THIS week sees the 150th anniversary of the death of the man who was the most famous Scottish journalist of the 19th century, James Gordon Bennett, founder of the New York Herald.

He was born on September 1, 1795, in Newmill, the planned village just over a mile north of Keith in what is now Moray council area but was then in Banffshire. His farm-owning parents were of French descent and the family were devout Roman Catholics, so much so that at the age of 15, Bennett went to the seminary at Aquhorthies in Aberdeenshire to study for the priesthood.

He suffered a crisis of faith in his teens and left Aquhorthies at 18. He would continue to struggle with his Catholic faith most of his life but asked for and was given the Last Rites on his deathbed by Archbishop John McCloskey, later America’s first cardinal.

Bennett left seminary with a rudimentary knowledge of Latin and almost fluent French and Spanish. He also adored the works of the poet Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott who appear to have inspired him to become a poet and author.

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After a few years of travelling and writing poetry he encountered the biography of Benjamin Franklin, who was much admired in Scotland and who was a Freeman of Edinburgh. The legend is that Bennett met a friend in Aberdeen in 1819 and on the spur of the moment decided to accompany him to America. He would later acknowledge, however, that Franklin was the real inspiration for his desire to go to the USA, which he did via a short stay in Canada, arriving in Boston on Ne’erday, 1820.

Scottish connections saved Bennett from poverty, as a fellow Scot recognised his accent and got him a job with booksellers and publishers Wells & Lilly. He was by his own admission more interested in the publishing side and transferred to the proofreading department where his close work with text worsened his strabismus eye condition – a later acquaintance would say that Bennett had one eye on him and one on the City Hall.

Determined to become a journalist, Bennett moved to New York city where he was promptly hired by the Courier newspaper of Charleston, South Carolina, to translate French and Spanish press articles. He spent less than a year in the southern state but it made a big impression on him before he returned to New York in 1824, freelancing at first before becoming a staff journalist on newspapers such as the New York Courier and the National Advocate on both of which he worked under Mordecai Manuel Noah, the Jewish writer who made Bennett the first Capitol Hill correspondent – allegedly to ensure that Bennett’s superior journalism did not outshine his own.

Bennett responded by making his work in Washington a cornerstone of newspaper coverage of national affairs and he was snapped up to become Washington correspondent of the more prestigious New York Enquirer. He was dissatisfied, however, and felt that only by owning his own newspaper could he wield the sort of influence that he felt he should.

After at least two abortive attempts to start newspapers in both New York and Pennsylvania, Bennett scraped together $500 in capital and on May 6, 1835, he printed the first edition of The New York Herald from a cellar in the city. It cost one penny, i.e. one cent, and had four pages, and from the outset Bennett showed why he would end up being acclaimed as one of the founding geniuses of journalism in America and indeed the entire world.

Not yet 40, Bennett did all the jobs on the Herald, from writing advertising copy to book-keeping and editing the many stories it carried, all with his trademark lightness of tone.

Britannica.com lists his “firsts”: “He published on June 13, 1835, the first Wall Street financial article to appear in any American newspaper; printed a vivid and detailed account of the great fire of December 1835 in New York; was the first, in 1838, to establish correspondents in Europe; was the first, in 1846, to obtain the report in full by telegraph of a long political speech; maintained during the Civil War a staff of 63 war correspondents; was a leader in the use of illustrations; and introduced a society department.”

He knew that speed was of the essence so he was one of the first proprietors to use the telegraph and also had his own steam-powered vessel to intercept news coming into New York Harbour on ships from abroad. Bennett realised the value of gossip and his newspaper’s society column became a must-read for New Yorkers.

In 1836 he pushed the envelope of American journalism with an interview – one of the first ever news interviews – with the madame of a brothel in New York where a prostitute, Helen Jewett, had been murdered. It is rightly remembered as the edition which began sensationalist journalism.

He also made sure sports were covered, and the mix of articles with bold headlines and all the staples of newspapers put together for the first time made the Herald a huge success.

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Bennett also gained the first ever interview with a sitting President, Martin van Buren, who was an old acquaintance from Bennett’s days as a fellow-traveller with Andrew Jackson and his supporters who founded the Democratic Party.

Bennett expressed what we would now term racist views and held a variety of contrary political philosophies, opposing slavery but also being no fan of Abraham Lincoln. In 1867 when he handed over control to his playboy son James Gordon Bennett Jnr – the man from whom the exclamation Gordon Bennett was coined – the New York Herald had the largest circulation in the USA.

In the 2017 film The Greatest Showman, Bennett is depicted as a fierce critic of Phineas T Barnum but the two men in reality enjoyed a love-hate relationship.

There was one flaw in the film – Bennett kept his Scottish accent until he died on June 1, 1872.