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.

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]

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]

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]

After retiring from politics and journalism, Buckingham published two two-volume sets of memoirs,^[1] and edited the annals of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association.

• Buckingham, Joseph Tinker (1852). Specimens of Newspaper Literature: with Personal Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Reminiscences. Boston: Redding & Co.
  • At Google Books: Volume 1 Volume 2
  • At Internet Archive: Volume 1 Volume 2
• Buckingham, Joseph Tinker (1852). Personal Memoirs and Recollections of Editorial Life. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields.
  • At Internet Archive: Volume 1 Volume 2
• Joseph Tinker Buckingham, ed. (1853). Annals of the Massachusetts charitable mechanic association. Boston: Crocker & Brewster.

• Crocker, Matthew H. (1999). The magic of the many: Josiah Quincy and the rise of mass politics in Boston, 1800-1830. Univ of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 1-55849-222-4.
• Evert Augustus Duyckinck; George Long Duyckinck, eds. (1856). "Joseph T. Buckingham". Cyclopaedia of American literature. Vol. 2. C. Scribner. pp. 19–20.
• Howard B. Rock; Paul A. Gilje; Robert Asher, eds. (1995). American artisans: crafting social identity, 1750-1850. JHU Press. ISBN 0-8018-5029-0.
  • Laurie, Bruce. ""Spavined Ministers, Lying Toothpullers, and Buggering Priests": Third-Partyism and the Search for Security in the Antebellum North". American artisans. pp. 98–120.
  • Kornblith, Gary J. "Becoming Joseph T. Buckingham: The struggle for artisanal independence in Early-Nineteenth-Century Boston". American artisans. pp. 123–135.
• Mott, Frank Luther (1930). A history of American magazines. Vol. 1: 1741–1850. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-39550-6.
• "Miscellany". The Historical Magazine. 5 (7). New York: Charles B. Richardson & Co: 224. July 1861.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Joseph Tinker Buckingham.

• Works by or about Joseph T. Buckingham at the Internet Archive