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John Binns (December 22, 1772 - June 16, 1860) was an Irish-American journalist, engraver, radical politician, and publisher. Binns was born in Dublin, Ireland to a wealthy ironmonger, also John Binns. His father died when he was young, and his mother remarried the lawyer George McEntegarte - who proved abusive to both John and his brother Benjamin (1771 - c. 1857). The brothers fled to their grandfather's home in Dublin, where they attended the Sisson Putland Darling's (1737 - 1817) school. John was later apprenticed as a chandler and soaper. As a young man he relocated with his brother Benjamin Binns, to London where they became political radicals with the London Corresponding Society. John, a gifted public speaker, became chairmen of that organization's general committee in 1795. He traveled throughout England preaching Paineite Radicalism and violent revolution. His political leanings caused him to be arrested and imprisoned several times. The ground getting too hot for them in London 1801, the brothers immigrated to the United States, settling in Baltimore. There they joined the deist New York Society of Theophilanthropists, which advocated a freethinking, democratic, republican society. In 1802, he founded a radical left newspaper, the Republican Argus in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Later, from 1807 to 1829, he published the Philadelphia Democratic Press, then Pennsylvania's leading Democratic newspaper. His political beliefs in included the territorial annexation of Canada and global American imperialism - with the idea being to forcibly spread democracy. Binns is best known for his 1819 issue of a highly decorative ceremonial broadside of the Declaration of Independence. He also published an autobiography in 1854 and died in Philadelphia in 1857.
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This copy is copyright protected.
Copyright © 2024 Geographicus Rare Antique Maps