The telegraph manual: a complete history and description of the semaphoric, electric and magnetic telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, ancient and modern.

EMINENT TELEGRAPHERS. 825
WILLIAMI TANNER,
Of Iabama.
MR. TANNER was born in Montgomery county, Kentucky, in 1802, and
is, consequently, fifty-seven years of age, though he does not look so old
by several years. When a boy not fifteen years of age, having as good
an education as the schools near him, at that time, could afford, he was
placed in the printing office of the Argus of Western America, a newspaper published at Frankfort, Kentucky, and edited by the IIon. Amos
Kendall, then a young man, where he learned the printing business.
Mr. Kendall was then the publid printer of the State. and his paper the
leading Republican journal of the West, which, doubtless, had its influence in making the subject of this sketch a firm democratic politician
all his after-life. It is worthy of mention here, and alike creditable to
both parties, that from the time Mr. Kendall was a young man and
Mr. Tanner a boy, they have continued to be warm and confidential
personal friends, now more than forty years, and much of the time in
some way associated in the same pursuits.
From a respectably educated printer the transition to an editor was
almost a matter of course, and as early as 1823, Mr Tanner entered upon
the life of an editor and publisher, before he was quite of legal age, and
so continued, with occasional intermissions, until 1854. At that time he
was the oldest editor, in point of time, in Kentucky. He published the
Western Monitor, at Lexington, the first semi-weekly paper printed in
the State, next the Morning Post, at Louisville, the first daily paper, and
in 1843 he started the first daily paper published at Frankfort, the capital
of the State. During several years of the time he was sole editor and
publisher of the Kentucky Yeoman, the present State journal at Frankfort; it was unquestionably the organ of the democracy of that State,
and, besides the influence it exercised in national politics, it wielded an
influence over many questions of local and State policy, the defeat or
success of which have left their impress upon the permanent destinies of
his native State. I may mention, as the leading measure of this kind, of
which he was the earliest, most persistent, and devoted advocate, the
adoption of the present Democratic Constitution of the State. In 1845-'6,
he found the State government not only in the hands of his political opponents, as it had been for a long series of years, but nearly all of the
public offices of every description were in possession of persons who had
either inherited them from generation to generation, or who had purchased them in open market for a stipulated price, to be paid in hand or
out of the annual profits arising from abuses of the office. Through his
own paper, the Kentucky Yeoman, and another paper which he caused to
be established and published, almost entirely at his own expense, devoted
to that particular subject, he not only exposed the venality of the official
corps of the State, but made such appeals to the pride and patriotism of
her chivalrous people, that he soon had enlisted in the cause the leading
men of both parties, and upon the submission of the question to the people by the Legislature, they voted for a new convention with almost
unexampled unanimity. The result was, that in 1849 delegates were
chosen by the people from the best men of the State to form a new con