The Court party also possessed the only newspaper in the Colony, William
Bradford’s _New York Gazette_. Bradford himself was hardly a party man,
but (again as official printer) he was in no position to let his little
two-page publication be used against those in power. He could not refuse
to let them censor the _Gazette_. He could not even demur when Governor
Cosby decided to put one of his own men in charge of editorial policy.
That decision introduces us to the most entertaining rascal of the
Zenger case—Francis Harison, the dubious individual who functioned as
editor-by-appointment and flatterer-in-chief to His Excellency the
Governor. Since Harison was a censor in fact, if not in name, he merits
some attention in any explanation of how freedom of the press was
established for the first time on this side of the Atlantic. His career,
more than any except Governor Cosby’s, reveals why the Popular party of
New York determined to throw down the gauntlet in the form of an
opposition newspaper.
Francis Harison was notorious before Cosby was ever heard of in the
Colony. Arriving more than twenty years earlier, he soon carved out a
comfortable niche for himself. He had an enormous gift for wheedling
jobs of some importance, and he did very well for himself, becoming
among other things a member of the Governor’s Council, recorder for the
City of New York, and a judge of the admiralty. He served as one of the
commissioners in settling the boundary dispute with Connecticut. He must
have been a real genius at wangling, for on more than one occasion he
showed a dishonesty and a stupidity so startling as to rouse wonder that
anyone ever trusted him with responsibility.
Take the matter of the Connecticut boundary, when he stumbled on the
chance for his first really outrageous performance, an act as
characteristic of the man as anything you could ask for. Knowing that
50,000 acres were to be turned over to New York in one place (the famous
“Oblong”), he wrote clandestinely to friends in London, urging them to
snap up the land before local people could get their hands on it. At the
same time he maneuvered himself into the group of Colonials who were
applying for a patent, apparently with the intention of undermining his
trusting and unsuspecting colleagues, and of wresting control from them
as agent for the London syndicate.
If such duplicity was second nature to him, its outcome was no less
typical. The London patentees, after hurriedly obtaining a royal grant
according to the advice of their mentor in New York, discovered that he
(a boundary commissioner, be it remembered) had given them misplaced
lines on the map, and that their claim was already occupied. How they
felt about him after that may easily be surmised, also how the New
Yorkers reacted to his perfidy. From then on it was axiomatic that when
dealing with Francis Harison you had to use extreme caution and
circumspection.
If we judge by intent and motive rather than by accomplishment, he was
as consummate a scoundrel as the Colonies ever produced. His only saving
grace was a beguiling habit of being almost invariably hoist with his
own petard. Stupid criminality followed by exposure and humiliation—that
is the pattern; and wherever you find it on the banks of the Hudson
during the early 1730’s, you may justifiably look for the imprint of
Francis Harison’s fine Italian hand.
His big opportunity came with the arrival of Colonel Cosby. The two hit
it off from the start. They were two of a kind, complementaries: the one
found a willing tool, the other a powerful patron. Where the Governor
was perforce hemmed in to a certain extent by the nature of his office,
his lieutenant enjoyed a wide latitude where he could do almost as he
pleased.
In the Cosby scheme of things Harison was allotted the dirty work, the
low chicanery, and the brute force that the administration resorted to.
In particular, he was given control of the _Gazette_, to which he fed
weekly eulogies of the administration. His associates may have despised
him privately (we know that James Delancey did), but in the governor’s
mansion he received the appreciation due his special talents. Cosby,
like many another tyrant, had a place near the top for an unprincipled
adventurer. Francis Harison was his hatchetman.
They were so close that Cosby almost made Harison chief justice
following the dismissal of Lewis Morris. Delancey, who got the post, was
not at all happy about it, and Colden tells us:
Mr Delancey excused his accepting of the commission at the expense of
his predecessor by saying that the Governor could not be diverted from
removing Mr Morris, and that if he did not accept it the Governor was
resolved to put Mr Harison in the office, a man nowise acceptable to
anybody. If that had been done it would certainly have been of great
advantage to Mr Morris, for Mr Harison was of so bad a character, and
so odious to the people, that they certainly would have pulled him
from the Bench.[8]
Harison finally went too far in his shady deals and ruined himself.
William Truesdale, one of the small fry who worked for him, owed a debt
to a persistent creditor, Joseph Weldon of Boston. Somehow Harison got
hold of a dunning letter from Weldon to Truesdale. Just what he had in
mind is not clear—a pathetic lament that the historian has to make so
often in dealing with what passed for ratiocination in this particular
mind—but he caused a warrant to be sworn out against Truesdale in
Weldon’s name. If you think he simply had his minion arrested without
further ado, you do not know Francis Harison. His behavior is described
thus by Colden:
Mr Harison met Truesdale at an ale house where, pretending not to like
the beer, he invited Truesdale and his company to meet him two hours
afterwards at another house. When Truesdale came to the other house he
found the Under-Sheriff, who immediately arrested him. Truesdale sends
to Mr Harison, as his friend, to help him in his distress. As soon as
Mr Harison came, he, in a seeming great surprise, said to Truesdale,
“In the name of God, what is this? I hear you are arrested for such a
sum”—and blamed him for not informing of it that he might have kept
him out of the Sheriff’s way.[9]
New York’s archvillain must have been very pleased with himself as his
victim was carted off to jail. Did he whisper, “Honest Iago!” to
himself?
The roguery was there, but as usual there was no intelligence to back it
up and make it work. The intriguer had counted on a smooth explanation
to fend off the man in whose name he was practicing on Truesdale.
Instead, Joseph Weldon felt outraged when he learned what was going on,
rushed down from Boston, swore that he never gave anyone any authority
to act for him, and added that at the time he did not even know of
Harison’s existence.
After this scandal there was no place in New York for Francis Harison.
Even his protector in the governor’s mansion could not save him. A Grand
Jury indicted him for using Weldon’s name, whereupon he fled from the
Colony in May of 1735, made his way to England, and never came back.
From then on his story is virtually a blank, the last word on him being
that he was down-and-out when he died.
However, this melancholy denouement was in the future and unforeseen
when Cosby put Harison in charge of the _Gazette_ in 1732. The new
editor began to ride very high indeed, for he was in the enviable
position of one who could both flatter his own side and castigate its
critics with impunity since there was no rival newspaper to contradict
him. With Harison in command, the administration’s mouthpiece lavished
on William Cosby the adulation that he loved and could get only from a
trusted henchman, interspersing at the same time quick jabs at Morris,
Van Dam, Alexander, and the rest.
Here is the way the _Gazette_ covered one meeting between the Governor
and the Assembly:
The harmony and good understanding between the several branches of the
legislature—whereby nothing came to be demanded on the one side but
what was for the public general good and welfare of His Majesty’s
people, and everything done on the other which may recommend the
honorable House to His Majesty, to his representative and to their
constituents—will, we hope, continue to us all those blessings which
we enjoy under a government greatly envied, and too often disturbed by
such as, instead thereof, are struggling to introduce discord and
public confusion.[10]
The _Gazette_ resorted to verse to make its case:
Cosby the mild, the happy, good and great,
The strongest guard of our little state;
Let malcontents in crabbed language write,
And the D...h H...s belch, tho’ they cannot bite.
He unconcerned will let the wretches roar,
And govern just, as others did before.[11]
It went to Pope’s translation of the _Odyssey_ to find a suitable
description of the opposing faction:
Thersites only clamored in the throng,
Loquacious, loud, and turbulent of tongue,
And by no shame, by no respect controlled;
In scandal busy, in reproaches bold;
But chief, he gloried with licentious style,
To lash the great, and rulers to revile.[12]
These passages epitomize the problem facing the Popular party. In
fighting the Governor there was no hope of success unless he could be
met at every critical spot, and one of the most critical was precisely
that of journalism. Irregular pamphlets and open letters were of little
use against a systematic weekly dose of administration propaganda in the
_Gazette_. The passage of time only made the problem more acute.
Naturally we do not have minutes of the discussions that went on between
the anti-Cosby conspirators, but we do not need such information to see
the rationale of the strategy they worked out. Their behavior is most
eloquent on that score; it systematizes by practical example the
disjointed notes, memoranda, and other documents that have come down to
us.
First of all, they would do everything they could to sap the political
strength of their hated enemy: they would support opposing candidates at
elections, they would provide legal counsel for those whom he attacked
through the courts, they would found a newspaper to bring their side of
the controversy before the bar of public opinion. Secondly, they would
wage their war on another front, in London, sending to the Board of
Trade a steady barrage of propaganda designed to prove that William
Cosby was no more fit to govern New York than he had been to govern
Minorca. Eventually they would dispatch an emissary to make the
situation clear in personal talks with the authorities.