James McMaster

James McMaster (born MacMaster; April 1, 1820 – December 29, 1886) was a 19th-century American Roman Catholic newspaper editor and activist known for his conservative political views and ultramontane religious values. McMaster was a "states rights" Democrat, "...ever intemperate and always arch-conservative." the son of Gilbert MacMaster, a Presbyterian minister. He was descended from Scots who had settled in Vermont. He entered Union College but left before graduation. He briefly read law at Columbia.

Career McMaster returned to New York, worked as a freelance journalist, and in 1848 became the publisher and editor of the city's principal Catholic newspaper, The New York Freeman's Journal, which he purchased from then-bishop John Hughes. He changed his surname to McMaster, an Irish-looking name with more appeal to the paper's largely Irish-American readership than the Scottish-spelling MacMaster. Any number of articles from that period might have offended Hughes, but McMaster crossed a line in a May 31 editorial about the Bleeding Kansas controversy when he offered the view that if someone took a gun to abolitionists Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, and William Lloyd Garrison, a "great relief" would be felt across the nation. That was not a sentiment that the archbishop shared or could afford to be associated with.

McMaster strongly opposed sending Catholic children to public schools. He supported slavery and the secession. He opposed the Wilmot Proviso, advocating the right of Americans to hold slaves in every state. Meekness and generosity held no appeal for McMaster. The H.L. Mencken of his day, the publisher of the Freeman's Journal made clear when hiring anyone that he wanted writers with a fluent pen, a disregard for consequences, and a large capacity for malice. He expected his underlings to share his many prejudices (e.g., a belief in states' rights, a hatred of abolitionists, a lifelong suspicion of the Jesuits) and said that he wrote "to edify such good people as are not overstocked with brains or at least not trained to follow theological discussions."

McMaster was jailed at Fort Lafayette and his newspaper shut down during President Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus at the start of the American Civil War. When released from prison, he continued to write against the war effort, always believing that the South had a right to secede from the Union.

Death He died in Brooklyn in 1886, age 66. He had suffered a fall and spent two weeks at St. Mary's General Hospital before his death.