Benjamin Perley Poore, circa 1850.

Benjamin Perley Poore (2 November, 1820 - 30 May, 1887) was a prominent American newspaper correspondent, editor, and author in the mid-1800s. Year 1820 ( MDCCCXX) was a Leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Leap year Year 1887 ( MDCCCLXXXVII) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common

Poore was born near Newburyport, Massachusetts to parents Benjamin and Mary Perley (Dodge) Poore on the family estate, Indian Hill Farm. Newburyport is a small coastal city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, 38 miles (61 km northeast of Boston. His father's family were long-time residents of the area; his mother had been born in 1799 in Georgetown, a small incorporated community in the newly defined District of Columbia. Washington DC ( formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D

When Poore was seven, his parents took him to Washington, D. C. for the first time, during the administration of another Massachusetts man, President John Quincy Adams. John Quincy Adams (July 11 1767 &ndash February 23 1848 was an American diplomat and politician who served as the sixth President of the United States About this time, he enrolled in Governor Dummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts to prepare for a West Point appointment. The Governor's Academy (formerly Governor Dummer Academy is an independent school with 376 students in grades nine through twelve approximately 75% of whom are boarders Byfield is a parish in the town of Newbury, in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. "USMA" redirects here For other uses see USMA (disambiguation The United States Military Academy (also known as USMA, When he was eleven years old he was taken by his father to England, where saw Sir Walter Scott, the Marquis de Lafayette, and other notables. Sir Walter Scott 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 &ndash 21 September 1832 was a prolific Scottish Historical novelist and Poet popular throughout Poore was subsequently expelled from Dummer Academy for misbehavior and apprenticed himself to a printer in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester (ˈwʊstɚ is a City in the state of Massachusetts in the United States of America.

Poore's father purchased a paper in Athens, Georgia, the Southern Whig, which Poore edited for two years. Athens-Clarke County is a unified city-county in Georgia, US, in the northeastern part of the state at the intersection of U In 1841 he visited Europe again as attache of the American legation at Brussels, remaining abroad until 1848. During this period he was the foreign correspondent of the Boston Atlas. After editing the Boston Bee and Sunday Sentinel, Poore returned to the national capital in 1854 as a Washington correspondent. His colorful letters to the Boston Journal and other newspapers over the signature of "Perley" made his national reputation.

Benjamin Perley Poore, between 1870 and 1887.

One of the most popular and prolific journalists of his era, he was an active partisan for the Whig and Republican parties. A widely reported anecdote concerns his support for Millard Fillmore in the election of 1856. Millard Fillmore ( January 7 1800 &ndash March 8 1874 was the thirteenth President of the United States, serving from 1850 until 1853 and the last member of the Whig Poore declared that he would wheel a barrel of apples from his home town of Newburyport to Boston if Fillmore failed to carry Massachusetts - a promise he fulfilled in a two-day journey, cheered on by crowds who lined his route.

In additional to his newspaper writing, Poore served as clerk of the committee of the United States Senate on printing records, where he edited the Congressional Directory and the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. The United States Senate is the Upper house of the bicameral United States Congress, the Lower house being the House of Representatives During the Civil War, he organized a battalion of riflemen at Newbury that formed the nucleus of a company in the 8th Massachusetts volunteers, in which Poore served as major for a short time, retaining the title of Major Poore for the rest of his life.

In 1885, Poore organized the Gridiron Club and served as its first president. Designed as social events to bring reporters and politicians together to repair the ill-will sometimes generated by news stories, Gridiron dinners featured satirical songs and skits performed by Washington's leading journalists. The Club's annual white-tie dinners continue to attract presidents and other dignitaries, functioning much as Poore anticipated.

Among his publications were Campaign Life of General Zachary Taylor],' and Rise and Fall of Louis Philippe (Boston, 1848); Early Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1851); The Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of Abraham Lincoln (1865); Federal and State Charters (2 vols. Zachary Taylor (November 24 1784 &ndash July 9 1850 was an American military leader and the twelfth President of the United States. Napoleon Bonaparte (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821 was a French military and political leader who had a significant impact on the History of Europe. Abraham Lincoln (February 12 1809 &ndash April 15 1865 the sixteenth President of the United States, successfully led his country through its greatest internal , 1877); Life of Burnside (1882); and Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1886). He died in Washington, D. C.

For further reading

• James Grant Wilson, John Fiske and Stanley L. Klos, eds. , Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887-1889).
• Joseph P. McKerns, "Benjamin Perley Poore of the Boston Journal: His Life and Times as a Washington Correspondent" (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1979).
• Donald A. Ritchie. Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1991).

External links

• Perley's Reminiscences, v. 1-2, of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, available at Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, abbreviated as PG, is a volunteer effort to Digitize, archive and distribute Cultural works
• Works by or about Benjamin Perley Poore in libraries (WorldCat catalog)