Welcome to The Radical Printer
The Radical Printer explores the life and times of Peter Timothy, who published the South-Carolina Gazette from 1747 to 1778 and helped shape the politics of the colony and the emerging nation.
Leila Sellers based her 1934 book, Charleston on the Eve of the American Revolution, largely on three sources: Henry Laurens (the Founding Father who imported more kidnapped Africans than any other slave trader in British North America), William Bull (the lieutenant governor who covered for the royal governors) and Peter Timothy, whose weekly four-page newspaper, the South-Carolina Gazette, chronicled the pre-Revolutionary years. Sellers referred to Peter as “the radical printer.”
The South-Carolina Gazette appears in footnotes throughout histories of the early years of the colony and many of early North America. From 1747 to 1778, the Gazette spread the rhetoric of civil liberty and democracy that prepared the colony to protest against British rule and participate in the Revolutionary War and the forming of the new nation. The newspaper was a major node in the communications network that linked the colonies and helped them unite in the lead up to independence. It traveled to all major ports in North America and to London and beyond. The Library Society of Charleston, which Peter Timothy cofounded in 1753, holds orginals.
Unlike Laurens and Bull, whose surviving letters, journals, and ledgers fill volumes, Timothy left little in record other than a handful of letters and forty years of weekly news in the South-Carolina Gazette. The Radical Printer draws on those pages to tell the story of the Timothys and their world.
The posts appear roughly in chronological order, beginning in January of 1739, when Peter’s name first appeared as printer in the pages of the South-Carolina Gazette. He was thirteen years old.