The early death of Philip Freneau’s National Gazette ended Jefferson’s dream of a truly national Republican organ, but not the need for it. The emerging party still needed a voice that would bring the concerns of the leaders and activists in the capital to allies and potential supporters in other parts of the nation. The place was filled almost immediately by the Philadelphia General Advertiser, edited by Benjamin Franklin Bache, favorite grandson of his namesake. Founded in 1790, Baches paper was initially a typical urban newspaper of the period. As the title suggested, it was stuffed with local advertising, with even the front page covered with ads and notices. Nevertheless, it became the most important political journal in the nation and remained so throughout the 1790s.
The General Advertiser (known as the Aurora General Advertiser after 1794) both represented and led the larger transformation of American printing and journalism that occurred as the Republican and Federalist parties coalesced. By the time of his death in 1798, the commercial printer Bache had changed his trade to that of Republican printer, meaning a full-time party spokesman and activist. Though political printing was a golden opportunity for many of his fellow travelers, who could never have risen to political consequence without it, for Bache partisanship was a costly act of conviction that required great courage. In becoming a political professional, Bache would lose both the prosperity and the social position his grandfather had labored hard to bequeath him. Bache’s story makes up an important early phase in the rise of newspaper politics in itself, but it also reveals that there was more to partisanship than the self-interested ambition and greed for spoils that we typically attribute to party politicians. Party politics was a new mode of public life that involved abandoning the traditionally personal measures of fitness for political leadership, measures that even most Republican members of the Revolutionary elite embraced: respectability, character, talent, and “services” (especially military ones) to the republic.1 By contrast, Bache came to judge all political men on the basis of their political principles, especially in terms of their commitment to democracy. Choosing his own course by the same ideological standards, Bache became a ground-level political activist and set himself on a steep path of downward mobility by leaving behind the genteel political values to which he had been born.
Bache may have had the most extensive education of any man to edit a political newspaper before the Civil War. In terms of formal schooling, he even surpassed many of the high officeholders defended or attacked in his newspaper. Most of his childhood was spent in Europe, where Benjamin Franklin had him educated in the best schools Paris and Geneva had to offer. When the two returned to Philadelphia, young Benjamin acted as his grandfather’s secretary and earned a degree from the University of Pennsylvania. One of two people present when his grandfather died, Bache was considered his right-hand man and the most promising member of his illustrious family’s younger generation.2
Unlike Fenno or Freneau, Bache was a printer and typefounder by training. Feeling he had ruined his dissolute older grandson, William Temple Franklin, by raising him to be a gentleman officeholder, Benjamin Franklin “determin’d to give [young Benjamin] a Trade that he may have something to depend on, and not be oblig’d to ask Favours or Offices of anybody.”3 But Franklin had no intention of making his favorite grandchild a simple tradesman. Rather than apprenticing the boy to a printer and letting him work his way up through the trade, Franklin arranged for “Benny” Bache to start at the top. Franklin brought in leading French printers to train the boy on Franklin’s own state-of-the-art press at his estate in Passy Then Bache was sent to study with François Didot, an eminent typefounder and “the best Printer that now exists & maybe that has ever existed.”4
Franklin’s long-range intentions for the boy were not entirely clear, but they seem to have been for the grandson to follow the grandfather’s career path: make his fortune in the printing business before retiring to a life of public affairs. As author of the “Apology for Printers” and a politician who had survived a lifetime of political turmoil through conciliation and finesse rather than partisan ardor, Franklin did not set out to make his grandson a pugnacious partisan journalist. Upon returning to Philadelphia, Franklin steered Benjamin into printing but away from politics. The grandfather built a lavish new printing office and type foundry largely for his grandson’s use, and together they went into the typefounding and publishing business. Their first publication ventures were a series of children’s books based on the latest Enlightenment educational theories.5
Yet Bache’s upbringing hardly disposed him to enjoy a quiet life of money making. The education Franklin obtained for his grandson was far from vocational. The French and Genevan schools had prepared him only to be a European gentleman, and he had learned printing more as an art than a trade. In later years, Bache remarked that he had not “been brought up as a man of business,” a deficiency, he regretted saying, that had “proved a considerable disadvantage” in making a living from his newspaper.6
Bache’s adolescence in prerevolutionary France gave him a much firmer grounding, and greater ambitions, in philosophy, politics, and journalism. He grew up under the shadow of a grandfather who had not been a businessman for years but was one of the most famous and popular journalists and politicians of his age. Even as a boy, Bache had felt the need to live up to the great name he bore. He had written to his grandfather from school in Geneva, “I feel how I am responsible to you and how I must do things on my part to make me worthy of the attentions you have given me.” While living at Passy, Bache was allowed to share in Franklin’s activities and meet many of literary and political dignitaries who constantly surrounded the American envoy. Voltaire had said the blessing “God and Liberty” over him as a small child, with Condorcet in attendance; during his teenage years, Prince Henry of Prussia burst into a private room and eagerly peppered the great Franklin’s grandson with questions.7
More relevant to Bache’s future career, Franklin numbered among his French acquaintances several journalist-politicians who became prominent leaders of the French Revolution, including Mirabeau, Desmoulins, Brissot de Warville, Danton, Marat, and the Abbé Sieyès. Most of them were members of a constitutionalist Masonic lodge that elected Franklin grand master; at around the time Bache was learning to print, his grandfather supplied some ideas and helped find a publisher for Mirabeau’s first signed political pamphlet.8 Some of Franklin’s friends were participants in the Old Regime’s scabrous and burgeoning clandestine publishing industry, before which France’s elaborate censorship apparatus was beginning to give way in the 1780s. Though it is more than the sources prove, it seems likely that Bache, who was so immersed in French culture that he literally forgot English for a long period of his childhood, was familiar with his adopted country’s outlawed popular political culture. He might thus be considered one of the numerous young French literati of the period who set out to be philosophes but were deflected into subversive journalism instead.9
After returning to Philadelphia, Bache led the life of a young socialite—“a young Man of no pressing business,” as he put it: “frequenting good Company,” attending society dances, and romancing his future wife, Margaret Hartman Markoe, daughter of a St. Croix sugar planter and stepdaughter of Dr. Adam Kuhn, Philadelphia’s leading physician after Benjamin Rush. Bache’s aristocratic lifestyle and status as Franklin’s favorite grandson convinced Philadelphia’s young gentlewomen that he was a “Man of Fortune.” Though he protested to Margaret that his parents would get most of his grandfather’s money and that he would have to earn his own by “steady Industry,” there is no doubt that Bache was one of the better-placed young men in the city.10
When Franklin died in April 1790, Benjamin Bache’s inheritance was all of his grandfather’s printing and typefounding equipment. Lost without Franklin’s advice, Bache wrote immediately to his French teachers, the Didots, for technical help and made plans to publish a newspaper instead of books. This decision shocked and disappointed many of Bache’s acquaintances in the Philadelphia upper crust. They found the newspaper business economically unpromising and generally inappropriate for a young man of Bache’s station. Specifically, they worried that running a newspaper might lead the young man into partisanship that might dishonor his name. When Bache wrote to the Philadelphia financier and senator Robert Morris for help in securing government printing contracts, Morris responded with a warning:
Some of your friends here are rather sorry for your intention of Printing a News Paper. There are already too many of them Published in Philadelphia, and in these days ... it is difficult for a Press of such Reputation as you would choose yours to be, to maintain the Character of Freedom & impartiality, connected with Purity. They seem to entertain the opinion that you might be more honorably & more lucratively employed by the Printing of Books.11
Nevertheless, within six months of Franklin’s death, the General Advertiser began to issue from Bache’s palatial new printing office. At first, Bache stuck close to policies his grandfather had laid down in the “Apology for Printers,” promising in the inaugural issue that his paper would be impartial. For the first few years, he restricted himself to the standard repertoire of the commercial newspaper business, filling his pages with advertising, mercantile information, and foreign news. The General Advertiser was bland but well executed and respectable. Through his and his grandfather’s friends abroad, Bache had more and better sources of European news than most American printers, and this made his paper unusually accurate and informative for the time, especially on continental affairs.12
Yet almost from the beginning, impartial, apolitical journalism bored the young editor. The General Advertiser was only three weeks old when Bache first expressed dissatisfaction with his work, semifacetiously lamenting the lack of “party disputes” or “private abuse” to “raise the printer’s drooping spirits.” He wrote dejectedly to Margaret about the monotony and mundaneness of his daily routine as a commercial printer: scurrying around the city for information, scribbling copy, reading the foreign newspapers, and wrangling with newsboys and compositors “thro’ out the week . . . thro’ out the month, thro’ out the year, & probably from year to year—for years to come.”13
Bache was primed for some more exciting and intellectually challenging endeavor. Two months after the Advertiser’s debut, Alexander Hamilton gave Bache his chance by introducing his financial program and inspiring the beginnings of opposition to the national administration. From that point on, Bache slowly gravitated toward the example of Franklin’s French acquaintances, who were by now unabashedly partisan in their journalism and leading political actors in their own right.
Before 1792 the domestic political content of the General Advertiser was quite mild, but according to Jefferson its “principles . . . were always republican,” a fact that showed particularly in the foreign news, which was derived from sources less hostile to the French than was usual for American papers. As Freneau’s National Gazette began its assaults on the administration during 1792, Bache’s paper followed a few steps behind. Then, in the first week of December, a rather sudden change came over the paper, as Bache began to associate himself openly with the emerging Republican party. Significantly, he did so in conjunction with a major election. A series of fierce articles appeared supporting George Clinton against Vice President Adams, including one by “Portius,” who concluded that “the fall of ADAM s” would “crush the Hydra of ARISTOCRACY.”
In the same issue, Bache editorialized on the emerging party division, sketching both the nature of the division and his own conception of what the newspaper editor’s role in the party would be:
A language in praise of monarchical and aristocratical institutions, and in derogation of our republican systems, which would not have been whispered a few years past, is becoming so familiar in certain scenes as scarcely to call forth observation. In this posture and prospect of things all true friends to liberty ought to be on their constant guard against insidious attempts to divide them by abuse of names, and to unite firmly in checking the career of monarchy, by bearing testimony against its advocates, keeping continually in mind that it is not a question now between federalism and anti-federalism, but between republicanism and antirepublicanism.
As one who had much experience of high Philadelphia society, Bache was in a position to know what was being said in “certain scenes.” He now resolved that his newspaper would testify to the creeping antirepublicanism of his social peers and work to unite the “friends of liberty against them.” That meant not just exposing the enemies of liberty, but also using the electoral process to remove antirepublicans from power.14
In the days and weeks that followed, Bache and other newspaper writers assailed the administration in much the same terms as Freneau and began to build a case for the legitimacy and even necessity of popular, extragovernmental politics. “Mirabeau” listed among the “Forerunners of Monarchy and Aristocracy in the United States,” the increasingly common opinion—expressed often in John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States—that “the care of the state should be the exclusive business of the officers of the government.”
Reaching back to the bitter struggle in Philadelphia over American independence, during which the old colonial assembly had been overthrown by a radical pro-independence movement drawing its main support from artisans and poor people, “Mirabeau” compared the present condemnation of popular politics with the Tory spirit that had “produced so many publications in the years 1774 and 1775 which [criticized] the mechanics for meddling with politics.” Such attitudes had no place in post-Revolutionary America, the writer argued:
It is well enough in England to run down the rights of man, because the author of those inimitable pamphlets [referring to Thomas Paine] was a stay-maker; but in the United States all such proscriptions of certain classes of citizens, or occupations, should be avoided; for liberty will never be safe or durable in a republic till every citizen thinks it as much his duty to take care of the state, as to take care of his family, and until an indifference to any public question shall be considered as a public offence.15
This comment introduced what would be a perennial theme of Bache’s paper and, later, of the Republican press generally: the positive duty of ordinary citizens to engage in politics, express public opinion, and influence government policy from the outside. Though Bache did not initially print these remarks in the context of an organized political party, the ideas provided clear justification for such an organization. A few weeks later, another General Advertiser writer made a significant addendum to the argument. Newspapers played a critical role in this new popular politics, not just by providing an open forum for public debate, but also by positively defending the public’s rights and interests. The press provided
a constitutional check upon the conduct of public servants .l.l.l. In a republic of which the public opinion is the basis, it is of very peculiar importance as the organ of that opinion, and in many cases, the only organ. There are many occurrences, properly within the sphere of public investigation, on which the people cannot express their sentiments by their representatives.
Newspaper writers and other politicians outside the government had to stand in as the people’s representatives when the officially appointed and elected ones refused to heed their constituents.16
Bache’s motives for turning partisan against his revered grandfather’s advice were rooted in disappointment that his native country was lagging so far behind his beloved France in implementing the ideals of the American Revolution. He had followed the progress of the French Revolution avidly since it began, and he took the French Republic’s recent military victories as a call to action for fellow republicans around the world. With democratic revolution flourishing in Europe, it was particularly galling that America, the great symbol of freedom that Franklin’s French friends had worshiped while nurturing their own revolutionary dreams, should be drifting back toward monarchy.17
Suspicious Federalists such as Timothy Pickering assumed that Bache’s turn to partisanship was a sensationalistic play for popularity and increased subscriptions, but they had little insight into Benjamin Bache or the economics of the newspaper industry.18 The young editor had grave reservations about joining fully in the partisan battle that was emerging. It would have been much more comfortable to lead the sheltered life of an apolitical or conservative Philadelphia aristocrat, but Bache hoped to resist that temptation. “When [the political line] comes to be struck definitely,” he wrote of the emerging party division, “I hope I shall be found on the right side of it.”19
It took a long time for the General Advertiser to become exclusively Republican in content, but its partisanship was quite bold from early on. Bache has become infamous among historians as George Washington’s bitterest newspaper critic. His campaign against Washington would not reach its highest pitch until after the president signed the Jay Treaty in 1795, but constant criticism of the neomonarchical symbolism and ceremonials that Washington had allowed to grow up around himself began to appear as soon as the General Advertiser turned toward partisanship.20
As late as 1793, however, Bache continued to publish occasional articles that opposed his editorial line, while feeling increasingly disenchanted with such a permissive policy. A turning point seems to have come in late January 1793, when he printed a paragraph chiding the paper’s attacks on the president’s regal deportment but also appended a rebuttal. Inverting the usual reasoning, the editor argued that including criticisms of the president was an impartial rather than partisan act, because the president was popular and praising him would be taking the path of least resistance from advertisers, government officials, and well-heeled readers. “Impartiality [is] a duty” for a newspaper editor, and he was “unwilling to shrink from it, though perhaps interest might point out a safer line of conduct.”21
The old colonial printers’ conceptions of “impartiality” and “freedom of the press”—that the press should be free to all paying customers and all sides of a political controversy—were coming to have new meanings for Bache. They now denoted a lack of partiality toward the government and a determination to conduct his newspaper free and uninfluenced by personal or economic considerations that might curb its political activity. Though still quite moderate, the General Advertiser was already alienating many of its editor’s former friends and peers. Bache made this quite explicit in his New Year’s “address” for 1794:
In politics, the violence of parties, and the severe duties of the Editor of a free press leave him to regret some friends lost and some enemies made. If these were for a week only conductors of a impartial paper, the friends would return and the enmity be forgotten. The Editor, however, never will shrink from what he conceives his duty. Public men are all amenable to the tribunal of the press in a free state; the greater, indeed, their trust, the more responsible are they.22
The New Year’s address presaged an escalation of the attacks on Washington. The strategic wisdom of this decision is open to debate, but Baches intentions were quite high minded. He aimed to preserve a polity based on “principles, not men,” in which political debate and governance could take place without reference to personal loyalties, relationships, reputations, or status. “Private persons must never be suffered to weigh an instant against the public interest,” Bache wrote in a quiet moment of one attack, “but every person must judge of public affairs by public considerations.”23
Bache’s statements invoked a universalistic conception of the public sphere similar to that which undergirded many productions of the Revolutionary press. One way of stating this conception is that governments draw their legitimacy not from the participation of specific people (such as monarchs and nobles, whose power had supposedly been delegated by God), but from abstract ideas (such as natural rights) that could be impersonally defended in printed debate. Hence writers rarely used their personal names or revealed their true social or official identities. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the other squabbling founders debated in the press under classical pseudonyms, often chosen to evoke a particular political stance or theoretical position, rather than as the treasury secretary, the congressman from Virginia, and so on. In theory, this depersonalized political arena allowed people with wildly different levels of status and power to encounter each other on relatively equal terms: colonial protesters could take on kings, and printers could do battle with presidents, even with George Washington himself.24
The reality seems to have fallen far short of the theory. Hamilton and Madison used pseudonyms partly to disguise the fact that their ideas emanated from high official stations, and Benjamin Franklin Bache’s ability to serve as point man in the assault on Washington seems to have been made possible by his attributes as a private man. As the living embodiment of the great Franklin, Bache differed from other Republicans in feeling no awe of Washington’s reputation and position. Thus he alone was willing to take public responsibility for a campaign of vilification against Washington that intensified from condemning elaborate social protocols and high salaries to tarring nearly every aspect of the national patriarch’s career.
For a time, the attack on Washington took the intermediate position stated in Bache’s “Political Creed of 1795,” that “a good joiner may be a clumsy watch-maker; that an able carpenter may be a blundering taylor; and that a good General may be a most miserable politician.”25 By the end of Washington’s presidency, however, Bache and his friends were willing to argue more boldly that Washington’s behavior as president had abrogated his “claim . . . either to the gratitude or confidence of his country.” Bache’s personal efforts in the campaign culminated in a lengthy pamphlet that extended the indictment even to Washington’s war record. According to Bache, the president was not only a would-be king, but a bad general as well.26 Then there was the Aurora’s famous send-off to Washington, on Inauguration Day, 1797:
If ever there was period for rejoicing, this is the moment—every heart in unison with the freedom and happiness of the people ought to beat high with exultation, that the name of WASHINGTON from this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity; and to legalize corruption . . . this day ought to be a JUBILEE in the United States.27
Bache’s uncompromising partisanship was politically courageous but personally disastrous. To begin with, it severely damaged his newspaper as a business. The editor could hardly expect printing contracts from a government he criticized, nor did he long retain the advertising support of merchants, brokers, and other beneficiaries of Hamiltonian policies. Many other advertisers abandoned Bache simply to dissociate themselves from political controversy—especially if it involved tarring the name of George Washington.
Some of Bache’s former colleagues in the commercial printing trade disapproved of his flagrant disregard for the bottom line. Mathew Carey, who had forsaken newspapers for more profitable and less controversial fare after getting into a duel in the 1780s, clucked at Bache in his autobiography. Bache had been “popular on account of his amiable manners and his descent from Dr. Franklin.” His newspaper was “ably conducted,” with “a very extensive circulation. But the attacks on General Washington blasted Bache’s popularity, and almost ruined the paper. Subscribers withdrew in crowds—and the advertising custom sank to insignificance.”28 Foreclosing these sources of income was a serious matter for Bache, whose newspaper had, he admitted later, “never been a very lucrative establishment.” This was putting it mildly. According to his successor, Bache lost almost $20,000 over his eight years as proprietor.29
Even worse, Bache lost the “decided station in Society” he had occupied by virtue of his famous family, good marriage, and European polish.30 It was bad enough for his old friends and acquaintances that Benjamin had entered an occupation of such dubious prestige. That Bache would also assault the president—and the well-ordered society and polity that the dignity of his position represented—was too much. Moreover, most of Bache’s former peers in the Philadelphia elite supported Federalist policies and politics, and Bache lost caste by siding with the Republicans. Federalists considered themselves a “natural” republican aristocracy, holding power because they deserved it, on the strength of their superior virtue, intelligence, education, and experience. Oppositionists declared themselves outside this natural aristocracy, or worse, renegades from it, out to serve only their own base desires and selfish designs. In any number of ways, Bache had placed himself beyond the pale of respectability as his old circles defined it.31
The combination of class prejudice and political opprobrium that Bache’s partisanship brought down on him can be seen in two encounters with a young female socialite. One morning she came to the General Advertiser office and tongue-lashed Bache for some impertinent article. “When she so violently attacked me she knew me only as Bache the printer, and had seen me only in my rusty breeches;—she thought surely I was nobody,” the editor wrote his parents. She was surprised a few days later when making her debut at the City Dancing Assembly, which Bache had long attended. “Who should hand her out of the carriage but the same said nobody; but it is so, she doubted her eyes, what is it you Mr. Bache, I really did not know you.”32
The girl’s discomfiture amused Bache at the time. When his partisanship grew sharper, however, the snubs mounted, as polite Philadelphia society increasingly ostracized the Baches. He would not attend many more City Dancing Assemblies. “At the time of Dr. F’s death Ben was universally beloved and esteemed and now he is as much despised,” reported Elizabeth Hewson, a friend of the Franklin-Bache family, who fully shared her peers’ disgust with the wayward editor. He was “now considered in the most despicable light by the most respectable part of his fellow citizens, and by almost everyone he might formerly have considered as his particular friends.” As for Margaret, “Poor woman, her old acquaintance have almost all deserted her.” Hewson evidently considered it a magnanimous gesture on her part to accept Margaret’s repeated invitations to visit. Hewson wrote in disbelief that Mrs. Bache “was of the opinion that her husband was quite in the right. She does not therefore suffer the pain of entertaining a mean opinion of him which I am sorry to say most people do. What a pity a few years should make so great an alteration.”33
As the Baches’ old friends deserted them, they became increasingly enmeshed in a new and less elevated social world of Republican political activists. Much more than Freneau, Bache became deeply and personally involved in Republican efforts at organizing a party and mounting election campaigns. As with many Republican activists, Bache found in Philadelphia’s Democratic Society a kind of halfway house between espousing the Republican cause as a private citizen and promoting the emerging political party. One of a national network of such groups, the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania was a political club organized in support of the French Revolution. President Washington and his supporters considered the societies subversive, re-creations of the French Jacobin clubs that were in league with revolutionary France to bring social and political anarchy to America.
Bache was elected to the society’s Committee of Correspondence on 2 January 1794, the day after promising the readers of his newspaper that he would not shrink from his duty as “Editor of a free press.” He quickly became one of the controversial group’s three or four most active members.34 Among his other duties, Bache was placed on a committee charged with a mission that amounted to managing the Republican campaign in the 1794 congressional elections: “calling upon the people to deliberate and decide, at the approaching elections, how far their Representatives are entitled to public confidence, by approving the good and dismissing the bad.”35
Bache became a leader of the Democratic Society’s more radical faction, along with his friends, fellow activists, and contributing editors John Smith and Michael Leib. Smith was a hatter and prominent militia officer, while Leib was a German physician who was emerging as the political tribune of Philadelphia’s ethnic immigrant neighborhoods. These men’s thoroughgoing commitment to Republican ideals, and “outdoor” political organization as the way to realize them, eventually caused a schism in the society over the Whiskey Rebellion. After defending the Democratic Societies in the General Advertiser throughout 1794 as a legitimate, constitutional, and benign means of promoting their political beliefs, Bache and his friends were thoroughly dismayed by the western tax revolt. The impending violence threatened to undermine their ideal of conducting public affairs by discussion and majority vote and to discredit their argument (disbelieved by Hamilton and the Federalists) that a popular, democratic style of politics was compatible with public order. Bache and his friends opposed Hamilton’s excise tax just as the rebels did, but the means they favored to stop it was electing a new congress rather than taking up arms.
At the meeting of 11 September 1794, Leib introduced a resolution condemning “the intemperance of the Western Citizens” and asserting that “so far from entitling them to the patronage of Democrats, [violent resistance] will merit the proscription of every friend of equal liberty.” Leib’s resolution met opposition from society moderates allied with Secretary of the Commonwealth Alexander J. Dallas (also an important Philadelphia attorney), who believed that the existing civil authorities in the West could handle the problem on their own and wanted to avoid embarrassing leading western Republican politicians such as Albert Gallatin. In the ensuing debate, “unusual warmth took place among some of the members,” after which the president of the society along with about half the members walked out of the meeting. Bache’s faction felt so strongly about the matter that several of them, including Dr. Leib and his brother, volunteered for the military force that marched west to quell the insurrection.36
In late 1794 Bache more or less officially declared the General Advertiser a Republican paper when he added the word “Aurora” to the title, installing his mission to promote enlightenment and Democratic Republican principles in the journal’s very name:
The AURORA, as far as the editor’s exertions extend, shall diffuse light within the sphere of its influence,—dispel the shades of ignorance, and gloom of error and thus tend to strengthen the fair fabric of freedom on its surest foundation, publicity and information.37
The controversy over the Jay Treaty soon demonstrated the Baches’ total commitment to Republican party politics and cemented his and his family’s move to a totally different sphere of life. The Aurora revealed the treaty’s previously secret contents to the world on 29 June 1795, and the newspaper’s office became the command center of a national effort to spread the news of the outrageous document and organize opposition to it. Bache immediately turned the treaty’s text into a pamphlet and set out northward with thousands of copies, while another Philadelphia Republican went on a similar mission south.38
At the various stops along the trip, Baches fellow Republican activists (especially other editors) treated him as a comrade in arms. He instructed Margaret to send his mail in care of the leading Republican printers in Boston and New York. In Boston, he was warmly received at the offices of the Independent Chronicle, the city’s leading Republican newspaper, and sought out by Governor Samuel Adams, “a patriot according to my own heart.” The leading spirits of the Chronicle were also the leaders of the Republican party in Boston. Bache met with them daily and attended a town meeting on the treaty that the Republicans were able to dominate because of the documents he had brought. (Bache hoped every city in the country would have a similar meeting, and he helped organize one in New York City on his way home.) Administration supporters in Boston took alarm at this evidence of national coordination among their journalistic antagonists. The visiting editor saw himself denounced as “the arch Jacobinical tool from Philadelphia” in the Boston newspapers. Bache knew he was no tool—he had not been lured into partisan journalism with a government appointment or any other inducement—but he gladly accepted the role of national Republican spokesman and organizer.39
Margaret Bache was as deeply embroiled in the Jay Treaty campaign as was her husband. Margaret was left in charge of the Aurora while Benjamin was away, and though Dr. Leib was assigned to help her, she shared fully in the editorial and financial management of the paper during a tumultuous period. On the first day of Benjamin’s trip, the office was crowded with Philadelphians eager to obtain copies of the pamphlet and the Aurora. “It was more like a fair than anything else,” she reported happily. The editor’s sudden departure, however, prevented the paper from appearing the next day, and Margaret had to face an irate clientele. “You have no Idea how angry every body was that there was no paper of Thursday,” she told her husband. She managed to mollify the Aurora-starved readership by telling them that an accident that had damaged the press.
Then there was another setback: Saturday was the Fourth of July, and only a few of the journeymen were willing to work. “I was mortified that the Aurora did not rise in its fullest glory on this day,” Margaret wrote dejectedly, lamenting that they had been able to produce just half of the normal paper. Nevertheless, she was proud to say that the Monday edition would be a “very full issue”; it was midnight when she wrote, and she was sitting up while one of her husband’s employees read the next paper’s proofs.40
FIGURE 1. Philadelphia Aurora General Advertiser, top half of front page, 29 June 1795. (Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society)
Leib, Smith, and other Republican activists had become the Baches’ circle of friends as well as their political allies. The Baches exchanged their “decided station in Society” for this political underworld of journeyman printers, newspaper writers, and street- and tavern-level activists. The Bache family home and the Aurora office occupied the same building on Market Street. The household became a gathering place for party leaders and the headquarters of what has been called “the Republican party’s Grub Street.” Aurora staff members were free to spend the night if the work kept them too late, and over the years numerous men who were thoroughly disreputable by the standards of the Baches’ former peers found a haven under the Aurora’s roof. Among them were refugee radicals such as the exiled journalists James Thomson Callender and William Duane, the United Irishman and utopian socialist Dr. James Reynolds, and the United Irish leader Theobald Wolfe Tone. Several of the refugees assisted Bache with the Aurora, and Duane eventually became its editor.41
Margaret formed personal and political friendships with some of these men’s wives. Matilda Tone wrote in 1798 to ask how the latest pregnancy of her “dear Friend” was progressing and to inquire after the health of her children. She also made a comment that shows how fully the women shared and were involved in their husbands’ incendiary affairs: “Thank [Benjamin] very much for his Aurora. I welcome it every evening as I would a pleasant, intelligent friend. You can’t think How delightful it is, in this region of Aristocracy to meet a little—I had almost said Treason.” The First Lady of the United Irishmen signed the letter, “Health and Frat.”42
Benjamin Bache’s mission against the Jay Treaty also marks the point at which he became a professional politician, a man who lived both “for” and “off of” Republican politics. He was proprietor of a business (the Aurora) now wholly devoted to politics, and his trip to Boston was an entrepreneurial venture in both politics and publishing. His letters to Margaret expressed concern with both the treaty pamphlet’s political effect and its profitability. From New York, Bache wrote that a previous bundle of treaties sent by another messenger had “sold here like mad” but regretted that the local newspapers had already republished the pamphlet. Otherwise, he thought, four times as many could have been moved. In Boston, the pamphlet sold, but “not so well as I expected”; however, Bache exulted that, thanks to those same pamphlets, “the voice of the toad-eaters of government was drowned in the universal disapprobation of the treaty.” He did sell enough of the 25- to 50-cent pamphlets to pay for the trip, and total sales were sufficient to justify a second edition. (His colleague’s southern journey, however, was a money loser.) In a further effort to make the trip a paying venture, Benjamin had Margaret send him a list of delinquent Aurora subscribers so he could collect overdue bills along his route.43
Henceforward, Bache would also combine business with politics in other ways. Rather than the general-interest bookstore maintained by a typical newspaper publisher, Bache started a specifically political one. Writing to a London bookseller, Bache described his business and the kind of works he wanted to order: “I publish a newspaper and have connected with it pamphlets and books of a political cast. Any thing of merit in the line of political novelty of a republican cast will be most acceptable.”44 Baches stock of Republican “Political Novelties,” constantly advertised in the Aurora, included the literature produced during the recent party battles, the works of Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, the published transcripts of several Irish and English political trials, the French Constitution in translation, a history of the French Revolution, and more outré items such as the Calendrier Republicain and Charles Pigott’s Political Dictionary. (This last work was touted on the basis of its author having been prosecuted in England.)45
To argue that Bache attempted to make money from his political activities is not to label him cynical or venal. His ideal appeared in the Aurora’s masthead motto, “Surgo Ut Prosim,” or “I rise to be useful,” both of which might be translated as a creed of doing well, or at least making a living, by doing good. In fact, the two elements of a political business did not mix very well, with the politics tending to overwhelm the business. Bache fervently believed the American people sided with the Aurora, the Republicans, and the French. Thus he was convinced that Republican political works would naturally sell well. Yet he constantly lost money on his ventures, allowing his desire to get politically valuable literature into people’s hands to prevail over economic realities. The Jay Treaty pamphlet was a prime example, as was an edition of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, which was sold at very low cost so that more could afford to buy it. As one historian has put it, Bache was “functioning outside normal trade practices,” pioneering a new, political sector of the publishing industry.46
After passage of the Jay Treaty, Bache and his successors ran the Aurora explicitly as a party paper, going a step further than Freneau by actively involving it not only in political debate, but also very directly in election campaigns and other forms of practical political organization.47 In the fall elections of 1795, the Aurora campaigned vigorously for the antitreaty ticket, whereas even a year before it had been vaguely apologetic about the very practice of nominating tickets.48 After months of hammering at Washington and the treaty, the Aurora applied this national party issue to the local legislative elections, urging voters, in the words of one contributor, to oust the men “who voted for the man [for example, the state’s Federalist senator] who voted for the Treaty.”
Aurora writers extolled antiadministration candidates, denounced their opponents, and countered each new “ELECTIONEERING LIE” that issued from the Gazette of the United States and the rest of the pro-administration press. Around all of this election material, Bache wove a web of issues and arguments that linked the battle in Philadelphia not only to deeper concerns than which individual won or lost the election, but also to similar battles going on around the country. Exchanges and other papers sent through the mail disseminated the capital Republicans’ words and deeds to their allies and sympathizers in other cities, creating the possibility of unified national action. Bache probably engaged in more of this newspaper electioneering than any other American editor at this time, and to a certain extent he was teaching others how it could be done.49
Bache and the Aurora were quite literally constructing the Republican party during the mid-1790s, and they did it as much through the construction of the newspaper as through substantive argument. In between its advertising, European news, and political essays, the Aurora presented resolutions of political meetings and proceedings of banquets and reports of election results from all over Philadelphia and from other parts of Pennsylvania and the nation. In a time when the national opposition party was little more than some dispersed expressions of discontent and a group of congressmen who voted together, Bache packaged all the different forms of opposition together as a unit, creating an imagined partisan community of readers to whom to these candidates, arguments, resolutions, toasts, and election results belonged.50
Bache and his fellow electioneers employed the histrionic language of Revolutionary ideology in their campaigning, but their sincerely made claims of an imminent threat to liberty also had specific electoral purposes, such as encouraging a large Republican turnout and winning the election. On election day, an address “To the Freemen of the City and County of Philadelphia” presented the “No Treaty” ticket (which included some-time-Aurora coeditor Michael Leib running for state representative) and told voters that they were “summoned at this moment to choose between liberty or slavery.” Elsewhere in that day’s paper, Bache reminded readers that “no privilege [was] more sacred than that of choosing the men who are to make the laws,” and entreated them not to stay home “under the plausible but fallacious idea” that their single votes would not make any difference: “Be it engraven on the mind of every man who has a real regard for his country, that the most important questions ever agitated have been decided by very small majorities.”51
All of this was nothing compared to later years. In early September 1796, Bache announced publicly what had been well known in Philadelphia political circles for months, that Thomas Jefferson would be the Republican candidate for president. The editor had just discovered the long-kept secret that President Washington would not be running for reelection, and he now opened the presidential campaign. It required “no talent at divination” to guess that John Adams would be Jefferson’s opponent, making the election a question of “whether we shall have at the head of our executive a steadfast friend to the Rights of the People, or an advocate for hereditary power and distinctions.”52 From that point, the Aurora was a full partner in the presidential campaign masterminded by House of Representatives clerk John Beckley It extolled Jefferson’s qualifications for the presidency and rebutted Federalist attacks, while decrying Adams for his antirepublican ideas.
The paper was just as involved in the effort to reelect Philadelphia’s Republican congressman, John Swanwick. The Aurora publicized all Republican tickets and meetings and later followed the election returns closely, with a partisan eye.53 Baches involvement in party politics moved to yet a higher level when he ran for the Philadelphia common council on a ticket of Republicans. Like any good candidate, Bache refrained from self-promotion, not mentioning his own candidacy in the paper while boosting other Republican candidates for higher office. Perhaps a bit more self-promotion was needed, however, because he and the rest of the Republican council slate lost.54
It was a good thing that Bache had not turned partisan for either personal preferment or financial remuneration, because he received neither after Jefferson narrowly lost the election of 1796. Politically, he and the Republicans were put in a desperate position after 1796 by the French Directory’s increasingly high-handed and aggressive policy toward the United States, as manifested in the “XYZ Affair” and other incidents. As France’s most vocal defender in the United States, Bache came in for a share of the public opprobrium that shifted from England to France during the Adams years. Even worse, the “quasi-war” made Baches French background and continued support of a French alliance seem almost treasonous.55
In the crisis atmosphere, the Federalist approach to Bache moved beyond disdain to outright persecution. In the spring of 1797, he was physically assaulted and rather seriously injured by Clement Humphries, a young Federalist, while touring a ship at the Philadelphia waterfront. Though Humphries was later fined by the city court, the Adams administration seemed to endorse the assault on Bache by appointing the assailant a bearer of diplomatic dispatches to France in full knowledge of what he had done. With some justice, Bache regarded this action as tantamount to “giving direct encouragement to assassination, and setting a price upon my head.”
Other incidents followed. After a salute to President Adams and a long night of banqueting in May 1798, a group of young Federalists decided to visit the editor’s home. Margaret and the children cowered inside, while the patriotic drunks shouted curses and pounded on the doors and windows; with Benjamin away, the men had to be driven off by neighbors. Bache strongly suspected that the highest authorities approved of these tactics, and indeed First Lady Abigail Adams was predicting in her letters that “the wrath of an insulted people will by & by break upon him [Bache].”56
A few weeks later, the Federalists in Congress began to prepare a bill to punish sedition, with Benjamin Bache and the Aurora squarely in their sights.57 After the attack on his house, Bache had wondered whether it “might, indeed, be a gratification to some that I should have my throat cut,” and the Sedition bill seemed to hold out that prospect: in the original Senate version introduced by James Lloyd of Maryland, the measure defined the French as enemies of the United States and prescribed the death penalty for any who gave them aid and comfort.58 Some Federalists were unwilling to wait for an act of Congress to outlaw the Aurora, and on 26 June a U.S. Marshal arrested Bache on a federal warrant. Bache was charged with “libelling the President & the Executive Government, in a manner tending to excite sedition, and opposition to the laws, by sundry publications and republications.” Bache and two sureties were required to post $4,000 dollars in bail—all without the publications in question ever being specified.59
Bache needed help paying this enormous sum and received it from the staunch Republicans Thomas Leiper and Israel Israel, the former a prosperous tobacconist and the latter the keeper of a tavern popular with Republicans. Whatever share of the family fortune Bache may have had access to was used up or cut off by now. The opinion around Philadelphia was that Bache’s newspaper was in decline, and the editor did only a little to deny the fact. “Combinations were tried to deprive the Editor of support,” he wrote in one self-vindicatory pamphlet, “and tho’ by this means the establishment of the Aurora has not been as lucrative as it might have been, it has been sufficiently so to support itself and its editor.” Even this tentative affirmation was belied by other signals. In July 1798 Bache printed a “communication” that praised his own political services and suggested it was the duty of every Republican to support their editor with subscriptions:
It is hoped that the republicans, in whose cause he has suffered the most malignant persecution, and undergone the grossest calumnies, will in every part of the union countenance his virtuous exertions. Although his paper already has a very general circulation, no republican, who can afford it, should neglect becoming a subscriber.60
It seems likely that the sedition prosecution left Bache nearly bankrupt. Margaret had made the financial situation sound so dire in a letter to her brother that he wrote back urging her to have Benjamin put the family property in her and the children’s names and move back to St. Croix immediately.61
Despite repeated charges that Bache was in the pay of the French or of Thomas Jefferson, the bail money was the first political financial aid he had received in eight years of running the paper. He enjoyed no salary and had no hope of government printing contracts; nor had any national Republican leaders been particularly helpful. In October 1797 James Monroe had advanced Bache $600 for the publication of a book defending Monroe’s conduct as minister to France, then peremptorily asked for the money back a few months later.62 (Repayment was the not the custom of John Fenno regarding his loans from Hamilton.) Only when it appeared that the Aurora might actually collapse did Thomas Jefferson take any action in its behalf. Then he solicited subscriptions, but with nothing like the energy he had expended for Freneau. The Aurora and another Republican paper “totter for want of subscriptions,” he wrote Madison. “We should really exert ourselves to procure them, for if these papers fall, republicanism will be entirely brow-beaten.”63
Jefferson’s and Madison’s correspondence reveals little evidence that they followed up on this call to arms. Jefferson seemed more concerned with preserving his reputation from too close an association with Bache and his fellow radicals. The vice president denied at great length, even to fellow Republicans, John Fenno’s charge that he had met with the Aurora editor and his friends Doctors Leib and Reynolds.64
Insult was added to Bache’s physical and financial injuries by the rise of William Cobbett on the Philadelphia journalistic scene. No democratic radical in his first American phase, Cobbett belligerently opposed the Republicans and all their doings, but he supported Great Britain more than the Federalists and had little to do with party politics. A character assassin and hatemonger sui generis, his satirical pamphlets and newspaper, Porcupines Gazette, served up political polemic and personal attacks in a style that was earthy and accessible enough to make them popular entertainment. As such, and in contrast to most of the other political editors and writers in Philadelphia, Cobbett seems to have actually made money on his publications.65
Bache and the Aurora provided a good deal of Cobbett’s material from almost the moment Porcupine’s Gazette began in March 1797. In terms of detailed personal vilification, Cobbett went far beyond anything Fenno, Freneau, or Bache had ever published. He began by referring to Bache as a printer “notoriously in the pay of France” and continued by berating the “treasonable career of abuse” of “this prostitute son of oil and lamp-black” and wondering why the Republican paper had not been suppressed.
For publishing the Calendrier Republicain, Cobbett treated Bache, in November 1797, to a remarkably inaccurate and vitriolic character sketch that conflated the editor with his office-seeking cousin Temple and insulted Benjamin Franklin to boot: “This atrocious wretch (worthy descendant of old Ben) knows that all men of understanding set him down as an abandoned liar, as a tool, and a hireling; . . . He spent several years in hunting offices under the Federal Government . . . when he found he could not obtain employ in one quarter, he sought it in another . . . from that time to this been as faithful to the cut-throats of Paris, as ever dog was to his master.” Never one to limit himself to mere politics, Cobbett added that the overworked and undernourished Bache was “an ill-looking devil. His eyes never get above your knees. He is of a sallow complexion, hollow-cheeked, dead-eyed . . . just like ... a fellow who has been about a week or ten days on a gibbet.” Cobbett later amplified the gibbet remark with the characteristically bloody-minded suggestion that Bache be dealt with like “a TURK, A JEW, A JACOBIN, OR A DOG.”66
The toll that such journalistic thuggery took on Baches battered reputation and sensibilities can only be imagined. If he and Margaret had any illusions about where they stood in Philadelphia society after five years of partisanship, the fact that Cobbett could write such things and be not only approved of but also popular must have dispelled them. John Fenno and his mentor, Benjamin Russell of the Boston Columbian Centinel, sniggered in print at the “tradesmen” who were now Bache’s friends and benefactors. In response, Bache sarcastically agreed with Fenno that his friends were “mere simple men, none of your high-flying well borns, none of your speculators in moonshine . . . they are only plain, simple, unaffected republicans, and this is indeed a heinous fault.”67
By the end of that difficult summer of 1798, Bache was moving toward further integration with the evolving party, taking steps to make the Aurora a more self-consciously national party paper than it had been. He finally carried out something like the plan Jefferson had suggested in 1791 and began a “country” edition of the paper published three times a week. Each “country” Aurora featured two days worth of the daily paper’s political matter on the front and back of a single sheet, thereby saving postage and creating a product tailored to the distant subscriber. In announcing the new edition, Bache indicated that the Aurora’s financial picture was finally improving. The paper had gained two hundred subscribers since the beginning of July, when the Sedition Act had been passed. “The encrease in the circulation of this paper has been beyond the editor’s most sanguine expectations,” Bache enthused, and since the formal sedition proceedings against him started “it has been rapid beyond parallel. Thus the daring hand of persecution already counteracts its own designs.”
Bache was even more amazed to find some of the paper’s subscribers paying their overdue bills and a few actually sending in the required advance payments for the next year. Like the political professional he had become, Bache took these glimmerings of business success as vindication of his political course. He wrote proudly and almost tearfully of his realization that “the calumnies of the enemies of liberty in this country have not deprived the editor of the good opinion of a great portion of his fellow citizens.” It would be criminal of him
to shrink before the frowns of ambition . . . the malice of little men dazzled by the glare of power, at a time when the liberal support he receives from various parts of the United States, evince not only the stubborn consistency of freedom and the love of truth, but a marked approbation of his past conduct as well as a determination to aid him in the arduous and expensive undertaking in which he is engaged.68
Unfortunately for Baches rejuvenated ambitions, Philadelphia was in the midst of another yellow fever epidemic. The Baches were probably no longer among those who could afford to flee to the countryside, and at any rate the editor was determined to remain zealously at his post. On Friday, 7 September 1798, the day of a nominating meeting he had been planning for, Bache apparently fell ill. The next day, his assistant, William Duane, informed Aurora subscriber St. George Tucker that his employer seemed to be recovering, but Bache was dead by the following Monday night. News of the editor’s demise reached Tucker while Duane’s letter was still sitting on his desk. “So there is an end to all his persecutions,” the Virginian scribbled sadly below the signature. Bache’s rival John Fenno had made a vow similar to Bache’s in August, “to continue here so long as other printers remain at their Posts,” entrusting his life to the Deity he was sure took the Federalist side in the party quarrel. Fenno expired exactly one week after Bache.69
A few hours after her husband’s death, Margaret Bache issued a black-bordered and sternly political notice, addressed to the “friends of civil liberty and patrons of the Aurora.” She promised that the paper would resume shortly under her own direction and lamented “the loss of a man inflexible in virtue, unappalled by power or persecution—and who in dying knew no anxieties but what were excited by his apprehensions for his country—and for his young family”70 Despite her public bravery, Margaret was devastated. She had given birth just before her husband’s death, and six weeks later she was “disconsolate as ever—weeping over her babe.” Determined to give Benjamin an appropriate memorial, she rebuffed several attempts to buy the Aurora (one by Federalists) and saw to it that the paper did reemerge, with her husband’s handpicked successor, William Duane, at the editorial helm, and herself as proprietor.71
St. George Tucker was wrong about Bache’s persecutions ending at his death. When Margaret and Duane restarted the paper in November, William Cobbett made it a point of pride to unleash his savagery on her. Writing that he held the proprietor of a paper responsible for its contents over some “vagabond journeyman newsmonger,” he promised “that person . . . whether bearded or not bearded, whether dressed in breeches or petticoats, . . . shall receive no quarter from me.” Cobbett reached immediately for the most vicious weapon available, sexual innuendo, and then turned threatening: “I shall look upon her as the authoress of the licentiousness, falsehood, impudence, and bawdry, contained in [the Aurora] . . . she shall disavow the whole paper, or decency shall disavow her.” Thereafter he addressed her in the paper as “Mother Bache” or “Peg.”
Cobbett’s assault reached an especially low point in May 1799. He reprinted Margaret’s notice of Benjamin’s death and attacked her “modesty” for having “struck it off before his corpse was cold.” In the next column, he reprinted a snippet from an Aurora piece referring to castration in Italy as an example of a barbaric Old World practice abandoned during the Age of Reason. Cobbett hooted at the “maternal zeal with which she falls upon the remorseless barbers” and compared her to “a sympathetic Sow” prone to “grunt and champ and foam and fly, ‘till all the Swinish Multitude were in an uproar.” Two days later, pleased with having conceived an even more coarse and brutal jest, Cobbett added the comment that the “fury of this she-citizen” against castration “appears very natural, when we recollect the loss she had recently experienced.”72
Margaret Bache remained an outcast from respectable society for the rest of her life. She married William Duane in 1800, much to the titillation of Philadelphia’s supposedly high-minded Federalists. President Adams’s son Thomas wrote a friend that he was considering writing a satire based on “the scandalous stories of Duane & Madam Peggy’s courtship-sham marriage.” Becoming a political professional in the early republic could mean losing everything—for an editor or for the woman who shared his vocation.73
Cobbett’s attacks also had a significance apart from the human damage they did. He was trying to drive the Baches from the field of public debate. In the eighteenth-century public sphere, political writers usually concealed their identities, trying to become merely one disembodied contributor to the abstract “public opinion” that was to be formed through printed debate. In the past, the words of kings and nobles had been obeyed because they were kings and nobles, and the words of commoners, be they shopkeepers, artisans, laborers, women, or racial others, were disregarded because of who they were. In the more mild colonial American situation, gentleman and those above them on the social scale gained automatic credence for their words, while others were dismissed automatically if they had access to print at all. In the new “republic of letters,” the disembodiment of the writer and the excision of his or her personal identity focused attention on what was written rather than who wrote it and theoretically evened the political odds.
Cobbett’s personal exposures and ridicule thrust his targets’ private identities into the public sphere, ensuring that no one could read their words without thinking of the alleged low character and bad morals of the persons who wrote them. Thus treated, Republican editors should have been rendered ineffective, illegitimate participants in political debate. Cobbett was simply engaging in a more brutal and specific form of the name-calling practiced by less skilled Federalist writers such as John Fenno. It was the politics of exclusion, of ejecting opponents from the public sphere by reembodying them in guises that were, in Michael Warner’s words, “less than public.”74
The problem with this strategy was that it could potentially backfire, by turning editors into public figures whose lowliness and sufferings ordinary farmers, workers, and shopkeepers could identify with rather than despise. When that happened, as it would in Bache’s own newspaper, printed political debate could begin to move beyond the eighteenth-century customs that had made newspapers a powerful weapon in the hands of the American gentry, but not yet against them.