American Aurora

It was a special time in the history of America. The Vice President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, called it a “reign of witches.”¹³

A short, fat man who puffed at “seegars” and believed in monarchy¹⁴ was President of the United States. At incautious moments, he predicted the nation’s conversion to a kingdom with a titled nobility to oversee Congress.¹⁵ Presumably, he would be king.

When the U.S. Senate considered titles for the President, this man favored “His Highness The President of The United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same.”¹⁶ His hauteur failed of adoption, however, and many of us soon mocked him with the title “His Rotundity.”¹⁷

People who supported His Rotundity wore black cockades, most often as decoration for their hats. These inky circles of folded ribbon¹⁸ identified them with the patriotic fulminations of this irascible President, with his plans to wage war against the French Revolution, and with his notion that those who own this country ought to govern it.

People like me¹⁹ wore tricolor cockades. Our colors shone red, white, and blue.

I don’t like monarchs. I was born the year King George III became monarch of the British Empire, and I suffered all my years fighting or fleeing him. In his Ireland, I was a dirty Catholic; in his India, I teetered at the edge of Calcutta’s “Black Hole”; in his England, I was a possible assassin; and, in the American breakaway, I was a sans-culotte. Through it all, I was a newspaperman, a “scribbler” they called me. The fact is that my pen and press are the only formidable weapons I have ever used.²⁰

When I look back on my life with the advantage of these intervening years, I see my greatest battle with monarchy was fought in the last three years of the eighteenth century. I was working for my last newspaper and for my final publisher.

I had fled London’s Copenhagen Field and, accompanied by my wife, Catherine, our sixteen-year-old son, William John, our daughter, Kate, and our youngest child, Patrick, shipped to America aboard the Chatham under Captain Sammis. Throughout the journey, I anticipated a place ruled neither by George III nor by any other monarch. Though I had no money and no job awaiting me, I expected my life in America to be free and independent as the American nation, as new as her Constitution. The Chatham arrived in America on the Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day, 1796. It was as though the Lord himself had said, “William Duane, your freedom and America’s are now intertwined.”²²

This history begins twenty months later when I am living in Philadelphia and working part-time for Benjamin Bache (pronounced “Beech”) and his Philadelphia Aurora.²³ Had I kept a daily journal of this time and been able to quote from private letters and other documents that came to light only much later, I would offer you this history, day by day, in the words of those who lived it and in the writings of gazettes that reported it. I would start each day’s entry with a report from the Aurora, and I would let you tremble, with Thomas Jefferson and me, at “the rapid march of our government toward monarchy.”²⁴ Such a journal would read like this …

NEW THEATRE.

—On FRIDAY EVENING March 2.—

Will be Presented, a Comedy, Called,

THE ROAD TO RUIN

To which will be added a COMIC OPERA

(never Performed in America) Called

THE SHIP WRECK

BOX—One Dollar, PIT—Three-Quarters of a Dollar. GALLERY—Half a Dollar. The Doors of the Theatre will open at HALF past FIVE, and the Curtain rise precisely at HALF past SIX … Tickets to be had at H. & P. Rice’s Bookstore, No. 40 Market street and at the Office adjoining the Theatre.

AN EXHIBITION OF Elegant Figures In Wax, Equal in Nature to life, and lately arrived from France. By JOSEPH PROVINI, No. 107 North Second Street—WHERE the SPECTATOR will be delighted with a well executed Wax representation of all the late ROYAL FAMILY OF FRANCE … the great GENERAL BUONAPARTE, with many ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS among whom the striking likenesses of VOLTAIRE and ROUSSEAU … at the low price of a QUARTER OF A DOLLAR …

JUST PUBLISHED—And to be sold at the AURORA (Price One Dollar, neatly bound and lettered) AN ENQUIRY into the DUTIES of the FEMALE SEX. By THOMAS CISBORNE …

—PEALE’S MUSEUM—

This valuable Repository of the works of Nature … is open daily as usual … Many interesting additions have been lately made to this Museum: even the feathered tribe … Waxen figures often large as life … the North American Savage and the Savage of South America—a labouring Chinese and the Chinese Gentleman—the sooty African and the Kamischadle, with some Natives of the South Sea Islands. Admittance only 1/4 of a dollar.

LAILSON’S CIRCUS—MR. LAILSON has the honour of informing the Public, that … his Circus … will open … on the first Tuesday of next month—By the Novelty and Variety of Equestrian Exercises, as well as by the other representations which will be given, he hopes to deserve the approbation and patronage with which his Public has already honoured him.

For the Relief & Cure—OF COUGHS, ASTHMAS, and CONSUMPTIONS—CHURCH’S COUGH DROPS, AFTER a trial of Six Years, prove to be unequaled by any other Medicine in the world, Prepared by the INVENTOR and SOLE PROPRIETOR, DR. JAMES CHURCH, At his Medicine Store, No. 1, South Third street, Philadelphia …

The covered country marketplace (to left) in the middle lane of High-street, 1798.²⁵ (The market opens on Wednesdays and Saturdays.)

It’s the first day of March, 1798. I am living in Philadelphia and writing part-time for Benjamin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora at a salary of $10 a week.²⁶

I choose these advertisements from this morning’s Aurora to illustrate why a visitor says, “Philadelphia is … the finest city of the United States.”²⁷ They also show some features of our time.

The government of these United States is less than a decade old. Pending completion of a new federal city on the banks of the Potomac River, this government rests in Philadelphia, a town of some 55,000 people occupying a grid of cobblestone streets and red-bricked town houses, ten blocks square, which slopes west to higher ground from the docks and ships of the Delaware River.

The Delaware connects this town with the farmlands and fisheries which feed its stomach and with the trade routes of the Atlantic which feed its purse. At each favorable tide, numerous square-rigged vessels as well as sloops and schooners, coasters and foreign, negotiate the Delaware to deposit hooped barrels of beef and pork, casks of shad, herring, rye flour, and flax seed, kegs of rum, Madeira wine, and butter, bundles of shingles and lumber, carts of vegetables, and every other object of desire on the congested wharves along Water-street. From the riverfront and perpendicular to it, a covered country market occupies the middle of High-street (the city’s broadest avenue) in its gradual ascent to the city’s center. Sheltered by a series of old market buildings, this country market accommodates hundreds of vendors in a range of open wooden stalls, separated from each other by brick and wooden pillars and overhung by crossbeams and iron provision hooks.

During the course of this century, the covered market along High-street has extended itself, block by block, from the riverfront toward the city’s center, so that “High-street” is becoming known as “Market-street.” Today, half call it “High”; half, “Market.”

Facing the covered market on the south side of High, between Third- and Fourth-streets, is No. 112, the publishing office of the Philadelphia Aurora. A block and a half farther up High, on the same side of the street, is No. 190, the Executive House of the President of the United States.

Congress Hall at Philadelphia, 1798. U.S. House of Representatives on the first floor, U.S. Senate on the second.²⁸

March, the 2nd. Today’s Aurora carries its usual measure of Congressional news …

The Congress of these sixteen²⁹ United States of America meet a block and a half southwest of the Aurora in the City Hall of Philadelphia, commonly called the State-house of Pennsylvania, a range of attached brick buildings occupying the entire south side of Chestnut-street (parallel to and one block south of High) between Fifth- and Sixth-streets. The House and Senate chambers occupy a wing, commonly called Congress Hall, on the west (away from the Delaware) side of the State-house.³⁰ The U.S. House of Representatives sits on the first floor, the U.S. Senate on the second. A visitor to the city describes the House and Senate chambers as follows:

The hall for the Representatives is spacious. The Galleries above and below could hold perhaps four hundred spectators each. They are nearly always filled … The members have the privilege of introducing into the chamber itself all those [including the press] whom they wish; these persons must then remain behind the bar. Four rows of chairs placed in a semi-circle and protected by a semicircular enclosure are made ready for the members. Behind these … one sees as many benches or desks in a semi-circle in such a way that each member has an inkstand, a sandbox, some pens, a wafer, and some papers to make notes and comments, and even for writing letters. Before the center of this circle there is a raised platform on which is the Speaker’s chair, in front of two tables on which are placed the volumes of law … Four great stoves warm the chamber …

The chamber where the Senate assembles is above. It resembles more the rooms of a society than a sanctuary of laws. Thirty-two senators are likewise seated in a semicircle. The … Vice President of the United States performs the function of a Speaker. A small Gallery above can hold 50 spectators; they withdraw when the Senate is concerned with executive business.³¹

All Philadelphia newspapers report the affairs of Congress, although the Aurora’s publisher, Benjamin Bache, was barred, as of three weeks ago, from taking notes on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The banishment of Benjamin Bache arose from a bizarre incident which occurred in the House chamber on the last and very icy Tuesday of January, the 30th. Several members were warming themselves by the great stoves which heat the House chamber when, in idle conversation, a Republican congressman from Vermont (an Irish newspaper publisher) posed the possibility of starting an opposition newspaper in Federalist Connecticut. (President John Adams’ Federalist party controls each of the New England states and holds a commanding majority in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.) The Report of the House Committee on Privileges reads as follows:

Personal insults! Spitting! At a time when political etiquette and the hardship of overland travel force politicians to wait at home for the call to office³⁴ rather than travel some campaign trail in pursuit of it, the newspaper is a mighty force in the political life of America. As this bizarre event suggests, even the threat of an “opposition press” can lead to violence.

During the next three weeks, Congress held hearings on the spitting incident, and the Federalist Speaker of the House, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, tried to impose restrictions on newspaper coverage of embarrassing testimony. The Annals of Congress report:

A gag rule! This was the federal government’s first attempt to restrict press freedom since the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (guaranteeing freedom of the press) was ratified in December of 1791. Benjamin Bache refused to comply, even after Thursday morning, February 15th, when Lyon and Griswold fell upon each other with stick and tong. The Annals of Congress report:

FRACAS IN THE HOUSE.

About a quarter past eleven o’clock, after prayers, whilst the SPEAKER was in his chair … Mr. GRISWOLD [Federalist, Connecticut] entered the House and observing Mr. LYON [Republican, Vermont] in his place (who was writing), he went up to him with a pretty strong walking stick in his hand with which he immediately began to beat him with great violence … At length, getting behind the SPEAKER’S chair, Mr. L[YON] snatched up the tongs from the fire; the combatants then closed and came down together upon the floor, Mr. G[RISWOLD] being uppermost. The members of the House … got round the parties and separated them but not before Mr. L[YON] had aimed a blow at Mr. G[RISWOLD]’s head with the tongs but which he parried off.³⁷

From the initial encounter to the latest fracas, Benjamin Bache reported details and testimony of congressional misbehavior without prior clearance by Speaker Dayton. For this disregard, Speaker Dayton barred Benjamin Bache, as of February 12th, from reporting on the House floor. Instead, the Aurora’s representative would take notes from the spectators’ gallery, where debate is less audible, less visible (Quaker spectators don’t remove their hats!), and thus more difficult to discern.³⁸

Two days after his banishment, Benjamin Bache reported, in the Philadelphia Aurora, as follows:

That’s where things stand today. The Aurora’s reporter takes notes from the crowded House gallery, but the paper continues to report without Congress’ prior review.⁴⁰

One last word about Congress … A recent visitor claimed, “Philadelphia is not only the finest city of the United States, but may be deemed one of the most beautiful cities in the world.”⁴¹ The State-house Park behind Congress Hall supports this view. A current issue of the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine describes the park in these words:

On the south of [the State-house] buildings is a large area … enclosed with a brick wall and commanding an elegant front view of the [Walnut-street] jail, Philadelphia Library and Philosophical hall with the valuable Museum of the ingenious Mr. Peale. This garden is appropriated as a public walk for the use of the Citizens … [I]t is laid down in a grass platt, divided in the middle by a spacious gravel walk, lined with a double row of large native and exotic elms, which form a cool shadowy retreat, and is plentifully supplied with benches for the accommodation of visitors. As this is the only spot in this populous city appropriated to the necessary and refreshing uses of exercise and air, it is usually thronged with company … and on days of festivity, exhibits a lively scene of busy gaiety.⁴³

The City Hall Clock Tower at the State-house, 1798.⁴² (Its chime foretells each market day.)

Today, being a Friday, is the day before a market day. The covered market in High-street is open each Saturday and Wednesday. To remind Philadelphians that tomorrow is a provisioning day, a bell in the City Hall’s clock tower tolls this evening from dusk until nine, and, as custom dictates, Philadelphians emerge from their homes in fancy dress, meander the brick walking pavements of High, imbibe brandy, whiskey, and Madeira at their favorite taverns, and dance their legs away. At nine, the complexion of the town perceptibly darkens, the crowd of revelers thins, and an occasional streetwalker is the only newcomer to the night’s activities. By ten, the wailing oystermen with their barrows of mollusks are gone, and, by eleven, only the flickering of double-branched oil lamps on sidewalk posts and patrolling watchmen (no longer crying hour or weather) animate otherwise motionless streets.⁴⁴

One last item … A newsworthy event occurs this Friday evening, March 2nd, though too late for inclusion in tomorrow’s Aurora (Monday’s will report it). Some angry citizen or citizens hurl large rocks at the windows of the Aurora’s office at 112 High-street, shattering a number of panes. This has happened several times before …⁴⁵

The War of the French Revolution between Britain and France continues in its fifth year. The issues and conduct of that war occupy the pages of the Philadelphia Aurora this and every morning.

Five winters ago (which was almost four years after the French Revolution began), Frenchmen guillotined their king, Louis XVI, declared an end to kingly government, and founded France’s first democratic republic. As King Louis XVI passed through “the little door to heaven,” Europe’s other monarchs trembled at the thought that their own populations, inspired by the French example, might send them on a similar journey. Britain’s King George III was quick to respond, joining other European monarchs in a war to crush the French Revolution, to restore the French monarchy, and to prove the invincibility of monarchy in general.

This War of the French Revolution between Britain and France still rages. America claims neutrality in this war, but Britain and France continue to seize American shipping to each other’s ports. Needless to say, America’s merchant-traders are suffering.

Today is Saturday and so a market day. The covered market along High-street is open from daylight till three. A French visitor describes the congestion:

The principal market in Philadelphia excites the attention of every visitor. It is a long building [and] … greatly crowded … [T]he passages sometimes are almost choked up with people … [P]rovisions are so abundant, and the vendors so numerous, that the purchaser who is dissatisfied has but a step or two to make to consult his caprice, or to endeavor to take a better bargain … A great quantity of the provisions sold at Philadelphia is … conveyed in covered waggons that arrive in the night. The horses are unharnessed, and stand round the carts, with hay before them, which the farmer always brings with him, to save expenses at the inns. Sometimes there are more than a hundred of these waggons standing at the upper part of the street in which the great market is situated. Sometimes the farmers retail their provisions themselves, from their carts, which bring veal, pork, poultry, game, butter and cheese, as well as articles of agriculture and even the products of industry. Jersey furnishes the markets of Philadelphia with many articles, particularly hams, poultry, butter, and vegetables …⁴⁶

The market exudes quality. Another European claims, “for beef, veal and mutton, the big market of Philadelphia is only second to that of London-hall, and, for fish, it only yields to that of New York.”⁴⁷

The covered country market is a great distraction. Neither the Aurora’s office workers nor the President of the United States can ignore the hawkers and bell ringers, horses and hand-carts, and the babel of Philadelphia’s German, French, Dutch, English, and Gaelic tongues. The Aurora’s subscription office directly faces the boisterous High-street market, but the paper’s two-story print shop is located in a courtyard behind 112, through a vaulted carriageway which separates 106 from 108.⁴⁸ Office workers suffer market distractions; pressmen and compositors don’t.

Though the High-street country market and a weekly horse auction on Seventh-street are two important Saturday events, Saturday morning is also the time when Philadelphians wash doors, walking pavements, and window ledges, even during the freezing weather of deepest winter. Water for the task is provided by long-handled, black wooden pumps which border Philadelphia’s walking pavements every eighty-five yards or so, on alternate sides of the street.⁴⁹ Obviously, the Aurora waits till three (when the market closes) before cleaning the brickwork at 112 High.

[T]he front window of the office of the Aurora was, on Friday evening, successfully assailed by three stones of the size of a man’s fist or larger. Several panes of glass were consequently broken, and this is the third attack of the kind for which Mr. Bache has been indebted to the friends of regular government.

Mr. Adams, before taking his oath of office, made a long exordium … that, although the constitution makes no distinction in favour of the Christian religion, yet that he (Mr. Adams) in nominating to public offices would always have a special eye to that point. This truth was thereafter sent to the press. In July or August last … in plain terms, when [former Secretary of the Treasury Mr. Alexander) Hamilton came to Philadelphia to vindicate his character by a confession of adultery, this identical and most Christian president invited him to a family dinner with Mrs. Adams. Such is his selection of company for the entertainment of his wife! Oh, Johnny! Johnny!

[O]ne of the members … read in Congress the far famed letter said to be written by Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson to Mr. Mazzei … The substance of it is a complaint [by Mr. Jefferson) of an American aristocracy and of the growth of the principle of monarchy …

Public anger against the Philadelphia Aurora and Benjamin Bache really began last May 16th. That’s when President Adams warned Americans that French sympathizers were a threat to the nation’s security. President Adams was addressing an extraordinary session of the current U.S. Congress (the Fifth) which he had convened to consider relations with France.

Relations with France first began to deteriorate under the presidency of George Washington, who, having declared neutrality in the war between Britain and France, sought to end British interference with American shipping by signing the pro-British (and anti-French) Jay Treaty of 1795, and by firing America’s friendly Ambassador to France, James Monroe, who had publicly criticized Washington’s anti-French actions. These events upset France, provoking her to increase her seizures of U.S. shipping and not to accept James Monroe’s ambassadorial replacement, Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.

In his speech to Congress of May 16th—a speech that France found very insulting—the President’s “rage almost choked his utterance,”⁵⁰ as he excoriated the French for rejecting his ambassador, urged defensive measures against French dangers from abroad, and warned about French dangers at home. He cautioned,

[France] evinces a disposition to separate the people of the United States from the [American] Government, to persuade them that they have different affections, principles, and interests from those of their fellow-citizens whom they themselves have chosen to manage their common concerns, and thus to produce divisions fatal to our peace. Such attempts ought to be repelled with a decision which shall convince France and the world that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.⁵¹

Following that May 16th diatribe, the President’s supporters saw his critics as the “miserable instruments of foreign influence” producing “divisions fatal to our peace.” They saw French sympathizers such as Benjamin Bache and even Vice President Thomas Jefferson as “degraded people.” Thomas Jefferson himself remarked, “Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way lest they be obliged to touch their hats.”⁵² A friend of Ben Bache wrote, “What a pity … At the time of Dr. F[ranklin]’s death, Benjamin [Bache] was universally beloved and esteemed, and now he is as much despised, even by some who are warm Democrats.”⁵³ Now, the President’s supporters break Benjamin Bache’s windows.

That presidential speech was almost a year ago. Since then, Adams has sent a new three-man delegation (including the rejected Pinckney) to meet with French Foreign Minister Talleyrand in Paris. Last night, Mr. Adams received his first dispatches from those envoys. The news is not good.

Lawyer Alexander Hamilton, who was George Washington’s first Treasury Secretary, founded the Federalist party and still leads it from the relative anonymity of his private New York life. To the chagrin of his party, however, Mr. Hamilton publicly confessed last August to some adultery he had committed several summers earlier with one Maria Reynolds, wife of a convicted securities swindler. The liaison included several libidinous encounters in Hamilton’s own home while his wife, Betsy, and the Hamilton children were in upstate New York visiting Betsy’s father.⁵⁴ The article in this morning’s Philadelphia Aurora connects Mr. Hamilton’s adultery to President and Mrs. Adams and can only anger our very prudish and very Christian President of the United States.

Last spring, the American press published a private letter that Vice President Thomas Jefferson had written a year earlier to his Italian friend and former neighbor Philip Mazzei. This letter claimed that George Washington and John Adams’ Federalist party preferred monarchy and aristocracy to American democracy and, therefore, were returning America to British influence.⁵⁵ Mr. Jefferson never dreamt the following of his words would be made public:

The aspect of our politics has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of that noble love of liberty & republican government which carried us triumphantly thro’ the war, an Anglican monarchical & aristocratical party has sprung up whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance, as they have already done the forms, of the British government … Against us [Republicans] are the [Federalist-controlled] Executive, the Judiciary, two out of three … of the legislature, all the officers of the government, all who want to be officers, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants & Americans trading on British capitals, speculators, & holders in the banks & public funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption & for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model. It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field & Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England. In short, we are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors & perils.⁵⁶

Jefferson’s letter to Philip Mazzei rebukes Federalist party leaders like Alexander Hamilton and John Adams for their monarchical, aristocratic, and pro-British sympathies. More shockingly, the letter’s charge of apostasy to “men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council” clearly aims at George Washington!

Today, President John Adams sends a message to the Congress of the United States. The Annals of Congress report:

RELATIONS WITH FRANCE.

The following Message, with the documents accompanying it, were received from the President of the United States:

Gentlemen of the Senate and Gentlemen of the House of Representatives,

The first dispatches from our envoys extraordinary [to France] since their arrival in Paris were received at the Secretary of State’s office at a late hour the last evening—They are all in a character, which will require some days to be decyphered, except the last which is dated the 8th of January, 1798. The contents of this letter are of so much importance to be immediately made known to the Congress, and to the public, especially to the mercantile part of our fellow citizens, that I have thought it my duty to communicate them to both houses without loss of time.

JOHN ADAMS

UNITED STATES, March 5, 1798

DEAR SIR: We embrace the unexpected opportunity to send you the “Redacteur” [a Paris newspaper] of the fifth instant, containing the Message of the Directory [France’s five-man executive council] …

We can only repeat that there exists no hope of our being officially received by this Government or that the objects of our mission will be in any way accomplished …

Message of the Executive Directory to the Council of Five Hundred [the larger chamber of France’s legislature].

Citizen Representatives: … The English Government … has violated … the law of … neutral powers. It has caused to be seized the provisions, grain, and commodities which it supposed to be destined for France. It has declared contraband [not just military supplies as permitted under the law of neutral powers but] everything which it thought useful to the [French] Republic. It desired to starve it. All the citizens demand vengeance upon it …

The Directory thinks it urgent and necessary to pass a law declaring that the condition of [vessels as] … neutral or enemy shall be determined [no longer by their national flag but] by their cargo … In consequence, every vessel found at sea having on board English merchandise and commodities as her cargo, in whole or in part, shall be declared to be good prize …

P. BARRAS, President.⁵⁷

By these documents, the “mercantile part of our fellow citizens” knows that, under the proposed French decree, France will seize and confiscate any ship carrying British goods, whether or not it flies the American flag and regardless of its destination. American merchant-traders will want to arm their merchantmen.

The prejudices which have been excited against France … have greatly deceived the American public. It is believed that the French deserve to be viewed in a light very different [and more favorable] from what was lately pretended to be just …

From the beginning of the present war [betwee n Britain and France] down to this time, the conduct of our executive [the President] has been a series of ill offices toward France …

Benjamin Bache’s Philadelphia Aurora is the leading opposition paper in the United States.⁵⁸ Its location in the nation’s capital provides immediate access to national and international news.

Readership of the Aurora is perhaps the largest in the country, far larger than its subscriber base of 1,700 might suggest. With newspaper franking privileges to mail the Aurora cost-free to fellow publishers, the Aurora inflates its readership by a network of papers throughout the nation which share its views and reprint its news and opinion as part of their daily fare. The Aurora’s popularity among the lower classes also multiplies its readership, because such people tend to pass a newspaper from hand to hand, and family to family, and leave it in local taverns, which serve as libraries for the poor.⁵⁹

The Aurora is manufactured six days a week in a two-story wooden print shop in the courtyard behind 112 High. Compositors and binders work on the first floor; pressmen on the second. Though the newspaper owns type fonts from Baskerville, Caslon, Fournier, and Didot (specimen books display sixty different fonts),⁶⁰ the Aurora emphasizes simple Petite Texte-Romain as its standard face.

American newspapers are printed on the English common press,⁶¹ with its vintage profile of two upright pieces of timber, seven feet tall and four feet apart, joined at their upper ends by a heavy crossbeam from which the square wooden platen (plate) descends to force paper against type and joined at their midpoint by a long horizontal carriageway on which paper and type travel to their proper place beneath the platen’s descent.

To print a daily Aurora, platens have to descend about eight thousand times, and the Aurora’s pressmen dance and wrestle in a bath of perspiration to achieve that production. To make an imprint on one side of a newspaper sheet, two pressman have to coordinate thirteen steps in agreed roles as Puller and Beater.

The Puller takes a sheet from the heap of paper and lays it on top of a parchment, of equal size, stretched across a wooden frame (the tympan), which is hinged to the end of the press. To hold the edges of the paper to the edges of the tympan, the Puller overlays a metal frame (the frisket), which is hinged to the other end of the tympan. He then lowers the paper (sandwiched between the tympan and the frisket) onto the locked bed of metal type (the form), which resides on a large flat stone within a wooden box (the coffin) on the carriageway. The Puller then pulls a three-and-a-half-foot overhead iron bar across the press, lowering the platen to force half a side of paper against half of the inked type form. He then returns the overhead bar to raise the platen, rotates a sidehandle (the rounce) to position the remaining half sheet beneath the platen, pulls the overhead bar to imprint the remaining half sheet, and returns the bar to raise the platen. Next, he rotates the rounce to remove the carriage, paper, and form from beneath the platen, raises the printed sheet (still sandwiched between frisket and tympan) off the form, hinges the frisket back from the tympan to release the sheet, removes the sheet from the tympan, places it onto a heap, and examines the form for problems of registration and foreign particles.

While the Puller is performing this list of tasks and in close coordination with him, the other pressman, as Beater, mixes (rubs) a mound of lampblack (soot from burning oil) and varnish (linseed oil thickened by boiling), which together compose printer’s ink, slices away any film that has dried on the surface of the ink, dips two wooden-handled, leather-covered balls of wool into the ink, presses (beats) the inked leather-balls along the form of type for uniform ink distribution, and reviews the latest printed sheet for imperfections (picks) in inking.

Though Puller and Beater exchange roles every two or three tokens (a token being 250 sheets), each pressman performs the entire series of described procedures in fewer than fifteen seconds, thousands of times each day, six days a week.⁶²

A custom has crept into the United States of publishing toasts. A club of any tolerable number can hardly meet and get drunk without incumbering the newspapers of the next morning by a long string … [I]n the Concert Hall in Boston, on Mr. Washington’s late birthday … toasts were drank to the bottom of the glass. Thirty-five glassfuls … [T]he majority must have been in a beastly pickle before the end of the entertainment. Even of Yankee rum diluted into grog, so many cubic inches would make an enormous belly full. It is no wonder that the toasts … leave room for criticism …

Mr. Dawson [Republican, Virginia] proposed a resolution for amending the rules of the house [of representatives] … “Resolved, That … persons attending this house to take down its debates and proceedings for the purpose of publication shall be permitted to take their seats within the bar of the house.” The Speaker [Mr. Dayton] said he would state to the house that this was the case except as to one person who had abused the privilege … Mr. Bache having been driven from his place within the bar of the house by the single mandate of the Speaker, Mr. Dawson moved the above resolution that he might be admitted there …

Many charges and much abuse have issued from the Gazette of the United States and Porcupine’s Gazette … To charges so general and so vague, however, it is impossible to give any other than a general answer which may be effectually done by these two words: prove them!

[I]n the [French] decree proposed in [this] January 1798, the unwarrantable proceedings of the English government are the avowed foundations of the French measures … It is really time … to acknowledge and admit the extravagance and unwarrantableness of the … British … [and to] take a correct and candid view of the course of English proceedings from 1792 to 1797 which have contributed to bring on the measures of the French Government.

Thomas Jefferson praises the Philadelphia Aurora. Federalist gazettes hurl charges and abuse.

John Fenno’s well-established and quasi-official Gazette of the United States and William Cobbett’s new and reactionary Porcupine’s Gazette are the two leading papers for the views of John Adams’ Federalist administration. Like the Aurora, these papers are published in Philadelphia six days each week and copied by like-minded publishers throughout the country. Unlike the Philadelphia Aurora, these papers serve highborn readers and, as late-afternoon papers, enjoy the last journalistic word each day.

John Fenno, publisher of the Gazette of the United States, is a former Boston merchant of pure English ancestry who, following a business failure, moved to New York in January of 1789 to undertake a new life and a new newspaper when the federal government was beginning its operations, initially at New York. Accompanying John Fenno were his wife, Mary (he calls her “Polly”), their then-eleven-year-old son, John Ward (the family calls him “Jack”), and the other Fenno children. With financial help from fellow Bostonian and then Vice President-elect John Adams, and from New Yorker and then U.S. Senator Rufus King,⁶⁴ John Fenno started the Gazette of the United States in mid-April of that year. He has published that paper ever since.

In the autumn of 1790 when the federal government moved to Philadelphia, John Fenno, his family, and his newspaper followed, becoming a Philadelphia institution (Mary alone would justify this with her birthing of fourteen children). Fenno gets the lion’s share of federal government printing, is printer to the United States Senate,⁶⁵ and, when problems arise, gets help from Federalists like Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton,⁶⁶ and his confidential friend John Adams.⁶⁷ This support upsets Benjamin Bache,⁶⁸ but not nearly so much as John Fenno’s strict adherence to the ideology of his government sponsors.

William Cobbett, publisher of the Porcupine’s Gazette, has, in one short and vitriolic year, made his radically conservative paper more popular and influential than any Federalist journal in the country except perhaps John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States. William Cobbett started Porcupine’s Gazette on the day John Adams took the presidential oath, and, from that day to this, “Peter Porcupine” (as Cobbett often signs his articles) has defended Mr. Adams with a knifelike quill his opponents are loath to match.

William Cobbett is a powerful man, six feet in height, of heavy build, fair-complected, gray-eyed, and possessing, as he says, “a plump and red and smiling face.”⁶⁹ Perhaps because he endured seven years as a British corporal in the backwoods of Canada, William Cobbett is dogged in his pursuits and intense in his anger. He is also British, very royalist, and possibly crazy.

Crazy! How else can one explain an Englishman—and he is an Englishman—who, eight months before starting an American newspaper, opened a bookstore opposite Philadelphia’s Christ Church (the “English” church) on Second-street to sell loyalist, royalist, and Federalist propaganda, removed the building’s shutters, painted its facade a bright blue, and decorated its front windows with portraits of royalty like Britain’s King George III (from whom Americans won their independence) and France’s King Louis XVI (whom the French Revolution had overthrown)?⁷⁰

In the first issue of Porcupine’s Gazette, William Cobbett declared Benjamin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora his enemies. Calling the Aurora a “vehicle of lies and sedition,” the first Porcupine’s Gazette opened with a letter to Benjamin Bache:

I assert that you are a liar and an infamous scoundrel … Do you dread the effects of my paper? … We are, to be sure, both of us news-mongers by profession, but then the articles you have for sale are very different from mine … I tell you what, Mr. Bache, you will get nothing by me in a war of words, and so you may as well abandon the contest while you can do it with good grace … I am getting up in the world, and you are going down. [F]or this reason it is that you hate me and that I despise you; and that you will preserve your hatred and I my contempt till fortune gives her wheel another turn or till death snatches one or the other of us from the scene. It is therefore useless, my dear Bache, to say any more about the matter …⁷¹

Nearly every day, John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States and William Cobbett’s Porcupine’s Gazette assail the Philadelphia Aurora, and, with equal frequency, the Aurora reviles them. Their angry colloquy ripples across the pages of America’s newspapers and infuses the nation’s opinions.

Tonight, March 8th, for example, John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States attacks Aurora writer Jimmy Callender, who is in charge of the Aurora when Benjamin Bache is away. The Gazette calls Callender a “renegade”:

“Surgo ut Prosim” is the Philadelphia Aurora’s masthead motto: “I rise so that I may be useful.”

Tonight, for another example, in the Porcupine’s Gazette, publisher William Cobbett attacks the Aurora’s publisher, Benjamin Bache:

“Young Lightening-Rod” is a nickname for Benjamin Bache. It derives from a Latin epigram that France’s onetime Comptroller General of Finance, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, wrote to honor Benjamin Franklin: “Eripuit caelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis.” Translation: “He snatched the lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”⁷²

Benjamin Franklin Bache is the grandson of Benjamin Franklin. He was born August 12, 1769, in Franklin’s home at the rear of Franklin Court, only a few yards from where the Aurora’s printshop now stands. Poor Richard⁷³ designed and built that two-story printshop. Poor Richard bought the Aurora’s presses. He bought its very printing fonts. At his death, Benjamin Franklin bequeathed the Aurora’s presses and other equipment to his twenty-year-old grandson, “Benny” (as his grandfather called him),⁷⁴ who, six months later, started the Aurora, with a public acknowledgment of “the advice the Publisher had received from his late Grand Father.”⁷⁵

Benjamin Franklin’s wife, Deborah Read Franklin, bore him only one son. That was “Franky,” who died at the age of four. When their only daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Richard Bache, named their first son after his grandfather, Ben Franklin quickly identified the dark-haired child with the “Franky” he had lost long before. Though Ben Franklin was in London when Benny turned two, Poor Richard celebrated his grandson’s birthday, reporting:

As Benny himself approached the age of four, Ben Franklin confessed that Benny brought “often afresh to my Mind the Idea of my Son Franky, tho’ now dead 36 Years, whom I have seldom since seen equal’d in every thing, and whom to this Day I cannot think of without a Sigh,”⁷⁷ and when Benny turned fifteen, Poor Richard began to teach him the printing business, noting

So Franklin treated this grandson like his own son, and the grandson was at Poor Richard’s bedside when he died. Of that last day, Benny wrote, “Whenever I approached his bed, he held out his Hand & having given him mine he would take & hold it for some time.”⁸⁰

Strange the Aurora should rise in 1790, the year of Franklin’s death! Strange that Franklin’s namesake should start work on a Philadelphia newspaper at about the same age Franklin did!⁸¹ Strange that Franklin’s old printing equipment should still publish his philosophy! Strangest of all, how Poor Richard still lives, in the minds of everyone, through a twenty-eight-year-old giant-killer we all view as “Young Lightening-Rod”!

CHAPTER ONE

REIGN OF WITCHES