On October 8, 1802, Albert Gallatin Hodges was born in Madison County, Virginia. In 1810, his family moved to Fayette County, Kentucky. As a teenager, Hodges began working as a carrier for the Kentucky Reporter, and before he was twenty, he had started his own newspaper in Lancaster. In 1833, after a publishing a string of newspapers in the Bluegrass, Hodges founded the Frankfort Commonwealth. The Commonwealth was a staunch Whig paper and when the Whig party dissolved in the 1850s, it gave its support to the American, or Know-Nothing, Party. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Hodges and the Commonwealth encouraged Unionism in Kentucky. Although Hodges often criticized Lincoln's plans for emancipation, by the end of the war, Hodges was one of the president's closest advisors about affairs in Kentucky. In 1872, Hodges retired and moved to Louisville, where he died on March 16, 1881.

Frank F. Mathias, "Albert Gallatin Hodges," in John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 435-6.