Chapter II: A Colonial Feud

The powder train for the explosion had been laid during the previous decade in the form of a savage feud between two of the most powerful families in New York—the Morrises and the Delanceys, led by the patriarchs Lewis Morris and Stephen Delancey. Fundamentally, the conflict was the primordial one between landed gentry and business tycoons, and the occasion produced two perfect representatives to act as leaders.

Lewis Morris—territorial aristocrat, councillor, assemblyman, chief justice of the Supreme Court—was the model of the wealthy, influential, proud, and ambitious colonial magnate. He made his family great, and handed on the tradition to his more famous grandsons, Gouverneur Morris and the Lewis Morris who signed the Declaration of Independence. He was a commanding figure in the politics of both New York and New Jersey, headstrong in defense of himself, his family, and his class, and a power for any governor to reckon with.

Stephen Delancey stood for the ever-increasing authority of money. He was New York’s leading merchant prince, a self-made man who accumulated a fortune in trade with Canada. French by birth, he was a Huguenot by religion, with all the tenacious acquisitiveness and flinty Puritan morality of his sect. In the Assembly he spoke for the powerful mercantile clique, and that alone would have made him—hardly less than Lewis Morris—a dangerous man to cross.

Now Morris crossed Delancey, and did it in two peculiarly galling ways. First of all, from the floor of the Assembly he led an attack on the trade in which the entrepreneur had made his money. Under this commercial system, New York businessmen sent their wares directly to the French in Canada, who used the manufactured articles they received to carry on their fur trade with the Indians. The system was a very profitable one for many New Yorkers, but Governor William Burnet was anxious to end it because it strengthened the hand of the French with the Indians, making the latter reliant on Quebec instead of Albany. Morris acted as his manager in the Assembly during the furious controversy that followed, while Stephen Delancey naturally commanded the opposition. The struggle developed into a fierce personal rivalry that continued to move with its own momentum long after Delancey had triumphed over Morris in this case of the Canada trade.

Secondly, Morris seems to have instigated Governor Burnet to question Delancey’s right to sit in the Assembly on the ground that he was a foreigner, a purely personal attack of so little validity that the Governor had to back down and apologize to the Chamber for usurping one of its prerogatives, after which it put its seal of approval on Stephen Delancey.

There is no need to explain at length how the old plutocrat reacted to these insults. We simply note that the perspicacious Cadwallader Colden terms Delancey “a man of strong and lasting resentments” and adds that the Morris-Delancey clash gave rise to “violent party struggles.” Before long New York was disturbed by hostile groups known from their chiefs as the “Morris Interest” and the “Delancey Interest.” This is the background to the Zenger case. Party alignment was obviously dictated in many cases by motives other than personal allegiance—by political, social, and economic factors—but for our purposes the fundamental thing is the Morris-Delancey antithesis. During Burnet’s administration (1720-28) these embittered Interests were engaged in a constant struggle for power, with the Morrisites strong because they had the ear of the Governor, and the Delanceyites because the Assembly swung over to their side.

With the regime of Governor John Montgomerie (1728-31), the Delancey Interest definitely became paramount in New York because this executive made it the cornerstone of his policy to stay on good terms with the Assembly. Montgomerie maintained an uneasy peace (partly because he was himself a rather feckless individual), but the atmosphere in New York did not thereby cease to be explosive, for the Morris Interest, although temporarily checked, was still powerful, still ambitious, still hopeful, and still watching for the pendulum to swing its way.

Thus the scene was set for a violent climax whenever a sufficient cause should appear. It appeared on Montgomerie’s death in the person of the new governor, Colonel William Cosby.

III. Governor Cosby

If you look into Burke’s _Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland_, you will find the following paragraph embedded in the genealogical history of “Cosby of Stradbally”:

William, brigadier-general, col. of the royal Irish, governor of New
York and the Jersies, equerry to the Queen, and m. Grace, sister of
George Montague Earl of Halifax, K.B., and left by that lady (who d.
25 Dec. 1767) at his decease, 10 March 1736, the following issue,
William, an officer in the Army; Henry, R.N., d. 1753; Elizabeth, m.
to Lord Augustus Fitzroy, 2nd son of Charles, Duke of Grafton; Anne,
m. to —— Murray, Esq. of New York.

The entry enables us to form a pretty good idea of the background from which Governor Cosby came and explains much of his behavior as chief executive of New York. He was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, sprung from the notorious Ascendancy class that maintained its position through a whole series of penal laws designed to keep the majority of Irishmen in subjection. He had all the craving for place and pension, the haughtiness, and the venal devotion to the _status quo_ that were common in the worst section of his class, and these vices merely perverted a strong will and a certain resourcefulness in meeting obstacles.

With intelligence and decency William Cosby might have been a man of fair ability; instead he became a sycophant with his superiors, an intriguer with his equals, and a petty tyrant with those beneath him. We know from his correspondence that he could not abide opposition or even criticism.

How much of a soldier he was remains doubtful since, although he rose to the rank of general, it was a period in which office frequently enough went with bribery, conniving, and influence rather than with ability. William Cosby was in a position to resort to all of these because he enjoyed powerful contacts in England, being a close friend of the Duke of Newcastle, while his wife was a sister of the Earl of Halifax. These noblemen may both have been instrumental in furthering his rise in the army. His administrative career in the Colonies was certainly largely due to Newcastle, who controlled the Board of Trade and was able to send out whom he chose.

Cosby’s first governorship took him to the island of Minorca, where his high-handedness and cupidity exasperated the Minorcans, and they protested repeatedly to the Board of Trade. He committed one crime that London could not overlook or minimize: while England and Spain were at peace in 1718 Cosby ruthlessly seized the goods of a Spanish merchant, ordered them sold at auction, and then manipulated the records to cover his tracks. The whole thing was too flagrant. The Governor was ordered to reimburse his victim and removed from his post in Minorca.

Notwithstanding the incident, Cosby was able to wangle other appointments, of which the New York governorship was the most important. The feeling of the Colonials when they learned of the Minorca affair was expressed by Cadwallader Colden:

How such a man, after such a flagrant instance of tyranny and robbery,
came to be intrusted with the government of an English colony and to
be made Chancellor and keeper of the King’s conscience in that colony,
is not easy for a common understanding to conceive without
entertaining thoughts much to the disadvantage of the honor and
integrity of the King’s Ministers, otherwise than by thinking that the
Ministry believed that what he had suffered by the complaints made
against him from Minorca would make him for the future carefully avoid
giving any occasion of complaint from his new government.[1]

However, there was no local prejudice against the new Governor when he arrived on August 1, 1732. His Minorca past was unknown. He had had the shrewdness to ingratiate himself with New Yorkers, while he lingered in England for over a year, by agitating against the pending sugar bill as detrimental to Colonial commercial interests; he was unable to bring news of success with him, but at least he was believed to have tried, and this alone would have created an atmosphere favorable to him. He had, moreover, personal attributes calculated to make him popular in Colonial society—a smooth charm, good birth, high military rank, familiar connections with the nobility at home, and a wife who was the sister of an earl. He was fond of playing the host on a lavish scale, and the parties and dances at the Governor’s mansion were soon noted as among the gayest ever seen in New York City.

IV. The Governor and His Enemies

Given all this popularity and good will on his arrival, what was it that went wrong? How did William Cosby’s become “one of the most disturbed administrations in New York Colonial history”? The transition was very rapid. Within three months of his arrival the new Governor wrote to the Duke of Newcastle:

I am sorry to inform your Grace that the example and spirit of the
Boston people begin to spread amongst these colonies in a most
prodigious manner. I had more trouble to manage these people than I
could have imagined; however for this time I have done pretty well
with them; I wish I may come off as well with them of the Jersies.[2]

That old bugbear of Colonial governors, trouble with the Assembly, was not in question. Unlike many men better than himself, Cosby got along very well with his legislature, his differences with it being hardly more than the inevitable friction created by two forces in contact and working toward ends that did not always coincide. The harmony was striking because he insulted the Assembly after it had voted him a present for his opposition to the sugar bill: the sum did not satisfy him, and he snarled to Lewis Morris, “Damn them, why did they not add shillings and pence? Do they think that I came from England for money? I’ll make them know better.”[3]

This was a gratuitous affront, and typical of the small-minded avaricious man who offered it, but it did not raise any political issue that could cause a quarrel.

The quarrel began within the Governor’s Council, among the men who were supposed to be his close intimate advisers. The predisposing condition already existed there in the form of the Morris-Delancey feud, on the smoldering embers of which Cosby proceeded to pour oil. From the Council, ripples of animosity spread through the Colony, dividing the people into two factions—the Court party of the Governor (which absorbed the Delancey Interest), and the Popular party (formerly the Morris Interest) of his enemies. It happened like this.

During the year that Cosby stayed on in England after his appointment, the leadership of New York devolved on the president of the Council, the ranking member, who happened to be a veteran of the old New Amsterdam days named Rip Van Dam. He was a hard-headed, tight-fisted, honest Dutchman, not very able, but extremely devoted to his duties and his rights. During his tenure of office he was voted, and drew, the stipend attached to it.

When Cosby finally arrived on the scene, he produced a royal decree ordering Van Dam to divide the sum with him. Van Dam’s answer was a shrewd reprisal. Knowing that Cosby had received many emoluments of the governorship while in England, he suggested a division that would include these, and he calculated that on this basis the Governor actually owed him a substantial amount. The dictatorial proconsul rejected the proposal with all the anger and contempt he usually displayed when thwarted. He decided to sue.

Determined to keep the case away from a jury because of local sentiment that favored a Colonial against a crown official, and unable to proceed in chancery since he would be presiding as chancellor over his own suit, Cosby hit on the idea of letting the justices of the Supreme Court handle it as Barons of the Exchequer. He therefore named the Supreme Court a court of equity, after which he brought suit against Van Dam.

The defendant’s lawyers were James Alexander and William Smith, two of the foremost members of the New York bar, who had been advising him throughout. When the suit began in the new court of equity, Alexander and Smith adopted the bold course of denying the validity of the court itself, arguing in particular that it was illegal for the Governor to establish it of his own free will and without the consent of the Assembly. This plea was more than an attack on the jurisdiction of a court: it was a direct accusation that the Governor had overstepped the limits of his authority and had violated the law.

The three justices of the Supreme Court were divided on the merits of the plea. Two of them, James Delancey and Frederick Philipse, rejected it out of hand. They belonged to the Governor’s faction. But the Chief Justice was of another mind, and that was the critical thing, for he was Lewis Morris. (Notice the names. We are back in the familiar atmosphere of the Morris-Delancey feud, James being the son of old Stephen Delancey.) Morris had opposed obnoxious governors in the past, and he would not back down before Governor Cosby. There was this added point about Lewis Morris, that he had functioned in the New Jersey Council as did Van Dam in New York’s, so his pocketbook stood in the same kind of jeopardy if Van Dam should be condemned.

The Chief Justice therefore agreed with the counsel for the defense that the court of equity was no true court, and he openly defied the Governor with these words:

I take it the giving of a new jurisdiction in Equity by letters patent
to an old Court that never had such jurisdiction before, or erecting a
new Court of Equity by letters patent or ordinances of the Governor
and Council, without assent of the legislature, are equally unlawful,
and not a sufficient warrant to justify this Court to proceed in a
course of Equity. And therefore by the grace of God, I, as Chief
Justice of this Province, shall not pay any obedience to them in that
point.[4]

The Governor was away in New Jersey at the time but, hearing what had happened, he wrote Morris a furious and insulting letter, and demanded a copy of the remarks he had made in court. The Chief Justice complied, at the same time publishing the remarks (through the Zenger press) as a gesture of studied contempt for all the Colony to see. This was more than Cosby was willing to stand. On May 3, 1733, he wrote to the Duke of Newcastle:

Things are now gone that length that I must either discipline Morris
or suffer myself to be affronted, or, what is still worse, see the
King’s authority trampled on and disrespect and irreverence to it
taught from the Bench to the people by him who, by his oath and his
office, is obliged to support it. This is neither consistent with my
duty nor my inclination to bear, and therefore when I return to New
York I shall displace him and make Judge Delancey Chief Justice in his
room.[5]

In August, Cosby made good his threat. At one Council meeting, and without notifying Morris in advance, he announced that henceforth Delancey was chief justice of the Supreme Court of New York, with Philipse advancing to the second place. Cadwallader Colden, who was present in his capacity of councillor, tells us that he disapproved of the Governor’s action, and that Cosby resented his saying so. Colden’s account of the episode is so revealing of Cosby’s character that it is worth quoting in full:

I had been sent for to town a few days before under pretense of some
affairs in my office of Surveyor General. When I came into the
Governor’s house he received me into his arms with, “My dear Colden, I
am glad to see you.” I was caressed for two or three days by every one
of the family. Just before I went to Council he took me upon the couch
and seemed to entertain me in the most friendly manner, but spoke not
one word of removing the Chief Justice and appointing another till we
were sitting in Council, when he said that he had removed Mr Morris
and appointed James Delancey in his room, and thought this the most
proper place to give the first notice of it. Upon which I said, “Then
Your Excellency only tells us what you have already done?” To which he
answered, “Yes.” I replied, “It is not what I would have advised.” And
he very briskly returned to it, “I do not ask your advice.” This put
his having the consent of the Council out of the question and defeated
the whole design he had been put upon of cajoling me (for I do not
think he was capable of forming any design himself that had any
reach). However he never forgave me.[6]

Morris soon learned what had taken place at the meeting, and in a letter of protest he passed the information on to London:

I believe I am well informed that, on the delivery of the Commissions
to the Judges in Council, Doctor Colden asked the Governor whether the
Council was summoned to be advised on that head? If they were, he
would advise against it as being prejudicial to His Majesty’s service.
To which the Governor replied that he did not, nor ever intended to,
consult them about it; he thought fit to do it, and was not
accountable to them; or words to that effect.[7]

From this time on there was no mollifying Lewis Morris. Implacably revengeful, he never lowered his sights from two main goals, to regain the office of chief justice, and to get William Cosby removed from the governorship of New York. He achieved neither of these, but he did achieve the leadership of the antiadministration faction—the Popular party—that gave Cosby no peace.

The Governor had really stirred up a hornets’ nest. Not only was New York already disgusted with him as a man and an executive, his private arrogance and public avarice being notorious, but he had openly adopted the pattern of behavior that had made Colonial governors unpopular in the past. Before he finished he had insulted the Assembly, tampered with the courts, divided his Council into venomous cliques, frightened property owners with his claims to land, and treated leading citizens with cavalier disdain. He practiced nepotism, tried to rig elections, and violated his instructions from London.

He committed a blunder as well as a crime when he alienated some of the most powerful men in his Colony—especially Lewis Morris, Rip Van Dam, and James Alexander, the last of whom became the mastermind of the Popular party. Working with them were Colden, William Smith, Lewis Morris, Junior, and many others down the scale into the anonymous mass of the population. The opposition to Governor Cosby soon turned from a matter of sporadic pinpricks into a concerted conspiracy bent on his political destruction.

The Governor’s friends rallied around him, led by Chief Justice James Delancey (the only man of real ability among them), but they suffered in the contest for public opinion because they had to defend Cosby at a time when New Yorkers generally had made up their minds that he was indefensible. However, the Court party was strong in this, that it possessed the governmental machinery that could be brought to bear at a dozen different points of the battlefield, for example in the magistracies and at the bar.

V. The Administration Newspaper

The Court party also possessed the only newspaper in the Colony, William Bradford’s _New York Gazette_. Bradford himself was hardly a party man, but (again as official printer) he was in no position to let his little two-page publication be used against those in power. He could not refuse to let them censor the _Gazette_. He could not even demur when Governor Cosby decided to put one of his own men in charge of editorial policy.

That decision introduces us to the most entertaining rascal of the Zenger case—Francis Harison, the dubious individual who functioned as editor-by-appointment and flatterer-in-chief to His Excellency the Governor. Since Harison was a censor in fact, if not in name, he merits some attention in any explanation of how freedom of the press was established for the first time on this side of the Atlantic. His career, more than any except Governor Cosby’s, reveals why the Popular party of New York determined to throw down the gauntlet in the form of an opposition newspaper.

Francis Harison was notorious before Cosby was ever heard of in the Colony. Arriving more than twenty years earlier, he soon carved out a comfortable niche for himself. He had an enormous gift for wheedling jobs of some importance, and he did very well for himself, becoming among other things a member of the Governor’s Council, recorder for the City of New York, and a judge of the admiralty. He served as one of the commissioners in settling the boundary dispute with Connecticut. He must have been a real genius at wangling, for on more than one occasion he showed a dishonesty and a stupidity so startling as to rouse wonder that anyone ever trusted him with responsibility.

Take the matter of the Connecticut boundary, when he stumbled on the chance for his first really outrageous performance, an act as characteristic of the man as anything you could ask for. Knowing that 50,000 acres were to be turned over to New York in one place (the famous “Oblong”), he wrote clandestinely to friends in London, urging them to snap up the land before local people could get their hands on it. At the same time he maneuvered himself into the group of Colonials who were applying for a patent, apparently with the intention of undermining his trusting and unsuspecting colleagues, and of wresting control from them as agent for the London syndicate.

If such duplicity was second nature to him, its outcome was no less typical. The London patentees, after hurriedly obtaining a royal grant according to the advice of their mentor in New York, discovered that he (a boundary commissioner, be it remembered) had given them misplaced lines on the map, and that their claim was already occupied. How they felt about him after that may easily be surmised, also how the New Yorkers reacted to his perfidy. From then on it was axiomatic that when dealing with Francis Harison you had to use extreme caution and circumspection.

If we judge by intent and motive rather than by accomplishment, he was as consummate a scoundrel as the Colonies ever produced. His only saving grace was a beguiling habit of being almost invariably hoist with his own petard. Stupid criminality followed by exposure and humiliation—that is the pattern; and wherever you find it on the banks of the Hudson during the early 1730’s, you may justifiably look for the imprint of Francis Harison’s fine Italian hand.

His big opportunity came with the arrival of Colonel Cosby. The two hit it off from the start. They were two of a kind, complementaries: the one found a willing tool, the other a powerful patron. Where the Governor was perforce hemmed in to a certain extent by the nature of his office, his lieutenant enjoyed a wide latitude where he could do almost as he pleased.

In the Cosby scheme of things Harison was allotted the dirty work, the low chicanery, and the brute force that the administration resorted to. In particular, he was given control of the _Gazette_, to which he fed weekly eulogies of the administration. His associates may have despised him privately (we know that James Delancey did), but in the governor’s mansion he received the appreciation due his special talents. Cosby, like many another tyrant, had a place near the top for an unprincipled adventurer. Francis Harison was his hatchetman.

They were so close that Cosby almost made Harison chief justice following the dismissal of Lewis Morris. Delancey, who got the post, was not at all happy about it, and Colden tells us:

Mr Delancey excused his accepting of the commission at the expense of
his predecessor by saying that the Governor could not be diverted from
removing Mr Morris, and that if he did not accept it the Governor was
resolved to put Mr Harison in the office, a man nowise acceptable to
anybody. If that had been done it would certainly have been of great
advantage to Mr Morris, for Mr Harison was of so bad a character, and
so odious to the people, that they certainly would have pulled him
from the Bench.[8]

Harison finally went too far in his shady deals and ruined himself. William Truesdale, one of the small fry who worked for him, owed a debt to a persistent creditor, Joseph Weldon of Boston. Somehow Harison got hold of a dunning letter from Weldon to Truesdale. Just what he had in mind is not clear—a pathetic lament that the historian has to make so often in dealing with what passed for ratiocination in this particular mind—but he caused a warrant to be sworn out against Truesdale in Weldon’s name. If you think he simply had his minion arrested without further ado, you do not know Francis Harison. His behavior is described thus by Colden:

Mr Harison met Truesdale at an ale house where, pretending not to like
the beer, he invited Truesdale and his company to meet him two hours
afterwards at another house. When Truesdale came to the other house he
found the Under-Sheriff, who immediately arrested him. Truesdale sends
to Mr Harison, as his friend, to help him in his distress. As soon as
Mr Harison came, he, in a seeming great surprise, said to Truesdale,
“In the name of God, what is this? I hear you are arrested for such a
sum”—and blamed him for not informing of it that he might have kept
him out of the Sheriff’s way.[9]

New York’s archvillain must have been very pleased with himself as his victim was carted off to jail. Did he whisper, “Honest Iago!” to himself?

The roguery was there, but as usual there was no intelligence to back it up and make it work. The intriguer had counted on a smooth explanation to fend off the man in whose name he was practicing on Truesdale. Instead, Joseph Weldon felt outraged when he learned what was going on, rushed down from Boston, swore that he never gave anyone any authority to act for him, and added that at the time he did not even know of Harison’s existence.

After this scandal there was no place in New York for Francis Harison. Even his protector in the governor’s mansion could not save him. A Grand Jury indicted him for using Weldon’s name, whereupon he fled from the Colony in May of 1735, made his way to England, and never came back. From then on his story is virtually a blank, the last word on him being that he was down-and-out when he died.

However, this melancholy denouement was in the future and unforeseen when Cosby put Harison in charge of the _Gazette_ in 1732. The new editor began to ride very high indeed, for he was in the enviable position of one who could both flatter his own side and castigate its critics with impunity since there was no rival newspaper to contradict him. With Harison in command, the administration’s mouthpiece lavished on William Cosby the adulation that he loved and could get only from a trusted henchman, interspersing at the same time quick jabs at Morris, Van Dam, Alexander, and the rest.

Here is the way the _Gazette_ covered one meeting between the Governor and the Assembly:

The harmony and good understanding between the several branches of the
legislature—whereby nothing came to be demanded on the one side but
what was for the public general good and welfare of His Majesty’s
people, and everything done on the other which may recommend the
honorable House to His Majesty, to his representative and to their
constituents—will, we hope, continue to us all those blessings which
we enjoy under a government greatly envied, and too often disturbed by
such as, instead thereof, are struggling to introduce discord and
public confusion.[10]

The _Gazette_ resorted to verse to make its case:

Cosby the mild, the happy, good and great,
The strongest guard of our little state;
Let malcontents in crabbed language write,
And the D...h H...s belch, tho’ they cannot bite.
He unconcerned will let the wretches roar,
And govern just, as others did before.[11]

It went to Pope’s translation of the _Odyssey_ to find a suitable description of the opposing faction:

Thersites only clamored in the throng,
Loquacious, loud, and turbulent of tongue,
And by no shame, by no respect controlled;
In scandal busy, in reproaches bold;
But chief, he gloried with licentious style,
To lash the great, and rulers to revile.[12]

These passages epitomize the problem facing the Popular party. In fighting the Governor there was no hope of success unless he could be met at every critical spot, and one of the most critical was precisely that of journalism. Irregular pamphlets and open letters were of little use against a systematic weekly dose of administration propaganda in the _Gazette_. The passage of time only made the problem more acute.

Naturally we do not have minutes of the discussions that went on between the anti-Cosby conspirators, but we do not need such information to see the rationale of the strategy they worked out. Their behavior is most eloquent on that score; it systematizes by practical example the disjointed notes, memoranda, and other documents that have come down to us.

First of all, they would do everything they could to sap the political strength of their hated enemy: they would support opposing candidates at elections, they would provide legal counsel for those whom he attacked through the courts, they would found a newspaper to bring their side of the controversy before the bar of public opinion. Secondly, they would wage their war on another front, in London, sending to the Board of Trade a steady barrage of propaganda designed to prove that William Cosby was no more fit to govern New York than he had been to govern Minorca. Eventually they would dispatch an emissary to make the situation clear in personal talks with the authorities.

VI. An Opposition Newspaper

With the lines thus drawn up, the first blows were struck on October 29, 1733. On that day was held the election of an assemblyman for Westchester, and the candidate of the Popular party was Lewis Morris. Governor Cosby, desperately anxious to defeat this formidable antagonist, threw everything he had to the support of his own man, William Forster. The result was the famous poll on the green of St. Paul’s Church, Eastchester.[1]

The two candidates, arriving with motley arrays of their followers behind them, were like commanding generals bound for battle. The image is not at all inexact, for Westchester was a stronghold of the Delancey-Philipse element of the Court party, and both sides were able to count on a disciplined mass of voters.

The sheriff presiding over the election was, like many officials, a creature of the Governor. Cosby evidently had ordered him to make sure, in one way or another, that the result went against Morris—in other words, to rig the election if necessary. When it became clear that Morris had a majority of the voters with him, the sheriff intervened and tried to snatch a victory by disfranchising one whole body of the population.

It had been customary to let Quakers vote without taking the oath, for by their religion they were forbidden to “swear.” Instead they were allowed to “affirm.” That custom gave Cosby’s sheriff a loophole. He decreed that no one who would not take the oath should be allowed to cast a ballot, and so he ruled the Friends out of the election, hoping that this maneuver would change the result. In fact it did not, for even without this group of his supporters Morris won a resounding victory.

The election was momentous beyond the fact that it returned to the Assembly a veteran of rough-and-tumble politics who was sure to throw his weight against the Governor wherever he could, and that it hardened the Quakers against the regime. It revealed Cosby as completely unscrupulous in dealing with his opponents, as a man who, occupying the position of chief upholder of the law, had no hesitation in playing fast and loose with it when he thought he could gain some advantage. Before the election he had been guilty of many questionable things, such as the legal attack on Van Dam and the removal of Lewis Morris from the Supreme Court, but these were at least debatable, with something to be said for him even if he could not be exculpated. Now his conduct was not debatable. It was plainly unethical, if not technically illegal.

The Westchester election was, in more ways than one, a triumph for the Popular party, which had impelled Cosby into a crime that was at once manifest and useless, revealing him as stupid as well as criminal.

The furor had hardly begun to die away before there burst upon the Governor the bombshell of an opposition newspaper. The _New York Weekly Journal_, edited by James Alexander and printed by Peter Zenger, was the first _political independent_ ever published on this continent. The men behind it created a journalistic category new to American experience when they deliberately decided to make a continuing open battle with Governor Cosby the rationale of their editorial policy. They published a specifically political newspaper, no arm of the authorities or toady to headquarters, but the mouthpiece of those who were challenging the representative of the king in their Colony. There was nothing hesitant or sporadic about their undertaking. The paper came out every Monday, always truculent and always propagandizing one point of view in politics. The political issue was the only _raison d’être_ of publication. Everything else—foreign news, essays, verses, squibs, advertisements—was filler.

Here was something original for this side of the ocean, an experiment in journalism as critical as ever was attempted by any members of our fourth estate; and successful, for the _Journal_ lived and throve and became the ancestor of the great American political organs of modern times.

Now for all of this James Alexander was more responsible than any other man. From his literary remains we know that he was in full possession of the theory of a free press long before the occasion rose for him to implement it as a working editor, and that, the occasion having risen, he wrote much of the copy for the opposition newspaper and blue-penciled virtually all the contributions bearing on the feud with the Governor.

This pivotal figure of American history was Scottish by birth, heir to the title of Earl of Stirling (a title his son made illustrious in the patriotic annals of the Revolution). He studied mathematics and science in Edinburgh, but compromised his future there by joining the Jacobite rising that attempted to place the Old Pretender on the British throne in 1715. After the fiasco, Alexander, like so many of his class, found Scotland too hot for him. He fled to America, studied law, went into politics, and eventually entered the Councils of both New York and New Jersey. Mathematician, scientist, lawyer, and politician, he was one of the most extraordinary men of his generation, a gentleman and a scholar, a charter member of Benjamin Franklin’s Philosophical Society, and the trusted confidant of more than one Governor.

The idea of founding the _Journal_ was probably his. For one thing, he was already something of a journalist, having published various items in William Bradford’s _Gazette_ when it was the only newspaper in town. Secondly, he was among the first overt opponents of Governor Cosby, the collision between them being remarkably quick and remarkably bitter, perhaps even more so than the Cosby-Morris and the Cosby-Van Dam conflicts. Only a few months after arriving the Governor wrote to his patron, the Duke of Newcastle:

There is one, James Alexander, whom I found here in both the New York
and the New Jersey Councils, although very unfit to sit in either, or
indeed to act in any other capacity where His Majesty’s honor and
interest are concerned. He is the only man that has given me any
uneasiness since my arrival.... In short, his known very bad character
would be too long to trouble Your Grace with particulars, and stuffed
with such tricks and oppressions too gross for Your Grace to hear. In
his room I desire the favor of Your Grace to appoint Joseph
Warrell.[13]

Many more letters of a similar content passed between the governor’s mansion in New York and authoritative personages in England.

Alexander repaid the compliment in his own correspondence. To his old friend, former Governor Robert Hunter, he confided:

Our Governor, who came here but last year, has long ago given more
distaste to the people than I believe any Governor that ever this
Province had during his whole government. He was so unhappy before he
came to have the character in England that he knew not the difference
between power and right; and he has, by many imprudent actions since
he came here, fully verified that character. It would be tedious to
give a detail of them. He has raised such a spirit in the people of
this Province that, if they cannot convince him, yet I believe they
will give the world reason to believe that they are not easily to be
made slaves of, nor to be governed by arbitrary power.... Nothing does
give a greater luster to your and Mr Burnet’s administrations here
than being succeeded by such a man.[14]

This letter is notable for giving Alexander’s own express statement about the reason for publishing the brand new _Journal_:

Inclosed is also the first of a newspaper designed to be continued
weekly, chiefly to expose him [Cosby] and those ridiculous flatteries
with which Mr Harison loads our other newspaper, which our Governor
claims and has the privilege of suffering nothing to be in but what he
and Mr Harison approve of.

Mr Van Dam is resolved, and by far the greater part of the Province
openly approve his resolution, of not yielding to the Governor’s
demand. He has not as yet answered, nor will the Governor’s lawyers be
able for one while to compel him unless they break over all law and
persuade the new Judges [Delancey and Philipse] into a contradiction
of themselves. Which if they do, the world shall know it from the
press.[15]

The advent of the _Journal_ did nothing to lessen the bitterness of Cosby’s condemnation of Alexander, for although it was known as “Zenger’s paper” (since it bore only the printer’s name), the Governor was in no doubt about who was the guiding genius of the enterprise. On December 6, 1734, he writes to the Board of Trade:

Mr James Alexander is the person whom I have too much occasion to
mention.... No sooner did Van Dam and the late Chief Justice (the
latter especially) begin to treat my administration with rudeness and
ill-manners than I found Alexander to be at the head of a scheme to
give all imaginable uneasiness to the government by infusing into, and
making the worst impression on, the minds of the people. A press
supported by him and his party began to swarm with the most virulent
libels.[16]

Cosby realized further that Alexander was not the only one in New York who was playing at the new kind of journalism, and he said of Morris:

His open and implacable malice against me has appeared weekly in
Zenger’s _Journal_. This man with the two others I have mentioned, Van
Dam and Alexander, are the only men from whom I am to look for any
opposition in the administration of the government, and they are so
implacable in their malice that I am to look for all the insolent,
false and scandalous aspersions that such bold and profligate wretches
can invent.[17]

Cosby’s cries of rage and anguish are understandable enough. From the date of the _Journal_’s appearance (November 5, 1733) until his death more than two years later it constituted itself his most alert censor, critic, and judge. Every Monday the lash fell across his shoulders, the attacks varying through the gamut from airy satire to thundering condemnation. The opposition writers called him everything from an “idiot” to a “Nero,” and pointedly suggested that his London superiors should do something to alleviate the affliction they had imposed on their Colony.

The first issue started the ball rolling with a brilliant and biting story of the Westchester election and Morris’ victory in spite of the sheriff’s heavy-handed machinations; and from then on there was no letup. The fundamental idea being to convict Cosby of violating the rules of his governorship, the _Journal_ never ceased to hammer at this theme. The best example of the technique is in the issues of the last two weeks of September, 1734, a continued essay that accuses Cosby of voting as a member of the Council during its legislative sessions, of demanding that bills from the Assembly be presented to him before the Council saw them, and of adjourning the Assembly in his own name instead of the king’s.

All three of these acts violated the rules by which the Governor was bound, and when the _Journal_ carried the story to the Board of Trade, Cosby was warned about them. He could not, of course, be condemned out of hand on the basis of a newspaper story, but the significant thing is that the Board should have found the story sufficient basis for mentioning the subject.

Most of the _Journal_ writing is lost irretrievably behind a veil of anonymity, which is not too important since whoever “Cato” and “Philo-Patriae” and “Thomas Standby” may have been, they were acting in concert. But every once in a while individual personality peeps or glares through the writing, as in this reply to one argument for the prudence of obeying the government, no matter what. The text of the reply is saturated through and through with the pent-up gall and venom on which Lewis Morris had been feeding for so long:

Let this wiseacre (whoever he is) go to any country wife and tell her
that the fox is a mischievous creature that can and does do her much
hurt, that it is difficult if not impracticable to catch him, and that
therefore she ought on any terms to keep in with him.

Why don’t we keep in with serpents and wolves on this foot? Animals
much more innocent and less mischievous to the public than some
Governors have proved.

A Governor turns rogue, does a thousand things for which a small rogue
would have deserved a halter; and because it is difficult if not
impracticable to obtain relief against him, therefore it is prudent to
keep in with him and join in the roguery; and that on the principle of
self-preservation. That is, a Governor does all he can to chain you,
and it being difficult to prevent him, it is prudent in you (in order
to preserve your liberty) to help him put them on and to rivet them
fast.

No people in the world have contended for liberty with more boldness
and greater success than the Dutch; are more tenacious in retaining
it; or more jealous of any attempts upon it; yet in their plantations
they seem to be lost to all the sense of it, and a fellow that is but
one degree removed from an idiot shall, with a full-mouthed
“Sacrament, Donder and Blixum!” govern as he pleases, dispose of them
and their properties at his discretion, and their magistrates will
keep in with him at any rate, and think his favor no mean purchase for
the loss of their liberty.

There have been Nicholsons, Cornburys, Coots, Barringtons, Edens,
Lowthers, Georges, Parks, Douglases, and many more, as very Bashaws as
ever were sent out from Constantinople; and there have not been
wanting under each of their administrations persons, the dregs and
scandals of human nature, who have kept in with them and used their
endeavors to enslave their fellow-subjects, and persuaded others to do
so.[18]

This was political independence with a vengeance. Never before had an American newspaper dared to treat an officer of the crown so. Other periodicals depended on official sanction to keep them going, or at least never strayed too far from the line laid down for them. The _Journal_ had no sanction and toed no line. It was, depending on one’s political sympathies, either an outrageous innovation or else simply an unfamiliar experiment. In either case it needed to be legitimized in the eyes of its readers.

VII. Freedom of the Press

That was why Alexander, as editor, pushed the issue of freedom of the press so hard. New Yorkers who had been unaware of that freedom would come upon it every time they opened “Zenger’s paper.” Side by side they would find stories about the misdemeanors of the Governor and essays defending and defining a free press, an ingenious interplay of practice and theory, a journalistic dialectic shifting between independent news reporting and the theory that justifies such reporting. Under Alexander’s editing hand the contributors both pilloried their enemy in the executive mansion and claimed the right to do so.

Alexander did not, of course, invent the technique. It was already well known in Britain, and he took it over for his own purposes, just as our political philosophers such as Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison took over ideas already current in Britain and France. Like all our Colonial editors, he was dependent on classics such as Milton, Locke, Swift, Steele, Addison, and Defoe. He used all of these at different times, quoting them as authorities for unfettered journalism and free speech.

Most of all he used the celebrated _Cato’s Letters_ of Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard. They furnished him with an ideal model. The letters had appeared in the _London Journal_ and the _British Journal_ only a decade before, when, signing themselves “Cato,” Gordon and Trenchard castigated his majesty’s government, and particularly the men responsible for the scandal of the South Sea Bubble. They also larded their attacks with animadversions on freedom of the press, which they explicitly defended as intrinsic to liberty itself. They caused so much embarrassment to the Ministry that it was forced to counterattack: characteristically for the eighteenth century, it solved the problem by buying out the _London Journal_.

But that did not kill the argument, for _Cato’s Letters_ were published in four volumes and enjoyed a tremendous popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. It took James Alexander to show just how much might be done with them over here. He manifestly had read and reread Gordon and Trenchard, soaking up their ideas as avidly as a sponge soaks up water, and, turning editor, he found in them a treasure trove of journalistic philosophy and invective. His policy is theirs adapted to the situation in Colonial New York.

He copied out extracts from the _Letters_ both for his own private edification and guidance and for use in the _Journal_. There is extant in his handwriting part of the letter headed “Of the restraints which ought to be laid upon public rulers.” He thought it apropos of the Cosby administration, so it appeared in the _Journal_ on May 27, 1734. Here are a few others that he selected, or else approved, for reprinting: “The right and capacity of the people to judge of government,” “Of reverence true and false,” “Of freedom of speech: that the same is inseparable from public liberty,” “Reflections upon libelling,” “Cautions against the natural encroachments of power.”

To put his editorial credo in a nutshell, Alexander went to another classical source, the _Craftsman_, and printed this maxim on November 12, 1733:

The liberty of the press is a subject of the greatest importance, and
in which every individual is as much concerned as he is in any other
part of liberty.

Under the aegis of his text he adroitly maneuvered the opposition newspaper against all the power of the Governor—and against all the defenses thrown up by Francis Harison as editor of the Governor’s newspaper.