Joseph Gales (1761–1841), printer and journalist, was born in Eckington, Derbyshire, England, and apprenticed with printers in Manchester and Newark-on-Trent before starting the Sheffield Register in 1787. His publication of reformist articles brought him unfavorable attention from the British government, and in 1794 he fled from England to Hamburg. Gales immigrated to Philadelphia with his family the following year. He worked for the publishers of the Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser before taking over that city’s Independent Gazetteer in 1796. Gales settled in 1799 in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he established the Raleigh Register. His son Weston R. Gales became a partner in the paper in 1822 and assumed control in 1839. TJ subscribed to both the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer and the Raleigh Register. Gales also served as North Carolina’s state printer for several decades beginning in 1800 and was mayor of Raleigh, 1819–33 and 1840–41. He was a lifelong advocate of such reform causes as education, internal improvements, religious toleration, and an end to imprisonment for debt. Gales served as secretary of the Raleigh chapter of the American Colonization Society beginning in 1819 and as treasurer of the national organization during a sojourn in Washington, D.C., 1834–39. He died in Raleigh (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; DNCB description begins William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 1979–96, 6 vols. description ends , 2:265–7; ODNB description begins H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, 60 vols. description ends ; Seth Cotlar, “Joseph Gales and the Making of the Jeffersonian Middle Class,” in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, ed. James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf [2002], 331–59; Brigham, American Newspapers description begins Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 1947, 2 vols. description ends , 2:774–5, 910; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 40 vols. description ends , 37:312; MB description begins James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends , 2:963, 1019, 1199, 1335; Raleigh Register, and North Carolina Gazette, 4 Jan. 1822, 21, 28 Sept. 1839, 27 Aug. 1841; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 28 Aug. 1841).

Gales’s missing favor of may 23 is noted at TJ to Samuel J. Harrison, Charles Johnston, and Archibald Robertson, [13] Aug. 1817. On 9 Feb. 1809 TJ gave his servant Joseph Dougherty $5.25 to pay Gales’s son Joseph Gales (1786–1860) for his subscription to the Raleigh Register (MB description begins James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends , 2:1241).