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.