Sidney Howard Gay was a journalist, author. He was the editor of the American Anti-Slavery Standard and managing director of the New York Tribune and the Chicago Tribune.
Background
Sydney Howard Gay was the son of Ebenezer and Mary Alleyne (Otis) Gay. He was born on May 22, 1814, in Hingham, Massachusets.
His mother was a niece of James Otis and his father a grandson of Rev. Ebenezer Gay: an ancestry which he said was the best part of himself.
Education
Gay entered Harvard College as a freshman in 1829, but poor health caused him to withdraw two years later. The degree of B. A. was conferred upon him, however, in 1833.
After a period of idleness he entered the counting-house of Perkins & Company, in Boston, where he remained two years. He traveled in the West and then began the study of law in the office of his father in Hingham.
Career
In 1842, Gay lectured for the American Anti-Slavery Society and the following year went to New York as editor of the American Anti-Slavery Standard.
He was an active agent of the “underground railroad. ” After an editorship of fourteen years, he decided that the anti-slavery cause no longer demanded all his attention and in 1857, he joined the staff of the New York Tribune.
Appointed managing editor in 1862, he occupied that position until the summer of 1865 when broken health caused his resignation.
During the war his services were of great value to the Union; Henry Wilson said that the man deserved well of his country who kept the Tribune a war paper in spite of Greeley.
In 1867, he was asked to become managing editor of the Chicago Tribune; he accepted and remained in Chicago until the great fire of 1871. The following spring, he returned to New York and from 1872 to 1874 was a member of the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post under William Cullen Bryant.
In 1874, Bryant, then eighty years old was asked to undertake a history of the United States; to this, he agreed with the understanding that Gay would be its author. Bryant’s only contribution was a preface to the first volume; he died before the second appeared, but the publishers, with little justification, retained his name.
Though wanting a sense of proportion, the four volumes were based largely on research and were very readable. In 1884, Gay’s James Madison, a severe though a sympathetic study from the Federalist point of view, was published in the American Statesmen Series.
He wrote the chapter on “Amerigo Vespucci” for Justin Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America, contributed occasionally to the Critic, and was engaged on a life of his friend Edmund Quincy when he died of paralysis in 1888.
A study of history and of ethics had turned Gay's attention to slavery. Convinced that slavery was “absolutely and morally wrong, ” he gave up the law, for he could never take an oath to support a constitution which upheld the institution. He went to Boston and became a member of that group of Abolitionists led by Garrison.
Views
Quotations:
“This handful of people to the outside world a set of pestilent fanatics were among themselves the most charming circle of cultivated men and women that it has ever been my lot to know. ”
Membership
Gay was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1878.