Isaiah Thomas: Printer, Patriot, Freemason

by Rober W. Williams III

Isaiah Thomas was part and parcel of the birth of a new nation whose hopes for independence had flickered many times. Printer, publisher, patriot (rebel), firebrand, astute businessman, dynamic personality, a versatile and sometimes violent man of independence, and twice Grand Master of Masons in Massachusetts, Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) was a man among those who lived at the right time for the right cause, each playing a particular and necessary role in the making of a new nation.

Some historians have questioned Thomas’s motivation in the pre-Revolutionary days. What shaped his political positions? Was he motivated by ideology or by a sense of what was good for business? He fought hard against the Stamp Act even when he went to Nova Scotia. His printed words there excited the wrath of the people who lived under British flag.

The Stamp Act would have levied a tax against newspapers and other publications, and his business in printing. Yet, when he prospered in later life he became a conservative. He acquired aristocratic manners and believed that mobs should be punished. Esther Forbes, in her observation of Thomas, wrote: “There was always an element of opportunism in his politics as well as his printing career. When he first started the (Massachusetts) Spy in Boston he attempted to please both sides. He turned it into a radical scandal sheet when he saw the Loyalist cause was unpopular.”

In defense of Thomas and others who tried to appease both sides of the issues facing the colonies, it might be asked of any man who had English blood flowing in his veins: Which side of the issues would you have chosen? Was it easy to be a rebel like Joseph Warren, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, James Otis, and others?

In his book Two Men of Taunton, the late Ralph Davol pointed out the lukewarm attitude of Robert Treat Paine toward independence. The Taunton attorney who later opposed the Crown in the case of the Boston Massacre waited until late 1774 before taking his stand with the rebels. Perhaps the raising of the Liberty and Union flag on October 24, 1774, in his own town convinced him. Paine signed the Declaration of Independence.

Born in Boston on January 19, 1740 (O.S.), the son of Moses and Fidelity (Grant) Thomas, Isaiah was the fifth generation of the Evan and Jane Thomases who came to Boston from Wales in 1640. Moses was born in 1715 and died in North Carolina in 1752. Isaiah’s mother was born in Rhode Island; she died in Isaiah’s Worcester home in 1798. She married a second time with Ebenezer Blackman of Westcambridge in 1764. Her marriage with Moses Thomas resulted in the births of five children.

Isaiah Thomas had only six weeks of schooling, except what his mother taught, during his entire life. In 1755 he was indentured to Zechariah Fowle, printer and peddler of ballads and small books.  Fowle was the typical businessman of his day showing the boy little consideration. Standing on a box to reach the fonts, Isaiah was put to work setting type at a time when he knew only the letters and lacked the education to put them together to spell words. Fowle never taught the lad to read, write, or cipher, nor caused it to be done by others.

Fowle had a partner for three years (1758-61) named Samuel Draper who was a good printer and kind man. Perhaps it was Draper who counseled the young apprentice. Gamaliel Rogers, once a partner with Fowle, had opened a shop opposite Old South Church in Boston. Thomas was a frequent visitor to the shop where he received kind treatment, education, and suggestions from Rogers. Thomas was said to a be a good printer at age 17, was attractive in personality, tall, and handsome.

Following a serious altercation with Fowle, Thomas left secretly for Halifax in 1766. He found employment but his radicalism toward the Stamp Act was shown in his editorials and he soon drew a reprimand and a stern warning from the officials. His continued outward bitterness toward the Crown frightened his employer and after seven months Thomas left for Portsmouth, NH, thence to Boston and a return to Fowle’s shop.

An effort to establish a newspaper in Wilmington, NC, failed and he attempted to reach England by working his way, but, located in Charleston where married, in December of 1769,  Mary Dill of Bermuda. Whatever problem he had were multiplied during their marriage. She was 19, one year his junior, and the marriage was doomed from the start. She lacked restraint and fidelity and had borne an illegitimate son. In his suit for divorce (May, 1777) Thomas wrote: “Soon after the marriage I learned of the son and that she had prostituted to more than one.” The divorce, rare in those days, was granted by the Massachusetts Council. She went south but Isaiah, in a well he drew 20 years later, left $500 to be expended for her at the discretion of their son Isaiah, Jr. The wedlock had produced a daughter, Mary Ann (1772), and Isaiah, Jr., born September 5, 1773.

In 1770 Thomas joined Fowle in printing a newspaper to reach the lower social classes. The first copies were given away free but the Massachusetts Spy would soon become the most sought after publication in town. The shop was moved to Union St. and Thomas bought his partner’s share.

For the first few weeks he ran both radical and loyal essays. He apparently shifted to the Whigs when he bought out Fowle. John Hancock had assumed financial responsibility for the press and two radicals, Thomas Young and Joseph Greenleaf, were regular contributors to the Spy. The newspaper’s radical reputation spread rapidly and Thomas was asked to establish newspapers throughout the colonies and in Quebec.

He published the Massachusetts Calendar, Thomas’s New England Almanac, and the Royal American Magazine. He may have been only lukewarm in his attitude toward a complete break with England because in 1772 he sought financial backing from Bermuda to move his business, but this attempt failed.

In February, 1775, his domestic life deteriorated when his wife ran off to Newport with on Major Benjamin Thompson, a British officer, later the Lord Rumford. Their adultery led to the divorce. In her book Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, Esther Forbes wrote: “Thomas wasn’t attractive … printing presses were his absorbing passion. To that and his books he gave his life.”

In early April, 1775, Thomas slipped quietly out of Boston (the last issue of Spy was dated April 6) to confer with Hancock and member of the Provincial Congress. They advised him to move his press into the country where it would be safe. The wooden flatbed press, made in London in 1747, was put into a wagon, along with his type, and with the aid of Joseph Warren and Timothy Bigelow of Worcester, was ferried across the river to Charlestown. We may assume Bigelow helped because he had encouraged Thomas to move to Worcester in order to establish the Spy as the voice of the rebels in opposing the stronger Loyalist feelings. On the night of April 18 Thomas rode with others to alarm the countryside.

He joined the militia at Lexington, was at Medford that night (April 19), and the next day he walked to Watertown, bade his wife and children goodbye, and set out on foot for Worcester where would begin a new life of printing newspapers, books, Bibles, music, and finally gathering the memoirs of early America that would ultimately be placed in the American Antiquarian Society (A.A.S), chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in January, 1812. His History of Printing in America will never be superseded as the most important single source relating to the early history of printing in America. He had been called the “Baskerville of America.” Keenly aware that his own life spanned one of the great periods in the history of printing, he considered himself to be in a unique position to gather and preserve a mass of data which would otherwise be lost to posterity.

In the summer of 1780 he was drafted for military service. His apprentice, Benjamin Russell, was always devoted to his “master” and eager for adventure, volunteered and served for Thomas. Russell joined the Continental Army at West Point and was one of the guards who attended Major Andre and was present at his execution. This was the same Russell who later published the Boston Centinel and served as Grand Master of Masons in Massachusetts, 1814-16. It may be that Thomas had an influence in the choice of Russell.

In all Isaiah Thomas controlled five bookstores, seven newspapers, and the best Magazine (Massachusetts) in the country. He was in fact, the first chain newspaper owner in the United States.

On February 3, 1918, he presented his historical library to the A.A.S. Boston was again in danger from the British (War of 1812) and it was decided to the move the library to the Thomas mansion in Worcester. He also purchased the collection of the Mather Library and in 1819 ground was broken for the Antiquarian Hall. Thomas donated the site, $2000, and 150,000 bricks for its construction. Today one may view the press and original Greenwood painting of Thomas in the A.A.S., located at the corner of Salisbury and Regent Streets.

Into the busy and checkered life of Isaiah Thomas came a second marriage, with Mrs. Mary Thomas Fowle. From the day of this union in Boston, May 26, 1779, until her death in 1818 she gave to Isaiah unwavering loyalty. A third marriage, on August 10, 1819, to Rebecca Armstrong was short-lived. She had been a cousin, companion, and housekeeper to his second wife. The marriage ended in a separation in 1822 – Rebecca preferring the open road to the open hearth.

Young Isaiah lacked his father’s business acumen and proved to be virtually incompetent as a publisher, so the elder Thomas fired him and ran the Spy for six weeks until he found another editor. He became a director in the first bank of Worcester, as well as the second, and a partner in a Worcester tannery. He amassed a fortune of $170,000.

He became intrigued with a turnpike from Boston to Worcester to shorten traveling time. It seemed a waste of time to spend 15 hours to reach either destination. In 1804 he hired two surveyors and, with them, determined that a relatively straight road over relatively level land could be laid out direct to Shrewsbury. A year later he had the pleasure of riding out to meet the surveyors who had laid out a straight road from the schoolhouse in Roxbury to the Worcester Court House from Independence. Improved travel by railroad cause temporary abandonment of the highway plans but the twentieth century automobile traffic created the need for what is not known as Route 9, exactly as planned by Thomas.

It had been assumed that Thomas had joined a Masonic Lodge of which Joseph Warren was a member. But Grand Lodge records show that he became a Mason in Trinity Lodge, 1787-90, when it was located at Lancaster where it was holding meetings in 1778. Morning Star Lodge was the first one chartered in Worcester and Thomas served as the first master, 1793-94. He presided again in 1797, 1799, and 1801-02. He served as the D.D.G.M. of the 4th District in 1802 and was Senior Grand Warden, 1795-97.

Thomas was elected Grand Master of Masons in Massachusetts December 27, 1802, for a period of three years, occupying the office again in 1809. When the merger of St. John’s (Provincial) was consummated in 1792 into the Grand Lodge of Mason in Massachusetts, Isaiah Thomas printed the Constitutions of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons. It contained their charges, history, addresses, old records, faithful traditions, and Lodge books with a history of Masonry in the Commonwealth, the constitution, laws, and regulations of Grand Lodge. It was edited by his friend, the Corresponding Secretary and antiquarian, Dr. Thaddeus M. Harris.

In an effort to attain some uniformity of ritual and floor work in the Lodges through the jurisdiction, M.W. Thomas was the first to appoint Grand Lecturers. The chair used by him as Master of Morning Star Lodge is now in the Worcester Masonic Temple along with his gavel, apron, original charter, bearing his signature, and a desk, and at the head of the stairs hangs a copy of Greenwood’s painting beside that of M.W. Thomas S. Roy, Grand Master, 1951-53. Thomas’s son, Isaiah Jr., was Raised in Morning Star Lodge.

M.W. Isaiah Thomas died April 4, 1831, his last legacy to the Craft being a gift of $500 toward the erection of a temple, together with numerous interesting memorials and valuable records. The library at Grand Lodge houses much correspondence of Brother Thomas to Paul Revere and others of his day.

A Patriot Printer and His "Forge of Sedition": Autobiographical   Excerpts from Isaiah Thomas's History of Printing in America

M o r n i n g  S t a r  L o d g e

A. F. & A. M.

23rd MASONIC DISTRICT

INSTITUTED 1793