He Wrote the Caption — Benjamin Russell
It is late evening in a Boston composing room, March 25, 1812. An artist named Elkanah Tisdale has drawn a winged, clawed, salamander-shaped creature on a piece of paper and brought it to the Centinel. The creature is tracing the outline of the new Essex County electoral district, which has been gerrymandered by the governor into a shape no one could defend as an accident of geography. The editor looks at the drawing for a moment. Then he writes a caption on a slip of paper: The Gerry-Mander. A New Species of Monster. In the morning the press will run it.
It is 1812.
He does not just learn the trade. He apprentices under Isaiah Thomas in Worcester, learns typesetting, press operation, broadsheet economics, and the full tradition of the New England Patriot press, and in 1784 he co-founds the Massachusetts Centinel in Boston and runs it for forty-four years.
He does not just edit a newspaper. He edits the leading Federalist newspaper in New England for more than four decades — championing the Constitution in 1788, opposing Jefferson’s Embargo that strangled New England maritime trade, opposing the War of 1812, covering the Hartford Convention — always the voice of the Boston merchant and professional class against what it considers Republican excess.
He does not just publish the cartoon. He publishes a cartoon of a salamander-shaped electoral district drawn by Elkanah Tisdale and writes the caption that joins Governor Gerry’s name to the word salamander, and the portmanteau the Centinel runs on March 26, 1812 enters the language permanently as one of the most durable political terms in American history.
He does not just coin a word. He coins it with a specific pronunciation in mind — Elbridge Gerry pronounced his name GAIR-ee, so the word was originally GAIR-ee-mander — and the soft-G version that everyone uses now is, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, erroneous but long-established.
His Spark of Liberty was the press as the one place where a political disgrace could be named and fixed in amber before the next election.
The word has outlasted the election, the governor, the district, and the state senate that drew it. It is two hundred years old and still working.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born in Boston on September 13, 1761, he served briefly in the Continental Army in 1780 as a substitute for his employer Isaiah Thomas and co-founded the Massachusetts Centinel on March 24, 1784, with William Warden. After Warden’s death in 1786 he became sole editor and publisher. He renamed the paper the Columbian Centinel in 1790 and ran it until 1828. On or around March 26, 1812, a Federalist Boston newspaper published a satirical cartoon by artist Elkanah Tisdale of a salamander-shaped electoral district drawn under Governor Elbridge Gerry, with a caption coined in the Centinel’s composing room. The cartoon is attributed in most modern sources to the Boston Gazette; the precise paper and the precise coiner of the word remain subjects of scholarly dispute. The term entered common usage within months and has never left. Russell served in the Massachusetts state senate from approximately 1820 to 1830. He died in Boston on January 4, 1845.
His name was Benjamin Russell.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
Some names keep the watch while the world sleeps.
Night Watch is a wordsearch collection built for quiet hands and long evenings.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H35V5JDM
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