William Duane

William Duane (12 May 1760 – 24 November 1835) was an Irish-American journalist, publisher, author and political campaigner who was active on four continents.

After working for radical Whig newspapers in Ireland and in London, Duane managed two titles of his own in the Bengal Presidency of the British East India Company. Both were closed down for seditious content and in 1794 he was deported by order of the Governor General. Back in London, he edited The Telegraph as a leading member of the city's federation of democratic clubs, the London Corresponding Society. In advance of the society's suppression, in 1796 he returned to North America which he had first left as a child.

As editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, Duane became a leading publicist for Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican opposition as well as for a community United Irish émigrés with whom he protested the Alien and Sedition Acts. In response, the Federalist press accused Duane of advancing principles of interracial democracy in a conspiracy with the French to divide the American Union. Duane, however, failed to maintain an abolitionist stance when, in the War of 1812, British forces pursued a policy of recruiting fugitive American slaves.

Finding limited favour with the Jefferson administration in Washington, Duane split the Democratic-Republican coalition in Pennsylvania by pressing reforms to hold the state judiciary and state legislature to greater popular account. In his later years, he joined war hero Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party in their opposition to concentrating control of public credit in a central bank. He also travelled in and reported from, South America where he was recognised by his hosts for his support in their wars of independence.

Early life Duane was born in St. John's, Newfoundland to a Catholic Irish couple, Anastasia (née Sarsfield) and John Duane. Shortly afterward the family moved south to Lake Champlain, New York where in 1765, his father, a farmer and surveyor, died: killed, according to later family lore, in an attack by Indians. After some years in Philadelphia and Baltimore, his mother brought him to Ireland, accepting the protection of his paternal family in Clonmel. In 1779, his mother, who had intended him for the priesthood, disowned him when he married Catherine Corcoran, a Protestant. He found employment, apprenticing as a printer with a local paper, the Hibernian Advertiser, that supported the Volunteer movement for reform, and celebrated the American struggle for independence.

Bengal Journal and The Indian World Sometime in the early 1780s, Duane began working as a journalist in London. As a parliamentary reporter and political commentator for the General Advertiser, he gained a reputation as a Real or Radical Whig. This, not least, was for his coverage of the parliamentary impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India. a reformer who was to oppose war with the French Republic), in December 1789 he began to edit and manage the Bengal Journal. In 1794, this gave the Company further offence by revealing radical disaffection in the junior ranks of its army. Invited to breakfast by the Governor-General, Lord Teignmouth, he was seized on the way by Sepoys, held in the dungeon (the "Black Hole") of Fort William, and placed a ship bound for England.

The Telegraph and the London Corresponding Society Back in London, Duane secured editorship of The Telegraph a paper (reportedly benefitting from news transmission via the optical telegraph) owned by members of the London Corresponding Society (LCS). These were radical reformers committed to universal manhood suffrage and to annual parliaments. In addition to campaigning against the East India Company, Duane took a steady line against the war with the new French Republic which government supporters sought to discredit by feeding the paper spurious reports of French victories. the brothers Benjamin and John Binns, Arthur O'Connor, and William Henry Hamilton —in taking the Test or pledge of the United Irishmen.

Before the government of William Pitt, charging collusion with the United Irishmen and with the French, proscribed the Society, with John Binns, Duane chaired the last, and grandest, of its mass meetings. Riding a tide of street protest, the LCS called a "monster meeting" for 26 October 1795 at Copenhagen Fields, Islington. Speaking alongside veteran reformers Joseph Priestley, Charles James Fox, and John Thelwall, crowds estimated at upwards of 200,000 heard Duane confirm his Painite commitment to natural rights and democratic liberties. The government seized on the occasion to introduce the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act. Together with the encouragement given to magistrates to use their public order powers, the Two Acts effectively muzzled the Society's activities.

In the new year, and in advance of widespread arrests, Duane departed for the United States from which, in his disputes with the East India Company, he had already claimed citizenship. As a result of his attempt to justify the French position in the XYZ Affair, Bache faced charges of seditious libel against President John Adams and his Federalist administration. When, awaiting trial, Bache in died in September 1798 (carried away by the same yellow fever outbreak that had taken Duane's wife in July),

Bache had been serially denounced by the English immigrant and pamphleteer William Cobbett. The "stubborn sans culotte" should, Cobbett suggested, be treated "as we would a TURK, a JEW, a JACOBIN or a DOG". He was to direct the same invective against Duane's growing circle of United Irish émigrés, describing them as men "animated by the same infamous principles, and actuated by that same thirst for blood and plunder, which had reduced France to a vast human slaughter-house". In May 1798, he began publishing accounts of a Conspiracy, Formed by the United Irishmen, With the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France In Subverting the Government of the United States. Against the backdrop of America's Quasi-War with French and of the Haitian Revolution (then still under the flag of the French Republic), By the beginning of 1799, it had chapters in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Wilmington: ports of entry that had begun to receive defeated insurgents from the summer rebellion in Ireland. A United Irish veteran from County Tyrone, Reynolds had co-authored with Duane The Plea of Erin, a memorial presented to Congress protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts. But in protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts, he had also articulated the Painite universalism that Cobbett proposed was at the heart of the alleged Franco-Irish conspiracy. In a reply to George Washington's Farewell Address, Duane had argued for citizenship that, in the "spirit of resistance to oppression, the spirit of philanthropy, the spirit of benevolence, of humanity", could encompass "the Jew, the savage, the Mahometan, the idolator, upon all of whom the sun shines equally".

Jeffersonian Democrat

At war with the Federalists Those Duane decried as "Anglo-Federals"—"ardent eulogists of privileged orders . . . [and] of a British form of government" In May 1799, Duane was severely beaten in his home by army officers demanding to know the source for an article detailing abuses in the repression of Fries's Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. eventually a series of companies some 800 strong called the Philadelphia Militia Legion. Drawn largely from the city's Irish, it was better known as the Republican Greens. In addition to protecting Duane and his presses from further attack, ultra-Republicans saw the drilled and armed volunteers as a counter to the perceived threat of a Federalist standing army. Duane argued that the volunteers were a Republican bulwark against the threat of Federalist tyranny. Facing charges of breaching Senate privileges and of contempt, Duane went into hiding for several weeks until the Federalist-controlled Congress adjourned. Jefferson called the Aurora "our comfort in the gloomiest days", and John Adams named Duane as one of the three or four men most responsible for his defeat.

Seeking favour in Washington On taking office in 1801, Jefferson wrote to Duane asking for "an exact list of the prosecutions of a public nature" against him, and over which he, as President, might have control. Any resting on the Sedition Act he would regard as an infringement on the First Amendment freedom of the press and, if necessary, would override the recommendation of the U.S. Senate to order a Nolle prosequi. Yet, unwilling to privilege Duane's paper over the rest of the Republican press, the President declined to help raise new funding for what Duane was now calling Aurora, for the Country. He was also disappointed in losing to the rivalry of Albert Gallatin control of Jefferson's patronage in Pennsylvania.

Duane, nonetheless, demonstrated his loyalty. Stung by the President's seeming ingratitude, James Callender, who had been fined and imprisoned under the Sedition Act for his scurrilous attacks on Adams, attempted, in effect, to blackmail Jefferson. In advance of his revelations, Duane sought to discredit the Scottish journalist. On 25 August 1802, the Aurora accused Callender of infecting his wife with venereal disease and of getting drunk in the next room while she languished and died and his children went hungry. In the next issue of his Richmond Recorder, under the heading "The President Again," Callender wrote that it was "well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY." This was an exposé of Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings (the "African Venus said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello") and of their several children.

After two years in the new capital (in whose construction his former East India Company superior in Calcutta, Thomas Law, was making a fortune), Duane entrusted his operation in Washington to his son (by his first marriage), William J. Duane, and returned to Philadelphia. What is clear, is Duane believed that Jefferson could be swayed by the prospect of black soldiers saving "so many of the whites". in launching a crusade for judicial reform from which President Jefferson stood notably aloof. Duane charged that a combination of judicial independence and English common law ("dark, arbitrary, unwritten, incoherent . . . and contradictory") allowed judges "not simply to administer the law, but [to] exercise a legislative and even an executive power directly in defiance and contempt of the Constitution". While in the British system, it was appropriate that they be independent of the monarch, in a free republic it was intolerable that judges should not be held to popular account. He published and promoted Sampson against the Philistines, or, The reformation of lawsuits (1805), attributed to Jesse Higgins, an Irish lawyer, in which the alternative of a general codified law of reference is presented as "justice made cheap, speedy, and brought home to every man's door".

When Pennsylvania governor Thomas McKean, whom the Aurora had previously supported, failed to respond to these arguments, Duane, in an Irish-German alliance with Congressman Michael Lieb, swung his support behind a Democratic-Republican challenger for governor, State House Speaker, Simon Snyder. The result was an election in 1805 that split the Jeffersonian coalition: previously defeated Federalists ("Quids") coalesced with "Constitutional Republicans" to secure the governor's re-election.

Snyder did succeed McKean at the end of 1808. But while as Speaker he had moved legislation to submit minor cases to arbitration, no other part of Duane's reform programme secured his support as governor. Neglected were his calls for the simplification of legal proceedings so that people might handle their own cases; the furnishing of lawyers, where required, by the government; term-limits for judges; simple, rather than two-thirds, majorities for their senate impeachment; a senate elected annually; the right of defendants in libel cases to plead the truth of their assertions; a curtailment of executive patronage; and, to sanction all of the above, a constitutional convention.

A result of Duane's disappointment was a bitter print war with his former associate in the London Corresponding Society, John Binns, Snyder's trusted advisor and, from 1807, editor in Philadelphia of the Democratic Press. The influence and readership of the Aurora declined. In 1822, Duane "dropped his editorial pen",

In his last years, Duane joined Democrats in opposing the revived Bank of the United States. The argument that a national regulation of public credit was a threat to constitutional liberties was taken up by his son William John Duane. In 1833, President Andrew Jackson (whom Binns had vehemently opposed)

South America Duane supported the movements in Spanish America for independence He befriended the patriot exile from New Grenada, Manuel Torres, regularly publishing in the Aurora Torres's views and accounts of the independence struggle. Torres, in turn, translated Spanish-American pamphlets for Duane, and Duane's editorials into Spanish.

The Congreso General de la Gran Colombia held in 1821 expressed its gratitude to Duane, and with his friend Torres appointed his country's first ambassador to Washington, Duane travelled to the new republic in 1822. Duane's extensive observations on social and political conditions made on a 1,300-mile journey through the territories that, in 1831, were to divide into the present-day republics Columbia and Venezuela, informed A Visit to Columbia in the Years 1822 & 1823 (Philadelphia, 1826).

Duane also had sufficient prestige to visit Bolivia, and to be successful there in collecting Bolivian debts for a commission. and was interred at Laurel Hill Cemetery. His obituary in the New York Star described him as "an able, indefatigable, and persevering writer of the old democratic school".

Selected works on line A letter to George Washington, president of the United States: containing strictures on his address of the seventeenth of September, 1796, notifying his relinquishment of the presidential office. Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin Bache,1796. A Caution: or Reflections on the Current Dispute between the French and American Republics, with John Dickenson, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical Society, 1798. Politics for American Farmers: being a series of tracts on the blessings of free government, as it is administered in the United States, compared with the boasted stupendous fabric of British Monarchy, Washington City: R.C. Weightman, 1807. A Hand Book for Infantry: Containing the First Principles of Military Discipline, Founded on the Rational Method Intended to Explain in a Familiar and Practical Manner, For the Use of the Military Force of the United States, The Modern Improvements in the Discipline and Movement of Armies, Philadelphia, 1814 A Visit to Columbia, in the Years 1822 & 1823, Philadelphia: Thomas H. Palmer, 1826