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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
George Washburn Smalley was an American journalist.
Background
He was born on June 2, 1833 at Franklin, Norfolk County, Massachussets, United States, "of good Old Colony stock, " and grew up there and at Worcester, Massachussets, whither he went with his parents, the Rev. Elam and Louisa Jane (Washburn) Smalley, in 1840.
Education
In 1849 he entered Yale University, where he won his chief laurels as an athlete, rowing stroke in the first Yale-Harvard race on Lake Winnepesaukee. He received the A. M. degree in 1853, and read law for a year at Worcester in the office of George Frisbie Hoar. He studied at the Harvard Law School, 1854-55.
Career
He was admitted to the bar in 1856, and practised law in Boston until 1861. In Boston he became closely associated with Wendell Phillips, with whom he several times shared the danger of mob violence. When Smalley wished to go South in the autumn of 1861, partly for his health and partly to see something of the war, Phillips obtained for him an assignment from the New York Tribune to do a series of papers on South Carolina negro life.
From November 1861 to October 1862 he served as war correspondent at the front, notably with Fremont in the Shenandoah Valley and with the Army of the Potomac. On the field of Antietam, September 17, 1862, he acted as impromptu aide to "Fighting Joe" Hooker, carrying orders for him under fire. After the battle Smalley commandeered a horse (his own had two bullets in it), rode in the night thirty miles to the nearest telegraph, and wired in a summary of the engagement. The operator, on his own initiative, sent the dispatch to Washington instead of to New York. Smalley then took a night train to New York and wrote his longer story standing under a dim oil lamp. This earliest account of Antietam, which appeared on September 19, was a notable triumph for the Tribune, and Smalley's feat was, in the opinion of Henry Villard, the greatest single journalistic exploit of the war.
In October 1862 Smalley took a regular place on the Tribune staff in New York, and when the Tribune building was attacked by the draft rioters in 1863 he was prominent among the armed defenders. The beginning of Smalley's distinguished career as a foreign correspondent came in 1866, when he was sent to Europe on two days' notice to report the Austro-Prussian War. In 1867 he was again sent abroad to organize a London bureau which should receive and coordinate all European news.
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 Smalley formed the first international newspaper alliance, with the London Daily News. Smalley remained in charge of the Tribune's European correspondence until 1895, when he returned to America to act as American correspondent of the London Times. This position he held for ten years (1895 - 1905), living either in New York City or in Washington.
Retiring from active journalism except for weekly letters to the Tribune and occasional contributions to reviews, he made his home in London until his death in 1916.
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Personality
Moving freely in the upper strata of English society, he knew everybody of importance in both England and America, and was, perhaps, even too eager to let his high connections be known.
His somewhat superior air, his violent likes and dislikes, his "cold irony, " and his toryism, made him numerous enemies on both sides of the ocean. Yet he won the respect of people as diverse as Gladstone, Lowell, Whistler, and Arnold.
Connections
Smalley was married to Phoebe Garnaut, adopted daughter of Wendell Phillips, on December 25, 1862. She was the "only child of an estimable friend of Welsh birth who had married a native of France and come to Boston, where her husband soon died" (Lorenzo Sears, Wendell Phillips, Orator and Agitator, 1909). They had five children, two boys and three girls.