by Jill Lepore
The culture of the fact—the idea of empiricism that had spread from law to government—hadn’t yet quite spread to newspapers, which were full of shipping news and runaway slave ads, and word of slave rebellions and Indian wars, and of the latest meeting of Parliament. Newspapers were interested in truth, but they established truth, as Franklin explained, by printing all sides, and letting them do battle. Printers did not consider it their duty to print only facts; they considered it their duty to print the “Opinions of Men,” as Franklin put it, and let the best man win: truth will out.
But if the culture of the fact hadn’t yet spread to newspapers, it had spread to history. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes had written that “The register of Knowledge of Fact is called History.”74 One lesson Americans would learn from the facts of their own history had to do with the limits of the freedom of the press, and this was a fact on which they dwelled, and a liberty they grew determined to protect.
After James Franklin’s tangles with the law in Boston, the next battle over the freedom of the press was staged in New York, the busiest port on the mainland, where African slaves owned by the Dutch had once built a wall at the edge of town, and African slaves owned by the English had taken it down, leaving Wall Street behind. In 1732, a new governor arrived in New York to take up his office in city hall, built by Africans out of the stones that had once formed the wall.
William Cosby was a dandy and a lout. Like the governors of all but four of the mainland colonies, he’d been appointed by the king. He had neither any particular qualifications for the office nor any ties to the people over whom he would rule. He was greedy and corrupt. To topple him, a New York lawyer named James Alexander, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, hired a German immigrant named John Peter Zenger to print a new newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal. The first issue appeared in 1733. Much of the paper consisted of excerpts from Cato’s Letters and like-minded essays written, anonymously, by Alexander. “No Nation Antient or Modern ever lost the Liberty of freely Speaking, Writing, or Publishing their Sentiments but forthwith lost their Liberty in general and became Slaves,” Alexander wrote. By “slaves” he meant what Locke meant: a people subject to the tyranny of absolute and arbitrary rule. He most emphatically didn’t mean the Africans who worked and lived in his own house. One in five New Yorkers was a slave. Slaves built the city, its hulking stone houses, its nail-knocked wooden wharves. They dug the roads, and their own graves, at the Negroes Burying Ground. They carried water for steeping tea and wood for burning. They loaded and unloaded the ships, steps from the slave market. But the liberty to freely speak, write, and publish was not theirs.75
Cosby, brittle and high-handed, like many an imperious and thin-skinned ruler after him, could not abide criticism. He ordered all copies of Zenger’s paper burned, and had Zenger, a poor tradesman who was doing another man’s bidding, arrested for seditious libel.
At a time when political parties were frowned upon by nearly everyone as destructive of the political order—“Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few,” remarked the poet Alexander Pope in 1727—two political factions nevertheless emerged in the hurly-burly city of New York: the Court Party, which supported Cosby, and the Country Party, which opposed him. “We are in the midst of Party flames,” lamented Daniel Horsmanden, a petty, small-minded placeman appointed by Cosby to the Supreme Court. But three thousand miles from London, weeks of sailing time away from any relief from the abuses of a tyrannical governor, New Yorkers began to believe that parties might be “not only necessary in free Government, but of great service to the Public.” As one New Yorker wrote in 1734, “Parties are a check upon one another, and by keeping the Ambition of one another within Bounds, serve to maintain the public Liberty.”76
The next year, Zenger was tried before the colony’s Supreme Court, in that city hall of stone. Alexander, whose authorship of the essays remained unknown, served as Zenger’s lawyer until the court’s chief justice, a Cosby appointee, had him disbarred. Zenger was then represented by Andrew Hamilton, an especially shrewd lawyer from Philadelphia. Hamilton did not dispute that Zenger had printed articles critical of the governor. Instead, he argued that everything that Zenger had printed was true—Cosby really was a dreadfully bad governor—and dared a jury to disagree. In his closing argument, he both drew on Cato’s Letters and elevated the controversy in New York to epic proportions, in a rhetorical move that would become commonplace by the 1760s, as more colonies bridled at English rule. The question, Hamilton told the jury, “is not the Cause of a poor Printer, nor of New-York alone.” No, “It is the best Cause. It is the Cause of Liberty.”77
The jury found Zenger not guilty. Cosby died ignominiously the next year. But New Yorkers’ zeal for parties did not abate. There was even talk, for a time, of a civil war. The Country Party went on to dispute the authority of Cosby’s beleaguered successor, George Clarke, who reported to London, astounded, that New Yorkers believed that “if a Governor misbehave himself they may depose him and set up another.”78
And yet the idea that a people might depose a tyrant and replace him with one of themselves as a ruler was not, of course, such an astonishing notion: it lay behind every slave rebellion. In the years after the Zenger trial, fear that just such a conspiracy was in the minds of the city slaves became an obsession of their owners. In 1741, when fires broke out across the city, and Clarke’s own mansion—the governor’s mansion—burned to the ground, many New Yorkers became convinced that the fires had been set by the city’s slaves, plotting a rebellion, not unlike the rebellions that had taken place in the 1730s in Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina—and, if more violent, not altogether unlike the rebellion waged by the Country Party against Cosby. Were these not yet more terrifying party flames?
“The Negroes are rising!” New Yorkers shouted from street corners. Many of the city’s slaves had come to New York from the Caribbean; not a few had come from islands known for rebellion. Caesar, owned by a Dutch baker, was able to read and write, like Jemmy, the leader of South Carolina’s Stono Rebellion. Caesar had also fathered a child with a white woman—another crossing of racial lines. He was one of the first men arrested in New York. There followed whispered rumors and tortured confessions. Daniel Horsmanden decided that “most of the Negroes in town were corrupted” and that they planned to murder all the whites and elect Caesar as their governor.
What happened in New York in the 1730s and 1740s set a pattern in American politics. At Horsmanden’s urging, more than 150 black men in the city were arrested, thrown in prison, and interrogated. Many were tried. The outcomes of the trials of Zenger and men like Caesar could hardly have been more different. White New Yorkers had decided that they could bear the singe of party flames: political dissent, in the form of a newspaper and a political party opposed to the royally appointed governor, they could tolerate. But dissent in the form of a slave rebellion they could not. The very court that had acquitted Zenger tried and convicted thirty black men, sentencing thirteen to be burned at the stake and seventeen more to be hanged, along with four whites. “Bonfires of the Negros,” one colonist called the executions in 1741. But these, too, were party flames. Most of the rest of the black men who had been arrested were taken from their families and sold to the Caribbean, a fate many considered to be worse than death. Caesar, who at the gallows refused to confess, was hung in chains, his rotting body displayed for months, in hopes that his “Example and Punishment might break the Rest, and induce some of them to unfold this Mystery of Iniquity.”79 But the mystery of iniquity wasn’t conspiracy; it was slavery itself.
Waves of rebellion lashed the shores of the English Atlantic for more than a century, from Boston to Barbados, from New York to Jamaica, from the Carolinas and back again to London. “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; / Britons never will be slaves,” read a poem written in England in 1740 that became the empire’s anthem, and America’s anthem, too. It was lost on no one that the loudest calls for liberty in the early m
odern world came from a part of that world that was wholly dependent on slavery.
Slavery does not exist outside of politics. Slavery is a form of politics, and slave rebellion a form of violent political dissent. The Zenger trial and the New York slave conspiracy were much more than a dispute over freedom of the press and a foiled slave rebellion: they were part of a debate about the nature of political opposition, and together they established its limits. Both Cosby’s opponents and Caesar’s followers allegedly plotted to depose the governor. One kind of rebellion was celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure. In American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and dark: the threat of black rebellion gave a license to white political opposition. The American political tradition was forged by philosophers and by statesmen, by printers and by writers, and it was forged, too, by slaves.
Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 woodcut served as both a political cartoon and a map of the colonies. ON MAY 9, 1754, Benjamin Franklin, a man of parts, printed a woodcut in the Pennsylvania Gazette. It was titled “JOIN, or DIE,” and it pictured a snake, chopped into eight pieces, labeled, by their initials, from head to tail: New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
For centuries, the kings and queens of Europe had fought over how to divvy up North America, as if the land were a cake to be carved. They staked their claims on the ground, naming towns and waging wars, and they staked their claims with maps, drawing lines and coloring shapes. In 1681, a map called “North America Divided into its Principall Parts where are distinguished the several States which belong to the English, Spanish, and French” was bound in an atlas printed in London, with colors inked by hand. It took only passing notice of natives of these lands, vaguely noting the “Apache” near New Mexico. Like many maps, it became very quickly outdated. England and Scotland formed a union in 1707 and went on waging an on-again, off-again war with France and Spain that spilled over onto the North American continent, where both Britain and France allied with Indians. The colonists named these wars after the kings or queens under whose reign they fell: King William’s War (1689–1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), and King George’s War (1744–48). North America was divided into its principal parts, and then it was divided again, and again.
Franklin’s “JOIN, or DIE” woodcut illustrated an article, written by Franklin, about the need for the colonies to form a common defense—against France and Spain, and against warring Indians and rebelling slaves. Franklin, forty-eight, by then a man of means and accomplishment, dressed a cut fancier than his Quaker townsmen and spoke with warmth and force. In April 1754, the governor of Pennsylvania had appointed him to serve as a commissioner to a meeting, scheduled for June, in Albany, New York, where delegates from the colonies were to negotiate a treaty with a confederation of Iroquois, the so-called Six Nations: the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the Senecas, and the Tuscaroras. “Our Enemies have the very great Advantage of being under one Direction, with one Council, and one Purse,” Franklin wrote, suggesting it was this unity that Britain’s mainland American colonies lacked.80
Since running away from his apprenticeship in Boston in 1723, Franklin had headed very many civic-minded schemes for the North American colonies as they spread westward, farther from shore, farther from the islands, farther from London, and farther from one another. Many of those schemes involved closing the distance between the colonies, chiefly by improving communication between them.
Franklin, champion of the freedom of the press, promoted, in every way, the diffusion of knowledge. In 1731, he founded the first lending library in America, the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 1732, he began printing Poor Richard’s Almanack, which reached across the colonies and gave Americans a common store of proverbs and even a shared political history, as when, on the page for the month of June, Franklin added this notation: “On the 15th of this month, anno 1215, was Magna Charta sign’d by King John, for declaring and establishing English Liberty.” In 1736 Franklin was elected clerk of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly. The next year, he was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia, and began improvements to the postal service. “The first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies, which confines the Attention of People to mere Necessaries, is now pretty well over,” he wrote in 1743, in a pamphlet titled A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America. Everywhere in America there were “Men of Speculation,” conducting experiments, recording observations, making discoveries. “But as from the Extent of the Country such Persons are widely separated, and seldom can see and converse or be acquainted with each other, so that many useful Particulars remain uncommunicated, die with the Discoverers, and are lost to Mankind.” He therefore established the American Philosophical Society, the colonies’ first learned society.81
In much the same spirit that Franklin founded a library and a philosophical society, he dedicated himself to his work as postmaster: he wanted ideas to circulate, blood in the colonies’ veins. He went on a tour of the colonies inspecting the post roads. He calculated their distance, and the time it took to travel from farm to farm, from town to town. He was also taking a kind of a census, counting people, and measuring the distance between them.
By 1750, even though the overwhelming majority of migrants to England’s colonies had gone to the Caribbean, four out of every five people living in British America lived in one of the thirteen mainland colonies. This ratio was a consequence of different rates of mortality in different parts of Britain’s American empire. Migrants to the Caribbean died in heaps. In New England, English settlers enjoyed very long lives. The southern colonies had more in common with the Caribbean: a black majority and a high mortality rate. The middle colonies were mixed, a stew of Scots, Irish, English, Dutch, Germans, and Africans, a population healthier than that of the Caribbean but not as healthy as that of New England. Yet for all their differences, by some measures the mainland colonies were becoming more alike in the middle of the eighteenth century: “I found but little difference in the manners and character of the people in the different provinces I passed thro,” wrote the Scottish doctor Alexander Hamilton in 1744, after making a tour on horseback with his African slave, Dromo, from Maryland to Maine.82
One way in which the mainland colonies were becoming more alike was that so many of them were bound up in a religious revival, a more expressive religion, less in awe of ministers, more gripped by the power of the spirit and the equality of all souls under heaven. George White-field, a passionate evangelical from England, drew crowds of thousands. Fastidious and zealous, Whitefield was also sickly and cross-eyed—the uncharitable called him “Dr. Squintum.” Raised by a widowed innkeeper, he came from the humblest of people, and in the colonies he attracted, from town to town, what he called a “cloud of witnesses” from all ranks of society. He told his followers they could be born again, into the body of Christ, and urged them to cast off the teachings of more restrained ministers. “I am willing to go to prison and to death for you,” he said. “But I am not willing to go to heaven without you.”83
George Whitefield’s preaching stirred ordinary Americans and set them swooning, but it also inspired study, and intellectual independence, represented here in the form of a woman, in the lower left, wearing spectacles to study Scripture. This, too, represented a kind of revolution: Whitefield emphasized the divinity of ordinary people, at the expense of the authority of their ministers. In 1739, a gathering of orthodox clergy in Philadelphia had ruled that all ministers must have a degree from Harvard, Yale, or a British or European university. But Whitefield was a people’s preacher, preaching to farmers and artisans, seamen and servants.84
Franklin had his doubts about Whitefield, but about religion, as about much else, he practiced discretion. “Talking against religion is unchaining a Tiger,” as he put it. On other matters, he had far more to say. Having traveled the colonies and measured their extent, a
nd having tried to tally the people, he wrote in 1751 an essay about the size of the population, called “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.”
Franklin wanted to know: What would be the fate of colonists if the colonies were to grow bigger than the place they’d come from? Land was cheap in the colonies, “so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation.” And if that man marries and has children, he and his wife could be confident that there would be plenty of land for their children, too. Franklin guessed the population of the mainland colonies to be about “One Million English Souls,” and his calculations suggested that this number would double every twenty-five years. At that rate, in only a century, “the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water.”
Franklin’s numbers were off; his estimates weren’t too high; they were too low. At the time, more than 1.5 million people lived in Britain’s thirteen mainland colonies. Those colonies were far more densely settled than New France or New Spain. Only 60,000 French settlers lived in Canada and 10,000 more in Louisiana. New Spain was even more thinly settled. It was also more difficult—impossible—in New Spain and New France to separate out the settlers from the natives, since so many formed families together. In Britain’s North American colonies, such unions were less frequently acknowledged, most kept actively hidden.
Franklin, like many an American after him, lost his trademark equanimity when it came to the question of color. In Spanish America, a land of mestizos, slave owners commonly freed their slaves in their wills; by 1775, free blacks outnumbered black slaves. Something similar happened in New France, where the families of French traders and Indians were known as Métis. Both there and in New Spain, people from different parts of the world married and reared children together over generations. Color in many ways marked status, but it did not mark a line between slavery and freedom, and color meant color: reds and browns, pinks and yellows. Britain’s mainland colonies established a far different and more brutal racial regime, one that imagined only two colors, black and white, and two statuses, slave and free. Laws forbade mixed-race marriage, decreed the children of a slave mother to be slaves, and discouraged or prohibited manumissions. The owners of slaves very often had children with their female slaves, but they did not raise them as their own children, or free them, or even acknowledge them; instead, they deemed them slaves, and called them “black.” Franklin, reckoning with that racial line, added one more observation to his essay on population; he wrote about a new race, a people who were “white.”