Jonas Green was an American newspaper publisher during the Colonial Era in Maryland, and a strong opponent of The Stamp Act.
Early life
Green was born into a family of printers. The family tradition had been begun in Massachusetts by his great-grandfather, Samuel Green, who was himself the successor to the earliest printers in the NorthAmerican colonies, the Dayes of Cambridge. Samuel Green started his printing business in 1649 and producing a number of notable works, including Elliot's New Testament, translated into the Native American language.
Career
Jonas Green moved to Maryland in 1738, and became the Province's official printer. Green was a protégé of Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. He became the publisher of the Maryland Gazette. Its early masthead read as follows: Money was sometimes hard to come by, so Green sometimes traded an ad or a subscription for supplies. His wife, Anne Catharine Green, also helped to make ends meet by selling homemade chocolates at the post office.
Green, a born troublemaker, hated the Stamp Act, which among other things directly taxed his newspaper. Refusing to pay, he published the Gazette with what was then a blaring headline: "The Maryland Gazette Expiring: In Uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again." Green wrote that because of the Stamp Act, the newspaper "will not any longer be published." In the bottom right-hand corner of the page, where the tax stamp should have been placed, there appeared instead a skull and crossbones. Calmer heads persuaded Green to return to publishing as part of the struggle against tyranny, and he later resumed publication under this banner headline: "An Apparition of the late Maryland Gazette, which is not dead, but only sleepeth." Defenders of this newspaper's claim as "the oldest in the nation" say this brief interruption of publication was not a business decision as much as a deliberate political statement by a determined and courageous publisher. When Green died in 1767, his jobs as editor and publisher were taken over by his wife, Anne Catherine Hoof Green, making her the first woman to hold either of the top jobs at an American newspaper. A strong supporter of Colonial rights, she continued her husband's policy of operating an independent newspaper under the nose of the royal governor in Annapolis. Ultimately, she published the newspaper for eight years while raising 14 children. The newspaper stayed in the Green family for 94 years.
