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: