George Logan

Who was George Logan?

George Logan was an American physician, farmer, legislator and politician from Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania. He served in the Pennsylvania state legislature and represented Pennsylvania in the United States Senate. As a child, he was sent to England for schooling and graduated from the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1779. He was a founder of the Democratic-Republican Societies in 1793. An accomplished farmer, he was a founder of the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Agriculture.

In 1798, he went to Paris to negotiate peace with the French to settle the Quasi-War. On his return, he found he had been denounced by the opposition Federalists, who had passed a statute informally known as the "Logan Act", which made it a crime for an individual citizen to interfere in a dispute between the United States and a foreign country.

In 1781, he married Deborah Norris, a historian and diarist. She was the first woman elected to membership in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. As a girl, she had been a friend of Sally Wister.