The Governor paused long enough to see what could be done through the
usual legal channels, with Chief Justice Delancey given the job of
extracting a grand jury indictment for libel. That this attempt failed
twice is indicative of the administration’s unpopularity. The jurors
manifestly had determined from the start that they would do nothing, and
though they were in no more doubt than Delancey about the identity of
the principal men who wrote for the _Journal_, they used the “anonymity”
of the affair as an excuse to avoid indicting anybody.
With the second grand jury failure, Cosby’s attention began to focus
more intently on the newspaper and its printer. His next move was to
order copies of the obnoxious periodical to be burned, which was done
even though the Assembly and the magistrates refused to participate.
Naturally the man in charge was the man maintained expressly for such
purposes. Harison was all the more eager to perform the duty in that,
besides the eternal ridicule the _Journal_ heaped on him, in one issue
it had run a letter from the freeholders of Orange County thanking their
assemblyman, Vincent Matthews, for making a vitriolic attack on him from
the floor of the legislature. A copy from that issue was one of four
earmarked for the flames.
The hatchetman’s first instinct was to adopt strong-arm methods. He
therefore went around to Peter Zenger’s establishment, disburdened
himself of some violent opinions (“more fit to be uttered by a drayman
than a gentleman,” says Peter), and threatened to cane him on the
street. That was why the printer took to wearing a sword whenever he
went out—the sword that gave an excuse for much heavy sarcasm in the
columns of the _Gazette_.
Harison did not overlook more indirect and devious methods of dealing
with his critics. He sent a couple of his creatures, John Alsop and
Edward Blagg, to Orange County to spread the story that the _Journal_
with the freeholders’ letter commending Matthews had been burned by the
common hangman, and that the signers were to be rounded up and thrown
into jail—a rumor that caused some trepidation among the solid citizens
of the county.
Unfortunately Harison, misjudging the situation in his usual fashion,
had jumped the gun a little too smartly. He counted on the hangman to do
the job because he himself, as recorder of New York City, was supposed
to persuade the magistrates to throw their authority behind the
ceremonial burning. But when he met with them, he found himself in an
atmosphere of chilly distrust, for they knew that Cosby was trying to
kill legitimate opposition. Harison started to argue that there were
sound British precedents for dealing thus with the _Journal_; was
quickly shown up as grossly ignorant on that score (he put up the
defense that he did not carry his lawbooks around with him); was roundly
snubbed; and departed in a spasm of fury. The magistrates then forbade
anyone within their authority, including the hangman, to have anything
to do with the affair.
The _Journal_ was burned on schedule, with Harison presiding, but he had
to bring in a slave to set the fire, and they were virtually alone in
front of the City Hall as the flames rose. It was the most dismal fiasco
of a career studded with fiascoes.
We can judge how heated the situation had become by reverting once more
to that most percipient of contemporary witnesses, Cadwallader Colden:
One might think, after such aversion to this prosecution appeared from
all sorts of people, that it would have been thought prudent to have
desisted from farther proceedings. But the violent resentment of many
in the administration who had been exposed in Zenger’s papers,
together with the advantage they thought of gaining by his papers
being found libels by a Jury, blinded their eyes so that they did not
see what any man of common understanding would here have seen, and did
see.[24]
Governor Cosby was indeed blind. He was blinded by a baffled fury that
had grown increasingly unreasoning as his hopes crumbled into
nothingness. Instead of bowing to his will, his enemies were causing him
grave embarrassment with his superiors, compelling him to a perpetual
defense of his right to remain in his office. And locally they had made
him a laughingstock. With cool impudence Morris and Alexander (these two
above any) tormented him from behind the safeguard of an “anonymity”
that fooled nobody, and was intended to fool nobody—least of all the
victim of their attacks, for the dagger was honed to a fine edge
precisely by Cosby’s awareness of who held it. The commanders of the
Popular party were all very much at large, hurling their invectives at
him and satirizing his attempts to retaliate.
The hunters had fenced in the tiger, and were baiting him from a safe
distance, prodding him into a frenzy—until with a single bound he leaped
on the one man who stood within reach.
Printer Peter Zenger had not even a specious “anonymity” between him and
the Governor. The _Journal_ was “his” newspaper. Accordingly a warrant
for his arrest went out from the Governor and the Council, and the
sheriff arrested Zenger on November 17, 1734, and held him for trial on
a charge of “seditious libel.” Harison, needless to say, was one of the
councillors who signed the warrant; in fact, he is the only person
mentioned by name as having done so in the well-known “apology” that
Zenger printed in his newspaper on November 25:
As you last week were disappointed of my _Journal_, I think it
incumbent on me to publish my apology, which is this. On the Lord’s
Day, the seventeenth, I was arrested, taken and imprisoned in the
common jail of this City by virtue of a warrant from the Governor, the
honorable Francis Harison, and others in the Council (of which, God
willing, you will have a copy); whereupon I was put under such
restraint that I had not the liberty of pen, ink or paper, or to see
or speak with people, until upon my complaint to the honorable Chief
Justice at my appearing before him upon my habeas corpus on the
Wednesday following. He discountenanced that proceeding, and therefore
I have had since that time the liberty of speaking thro’ the hole of
the door to my wife and servants. By which I doubt not you will think
me sufficiently excused for not sending my last week’s _Journal_, and
hope for the future, by the liberty of speaking to my servants thro’
the hole of the door of the prison, to entertain you with my weekly
_Journal_ as formerly.
During all the printer’s imprisonment the _Journal_ failed of but that
one issue. The credit for its punctual appearance every Monday
thereafter belongs to his wife, Anna Catherine Zenger, who stepped into
his shoes back at the shop. Anna Catherine has a real claim to fame for
standing by her husband, a loyalty by no means insignificant in a woman
with a family. She may have been emboldened by her ability to keep the
press going in his absence, but even so it would have been a crushing
blow if he had been given a harsh sentence as, for all she knew, might
have been the outcome. The little evidence there is indicates that she
never pressed him to give in and name the men who actually were
responsible for the _Journal_. She must have known that the New York
administration would gladly trade the printer for the editor, a
comparatively minor figure for the archenemy—that is, Peter Zenger for
James Alexander—but there is no record of her ever complaining that the
Zenger family was suffering for someone else.
The Court party’s editor used the occasion for a show of mock sympathy
with the Popular party’s printer. The _Gazette_ for December 9, 1734,
has a reference to
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.