As printer, editor, publisher, politician, and patriot, Peter Timothy played an active and prominent role in a strategic Southern colony during a critical phase in the emergence of the United States. He literally grew up in the printing business, developed into a feisty and vigorous leader, and died--appropriately enough, some might say--in a violent storm at sea.

Timothy was one of the wave of French Huguenot refugees who came to America via Holland in the early eighteenth century. His father, Louis Timothèe, arrived in Philadelphia aboard the Britannia on 21 September 1731 with his wife, Elizabeth, and four young children. Timothèe opened a school for the teaching of French, but within the year Benjamin Franklin hired him as editor-translator for a new German-language newspaper, the Philadelphische Zeitung. This job, however, lasted only a few months. Timothée had been trained as a printer in Holland...