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.
John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, 1798.
William Cobbett’s Porcupine’s Gazette, 1798.
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”:
The Scotch renegade Callender is at present in the pay of Surgo ut Prosim, for the purpose of traducing the people of this country.
“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:
In this morning’s Aurora, Young Lightening-Rod has justified the conduct of his [French] friends even in their last nefarious measures against the commerce of this country … I look upon the fellow as a sort of bedlamite, or I must insist that he looks upon himself as talking to nobody but fools and idiots …
“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:
The Bishop’s Lady knows what Children and Grandchildren I have, their Ages, &c. So when I was to come away on Monday the 12th [of August] in the Morning, she insisted on my staying that one Day longer that we might together keep my Grandson’s Birthday … The chief Toast of the Day was Master Benjamin Bache, which the venerable old Lady began in a Bumper of Mountain [a Malaga wine]. The Bishop’s Lady politely added, “And that he may be as good a Man as his Grandfather.” I said I hop’d he would be much better.76
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
Benny continues well, and grows amazingly. He is a very sensible and a very good Lad, and I love him much. I had Thoughts of … fitting him for Public Business, thinking he might be of Service hereafter to his Country; but being now convinc’d that Service is no Inheritance, as the Proverb says, I have determin’d to give him a Trade [in printing and letter founding] that he may have something to depend on … He has already begun to learn the business from Masters who come to my House, and is very diligent in working and quick in learning …78
The sight of them was wonderful, as a family friend observed:
With Franklin, there is a youth of sixteen years, bright and intelligent, who looks like him physically and who, having decided to become a printer, is working to that end. There is something very imposing in the sight of the American Legislator’s grandson taking part in so simple a task.79
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 TWO
YOUNG LIGHTENING-ROD
I sometimes received visits from Mr. Bache … always with pleasure, because [he is a man] … of abilities and of principles the most friendly to liberty & our present form of government. Mr. Bache has another claim on my respect, as being the grandson of Dr. Franklin, the greatest man & ornament of the age and country in which he lived.
THOMAS JEFFERSON,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1801–180982
[Benjamin Bache’s Philadelphia Aurora] is the highest and, in my opinion, best political paper.
He is the grandson of Dr. Franklin and a republican …
JAMES MONROE,
&
nbsp; PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1817–182583
FRIDAY, MARCH 9, 1798
GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER
JUST PUBLISHED and for sale at the office of the AURORA (Price one-eighth of a dollar.) An Expostulatory letter, TO GEN. WASHINGTON (Late President of the United States) ON THE SUBJECT OF HIS CONTINUING A PROPRIETOR OF SLAVES. Written by a citizen of Liverpool …
George Washington reads the Philadelphia Aurora, and George Washington absolutely detests it. If he sees this advertisement for a pamphlet against his slaveholding, he can recall several Aurora editorials on the same subject,84 one of which, according to Thomas Jefferson, made Washington slam the paper on the floor with a “damn.”85
The Aurora published its first series of anti-Washington articles around the beginning of 1793 (the year Washington declared American neutrality in the war between Britain and France). Washington’s birthday was to be celebrated on February 21, and on January 2nd the Aurora published a mock advertisement for an American poet laureate. The humor was bitter:
TO THE NOBLESSE AND COURTIERS
OF THE UNITED STATES …
WANTED against the 21st of February, a person … who is willing to offer up his services to government as Poet laureate … One thing … will be certainly required, a dexterity in composing birthday odes … [C]ertain monarchical prettiness must be highly extolled, such as LEVIES, DRAWING ROOMS, STATELY NODS INSTEAD OF SHAKING HANDS, TITLES OF OFFICE, SECLUSION FROM THE PEOPLE, &C …86
Benny contrasted the pomp and pretentiousness of George Washington with the simplicity and modesty of his grandfather and with the egalitarianism of the French Revolution. Why not celebrate Ben Franklin’s birthday?
[I]n ascribing all the honors and glory to one man, you deprive … others … of their portion … Shall that venerable sage (who has since gained another immortality) … who … tamed the rage of thunder and of despotism, shall that philosopher who most contributed to extend the conquests of liberty over the whole earth, shall he be assigned to oblivion? … [S]hall his shade bear witness to our ingratitude? No, illustrious FRANKLIN … freemen cannot drop the curtain of indifference upon your services …
Turn your eyes, me brethren, to France … [Y]ou will see none but [equal] citizens, nothing but equality, the substance and not the shadow of democratic spirit—[A]re there any levees [audiences] in France since the downfall of monarchy? Are there any birthday celebrations and titles of office there? Does any officer of her government refuse to mix with the citizens? Does the pomp and splendour and distance of royalty cloath any officer acting under the republic?87
Shortly before the celebration of Washington’s birthday, the Aurora published a letter to Benny Bache which included:
Will this monarchical farce never end? … Could your venerable grandfather view from his celestial residence the mockery of royalty which is already acting among us? … No man ever deserved better of his country than Dr. Franklin, and yet the laurels which he nobly won are torn from his brow and entwined around the brow of another, who, if not second, is at most not more than his equal in fame and desert …88
For the remainder of Washington’s time as President, Benny described Washington’s comportment as “that of a monarch,”89 his governance as the “apish mimickry of Kingship,”90 citing his formal Tuesday-afternoon court-style public receptions (“levees”) at the President’s House,91 his “pompous carriages, splendid feasts, and tawdry gowns,”92 his “creamed coloured coach, drawn by six bay horses … attended by a wond’rous number of servants in livery,”93 and his encouragement of the public celebration of his birthday.94
In 1795, after Washington signed the Jay Treaty with England (which Thomas Jefferson described as an “infamous act which is really nothing more than a treaty of alliance between England & the Anglomen of this country against the legislature & people of the United States”95), the Aurora widened the accusations.
With the observation that Washington’s “new character ought to … shake off the fetters that his name has hitherto imposed on the minds of freemen,”96 the Aurora characterized Washington as anti-French and pro-British,97 charged that “[t]he administration of our government has been a series of errors or of crimes,”98 revealed that the U.S. Treasury had unlawfully advanced “expense” monies to Washington far exceeding the presidential salary he had supposedly waived (“the world was led to believe that, as President, he received no compensation; they are now permitted to suspect…”),99 urged the President’s immediate resignation (“let no flatterer persuade you to rest one hour longer at the helm of state”100), and published repeated calls for his impeachment.101
Not content merely to criticize Washington’s presidency, the Aurora attacked his leadership during the American Revolution, describing his mental faculties as “unadorned by extraordinary features or uncommon capacity,” his politics as an “inoffensive newtrality,” and his elevation to revolutionary war commander as an act of compromise (“because you were in principle neither a Briton nor an American, a whig nor a tory”).102 It portrayed Washington as lukewarm toward independence (“I ask you, sir, to point out ONE SINGLE ACT which unequivocally proves you a FRIEND to the INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA”), incompetent as a military leader (“[T]here is scarcely an action which stamps your character as a consummate General”), and deserving little credit for the final outcome of the war.103 It questioned how the owner of a thousand slaves could be the symbol of freedom (“[I]t must appear a little incongruous then that Liberty’s Apostle should been seen with chains in his hands, holding men in bondage”)104 and republished some wartime correspondence (“I love my king; you know I do …”) which purportedly discredited his patriotism.105
Benjamin Bache and his Philadelphia Aurora led the journalistic assault on Washington. Other newspapers merely copied. As one historian has written, “[I]t is unnecessary to investigate the motives of dozens of independent journalists and critics in order to reach some understanding of the nature of the assault on Washington. It is unnecessary, because one man alone—Benjamin Franklin Bache—either wrote or published a vast majority of the attacks.”106
George Washington suffered from the Aurora’s verbal onslaught, protesting that “[Bache’s] papers are outrages on common decency,”107 and “void of truth and fairness.”108 He complained
[i]f you read the Aurora of this City … you cannot but have perceived with what malignant industry, and persevering falsehoods I am assailed, in order to weaken, if not destroy, the confidence of the Public.109
But the attacks took their toll.
By the end of the winter of 1795/96, Washington suggested to then Vice President John Adams that he would not seek the presidency in the coming autumn election.110 Washington explained his readiness to leave office as a “disinclination to be longer buffited in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers.”111 Early in May, preparing a first draft of his Farewell Address, Washington included some words (deleted from the final text on Alexander Hamilton’s advice) bemoaning that
some of the gazettes of the United States have teemed with all the Invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent to misrepresent my politics and affections; to wound my reputation and feelings; and to weaken, if not entirely destroy the confidence you have been pleased to repose in me.112
Washington feared a loss of reputation and observed (at the beginning of July),
That Mr. Bache will continue his attacks on the Government, there can be no doubt, but that they will make no Impression on the public mind is not so certain, for drops of Water will Impress (in time) the hardest Marble.113
On July 18, Washington wrote his Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering,
The continual attacks which have been made and are still making on the administration, in Bache’s [paper are as] … indecent as they are devoid of truth and fairness … Under these circumstances, it would be wished that the enlightened public could have a clear and comprehensive view of fact
s. But how to give it lies the difficulty … I see no method at present …114
On September 17, Washington signed a public announcement he would leave the presidency. Two days later, a Philadelphia newspaper carried this Farewell Address.115 When he actually left office the following March, the Philadelphia Aurora proclaimed,
If ever there was a 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 currency to political inequity and to legalize corruption …116
The same day, George Washington exploded,
Mr. Bache has … celebrity in a certain way, for his Calumnies are to be exceeded only by his Impudence, and both stand unrivalled.117
And the following day, in the Gazette of the United States, John Fenno wrote,
[W]hat pain must the shade of the immortal Franklin experience in beholding the apostasy of his grandson … Mr. Bache … seems to take a kind of hellish pleasure in defaming the name of WASHINGTON. That a man who was born in America and is part of the great family of the United States could thus basely aim his poisoned dagger at the FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY is sorely to be lamented.118
By then, “the FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY” was gone.
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