For six months he absorbed the barbs of ridicule while maintaining an air of indifference. Finally, able to stand the badgering no longer, he whirled on his tormentors and attempted to repay them in their own coin:
Supposing another should turn the tables upon the authors of these infamous and fictitious advertisements, how easily might it be done? The real or imagined defects of the Amsterdam Crane, the Connecticut Mastiff, Phillip Baboon, Senior, Phillip Baboon, Junior, the Scythian Unicorn, and Wild Peter from the Banks of the Rhine might be enlarged upon, and placed in a most ludicrous light.[23]
Since the crass and clumsy Harison was devoid of the slightest capacity for satire, he inevitably suffered when he picked up the weapon that was wielded so devastatingly by his enemies. The only interesting thing about this paragraph is that it identifies the men of the Popular party who contributed most to the Journal: Rip Van Dam, William Smith, Lewis Morris, Senior, Lewis Morris, Junior, James Alexander, and Peter Zenger.
The honors of combat obviously went to “Zenger’s paper.” It was not always fair, by a long shot—nor has any newspaper ever been when fighting a war with a rival. But Cosby and Harison and the Court party in toto were too vulnerable for all the Journal’s broadsides to go astray. The Governor was hit over and over again. So was his editor. So were his other cronies.
They fought back in the Gazette, but they were always on the defensive, always incapable of getting a real attack going. Finally Cosby, boiling with rage, determined on something more practical than a war of words.
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.