He followed a detachment of Continental Army troops to Cambridge when he was twelve, and acted as their clerk until one day on an errand, he "encountered his father, receiving a thrashing, and next day was taken to Worcester and apprenticed to Isaiah Thomas," editor of the Massachusetts Spy; after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Benjamin enlisted in the army at age thirteen, but was released because he was too young; when his employer was drafter four years later Russell went as his substitute; returned to complete his apprenticeship, and in 1784 began his own Boston newspaper, the Massachusetts Centinel and the Republican Journal (which became the Massachusetts Centinel, and then the Columbian Centinel); the paper became on of the most influential in the country, and, during he French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, achieved a reputation for its "foreign intelligence" an accurate details of all the current events in Europe; member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, 1805-1835.
He followed a detachment of Continental Army troops to Cambridge when he was twelve, and acted as their clerk until one day on an errand, he "encountered his father, receiving a thrashing, and next day was taken to Worcester and apprenticed to Isaiah Thomas," editor of the Massachusetts Spy; after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Benjamin enlisted in the army at age thirteen, but was released because he was too young; when his employer was drafter four years later Russell went as his substitute; returned to complete his apprenticeship, and in 1784 began his own Boston newspaper, the Massachusetts Centinel and the Republican Journal (which became the Massachusetts Centinel, and then the Columbian Centinel); the paper became on of the most influential in the country, and, during he French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, achieved a reputation for its "foreign intelligence" an accurate details of all the current events in Europe; member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, 1805-1835.
Bio by: Connie Lagasse Russell
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