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Gamaliel Bailey

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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GAMALIEL BAILEY (1807-1859), American journalist, was born at Mount Holly, New Jersey, on the 3rd of December 1807. He graduated at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1827. After editing for a short time a religious journal, the Methodist Protestant, at Baltimore, he removed in 1831 to Cincinnati, Ohio, where at first he devoted himself almost exclusively to the practice of medicine. He was also a lecturer on physiology at the Lane Theological Seminary, and at the time of the Lane Seminary debates (February 1834) between the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery students, and the subsequent withdrawal of the latter, he became an ardent abolitionist. In 1836 he joined James G. Birney in the editorial control of the Philanthropist; in the following year he succeeded Birney as editor, and conducted the paper in spite of threats and acts of violence - the printing-office being thrice wrecked by a mob - until 1847. From 1843 also he edited a daily paper, the Herald. In 1847 he assumed control of the new abolitional organ, the National Era, at Washington, D.C. Here also his paper was the object of attack by pro-slavery mobs, at one time in 1848 the editor and printers being besieged in their office for three days. This paper had a considerable circulation, and in it, in 1851-1852, Mrs. H. B. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was first published. Bailey died at sea in the course of a trip to Europe on the 5th of June 1859.