Gamaliel Bailey

Physician, journalist, and abolitionist, born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, USA. In his early years he worked as a physician, but his true calling was abolitionism. He and James G Birney edited the Cincinnati Philanthropist (1836), the first anti-slavery organ in the West, and he later founded the daily Herald (1843). He moved to Washington, DC, to serve as editor-in-chief of the National Era (1847–59), the periodical of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Tolerant and cool-headed, he stood up to mobs to defend his abolitionist publications, exerting a wide moral and political influence for the anti-slavery movement.

Gamaliel Bailey (December 3, 1807 – June 5, 1859) was an American journalist and abolitionist.

Born at Mount Holly, New Jersey, Bailey graduated from the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in 1827. He was also a lecturer on physiology at the Lane Theological Seminary, and at the time of the Lane Seminary debates (February 1834) between the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery students, and the subsequent withdrawal of the latter, he became an ardent abolitionist. in the following year he succeeded Birney as editor, and conducted the paper until 1847 in spite of threats and acts of violence–the printing office of the Philanthropist was wrecked three times by mobs.

Beginning in 1843 he edited a daily paper, the Herald, and in 1847 assumed control of the new abolitionist publication, the National Era, in Washington, D.C. Here also his paper was the object of attack by pro-slavery mobs, one of which besieged the editor and printers in their office for three days in 1848.

Bailey died at sea in the course of a trip to Europe.