GREAT VICTORY!

In 1815 James Morgan Bradford may well have become the first modern war correspondent when he sent a firsthand account of the Battle of New Orleans to The Time Piece, the tiny newspaper he had established four years earlier in St. Francisville, Louisiana.

Bradford was born in Virginia in 1777 but grew up in Frankfort, Kentucky, where his father published a newspaper. Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Bradford moved to New Orleans, where he bought a printing plant and began publishing the Orleans Gazette. In 1805 he became the Louisiana Territory’s official printer, but his strident calls for the use of military force to liberate “the wretched subjects of despotic Spain” brought him into direct political conflict Gazette The Time Piece