Sargent, John O.

Born: 1811-09-20 Gloucester, Massachusetts

Died: 1891-12-28 New York, New York

John O. Sargent was a lawyer and newspaper editor. After receiving a traditional pre-collegiate education, Sargent matriculated to Harvard College, where he founded the Collegian, a newspaper he operated with his brother Epes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other students. Graduating from Harvard in 1830, he read law in Boston and earned admittance to the Suffolk County bar in January 1834. He opened a law practice in Boston. In addition to his law practice, Sargent contributed articles to the Boston Atlas, and served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. In 1837, he moved to New York City to become associate editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer. He resigned as associate editor after the presidential election of 1840 and returned to practicing law. During the presidential campaign of 1848, he operated the Battery, a campaign newspaper devoted to the support of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore for president and vice president, respectively, and subsequently edited, along with Alexander C. Bullitt, the Washington Republic, which became the principle newspaper of the Taylor and Fillmore administrations. Sargent discontinued editing the Republic at the end of Fillmore's presidency, and practiced law in Washington, DC and New York City until his death. In January 1854, he married Georgiana Wells. Sargent lived abroad during the Civil War.

William T. Davis, Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: Boston History, 1895), 1:241; James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., "Sargent, John Osborne," Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), 5:399; Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 57-58; Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2011); Gravestone, Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA.