This is a story you have probably never heard. Please read to the end to learn why it is important to me. Charles Thomson is one of the most consequential forgotten men of the American founding — a figure who sat at the center of the revolutionary enterprise for fifteen years, knew everything, and then vanished so completely that most Americans have never heard his name.
Origins and Early Life
Charles Thomson was born in County Derry in the north of Ireland in 1729, the son of a Presbyterian Scots-Irish merchant named John Thomson. He was one of several children. In 1739, when Thomson was ten years old, his father loaded the family onto a ship bound for America, intending to join the waves of Scots-Irish Presbyterians settling in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. John Thomson died on the voyage, and the children arrived in America as orphans without resources or connections.
Thomson’s older brothers were taken in by relatives or found their own way. Charles was initially left at the dockside in New Castle, Delaware — accounts vary as to whether he was simply abandoned or temporarily overlooked — before a blacksmith took him in. A local gentleman noticed the boy’s evident intelligence and arranged for him to be properly educated. Thomson eventually made his way to a Latin school run by Francis Alison, a Presbyterian minister and classicist of considerable reputation who educated many of the men who would later lead the American Revolution. Thomson proved an exceptional student of Greek and Latin, sufficiently skilled that he would later publish a translation of the entire Bible from the original Greek Septuagint — the first such translation by an American.
After completing his education Thomson taught school in New Castle and then in Philadelphia, where he became master of a Latin school attended by the sons of Philadelphia’s leading families. Through teaching he entered the social world of the city’s merchant and professional elite.....