g abilities of the young editor did
not fail to strike the discerning eye of President Madison, who
speedily gave him his affection and confidence. To that Administration
the "Intelligencer" stood in the most intimate and faithful
relations,--sustaining its policy as a necessity, where it might not
have been a choice. During the entire course of the war, the
"Intelligencer" sustained most vigorously all the measures needful for
carrying it on with efficiency; and it did equally good service in
reanimating, whenever it had slackened at any disaster, the drooping
spirit of our people. Nor did its editors, when there were two, stop
at these proofs of sincerity, nor slink, when danger drew near, from
that hazard of their own persons to which they had stirred up the
country. When invasion came, they at once took to arms, as volunteer
common-soldiers, went to meet the enemy, and remained in the field
until he had fallen back to the coast. And during the invasion of
Washington, moreover, their establishment was attacked and partially
destroyed, through an unmanly spirit of revenge on the part of the
British forces. In October, 1812, proposing to himself the change of
his paper into a daily one, as was accordingly brought about on the
first of January ensuing, Mr. Gales invited Mr. Seaton, who had by
this time become his brother-in-law, to come and join him. He did so;
and the early tie of youthful friendship, which had grown between them
at Raleigh, and which the new relation had drawn still closer,
gradually matured into that more than friendship or brotherhood, that
oneness and identity of all purposes, opinions, and interests which
has ever since existed between them, without a moment's interruption,
and has long been, to those who understood it, a rare spectacle of
that concord and affection so seldom witnessed, and could never have
come about except between men of singular virtues.

The same year that brought Gales and Seaton together as partners in
business witnessed an alliance of a more interesting character; for it
was in 1813 that Mr. Gales married the accomplished daughter of
Theodorick Lee, younger brother of that brilliant soldier of the
Revolution, the "Legionary Harry."

But, at this natural point, the writer must go back for a while, in
order to bring down the story of William Seaton to where, uniting with
his associate's, the two thus flow on in a single stream.

He was born January 11th, 1785, on the pater