IX. Zenger Goes to Jail
The Governor paused long enough to see what could be done through the usual legal channels, with Chief Justice Delancey given the job of extracting a grand jury indictment for libel. That this attempt failed twice is indicative of the administration’s unpopularity. The jurors manifestly had determined from the start that they would do nothing, and though they were in no more doubt than Delancey about the identity of the principal men who wrote for the Journal, they used the “anonymity” of the affair as an excuse to avoid indicting anybody.
With the second grand jury failure, Cosby’s attention began to focus more intently on the newspaper and its printer. His next move was to order copies of the obnoxious periodical to be burned, which was done even though the Assembly and the magistrates refused to participate. Naturally the man in charge was the man maintained expressly for such purposes. Harison was all the more eager to perform the duty in that, besides the eternal ridicule the Journal heaped on him, in one issue it had run a letter from the freeholders of Orange County thanking their assemblyman, Vincent Matthews, for making a vitriolic attack on him from the floor of the legislature. A copy from that issue was one of four earmarked for the flames.
The hatchetman’s first instinct was to adopt strong-arm methods. He therefore went around to Peter Zenger’s establishment, disburdened himself of some violent opinions (“more fit to be uttered by a drayman than a gentleman,” says Peter), and threatened to cane him on the street. That was why the printer took to wearing a sword whenever he went out—the sword that gave an excuse for much heavy sarcasm in the columns of the Gazette.
Harison did not overlook more indirect and devious methods of dealing with his critics. He sent a couple of his creatures, John Alsop and Edward Blagg, to Orange County to spread the story that the Journal with the freeholders’ letter commending Matthews had been burned by the common hangman, and that the signers were to be rounded up and thrown into jail—a rumor that caused some trepidation among the solid citizens of the county.
Unfortunately Harison, misjudging the situation in his usual fashion, had jumped the gun a little too smartly. He counted on the hangman to do the job because he himself, as recorder of New York City, was supposed to persuade the magistrates to throw their authority behind the ceremonial burning. But when he met with them, he found himself in an atmosphere of chilly distrust, for they knew that Cosby was trying to kill legitimate opposition. Harison started to argue that there were sound British precedents for dealing thus with the Journal; was quickly shown up as grossly ignorant on that score (he put up the defense that he did not carry his lawbooks around with him); was roundly snubbed; and departed in a spasm of fury. The magistrates then forbade anyone within their authority, including the hangman, to have anything to do with the affair.
The Journal was burned on schedule, with Harison presiding, but he had to bring in a slave to set the fire, and they were virtually alone in front of the City Hall as the flames rose. It was the most dismal fiasco of a career studded with fiascoes.
We can judge how heated the situation had become by reverting once more to that most percipient of contemporary witnesses, Cadwallader Colden:
One might think, after such aversion to this prosecution appeared from all sorts of people, that it would have been thought prudent to have desisted from farther proceedings. But the violent resentment of many in the administration who had been exposed in Zenger’s papers, together with the advantage they thought of gaining by his papers being found libels by a Jury, blinded their eyes so that they did not see what any man of common understanding would here have seen, and did see.[24]
Governor Cosby was indeed blind. He was blinded by a baffled fury that had grown increasingly unreasoning as his hopes crumbled into nothingness. Instead of bowing to his will, his enemies were causing him grave embarrassment with his superiors, compelling him to a perpetual defense of his right to remain in his office. And locally they had made him a laughingstock. With cool impudence Morris and Alexander (these two above any) tormented him from behind the safeguard of an “anonymity” that fooled nobody, and was intended to fool nobody—least of all the victim of their attacks, for the dagger was honed to a fine edge precisely by Cosby’s awareness of who held it. The commanders of the Popular party were all very much at large, hurling their invectives at him and satirizing his attempts to retaliate.
The hunters had fenced in the tiger, and were baiting him from a safe distance, prodding him into a frenzy—until with a single bound he leaped on the one man who stood within reach.
Printer Peter Zenger had not even a specious “anonymity” between him and the Governor. The Journal was “his” newspaper. Accordingly a warrant for his arrest went out from the Governor and the Council, and the sheriff arrested Zenger on November 17, 1734, and held him for trial on a charge of “seditious libel.” Harison, needless to say, was one of the councillors who signed the warrant; in fact, he is the only person mentioned by name as having done so in the well-known “apology” that Zenger printed in his newspaper on November 25:
As you last week were disappointed of my Journal, I think it incumbent on me to publish my apology, which is this. On the Lord’s Day, the seventeenth, I was arrested, taken and imprisoned in the common jail of this City by virtue of a warrant from the Governor, the honorable Francis Harison, and others in the Council (of which, God willing, you will have a copy); whereupon I was put under such restraint that I had not the liberty of pen, ink or paper, or to see or speak with people, until upon my complaint to the honorable Chief Justice at my appearing before him upon my habeas corpus on the Wednesday following. He discountenanced that proceeding, and therefore I have had since that time the liberty of speaking thro’ the hole of the door to my wife and servants. By which I doubt not you will think me sufficiently excused for not sending my last week’s Journal, and hope for the future, by the liberty of speaking to my servants thro’ the hole of the door of the prison, to entertain you with my weekly Journal as formerly.
During all the printer’s imprisonment the Journal failed of but that one issue. The credit for its punctual appearance every Monday thereafter belongs to his wife, Anna Catherine Zenger, who stepped into his shoes back at the shop. Anna Catherine has a real claim to fame for standing by her husband, a loyalty by no means insignificant in a woman with a family. She may have been emboldened by her ability to keep the press going in his absence, but even so it would have been a crushing blow if he had been given a harsh sentence as, for all she knew, might have been the outcome. The little evidence there is indicates that she never pressed him to give in and name the men who actually were responsible for the Journal. She must have known that the New York administration would gladly trade the printer for the editor, a comparatively minor figure for the archenemy—that is, Peter Zenger for James Alexander—but there is no record of her ever complaining that the Zenger family was suffering for someone else.
The Court party’s editor used the occasion for a show of mock sympathy with the Popular party’s printer. The Gazette for December 9, 1734, has a reference to
the pretended patriots of our days, the correspondents of John Peter Zenger, who are every hour undermining the credit and authority of the government by all the wicked methods and low artifices that can be devised, and which they flatter themselves are consistent with their own safety. I am sorry they are so tenacious of their own as to neglect that of their poor printer.
Harison had a fine time thinking up jibes like this. It would have been poetic justice if he had been around to suffer—with Governor Cosby and the rest of the Court party—through the acquittal Peter Zenger won so triumphantly on August 4, 1735. But by that time New York had become too hot for this particular member of the faction, and he was on the other side of the Atlantic.
The arrest of Peter Zenger was one of Cosby’s gross mistakes. No one in the Colony could miss the fact that he was bent on revenge, for the public bodies—Assembly, Common Council, grand juries—had all refused to have anything to do with proceedings that they recognized as strictly the Governor’s private affair. Nor could there be any doubt that his purpose was to silence a critic who had been uttering unpalatable truths. Popular feeling was exacerbated by the fact that Cosby’s vindictive wrath fell, not upon the powerful men of the opposite faction, but upon an insignificant German immigrant who plied the trade of printer in the city.
The way the thing was done added to the animosity that Cosby provoked. Zenger’s bail was placed at so high a figure that he could not meet it, his lawyers were disbarred for protesting against the Governor’s hand-picked court of Chief Justice James Delancey and Associate Justice Frederick Philipse, the prisoner had to linger in his cell for nine months before he was given his day in court, and Cosby tried for a packed jury in so blatant a way that his own chief justice had to disavow him. None of this could be kept secret; when the trial was finally held local sentiment had turned against the Governor to the point where he had only his closest friends with him.