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.
X. Van Dam’s Indictment of the Governor
As the Zenger case developed step by step in New York, Cosby was being forced to a more energetic defense on the London front, where Van Dam was waging a pamphlet war against him, and where Morris was present in person.
Months before the newspaper war began Van Dam had resolved to keep the New York public and the London authorities informed of the way in which the Cosby suit for half of his salary was going, and he began to publish successive accounts, with Peter Zenger doing the printing for him just as for the rest of the Popular party. Zenger’s business got better as the political controversy got worse. In the summer of 1733 he turned out for Alexander and Smith their arguments against the validity of the equity court. Shortly afterward Van Dam gave him the job of handling two protests in which the stubborn old Dutchman expressed his personal indignation at the way he was being treated by the Governor.
These partial attacks on Cosby were followed by a general indictment, a full bill of particulars drawn up to expose him point by point with the most meticulous exactitude. Almost everything that could be alleged against him with any degree of plausibility at all was set down in Van Dam’s Articles of Complaint.
The apparent author was not the real one. Van Dam undoubtedly had a hand in formulating the charges, but the writing must have been due to someone else since Van Dam was not skillful with the pen. James Alexander springs to mind as the obvious candidate for the role of ghost writer, a suspicion that is strengthened by the accusations that Cosby leveled at both him and Morris. Nevertheless, Van Dam was responsible for the Articles, a fact on which he insisted with dogged self-righteousness.
The indictment is composed of 34 separate counts. Not all of them are watertight, for some descend into carping criticism about trivialities. One, for instance, accuses Cosby of accepting a gift of French wines from the commander at Louisbourg: