Thomas Ritchie (November 5, 1778 – July 3, 1854) of Virginia was a leading American newspaper journalist, editor and publisher.
He read law and medicine, but, instead of practicing either, set up a bookstore in Richmond, Virginia in 1803. He bought out the Republican newspaper the Richmond Enquirer in 1804, and made it a financial and political success, as editor and publisher for 41 years. The paper appeared three times a week. Thomas Jefferson said of the Enquirer, "I read but a single newspaper, Ritchie's Enquirer, the best that is published or ever has been published in America." Ritchie wrote the stirring partisan editorials, clipped the news from Washington and New York papers, and did most of the local reporting himself. For 25 years he was state printer, a method by which his political friends subsidized their most articulate voice.
Ritchie was a leader of the "Richmond Junto," (originally with relatives Spencer Roane and Dr. John Brockenbrough of the Virginia State Bank Ritchie controlled the Republican state committee). Richmond was a violent frontier town when Ritchie arrived. Controversial rival journalist and Jefferson opponent James T. Callender was found drowned in three feet of water in 1803. Nonetheless, Ritchie set up a press and began advocating restrictions on free blacks as well as slave manumissions. Lawyer and Richmond Enquirer founding editor Meriwether Jones died in a duel on August 3, 1806. John Daly Burk and Skelton Jones (Meriwether's brother) also both died in duels before completing a projected four volume history of Richmond. Ritchie editorialized against South Carolina and Georgia reopening the transatlantic slave trade, and later for U.S. intervention in the War of 1812. Political rivals also could find themselves excoriated in the press, and even President James Monroe was not immune. The Democratic-Republican party, once nicknamed the quids and thought more radical than Jefferson, grew increasingly pro-slavery, anti-foreigner and anti-Catholic over time. Committed to democratic reform in representation of the western counties and full manhood suffrage (for whites), Ritchie promoted the 1829 Virginia state constitutional convention. A modernizer, Ritchie came to promote public schools and extensive state internal improvements.