All the News Unfit to Print

IN THE 1760S THERE APPEARED IN NORTH AMERICA A JOURNALIST similar to Franklin in one way and one way only: he believed that journalism did not always have to be true so long as it served a purpose. In fact, it hardly ever had to be true if the purpose was separating the colonies from the rule of Great Britain—legislatively if possible, militarily if not. And whereas Franklin wrote with subtlety and wit, Samuel Adams wrote angrily, his style the rejection of whimsy in favor of vituperation that knew no limits.

Adams told more lies in print than any other figure of his time, a distinction for which history has not only forgiven but honored him. After all, his lies served one of history’s greatest causes, the creation of the United States of America. As a patriot he was without peer. As a recorder of events he was without scruple. But he was motivated in his journalistic assaults on the British Empire by more than just a love of the colonies and an insistence on their rights. There was also something personal, a matter of revenge.

When Adams was a child, his father, Samuel Sr., known to his friends as the Deacon despite being a brewer as well as a church-man, invested some of his money in a land bank, an institution that specialized in real estate transactions. The bank got off to a good start. But to the Deacon and his fellow investors, it was more than just a business. In lending money to local entrepreneurs who wanted to start businesses of their own or expand existing ones, the bank was also providing an invaluable service to a young and growing nation, as it contributed not just to the financial well-being of its individual customers, but to the economic development of America’s leading city, Boston, and its environs.

The British should have been pleased with the enterprise of their countrymen in the New World. Stronger colonies meant a stronger Motherland. Instead, the British were jealous—more than that, vindictive. After but a few months, the Boston land bank was closed by order of Parliament. It seems that “some British banks wanted to offer that same invaluable service to the colonists, perhaps even charging higher interest rates and making more of a profit, and they had lobbied Parliament to get rid of their American competition. Parliament had acceded to their wishes with little debate.”

The Deacon and his partners were stunned. Had they perhaps been misinformed? Was it some other business that had been shut down? When they confirmed it was theirs, they were furious. They did everything they could to reverse the decision, “beseeching Parliament, sending a message to the king, importuning his ministers in North America—all to no avail.” Samuel Adams Sr. lost most of the money he had put into the bank, and the family fortunes went into a sharp and lengthy decline. His son, with the exaggerated sense of injustice that the young often feel, was even more enraged than his father, and as he grew older his hatred of the British only grew stronger. It was a hatred that demanded an outlet.

Some years afterward, with relations between the Crown and the colonies having worsened, Adams got the chance he was looking for. The Boston Gazette, which had been in business since 1719 without making much of an impression, was purchased by new owners, and the two men, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, not only hired Adams to run the paper, but virtually gave it to him. Editorial policy was his for the formulating, and so heavy-handed were his attacks on the British that those who favored a continued American alliance with the Motherland began to refer to the Gazette as the Weekly Dung Barge.

On one occasion, Adams wrote a story about Andrew Oliver, the man appointed by the Crown to collect taxes under the Stamp Act in Boston. Oliver had not petitioned for the job, and would in fact rather have served his government in some other way. But according to Adams’s article, Oliver lusted after the duties, and furthermore had been one of the men responsible for the existence of the Stamp Act in the first place, a charge that Adams knew to be untrue. Following several paragraphs of undiluted vitriol, Adams closed his piece by suggesting that the good citizens of Boston might want to take matters into their own hands against such a scoundrel. But Adams did more than suggest mayhem; he organized it.

After the Gazette’s presses had been shut down for the day, Adams met with some of those good citizens in the paper’s offices and gave them their marching orders. The men were known to one another, and to other citizens of Boston who favored independence, as the Sons of Liberty, and to Adams, their father, they could not have been more obedient.

What happened next was exactly what Adams wanted to happen:

Oliver was burned in effigy in August 1765, and then, two nights later, the same mob that had hung the effigy tore its head off as they proceeded to Oliver’s office and demolished it with axes before moving on to his residence, where they battered the walls and shattered windows and hurled curses with no less energy or sense of commitment. The rebels demanded that Oliver resign. Fearing for his life, he did.

When the marauders next gathered before Adams, he congratulated them heartily. Toasts were drunk and backs were slapped. In the next issue of the paper, Adams reported the incident with all the impartiality he could muster. There was not the slightest suggestion that the news he disseminated was also the news he incited.

Shortly afterward, a throng of angry Bostonians, jacked up on ninety-proof Sam Adams prose, trashed the house of Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. At first he seemed an unlikely victim. “He was highly regarded in Boston—even the Boston Gazette was impressed with him, at least for a time, finding Hutchinson ‘a tall, slender, fair-complexioned, fair-spoken, “very good Gentleman,” who had captivated “half the pretty Ladies in the Colony and more than half the pretty Gentlemen.” ’”

But before long, Adams turned on Hutchinson; he was, after all, a servant of the very same Parliament that had treated Adams’s family so unfairly in the land bank affair. In a matter of days, the Gazette did a complete about-face, now reporting that Hutchinson had been even more of an instigator of the Stamp Act than Oliver. Adams urged the Sons of Liberty to take their revenge.

One night some of them did just that. They were old men, young men, and boys barely old enough to read, and they assembled outside the lieutenant governor’s mansion and attacked it as if the structure itself were their enemy. It was a “hellish crew,” Hutchinson later said, and it “fell upon my house with the rage of devils.” They “split down the door and entered,” he went on, and he “was obliged to retire thro yards and garden to a house more remote where I remained until four o’clock.”

The hellish crew remained on the premises almost as long, not only wrecking but looting. Hutchinson later told authorities that nine hundred pounds in cash was missing, as well as books and clothing, table settings and jewelry, and perhaps even more. He was in no condition, he declared, to make a dispassionate inventory. For some time, he had been writing a history of Massachusetts, which he seems almost to have finished; the rebels found the manuscript and threw it into the mud in the front yard, ruining it. Hutchinson never had the heart for a rewrite. Of his house, nothing remained, he said, “but the bare walls and floors.” Outside, the attackers even cut down the trees.

As Adams knew, but did not reveal when he published his article about the assault on Hutchinson’s home, the lieutenant governor had not only not supported the Stamp Act, he had pleaded with Parliament to reject it, fearing precisely the kind of reaction in the colonies, especially Massachusetts, that had occurred. But no matter. Hutchinson was a high-ranking official of the Crown in the colonies. Crime enough.

Adams did not always stir up such episodes. Usually it was enough for him just to throw a few more logs on the fires of animosity that were already crackling. And there were times when he could rouse the Sons of Liberty to action without even alluding to rebellion, when his prose was so incendiary that the reader could not help but conclude in the wisdom of an indignant response. For instance, in a regular column alternately called “Journal of Events” or “Journal of the Times,” Adams wrote that British soldiers quartered in Boston physically attacked American men on the streets. He wrote that the soldiers insulted and sometimes even mishandled American women. And he wrote that they clubbed American children with the butts of their rifles. He was explicit in his details, insistent on his accuracy. But so far as anyone can prove, none of these events ever happened, or, if they did, they happened much less frequently and with much less severity than Adams had claimed.

The most violent story Adams reported was the Boston Massacre. But he did not just report it; he named it and might also have planned it. The Boston Massacre is a difficult event to understand and explain. Suffice it to say that on one colder than usual night in early March 1770, a crowd of American colonists gathered outside Boston’s Custom House, where a single British guard was standing on duty. The crowd apparently taunted the guard. Fearing for his safety, the guard called for reinforcements, and several other soldiers soon appeared around him.

It is not known why the crowd gathered in the first place, nor why it got so much bigger when church bells unexpectedly rang, or who rang them; it was odd for the bells to chime at so late an hour. Nor is it known who pulled the first cudgel or other non-lethal weapon, although chances are it was an American. What is known is that it was the British who opened fire, but was the act in self-defense or aggression? Regardless, by the time the shooting was over three colonists had been killed in front of the Custom House and another two died later.

Adams was not there. He learned about the incident from others, and for the most part his account in the Gazette reads objectively, almost dryly. Then, suddenly, there is this: “What shewed a degree of cruelty unknown to British troops, at least since the house of Hanover has directed their operations, was an attempt to fire upon or push with their bayonets the persons who undertook to remove the slain or wounded!”

Might the British have attacked in this way? Yes. Is it likely? Not in the least. As even Adams admits, such behavior was not typical of the Crown’s defenders in the past and would have been even less typical these days, with Parliament and King George III both having issued warnings to their forces that they were to keep order in the colonies, not foment a rebellion. Sam Adams, one cannot help but conclude, was the one doing the fomenting.

He had done the same thing three years earlier when Parliament passed a series of retributive taxes called the Townshend Acts, which had so angered Americans that they probably led to the Boston Massacre. Adams wrote about the money raised by the acts. He said it was going to officials of the Crown in the colonies, which was true, but he went on to claim that those officials were in turn spending it on “hirelings, pimps, parasites, panderers, prostitutes and whores.” There is no reason, none whatsoever, to think that they were.

Other papers began to take their cues from Adams, making the effects of his lies all the more deleterious to whatever slim chances of rapprochement still existed between the colonies and the Crown. In 1774, for example, in response to a new set of taxes from Parliament on the colonies known as the Intolerable Acts, the Pennsylvania Journal explained what Parliament was planning to do next:

• It would not allow any British citizen to settle in North America for a period of longer than seven years.

• It would demand that married couples in America pay a tax of fifteen pounds for each male child born and ten pounds for each female. If a child of either gender was born out of wedlock, the levy would be fifty pounds.

• It would impose new taxes on flour and wheat, and more severe penalties on those who did not pay the taxes or did not pay them on time.

And on and on it went, this list in the Pennsylvania Journal of proposed laws on the motherland’s drawing board. In truth, however, Parliament was not considering any of these measures, not a single one of them—and the Journal was well aware of the fact. This was Sam Adams-inspired journalism at its very worst.

Even Benjamin Franklin, the most unlikely of colonial journalists to emulate Adams, seems to have done so on one occasion. The year was 1782. Franklin, dispatched by his government to Paris to meet with officials from England and France, was trying to negotiate the treaty that would bring the Revolutionary War to a close. But Franklin wanted more than just an end of hostilities. He wanted reparations. In fact, he wanted Canada. He reminded Richard Oswald, representing the British foreign minister Lord Shelburne at one of the meetings, that the motherland had behaved atrociously at times, and would have to atone for its behavior.

Franklin perpetrated one of the practical jokes he so much enjoyed. He had his own printing shop near Passy [on the outskirts of Paris] and his slender young grandson Ben Bache to operate it. They printed a spurious supplement to a facsimile of a number of The Independent Chronicle of Boston with a bloody tale of bags of scalps captured on their way from the Indians [who were allies of the British in the Revolutionary War] to British headquarters in Canada: 43 soldiers’ scalps, 102 of farmers, 67 from very gray heads, 88 of women, 193 of boys, 211 of girls big and little, 29 of infants “ripped out of their mothers’ bellies.” Copies of the supplement were circulated through Europe wherever they would do the most good.

Apparently, they did not do enough good. The colonies did not get Canada. But Parliament did allow the citizens of the future United States “indefinite frontiers to the westward,” and American expansion toward the Pacific would come to be known as Manifest Destiny—the British concession eventually being regarded by its recipients as a God-given right.

It bears repeating that, as a patriot, a man who put what he believed to be the best interests of his country above all else, Sam Adams was beyond reproach, a tireless worker and as selflessly dedicated to his ideals as a man could be. In fact, for all the violence of his prose, it is possible, if not even likely, that in the long run Adams helped to save lives by inspiring his countrymen to fight so valorously and tirelessly that the war ended up shorter than it might have been otherwise. Fewer people were killed, fewer injured; there was less disruption to trade and economic well-being for both countries. That was the opinion of some British military officers at the time. It is also the opinion of some historians today as well as the opinion of David Ramsay, perhaps the first man to write a book-length chronicle of the Revolutionary War more than two centuries ago. “In establishing American independence,” he wrote, “the pen and the press had a merit equal to that of the sword.”