No one in New York knew more than James Alexander about how and why Peter Zenger came to be tried before the Supreme Court of the Colony. How could it have been otherwise when the New York Weekly Journal was under fire, and Alexander was the Journal’s editor? He himself had approved, and perhaps written, the “libelous” issues on which the prosecution was based. He himself would have been in the dock as defendant instead of the printer if only the attorney general had been able to get him indicted.
Alexander had been a leader of the Popular party from the beginning of its struggle with Governor Cosby. He had conspired against the Governor, fought him in the Courts and through the press, and used every weapon to hand in an all-out effort to ruin him politically. There was hardly a dissident movement in New York with which Alexander was not allied as adviser or mentor. It was only natural that he should have been one of Zenger’s lawyers, for he understood as few others could just what the administration attack amounted to, and how a counterattack should be developed. It is not difficult to imagine the intelligence and the alertness with which he noted every word that was spoken at the trial. He must have been the perfect spectator if ever there was one.
And all this does not exhaust the depths of his familiarity with the incident. Until his disbarment he had been one of the counsel for the defense, which made it his duty to draw up a brief in preparation for his plea. He fulfilled his duty so well that when he was summarily removed by order of Chief Justice Delancey he was able to hand over to Andrew Hamilton a whole plan of campaign, and Hamilton (brought in unprepared and at the last moment) relied on it substantially throughout the proceedings.
It takes nothing from Hamilton, whose performance remains one of the classical things in the history of American law, that Alexander gave him the lead which he followed with such stunning success—that is, the decision to base Zenger’s defense on the truth of the Journal articles, and on that basis to ask the jury to bring in a verdict of “Not guilty.” Alexander already held that guiding thread in his hand months before Hamilton appeared on the scene. (Not that he invented the idea, but he saw that it was the gambit to play.)
Hamilton’s own record of the trial went into the Brief Narrative, as is indicated by this passage from one of the letters that the Philadelphia barrister wrote to his friend and colleague in New York:
I have at last sent you my draft of Mr. Zenger’s trial.... I have had no time to read it over but once since it was finished. I wrote it by half-sheets and copied it as fast as I wrote. The meaning of all this is to beg you to alter and correct it agreeable to your own mind.[36]
Thus Alexander even edited the text submitted by the defense attorney, and the latter’s acceptance of the result shows how faithfully it reflected the spoken word. Alexander clearly has given us the events of August 4, 1735, almost to the life.
His account had an enormous success in his own time. Lawyers, journalists, and political philosophers felt the impact of the acquittal as something new, either hopeful or foreboding, and there sprang up a market for the text in both America and England. Other editions began to appear to meet the demand, several of them published in London as early as 1738. The eighteenth century, when the problems involved were still fighting issues, was the golden age of Zenger republication. One of these versions, that issued by J. Almon of London in 1765, is generally available today in the form of a reprint prepared by the Work Projects Administration and sponsored by the California State Library for its series of “Occasional Papers” (1940).
The nineteenth century saw two particularly useful editions in T. B. Howell’s State Trials (1816) and in Peleg W. Chandler’s American Criminal Trials (1841), the first following Alexander almost word for word, the second modified and abridged. With the turn of the century Livingston Rutherfurd made available a literal reprint of the Brief Narrative in his John Peter Zenger, His Press, His Trial and a Bibliography of Zenger Imprints (1904). Fifty years later Frank Luther Mott did the same for our generation in Oldtime Comments on Journalism (1954).
The first edition of any text (putting aside the corrupt or otherwise unreliable) always has a presumption in its favor. This is how the author saw his own work; this is the form in which he cast his own thoughts; this is the union of his own logic with his own rhetoric. Nothing else can begin to approach the authority and authenticity of his imprimatur. Consequently it is mandatory for later editors to justify tampering with the text instead of simply reproducing it.