Significance.

For forty-three years Benjamin Edes and his partner, John Gill, published the Boston Gazette and Country Journal. During the years preceding the Revolutionary War their paper served as the mouthpiece of the Patriot cause in Boston, and other colonial newspapers frequently reprinted stories from the Boston Gazette. Royal authorities continuously tried to silence the "trumpeters of sedition" but were never successful. Beginnings. Edes was born on 14 October 1732 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the son of Peter and Esther Hall Edes. As a boy he received some schooling. In 1754 he married Martha Starr, and in April of the next year Edes and Gill took over the Boston Gazette. The paper, established in December 1719 by William Brooker, had five other owners before Edes and Gill.

Political Commitment.

The two young printers set up a shop at the corner of Court Street and Franklin Avenue. In 1765 they...