Paper Cuts—and Gashes
The fight over a free press reached fever pitch in the fall of 1774
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
“Freedom of the press,” like “equality before the law” and “the American Dream,” is one of those concepts we consider central to our national identity. And yet, like them, it has been devilishly difficult to realize—or even to define. Freedom of the press in the United States is customarily said to begin with printer and journalist Peter Zenger, who was acquitted in 1735 over remarks critical of New York governor William Cosby, affirming the principle that truth is a defense against charges of libel. But that was a relatively novel idea. A decade earlier, Benjamin Franklin’s brother James was imprisoned four weeks over remarks critical of Boston’s government. (Among other things, Franklin argued that preventing smallpox by means of vaccination was ridiculous. Ben seized on his brother’s distraction to leave Boston and set up shop in Philadelphia.)
The notion of a free press was nevertheless widely invoked in the era of the American Revolution. As historians like Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood have amply documented, a blizzard of polemical print blanketed the colonies in the decades before 1776, arguing both sides of the case with growing intensity—and defending their right to do so. But no period in the history of a free press was more intense or contested than the fall of 1774. And no figure was more at the center of it than James Rivington.
Rivington is something of a curio in the history of the American Revolution. He routinely pops up in standard accounts, and yet no full-scale biography of him has ever been published. Rivington, like his peer Benjamin Franklin, was a printer—and like him, had his finger in multiple pies (among them smuggling tea for his coffeeshop). In 1773, he began publishing Rivington’s New-York Gazeteer, whose masthead boasted that it was “printed at his free and uninfluenced press.” (You can have a look at it here; in those days, “New-York” was hyphenated, a custom that remains in the name of the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.)
Rivington was also a publisher of political pamphlets, who, to use a contemporary term, platformed a variety of perspectives amid the intensifying polarization of late 1774. He issued Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British America, as well as a series of works from a Loyalist perspective, among them Reverend Thomas Bradbury Chandler’s The American Querist, which asked—and answered—a series of questions about how colonists should think about the conflict. That fall, Rivington published Samuel Seabury’s polemical Letters of a Westchester Farmer, and the following spring he issued Alexander Hamilton’s The Farmer Refuted. Both men would undoubtedly be astonished to have their works become the basis of a Latino hip-hop Broadway tune some 240 years later in Hamilton.
Rivington’s own politics appeared reasonably clear: he was a Loyalist. And by the fall of 1774, this had become a problem, as he was subjected to growing invective as revolutionary ferment reached a boiling point. One of Rivington’s business partners was future Revolutionary War general William Knox, who in the prewar years owned a bookstore (and learned a lot about military affairs) in Boston. Rivington wrote Knox that fall that he wasn’t going to be sending along one of Chandler’s works without a specific order. “My reason for not troubling you with these very warm [as in heated], high seasoned pamphlets, is that your very numerous friends, on the patriot interest, may be greatly disgusted at your distributing them.” Rivington was feeling the heat closer to home. When Pennsylvanian (and also future general) Joseph Reed referred to “the vilest collection of invective” in New York newspapers, he was likely referring to Rivington, certain that he was corrupt. Yet another future commander, Charles Lee, called Rivington a “miscreant” and expressed surprise that he was allowed to “heap insult upon insult on the [First Continental] Congress with impunity.” The following spring, Rivington was burned in effigy.
When war finally broke out in 1775, Rivington’s shop was burned and looted by the Sons of Liberty. He received assurance for his safety from the Committee Chamber of revolutionaries, but his office was raided, his press was converted into lead for bullets, and his home was destroyed. Rivington retreated to England.
But this story still has some twists. Rivington was appointed the King’s Printer for New-York, and following the British occupation of the city in 1776 returned to Manhattan in 1777, where he began publishing Rivington’s The Loyal Gazette with the legend “Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty.”
So informed observers were surprised—very surprised—that one Loyalist who did not evacuate the city when the Continental Army marched in at war’s end was none other than James Rivington. A newspaper in Massachusetts reported that “JAMES RIVINGTON, Printer at New-York, was, as soon as our troops entered the city, protected in person and property, by a guard . . . he will be allowed to reside in the country, for reasons best known to the great men at helm.” Note that I wrote a few paragraphs ago that “Rivington’s own politics appeared reasonably clear: he was a Loyalist.” But—and the details on this are unclear—Rivington was involved in the so-called Culper Ring, a spy network that provided intelligence to George Washington in the later years of the war.
There’s a wonderful scene of an encounter between the two just after the war in the AMC series on the Culper Ring, Turn, in which Washington recites a series of mockingly alliterative attacks on Washington (“Washington Trounced in Tryon Triumph”; “Rebel Rabble Routed at Monmouth”) that Rivington published, including a scurrilous attack on Martha. He then asks Rivington to read another of his passages: “In the country where he was born, he always heard the liberty of the press represented the great security of freedom.” Washington replies, “In regards to the liberty of the press, we are agreed.”
This story doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. Rivington continued to publish his newspaper, now called Rivington's New-York Gazette and Universal Advertiser, until the end of 1783. But he was subjected to ongoing intimidation and declining business. He nevertheless remained in the city until his death in 1802, and has gone down as one of the most enigmatic figures in American history.
Freedom of the press has never depended—cannot depend—on the self-evident virtue of those who favor or practice it. A willingness to listen to views with which one disagrees is the hallmark of a sound society, and a sound person. Perfect balance is difficult, even impossible to achieve. But we should cultivate the habit of maintaining it nonetheless.
