War correspondent during the American Civil War and novelist. He wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, in 1861 he started to write for the New York Herald. By 1868, he became a Washington correspondent, working for the "Chicago Tribune," and after 1874, for the "New York Graphic.His novels included The Entailed Hat (1884), which fictionalized a true story of a woman named Patty Cannon who kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Townsend's other works include the short story collection Tales of the Chesapeake (1880) and the novel Katy of Catoctin (1887).Townsend wrote under the pen name "Gath", which was derived by adding an "H" to his initials, and inspired by the biblical passage II Samuel 1:20.
