Jesper Harding was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 publisher in Philadelphia.

Biography

Harding was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...

 and learned the printing trade from the publisher Enos Bronson

Enos Bronson

Enos Bronson was an American writer and newspaper publisher. He graduated from Yale College. Afterwards, he became the first head of the newly founded Deerfield Academy....

 and started his own business in 1818 at the age of 18. Eleven years later, in November 1829, he purchased the Pennsylvania Inquirer newspaper from John Norvell

John Norvell

John Norvell was a newspaper editor and one of the first U.S. Senators from Michigan.-History:Norvell was born in Danville, Kentucky, then still a part of Virginia, where he attended the common schools....

 and John R. Walker. About the same time he began printing Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

s and became the largest publisher of Bibles in the U.S.

Initially a supporter of Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States . Based in frontier Tennessee, Jackson was a politician and army general who defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend , and the British at the Battle of New Orleans...

, Harding attempted to simultaneously support Jackson while also defending the directors of the Bank of the United States

Second Bank of the United States

The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816, five years after the First Bank of the United States lost its own charter. The Second Bank of the United States was initially headquartered in Carpenters' Hall, Philadelphia, the same as the First Bank, and had branches throughout the...

, which Jackson fiercely opposed. Harding later switched support (and his newspaper's editorial stance) to the anti-Jackson faction within the Democratic-Republican Party and in 1836 supported the Whig candidate William Henry Harrison

William Henry Harrison

William Henry Harrison was the ninth President of the United States , an American military officer and politician, and the first president to die in office. He was 68 years, 23 days old when elected, the oldest president elected until Ronald Reagan in 1980, and last President to be born before the...

 for president. After this, Harding's newspaper became an advocate for the cause of the Whig party, until it was weakened by internal divisions in 1852.

Harding also manufactured paper at a manufacturing plant in Trenton, New Jersey

Trenton, New Jersey

Trenton is the capital of the U.S. state of New Jersey and the county seat of Mercer County. As of the 2010 United States Census, Trenton had a population of 84,913...

. Harding merged the Pennsylvania Inquirer with the Daily Courier in 1839, and for a while the paper was known as The Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier. In 1845, it was called The Pennsylvania Inquirer and National Gazette.

Jesper Harding retired from publishing in 1859, succeeded by his son William White Harding, who changed the paper's name to the present Philadelphia Inquirer

The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Philadelphia Inquirer is a morning daily newspaper that serves the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, metropolitan area of the United States. The newspaper was founded by John R. Walker and John Norvell in June 1829 as The Pennsylvania Inquirer and is the third-oldest surviving daily newspaper in the...

in 1860.

Another son, George Harding, became a patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

 lawyer

Lawyer

A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...

 and argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.