campaign Life of General Zachary Taylor, of which 800,000 copies were circulated, and Rise and Fall of Louis Philippe (Boston, 1848); Early Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1851); Agricultural History of Essex County, Massachusetts; The Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of Abraham Lincoln (1865); Federal and State Charters (2 vols., 1877); The Political Register and Congressional Directory (1878); Life of Burnside (1882); and Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1886). As secretary of the United States Agricultural Society, he became the editor of its "Journal" in 1857. He died in Washington, D.C.
[edit] For further reading
- Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson, John Fiske and Stanley L. Klos. Six volumes, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887-1889.
