Of all the personalities involved in the Zenger case, none eludes
investigation so much as the man who gave his name to it. There are
irritating lacunae in the biography of John Peter Zenger, and no artist
ever found him worthy of sketch or portrait (at least none has
survived), so that we do not even know his face. But this lack of
information is by no means crippling to the historian of the period. If
we would prefer to know more about Peter Zenger, the plain truth is that
half a dozen other men were of more consequence than he in the
establishment of a free press in New York. He was neither the editor of
his newspaper nor even a principal writer for it during its great days;
his function hardly went beyond that of the mere printer. He became
famous almost by accident, famous as a symbol rather than as a
motivating force. We can, therefore, “place” him with the less
difficulty, and the data to hand are sufficient for that.
He was a German immigrant, a native of the Rhenish Palatinate, where he
was born in 1697. His family brought him to the New World in 1710, and
that same year he was apprenticed to William Bradford, the only printer
then at work in New York, and one of the top men of his trade in the
Colonies. Bradford’s establishment was a good school for any apprentice,
for it graduated a whole series of printers who became famous in their
own right, the best remembered of whom was the master’s son, Andrew
Bradford, who competed with Benjamin Franklin for the publishing trade
in Philadelphia.
Peter Zenger’s indentures were for eight years, during which time he
toiled at the Bradford press, beginning at the bottom as a typical
ink-stained printer’s devil and working his way up in the profession
that Bradford liked to call “the art and mystery of printing.” Peter
never became a refined practitioner, for one reason because his grasp of
the English language remained defective, but he came out of his training
as skilled as many others in the field, and he was obeying a sound
instinct when, his indentures up, he decided to strike out for himself
as an independent.
During the years 1719-22 he wandered through the Colonies looking for a
place to set up a permanent business. He married Mary White of
Philadelphia, and had a son, John Zenger, who was a printer after him.
His most ambitious venture took him to Maryland, where he became a
citizen and was granted the right to publish the Colony’s laws,
proceedings, minutes, etc. What happened then is uncertain; perhaps it
was just that his plans did not work out; perhaps the death of his wife
was the crucial thing; for some reason he decided to abandon his
Maryland career and return to New York. There he married his second
wife, Anna Catherine Maulin, a native of Holland, and settled down for
good.
In 1725 he joined William Bradford in a brief partnership, so brief that
they published only one book jointly before splitting up, for what
reason we do not know. The next year Peter Zenger went into business for
himself, thus becoming the second printer in New York, and the first
rival of his former master.
There was room for two. Bradford, the official printer, worked for the
Governor, the Council, and the Assembly. He was an honest man, but
understandably reluctant to jeopardize his position by turning out
anything of which his patrons might disapprove. That was where Zenger
came in. Proprietor of a second-class printing shop, cut off from
government work, he could keep his head above water in only one way, by
taking the trade of New Yorkers who had some motive for avoiding the
official press, especially those who were dissatisfied with the
situation in either Church or State and wanted to say so. For six years
he supplemented his staple output (mainly religious tracts) with
critical pamphlets and open letters. Gradually the logic of his
predicament pushed him into the position of “official” printer to those
writers whose material Bradford could not, or would not, touch.
Such was Zenger’s status in the fall of 1732 when affairs in New York
began to boil up into a political crisis that first involved him as a
partisan in a duel of contending factions, and ultimately landed him in
jail.