In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

George Knox Miller, who penned most of the documents in this collection , was born 30 December 1836 in a “double log cabin” in Talladega, Alabama. Local lore has it that Knox, as family and friends called him— no doubt to differentiate him from his father, George—was the ¤rst white child born in that community.1 The earliest of Knox Miller’s paternal ancestors to live in the new world was John Miller, printer, of London, who arrived in South Carolina in January 1783. This ¤rst John Miller was, so his great-grandson inferred almost 150 years later, “of respectable, considerate, well-to-do parantage .” Knox Miller based this assessment on his great-grandfather’s writings, which, he thought, demonstrated that his ancestor had received “a fair education as he grew to man’s estate.” By 1760 John Miller and his partner, Henry Sampson Woodfall, were the publishers of two London newspapers. Woodfall edited the Daily Advertiser , a morning journal; Miller served as managing editor of the partners ’ other newspaper, the Evening Post. In the early 1760s John Wilkes, another journalist, launched a vitriolic attack on the government in his newspaper, the North Briton, berating the royal ministers for what he considered their many failures. He even dared to criticize King George III himself. (“The insane bigot, Georgious Tertius Rex” and “daft old George, the Third, by the grace of a Dutch mis-alliance, king of Great Britain, etc.,” was how George Knox Miller later referred to the monarch whose of¤cials persecuted both Wilkes and his own great-grandfather.) When Wilkes won election to the House of Commons, the government engineered his prosecution for libel and succeeded in getting him expelled. Outlawed, Wilkes ®ed to France, but he Biographical Sketch soon returned and won a new election to Parliament. Once again the government managed to deny him the post to which he had been elected and persuaded the Commons to seat his defeated opponent in his place. The government’s long crusade against Wilkes aroused great indignation and even touched off serious riots. As this tumultuous story played itself out, Woodfall’s Daily Advertiser began publishing a series of letters signed “Junius.” Miller’s Evening Post also printed some of these writings. “Junius” excoriated the government for its persecution of Wilkes.2 The King’s of¤cials soon struck back, bringing charges of criminal libel against Woodfall, Miller, and John Almon whose bookstore had sold copies of a pamphlet containing some of the “Junius Letters.” The jurors in Miller’s trial, ignoring instructions from the presiding judge to determine only if the defendant had published the letters and not to concern themselves with whether the documents were, in fact, libelous, pronounced him not guilty. In 1771 Miller again fell afoul of the authorities when he and several other printers began to publish the debates of the House of Commons. Efforts to bring Miller before the House failed when street mobs blocked attempts to arrest him and the City of London interposed on his behalf. Eventually, the Commons dropped the matter, and the affair became part of the long struggle for freedom of the press. As these events unfolded, tensions between the British government and thirteen of its North American colonies led, in 1775, to the war that resulted eight years later in the independence of the United States. Not surprisingly, John Miller sympathized with the rebelling colonists. The government found his views obnoxious, and sometime around 1780 he left his wife and children in England and ®ed to France.3 In 1782 Miller crossed the Atlantic to North America. Not long after the war ended, South Carolina delegates to the U.S. Congress prevailed upon him to accept the post of state printer and sent him to Charleston where his wife and six of his children joined him in November 1783. The following August, John Miller secured a state land grant to 640 acres in the Pendleton District in the Upcountry—the higher elevations in the westernmost part of the state. (Until 1868 South Carolina was divided into judicial districts rather than counties.) Miller and his family settled on this land in 1786 or 1787. In the middle of the next decade he began publishing Miller’s Weekly Messenger, a newspaper soon renamed the Pendleton Weekly Messenger, which he edited until his death in 1809. His son, also named John Miller, edited the paper until he died in 1822. xvi / Biographical Sketch [3.147.104.248] Project MUSE (2024...

Share