Joseph T. Buckingham

Joseph Tinker Buckingham (December 21, 1779 – April 10, 1861) was a 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 but christened Joseph Buckingham, with his mother's mother's surname, which he adopted legally in 1804. 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. Nehemiah died in 1783, ruined by the devaluing of the Continental currency he received for supplying the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Tinker's widow, Mary née Huntington, soon became destitute, until friends offered the family a home in Worthington, Massachusetts.

Joseph was indentured to a farmer named Welsh, where he was kindly treated and got a basic education. After his term, he worked briefly as a printer's devil at the Farmer's Museum in Walpole, New Hampshire, before become an apprentice compositor and copy-editor at the Gazette in Greenfield, Massachusetts. In 1800 he moved to Boston as a journeyman at Thomas & Andrews. In 1803 he played in Salem, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island. In 1805, he married Melinda Alvord; they had thirteen children.

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