William Duane (12 May 1760 – 24 November 1835) was an Irish-American journalist, publisher, author and political campaigner who was active on four continents.
After working for radical Whig newspapers in Ireland and in London, Duane managed two titles of his own in the Bengal Presidency of the British East India Company. Both were closed down for seditious content and in 1794 he was deported by order of the Governor General. Back in London, he edited The Telegraph as a leading member of the city's federation of democratic clubs, the London Corresponding Society. In advance of the society's suppression, in 1796 he returned to North America which he had first left as a child.
As editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, Duane became a leading publicist for Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican opposition as well as for a community United Irish émigrés with whom he protested the Alien and Sedition Acts. In response, the Federalist press accused Duane of advancing principles of interracial democracy in a conspiracy with the French to divide the American Union. Duane, however, failed to maintain an abolitionist stance when, in the War of 1812, British forces pursued a policy of recruiting fugitive American slaves.
Finding limited favour with the Jefferson administration in Washington, Duane split the Democratic-Republican coalition in Pennsylvania by pressing reforms to hold the state judiciary and state legislature to greater popular account. In his later years, he joined war hero Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party in their opposition to concentrating control of public credit in a central bank. He also travelled in and reported from, South America where he was recognised by his hosts for his support in their wars of independence.
Early life Duane was born in St. John's, Newfoundland to a Catholic Irish couple, Anastasia (née Sarsfield) and John Duane. Shortly afterward the family moved south to Lake Champlain, New York where in 1765, his father, a farmer and surveyor, died: killed, according to later family lore, in an attack by Indians. After some years in Philadelphia and Baltimore, his mother brought him to Ireland, accepting the protection of his paternal family in Clonmel. In 1779, his mother, who had intended him for the priesthood, disowned him when he married Catherine Corcoran, a Protestant. He found employment, apprenticing as a printer with a local paper, the Hibernian Advertiser, that supported the Volunteer movement for reform, and celebrated the American struggle for independence.
Bengal Journal and The Indian World Sometime in the early 1780s, Duane began working as a journalist in London. As a parliamentary reporter and political commentator for the General Advertiser, he gained a reputation as a Real or Radical Whig. This, not least, was for his coverage of the parliamentary impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India. In 1788, after sending his wife and infant son back to Clonmel, Duane was induced to travel himself to India. The promised position in Calcutta as editor of The India Gazette did not materialise, but while working as a revenue collector for the East India Company (enjoying the friendship of his superior, Thomas Law,Pratt, John (1971), Independence National Historical Park: The Home and Office of William Duane (Publisher of the Aurora) 316 Market Street, Philadelphia, Historic Structure Report. Washington D.C.: Office of History and Historic Architecture Eastern Service Sector, United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service a reformer who was to oppose war with the French Republic),Anupama Arora and Rajender Kaur. India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s, Springer, 2017, pp. 78-81 in December 1789 he began to edit and manage the Bengal Journal.
The East India Company authorities were alarmed by his reporting of news from revolutionary France, and of intrigues in the various Indian princely courts where a return of French influence was greatly feared. He further offended by printing a spurious report of Lord Cornwallis having been killed while on the campaign against Tipu Sultan. Duane blamed a source he identified as an agent of the French Royalist Government in Exile. Sued for libel, Duane lost control of his paper and, dragged by his hair through the streets of Calcutta, was committed to a debtors' prison. Undaunted, he founded a second newspaper, The Indian World. In 1794, this gave the Company further offence by revealing radical disaffection in the junior ranks of its army. Invited to breakfast by the Governor-General, Lord Teignmouth, he was seized on the way by Sepoys, held in the dungeon (the "Black Hole") of Fort William, and placed a ship bound for England.
Possibly adding to the suspicion with which he was regarded by authorities, Duane sought to promote printing in the different languages of the sub-continent. He had for that purpose designed a number of different typeface scripts.Barnwell, David (2006), "William Duane and his "Visit to Colombia" of 1823", Irish Migration Studies in Latin America Vol. 4, No. 2: March. 54-58.
The Telegraph and the London Corresponding Society Back in London, Duane secured editorship of The Telegraph a paper (reportedly benefitting from news transmission via the optical telegraph) owned by members of the London Corresponding Society (LCS). These were radical reformers committed to universal manhood suffrage and to annual parliaments. In addition to campaigning against the East India Company, Duane took a steady line against the war with the new French Republic which government supporters sought to discredit by feeding the paper spurious reports of French victories.
Through the period 1795-96, Duane took an active role in the LCS, and may have followed a number of prominent Irish members—Colonel Edward Despard (who had returned from the West Indies equally disillusioned by Britain's colonial mission), the brothers Benjamin and John Binns, Arthur O'Connor, and William Henry Hamilton—in taking the Test or pledge of the United Irishmen.
Before the government of William Pitt, charging collusion with the United Irishmen and with the French, proscribed the Society, with John Binns, Duane chaired the last, and grandest, of its mass meetings. Riding a tide of street protest, the LCS called a "monster meeting" for 26 October 1795 at Copenhagen Fields, Islington. Speaking alongside veteran reformers Joseph Priestley, Charles James Fox, and John Thelwall, crowds estimated at upwards of 200,000 heard Duane confirm his Painite commitment to natural rights and democratic liberties. Three days later, George III, in procession to the state Opening of Parliament, had the windows of his carriage smashed by crowd shouting "No King, No Pitt, No war". The government seized on the occasion to introduce the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act. Together with the encouragement given to magistrates to use their public order powers, the Two Acts effectively muzzled the Society's activities.
In the new year, and in advance of widespread arrests, Duane departed for the United States from which, in his disputes with the East India Company, he had already claimed citizenship.
Philadelphia Aurora and the American United Irishmen In Philadelphia, then the provisional capital of the United States, Benjamin Franklin Bache (who had learned the printing trade in the company of his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin, in Paris) hired Duane to work on his Aurora newspaper. This was the leading journal of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republican opposition.Phillips, Kim T., "William Duane, Philadelphia's Democratic-Republicans, and Origins of Modern Politics," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 101 (1977), pp. 365–87.Pasley, Jeffery L., "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001, pp. 176–95. As a result of his attempt to justify the French position in the XYZ Affair, Bache faced charges of seditious libel against President John Adams and his Federalist administration. When, awaiting trial, Bache in died in September 1798 (carried away by the same yellow fever outbreak that had taken Duane's wife in July), his widow, Margaret Hartman Markoe Bache, relied on Duane to continue publication. They were later to marry.
Bache had been serially denounced by the English immigrant and pamphleteer William Cobbett. The "stubborn sans culotte" should, Cobbett suggested, be treated "as we would a TURK, a JEW, a JACOBIN or a DOG". He was to direct the same invective against Duane's growing circle of United Irish émigrés, describing them as men "animated by the same infamous principles, and actuated by that same thirst for blood and plunder, which had reduced France to a vast human slaughter-house". In May 1798, he began publishing accounts of a Conspiracy, Formed by the United Irishmen, With the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France In Subverting the Government of the United States. Convening in Philadelphia's African Free School, and admitting, together with "all those who have suffered in the cause of freedom" (including free blacks), the Irish republicans had formed a society dedicated to the proposition (to which each member attested) that "a free form of government, and uncontrouled [sic] opinion on all subjects, [are] the common rights of all the human species". Against the backdrop of America's Quasi-War with French and of the Haitian Revolution (then still under the flag of the French Republic), for Cobbett, this was sufficient proof of an intention to organise slave revolts and "thus involve the whole country in rebellion and bloodshed".
The American Society of United Irishmen had been formed in 1797. By the beginning of 1799, it had chapters in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Wilmington: ports of entry that had begun to receive defeated insurgents from the summer rebellion in Ireland. In December 1798, in an editorial reprinted by Cobbett, the leading Federalist paper, the Gazette of the United States, identified Duane as one of the society's principals, alongside his Market Street neighbor, the publisher Matthew Carey, and, James Reynolds.Green, James (1985), Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot, Philadelphia: Library. Company of Philadelphia, p. 26. A United Irish veteran from County Tyrone,McAleer (203), p. 183 Reynolds had co-authored with Duane The Plea of Erin, a memorial presented to Congress protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Duane declared that in the cause of Ireland's emancipation from "the horrid yoke of Britain" he was as "very a United Irishman as any tyrant could abhor". But in protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts, he had also articulated the Painite universalism that Cobbett proposed was at the heart of the alleged Franco-Irish conspiracy. In a reply to George Washington's Farewell Address, Duane had argued for citizenship that, in the "spirit of resistance to oppression, the spirit of philanthropy, the spirit of benevolence, of humanity", could encompass "the Jew, the savage, the Mahometan, the idolator, upon all of whom the sun shines equally".Duane, William (1797), Letter to George Washington President of the United States, Baltimore: Printed for George Keating's Bookstore. Cited MacGiollabhui (2019), p.113.
Jeffersonian Democrat
At war with the Federalists