Hugh Henry Brackenridge: Scholar, writer, attorney and judge
It may not be known by all, but one man was influential in the founding of the University of Pittsburgh as well as Pittsburgh’s daily newspaper.
It’s been difficult to identify when exactly Hugh Henry Breckenridge was born, other than sometime in 1748. His father John was sometimes identified as “Braikanridge” or “Breckenridge”; however, neither alternate spelling can be easily confirmed. His mother was Margaret Gardner, but she was from the same hometown. When Hugh was born the new family lived about as southeast as one can get on the Peninsula of Kintyre near Campbeltown, Argyll in Scotland.
Like so many others looking for a better life in the “New Country,” John Brackenridge was an impoverished farmer, who immigrated to America when Hugh was five. The family settled in York, Pa., which was then a small “frontier town” near the Maryland border. Not much is known about the Breckenridge family, aside from their financial hardship.
As a teen hungry to learn, Hugh Brackenridge was tutored by a Presbyterian minister who taught Latin and Greek. By the age of 15, young Hugh was the head of a free school in Maryland. Soon, he entered the College of New Jersey, which would later become Princeton University. It was here Brackenridge started to find is own personal confidence and footing. He has been described as possessing “a booming voice,” “fierce countenance” in college. He was also said to “use his fists with great skill.”
Hugh became friends with Philip Freneau, and the two worked on a patriotic poem, “The Rising Glory of America,” together. Freneau would later be dubbed, “The Poet of the American Revolution.” The two co-authored “Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca,” a work described as “prose satire and picaresque mock-epic.”
Hugh also struck up a lasting friendship with fellow student and future “The Father of the U.S. Constitution,” James Madison.
Brackenridge, who helped create a debate club called the American Whig Society, earned his B.A. in 1771 and a master’s in theology at Princeton in 1774. He would use the theology teachings to become a chaplain in George Washington’s army. He was said to give fiery and patriotic sermons to the troops.
At this time, Brackenridge thought he was better served away from the battlefield and in the media. Working out of Philadelphia, he is credited with being the first to publish a novel portraying frontier life in the United States with Revolutionary themes. He was able to publish “The Battle of Bunkers-Hill” in 1776 and “The Death of General Montgomery at the Siege of Quebec” in 1777. He followed that with “Six Political Discourses Founded on the Scripture” in 1778. For a short time, he helmed and edited The United States Magazine in 1779.
In 1780, Brackenridge entered the next chapter of his life and became a lawyer. Already flush with attorneys, Brackenridge didn’t see his legal future in Philadelphia, so he headed west.
A year later, he and his wife (her name has been lost to time) found the “tiny hamlet” of Pittsburgh. Many in the burgeoning frontier town of 400 inhabitants shared his Scottish heritage. A prolific writer, by Sept. 12, 1781, Brackenridge was being quoted from a July 15 speech, celebrating the Three Rivers and Pittsburgh in the Philadelphia-based The Freeman's Journal or The North-American Intelligencer. “H.H. Brackenridge” as he was sometimes identified by byline, practiced law and helped John Scull and Joseph Hall in the founding of the Pittsburgh Gazette, the first weekly newspaper published west of the Allegheny Mountains. The first four-page edition was printed on July 28, 1786.
A few weeks, prior to that debut, Brackenridge’s first son, Henry Marie, was born on May 11, 1786. Henry’s mother passed shortly after his death.
Elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1786, Brackenridge spent a lot of time in Philadelphia and penned a letter in the Pittsburgh Gazette eulogizing publisher Hall, who died a year after the paper started. Brackenridge would leave the Assembly in 1787.
Around this time, he Brackenridge would work with others to obtain the funding to create an academy that would become the University of Pittsburgh.
In 1790, Brackenridge, 42, married Sabrina Wolff, 19. They would go on to have three children, Alexander, Cornelia and William. Another son, Hugh, was born in 1799 and passed away in 1800.
Beginning in 1792, Brackenridge used his American Whig Society debate skills to mediate in the tax protest Whiskey Rebellion. While he ran into roadblocks, especially from sometimes violent Western Pennsylvanians who didn’t trust a central government, Brackenridge, wanted to avoid violence. He was able to smooth over some of that vitriol. But he was able to benefit from the experience in other ways. He wrote “Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania” in 1795.
He would later pen “Modern Chivalry” a novel he believed would become “a kind of classic of the English language.”
He was appointed as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1799. The family moved to Carlisle in 1801. The Honorable Judge Brackenridge continued to write and study law and serve as a Judge until his passing on June 25, 1816, after a persistent illness at the age of 67.
Henry Marie Brackenridge followed in his father’s footsteps in practically every way and was even a U.S. Congressman. After a long career in St. Louis, Henry Marie returned to Western Pennsylvania, and obtained a large tract of land along the Allegheny River. He established Tarentum, and the next steel town over became Brackenridge in his honor. The Brackenridge family continues to have influence in Western Pennsylvania to this very day.
