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William Hunter was a radical advocate for American democracy. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was the founder of the second newspaper west of the Alleghenies, and the first newspaper editor to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts. Arguably a Jacksonian Democrat before Andrew Jackson first ran for president, Hunter served the Jackson Administration, and as a civil servant seven successive administrations.
Yet that brief biography obscures his very interesting origins. For William Hunter had been born in New Brunswick, yes, but as the son of John Hunter of the 26th Regiment of the Line. For the first ten years of his life William followed his father as his peacetime service in British America became combat service in the rebellious territory of the new United States. Departing for Britain at age ten in 1778 when his sick father was detached for recruiting duties, William returned to the United States fifteen years later, his father dead, his mother and sister left behind. He was now a committed republican, arriving in Philadelphia in the midst of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. He would never again travel back across the ocean, or see his mother and again.
Gene Procknow describes the ups and downs, and twist and turns of William Hunter’s eventful life in his new book William Hunter Finding Free Speech: A British Soldier’s Son Who Became an Early American. Formerly a management consultant with a global consulting firm, Gene Procknow has become a careful historian of early American history; William Hunter is his first book.
For Further Investigation
- Gene’s website has some wonderful “behind the book” material
- Here’s an article Gene wrote for the Journal of the American Revolution on different perspectives on the quartering of British soldiers in New Brunswick, NJ
- In the course of the episode, Gene referenced Don Hagist. Here’s a conversation with Don about punishment in the British Army during the American Revolution; and here’s a conversation with Don that ranges much more widely into the society and culture of the British Army that fought in America
- Since Dan Gullotta, friend of the show, used to do a podcast called Age of Jackson, we’ve tended to avoid American history from roughly 1815 to 1850. But here’s an exception to the rule, a conversation about a no less radical Democrat than William Hunter, none other than Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.
- John Zaborney, Slaves For Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia
