American Aurora

American Aurora was born of some curiosity I had about the Sedition Act of 1798. How, I wondered, could America’s second President, John Adams, possibly sign—and its first President, George Washington, possibly support—a law that prohibited newspaper criticism of the President? After all, the Bill of Rights, with its guarantee of press freedom, was already seven years old in 1798.

The official answer, I soon learned, was national security. America was preparing for war with France. Press restrictions are upheld in times of war.

Yet something I read greatly troubled me. The Philadelphia Aurora, the principal newspaper that Adams and Washington wanted to silence—a paper that reportedly had driven Washington from the presidency the year before—was being published by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson (who began the paper shortly after Franklin’s death). Why, I wondered, would this grandson, Benjamin Bache, want to criticize his grandfather’s most famous colleagues? Why wouldn’t he want to stand in Franklin’s shoes?

I knew [Benjamin Franklin] had conceived an irreconcilable hatred to me and that he had propagated and would continue to propagate prejudices, if nothing worse, against me in America from one end of it to the other. Look into Bache’s Aurora and Duane’s Aurora for twenty years and see whether my expectations have not been verified.⁴

Did Adams see the ghost of Franklin at the Philadelphia Aurora? Did he want a sedition act, I wondered, to silence Franklin’s ghost?

I decided to take Adams’ advice and look into Bache’s Aurora and his successor William Duane’s Aurora to see what old “prejudices” Franklin’s ghost was propagating, what old coals Bache and Duane had rekindled that might provoke Adams and Washington to suspend the Bill of Rights, cause them to urge the arrest and prosecution of these editors, incite mobs of their supporters to attack the Aurora’s offices and to assault and nearly kill these editors, and justify the sacrifice of Bache’s life and Duane’s editorship in hiding.

Heresies! Charges that Washington and Adams were warring against the French Revolution because they were enemies to democracy, and had been even during the American Revolution; that Washington was not the “father of his country,” but an inept general who would have lost the American Revolution had Benjamin Franklin not gotten France to intervene; that Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and other founding fathers had denied Franklin his credit (partly by understating France’s), had mythologized Washington’s, and had adopted a British-style constitution to avoid Franklin’s design (and many Americans’ hopes) for a democracy; and that Adams, Hamilton, and other “Federalists” really wanted an American king.

The more I read, the more I wondered. The more I wondered, the more I read. Finally, the curtain of time seemed to lift, and I saw the America these editors saw. It was then that I shared their fears.

American Aurora is the story of Bache and Duane, the story of their newspaper, and the story of America’s beginnings that these editors wanted us to know. It is written from Duane’s radical Democratic-Republican point of view.

A word about methodology. William Duane, himself an historian, found great difficulty in writing a history of his time. He cited the following:

The epoch of a great revolution is never the eligible time to write its history. Those memorable recitals to which the opinions of ages should remain attached cannot obtain confidence or present a character of impartiality if they are undertaken in the midst of animosities and during the tumult of passions; and yet, were there to exist a man so detached from the spirit of party or so master of himself as calmly to describe the storms of which he has been a witness, we should be dissatisfied with his tranquillity and should apprehend that he had not a soul capable of preserving the impressions of all the sentiments we might be desirous of receiving.⁵

Today’s historian who writes of Duane’s times is on the other horn of Duane’s dilemma. He or she gains from the passage of time but loses from not having experienced the “animosities … the tumult of passions … the spirit of party … the storms.” How can he or she convey “the impressions of all the sentiments we might be desirous of receiving”? Won’t readers be “dissatisfied with his [or her] tranquillity”? The dilemma poses important questions about historical writing as reality, narrative, drama, literature, and more.

To resolve William Duane’s dilemma and reanimate his time, American Aurora allows the Philadelphia Aurora to report its own story, its own times, its own trials and tribulations, through day-to-day excerpts from the paper, same-day responses from opposing (evening) gazettes, same-day reactions from such avid Aurora readers as Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, and same-day writings of other government officials, legislative and court reporters, neighbors, friends, etc. To provide background, where needed, for this firsthand testimony (and to provide leitmotif reminders that American Aurora embodies Duane’s point of view), American Aurora imagines William Duane to be its narrator and its historian (chooser-of-fact), granting him the advantage of these intervening years but grounding his narrative assertions (which can be read as the author’s) in endnoted sources. At the midpoint of this work, William Duane becomes the editor of and speaks through the Philadelphia Aurora and thus becomes (as much as possible) the actual narrator of and speaks through this work. From that point, readers can compare Duane’s actual voice with the posited one, traveling the path of free inquiry from the imagined to the real, from the given to the tested, which lies at the heart of our First Amendment and which survived its most formidable test at the time of the American Aurora.

The Library at Philadelphia in 1798.⁶ Founded in 1730 by Dr. Benjamin Franklin.

Being frequently censur’d and condemn’d by different Persons for printing Things which they say ought not to be printed, I have sometimes thought it might be necessary to make a standing Apology for myself and publish it once a Year to be read upon all Occasions of that Nature …

I request all who are angry with me on Account of printing things they don’t like calmly to consider these following Particulars

2. That the Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men’s Opinions; most things that are printed tending to promote some, or opposite others …

4. That it is unreasonable in any one Man or Set of Men to expect to be pleas’d with every thing that is printed …

5. Printers are educated in the Belief that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter …

8. That if all Printers were determin’d not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed …

If you read the Aurora of this City … you cannot but have perceived with what malignant industry and persevering falsehoods I am assailed in order to weaken, if not destroy, the confidence of the Public.

[George Washington] is very jealous of Dr. Franklin & those who are governed by Republican Principles from which he is very averse.

PAUL WENTWORTH, BRITISH SPY⁸

AUTHOR’S NOTE