Setting and Context - Essays in this Section
Somewhat surprisingly, given the dramatic nature of his selection, the task of editing a newspaper was one that Charles Burleigh was prepared to do. He had studied law in Plymouth, Massachusetts with Zachariah Eddy (1780-1860). Eddy had once been the principal of the Plainfield Academy in Windham county Connecticut. This same school was where Rinaldo Burleigh and his sons, Charles and William, were all educated. Zachariah Eddy was a well-known legal authority in eastern Massachusetts, but also a mainstay of propriety and religious traditionalism. In the manner of students everywhere, Charles Burleigh found himself attracted to some new ideas, and played a brief part in the anti-Masonic movement and the newspaper founded to promulgate its position, We the People. While the anti-Masonic cause can appear preposterous and strange at this remove, it is best perceived as an attack on social inequality and entrenched privilege, couched in the language of religious piety and rejection of secrecy.
Whatever role he played in We, The People, the task before Charles Burleigh with The Unionist was daunting: he was fully in charge of a new periodical, in the midst of a major regional and national controversy. Mercifully, finances were not the issue. Arthur Tappan was paying the bill for the equipment, and likely subsidized distribution of the paper at first, so the economics of running a paper weighed less on Burleigh than on most new editors. This blessing enabled him to focus on content. The Unionist jumped into the firestorm of controversy from the start. The earliest parts of the files here contain substantial “dialogue” with the anti-Abolitionist newspaper editors, for instance, as well as combative defense of the Canterbury Female Academy and Prudence Crandall.
For Further Reference
- Brown, Ira V. “An Antislavery Agent: C. C. Burleigh in Pennsylvania, 1836-1837.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 105:1 (January 1981), 66-84.
- Davis, David Brion. Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature. Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (September 1960): 205-224.
- Formisano, Ronald P. and Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest, 1826-1827.” American Quarterly 29:2 (Summer, 1977), 139-165.
- Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.
- Rycenga, Jennifer, Nick Szydlowski, et. al. The Burleigh Family of Plainfield, Connecticut: An Anti-Racist Abolitionist Legacy. Digital Humanities project, San José State University, forthcoming 2024-2025.
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