Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas
Oil on canvas by Ethan Allen Greenwood in 1818 (American Antiquarian Society)
Born	(1749-01-19)January 19, 1749 Boston, Massachusetts
Died	April 4, 1831(1831-04-04) (aged 82)
Resting place	Rural Cemetery Worcester, Massachusetts
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Isaiah Thomas (January 19, 1749 – April 4, 1831) was an American newspaper publisher and author. He performed the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Worcester, Massachusetts, and reported the first account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. He was the founder of the American Antiquarian Society.

Thomas was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was apprenticed on July 7, 1756 to Zechariah Fowle, a Boston printer, with whom, after working as a printer in Halifax, Portsmouth (New Hampshire) and Charleston (South Carolina), he formed a partnership in 1770.

The partnership was formed to publish the Massachusetts Spy, and lasted for three months, after which Thomas continued publication alone. For the paper's motto, he chose “Open to all parties, but influenced by none.” Initially it came out three times each week, then (under his sole ownership) as a semi-weekly, and beginning in 1771, as a weekly. The paper soon espoused the Whig cause and was the object of government efforts to suppress it. In 1771 Gov. Thomas Hutchinson ordered the attorney general to prosecute Thomas, but the grand jury failed to find cause for indictment.

In Boston, in 1774, Thomas published the Royal American Magazine, which was continued for a short time by Joseph Greenleaf, and which contained many engravings by Paul Revere.

Wary of the Tories' growing resentment of the independence of the Spy, on April 16, 1775 (three days before the Battle of Concord, in which he took part), Thomas took his presses from Boston and set them up in Worcester. His other property was destroyed. In Worcester, he published and sold books, built a paper mill and bindery, and continued the paper until 1802 save for gaps in 1776–1778 and in 1786–1788. The Spy supported George Washington and the Federalist Party. He was also postmaster for a time.