Background
James William Simonton was born on January 30, 1823 in Columbia County, New York. His family moved to New York City when he was a boy.
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James William Simonton
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In New York he attended the public schools until the poverty of the family obliged him to become apprenticed to a tailor.
Career
He was eager for a journalistic career, however, and at the age of twenty he secured a position as reporter on the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer. For this work he displayed such aptitude that in the next year he was sent by his paper to Washington with Henry Jarvis Raymond as congressional correspondent. He remained until 1850, steadily winning the respect and confidence of leading statesmen in the capital.
With the opening of California in the fifties he conceived the plan of establishing a Whig paper in San Francisco, and he accordingly set out across the continent with a complete printing-press outfit. On his arrival, finding that he had been anticipated in his purpose, he joined the staff of the California Daily Courier. When the New York Times was founded in 1851 he became one of the proprietors, and soon afterward returned to Washington to serve as correspondent for the Times and for papers in New Orleans, San Francisco, and Detroit.
His weekly letters entitled "The History of Legislation, " 1855-58, which were almost a political history of these years, won for him wide recognition. In 1857 he performed the most distinguished feat of his career: an exposure in the Times for January 6, 1857, of a congressional bill ostensibly granting public lands for the provision of necessary rights of way to the Pacific railroad but actually surrendering a large part of the territory of Minnesota.
The congressional investigation that resulted ended in the expulsion of four members from the House of Representatives. In the course of the hearings before the investigating committee Simonton, subpoenaed as a witness, steadfastly refused to disclose the sources of his information, resting upon the principle of journalistic ethics that the origin of facts revealed to a representative of the press in confidence must not be divulged. Piqued by this persistent stand, the committee forthwith excluded him as reporter from the floor of the House. In 1859 he became part owner of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin and afterwards of the Morning Call.
In 1867 he was recalled to New York as the general agent of the Associated Press, a capacity in which he served fourteen years. During this period he was instrumental in exposing some of the corruption of Grant's administration through the press, but not without arousing bitter attacks upon his own integrity.
In 1873 appeared an anonymous pamphlet of forty-seven pages, One of the Reasons for Telegraphic Reform. Quoting at length from the record of the hearings of the investigating committee in 1857, but interlarding this text with distorted scurrilous headings, this broadside accused Simonton of perjury and of admitting that he had acted as a paid lobbyist.
Says the discreetly anonymous author of his pamphlet, "The object of its publication is to arouse the people generally to the real character of this small and vicious tyrant who prepares for the public the only telegraphic record they can have of the hurrying events of the times ".
But apparently the public remained apathetic, for the "tyrant" came through the ordeal unscathed. Retiring in 1881, Simonton purchased a large tract of land in the Sacramento valley and devoted his time to various agricultural and civic enterprises. He died suddenly in the following year on his estate at Napa.
Achievements
Connections
About a year and a half before his death he married Minnie Bronson, who was his second wife. He was survived by his widow, two sons, and a daughter.
