Hamilton referred only to legal development since he was defending a client in a court of law; but from his premise a political conclusion could be drawn, namely, that government might not necessarily be directly transferable either: if the Hanoverian monarchy, however successful in Britain, could not rule satisfactorily the Colonial democracy that was developing on this side of the Atlantic, then perhaps something else should be put in its place. In Hamilton’s time the crown itself was not yet suspect; it remained inviolate, the sanctum sanctorum of allegiance and veneration, when its representatives over here were attacked with unmitigated animosity. Hamilton himself remarked that the king differed from his officials in kind rather than merely in degree.
Once, however, the authority of the king had been challenged, then Hamilton’s appeal from British precedent to Colonial experience became very much to the point. His efforts in behalf of liberty for New York helped pave the way for liberty for America, the rebels of the 1770’s drawing from his legal premise the political conclusion that lay implicit in it. He enabled them to argue cogently that independence was not a scandalous novelty but a natural issue of the American situation in the face of an authority three thousand miles away.
The men of the Revolution were well aware of their indebtedness. Gouverneur Morris spoke for them all when he delivered his famous judgment that “The trial of Zenger in 1735 was the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America.”
Britain herself did not go unaffected by what had happened in the City Hall of her New York Colony. As far as it concerned freedom of the press, the Zenger case fell into place in a transition that had long been developing in the classical home of libertarian ideas. The account of the trial was reprinted there, and cited as an ideal of what British journalists were striving for. In 1738 a London correspondent wrote to Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette to say that Andrew Hamilton’s address to the jury was causing something of a furor in the coffeehouses where the gentry and the intelligentsia met, as well as among the professional lawyers. The correspondent quoted one leader of the British bar as saying of Hamilton’s argument, “If it is not law, it is better than law, it ought to be law, and will always be law wherever justice prevails.”
The two great principles—that truth may be used as a defense in libel cases, and that the jury has a right to decide on both the “fact” and the “law”—did eventually become legal for both Britain and America. The process of formal acceptance took time, and the mother country divided with her former Colonies the primacy of writing them into the lawbooks. Britain gave the jury its proper function as early as 1792, with the Fox Libel Act, whereas America had to wait for the Sedition Act of 1798; but we admitted that veracity might be alleged in the Sedition Act, a right which the British were without until Lord Campbell’s Act was passed in 1843.
The struggle for the two principles on both sides of the Atlantic is a monument to the sagacity of Andrew Hamilton. No one could have won their vindication at a single stroke against the inertia of old tradition and habitual usage. But he defended them at the critical moment when change had become a real possibility, and did it so powerfully as to give them a forward drive that could not be stopped. Their triumph was therefore his—at the remove of half a century and more.
The current of ideas set in motion by the Zenger case continued throughout the nineteenth century, and became an integral part of journalism as we know it. Libel suits did not diminish; on the contrary, they increased; but they did not follow the lines of the Zenger prosecution. They were mainly suits against “false, scandalous, and malicious” statements in the newspapers, the growing number of such cases reflecting the widening latitude within which editors worked. The word “false” retained the significance that Andrew Hamilton had attributed to it back in 1735. If the threat of the libel action still hung over the heads of journalists (as it rightly did and does), it was not the “libel” that Chief Justice James Delancey had tried to pin on Peter Zenger.
The name of the Colonial printer did not, however, gleam as brightly as it should have in the age of Bennett and Greeley and Raymond and Dana. He was, if not forgotten, at least overlooked or ignored to a surprising extent. Naturally he found a place in the volumes on his art—in Isaiah Thomas’ History of Printing in America, a masterpiece that appeared in 1810, and in Charles Hildeburn’s Sketches of Printers and Printing in Colonial New York at the other end of the century (1895). The astonishing thing is that no major work on the Zenger case was written for more than a hundred and fifty years after it.
The twentieth century redressed the balance with Livingston Rutherfurd’s John Peter Zenger, His Press, His Trial and a Bibliography of Zenger Imprints (1904), which, with all its defects, remains the only attempt to treat Peter Zenger and his newspaper extensively and completely. With its full reprint of the trial, it is the standard work on the subject. The past fifty years have produced a mass of periodical essays, learned monographs, and printed documents on the Zenger case; and, of course, we can interpret the event more intelligently through our added experience of how the press fares under tyrannies so abominable that they leave Governor Cosby looking like a rather mild specimen of the juvenile delinquent.
The memory of Peter Zenger was given a fillip in 1933, the year of the bicentennial of the founding of the New York Weekly Journal. In October a distinguished group of newsmen gathered at St. Paul’s Church in Eastchester to commemorate the first issue of “Zenger’s paper”—that being the place where the Popular party won the election (in spite of Cosby’s attempt to rig it) that was the feature story on November 5, 1733. The New York Public Library participated in the celebrations of 1933 by giving an exhibition of its Zenger material. In January of 1934 Senator Borah read into the Congressional Record the words from a tablet which the New York Bar Association set up to the memory of Andrew Hamilton: the inscription mentions how Hamilton came from Philadelphia to defend Peter Zenger: