66. The Tory Press in America

While the Whigs were leading an unsuccessful opposition in England, a small group of Tories, looked on with favor by the royal officials, were doing the same to the main current in America. Cynically crying out for “liberty”—they had never displayed much zeal for anyone’s liberty but their own—they denounced the rebels and the Continental Congress as a greater tyrant than the Crown. They could only do this, of course, by blurring any distinction between the coercive invasion of persons and property, and the voluntary methods of boycott or public censure.

Despite their charge of tyranny, the Tories had undisturbed control of several of the colonies’ most influential newspapers. By far the leading Tory journalist in America was James Rivington, publisher of the New York Gazetteer, whose articles circulated throughout the colonies. Rivington was seconded by Hugh Gaine’s New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury. Delighted by Rivington’s pen, Governor Gage distributed four hundred copies of each issue of the Gazetteer to soldiers and Tories in Boston. The radical editors fumed at Rivington, calling him a “Judas” and a “most wretched Jacobitish, hireling incendiary.” Rivington replied in kind. Young James Madison angrily wrote to a friend from Virginia that if “we had Rivington... twenty-four hours in this place, he would meet with adequate punishment.”

In Boston, the Tory press rode high under the guns of British troops. The two leading newspapers were the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Newsletter and the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy. One cocky Tory called upon the British troops to make ready to kill “those trumpeters of sedition,” the editors of the radical papers, the Boston Gazette and the Massachusetts Spy. The British troops did threaten to tar and feather these leaders.

Tory writers such as William Eddis of Maryland, “Grotius,” and “Thomas Trueman” made their case in the press. The leading statement of the Tory case was written in a series of articles by Daniel Leonard, as “Massachu-settensis,” in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy. Leonard, a renegade liberal now enjoying the perquisites of the post of solicitor general of the customs board, attacked the anarchy rampant in the colonies. Confusing invasion of person and property by violence with such noninvasive measures as public boycott, Leonard decried the tyranny as well as the anarchy of the rebels.

Answering Leonard in a running and scholarly debate in the Massachusetts press was John Adams, writing as “Novanglus.” Adams pointed to the mass support of the American cause and declared it to be in the great British tradition of resistance to tyranny. He asserted flatly that “America is not any part of the British realm,” and warned that Britain was preparing to conquer and crush the colonies. Adams grounded his defense in natural law, human reason, and the great revolutionary tradition of the English: “My friends, human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty... that all men by nature are equal; that Kings have but a delegated authority, which the people may resume, are the revolution principles of 1688; as are the principles of Aristotle, of Livy and Cicero, of Sidney, Harrington, and Locke, of nature and eternal reason.”

Particularly active in the drumfire of Tory agitation against the rebel cause was a group of Anglican clergymen, led by the Reverends Thomas Chandler, Myles Cooper, Charles Inglis, and Samuel Seabury of New York, and Jonathan Boucher of Maryland. Cooper tried to form a continentwide association of Anglican ministers to oppose the rebellion—an organization the very existence of which would have driven the Americans to fury. The Pennsylvania and southern clergy refused to go along, and New York remained the center of the Anglican Tory agitation—agitation fostered by the strength of the Anglican church in New York City affairs. Chandler, Cooper, and Seabury turned out numerous pamphlets in late 1774, all printed by James Rivington. Many incensed gatherings of Americans in New York, New Jersey, and Maryland publicly burned these tracts. As so many other opponents of natural rights have done, Seabury, in a pamphlet debate with the young student Alexander Hamilton of Kings College, confused “natural rights” with a primitive “state of nature.” Not realizing that natural-rights theory is a logical and moral rather than an historical construct, Seabury persisted in identifying it with an historical state of savagery.

The Americans began an effective, even though spontaneous and unorganized, boycott of the galling newspaper of James Rivington. A newly organized “Friends of America” in New York systematized the boycott and sent letters to rebel committees throughout the colonies urging a general boycott of the “Pensioned Servile Wretch” and all of his advertisers. Radical meetings pledged no further dealings with Rivington. By April 1775, twenty-one committees had acted to suspend purchases of the newspaper—led by committees and meetings in various counties of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In mid-April, a mob in New Brunswick, New Jersey, hung Rivington in effigy. Driven to the edge of bankruptcy by the boycott and threatened by an angry mob, Rivington, not long after, pledged to give no further offense.