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.