American Aurora Read online

  View of Philadelphia in 1798, from the north, along the Delaware.1

  AMERICAN AURORA

  A DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICAN RETURNS

  THE SUPPRESSED HISTORY OF OUR NATION’S

  BEGINNINGS AND THE HEROIC NEWSPAPER

  THAT TRIED TO REPORT IT

  RICHARD N. ROSENFELD

  FOREWORD BY EDMUND S. MORGAN

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

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  THIS WORK IS DEDICATED TO

  Poor Richard

  and

  Young Lightening-Rod

  and

  Rat-Catchers Who Aspire

  to

  Their Legacy.

  The red-brick townhouses and walking pavements of High-street, also known as Market-street, in Philadelphia, 1798.2

  Contents

  Foreword by Edmund S. Morgan

  Author’s Note

  BOOK ONE

  AURORA

  CHAPTER 1 Reign of Witches

  CHAPTER 2 Young Lightening-Rod

  CHAPTER 3 Black Cockades

  CHAPTER 4 American Terror

  CHAPTER 5 The Pestilence

  BOOK TWO

  FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY

  CHAPTER 6 Fabius

  CHAPTER 7 Lightening-Snatcher

  CHAPTER 8 The Duke of Braintree

  CHAPTER 9 Victory

  CHAPTER 10 The Rights of Man

  BOOK THREE

  AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  CHAPTER 11 Surgo ut Prosim

  CHAPTER 12 Kingly Government

  CHAPTER 13 Keystone of Democracy

  CHAPTER 14 Upper Chamber

  CHAPTER 15 Rat-Catcher

  CHAPTER 16 Victory

  Author’s Final Note

  Note on the Illustrations

  Endnotes

  Index

  Promenading on Third-street, in Philadelphia, 1798.3

  FOREWORD

  Political passions fade with time, leaving their pale shadows to be recovered by historians who usually affect an objective, if not an amused, detachment from them. American politics have seldom generated the fierceness of passion that they did in their first decade. The extravagant exchanges in the contests between Federalists and Republicans in the late 1790s seem today so to exceed the issues as to merit the patronizing dismissal that scholars have generally given them. After all, the nation survived, President John Adams did not secure the crown to which he allegedly aspired, and President Thomas Jefferson succeeded him without bloodshed. Accordingly the dire predictions of tyranny by journalists like Benjamin Franklin Bache and William Duane in their notorious newspaper, the Aurora, have become mere curiosities, extreme examples of the bad manners that political contests so often provoke.

  Not so fast, Richard Rosenfeld warns us. He has studied the newspapers and politics of the 1790s afresh and found the issues to justify all the passion they generated. Scorning the usual detachment, he has embraced as his own the outrage of the men who saw the republic threatened by the thrust for power of those entrusted with running it. He stands up for Benjamin Bache, the beloved grandson of Benjamin Franklin, and he literally and literarily becomes William Duane, Bache’s successor as publisher of the Aurora. He invites us to join him in living through the events that so alarmed these men and to share their alarm in their own words. If we see what was happening as these men saw it, we may emerge with a less complacent view of what it was that the country survived in the 1790s, with a different perspective of what the founding fathers accomplished, even with a new view of who the true founding fathers were.

  This is not a typical history, nor does it pretend to be. It is an indictment of some of our customary heroes and a salute to some of our customary villains. It is a piece of historical heresy, written by heretics of the time with the assistance of a kindred spirit who now appeals the sentence of irrelevance that orthodox history has imposed on them. If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, its vigilant defenders of an earlier time may still have a message for the republic they cherished. That message resounds through these pages.

  EDMUND S. MORGAN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  American Aurora was born of some curiosity I had about the Sedition Act of 1798. How, I wondered, could America’s second President, John Adams, possibly sign—and its first President, George Washington, possibly support—a law that prohibited newspaper criticism of the President? After all, the Bill of Rights, with its guarantee of press freedom, was already seven years old in 1798.

  The official answer, I soon learned, was national security. America was preparing for war with France. Press restrictions are upheld in times of war.

  Yet something I read greatly troubled me. The Philadelphia Aurora, the principal newspaper that Adams and Washington wanted to silence—a paper that reportedly had driven Washington from the presidency the year before—was being published by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson (who began the paper shortly after Franklin’s death). Why, I wondered, would this grandson, Benjamin Bache, want to criticize his grandfather’s most famous colleagues? Why wouldn’t he want to stand in Franklin’s shoes?

  I was flabbergasted when I read John Adams’ explanation:

  I knew [Benjamin Franklin] had conceived an irreconcilable hatred to me and that he had propagated and would continue to propagate prejudices, if nothing worse, against me in America from one end of it to the other. Look into Bache’s Aurora and Duane’s Aurora for twenty years and see whether my expectations have not been verified.4

  Did Adams see the ghost of Franklin at the Philadelphia Aurora? Did he want a sedition act, I wondered, to silence Franklin’s ghost?

  I decided to take Adams’ advice and look into Bache’s Aurora and his successor William Duane’s Aurora to see what old “prejudices” Franklin’s ghost was propagating, what old coals Bache and Duane had rekindled that might provoke Adams and Washington to suspend the Bill of Rights, cause them to urge the arrest and prosecution of these editors, incite mobs of their supporters to attack the Aurora’s offices and to assault and nearly kill these editors, and justify the sacrifice of Bache’s life and Duane’s editorship in hiding.

  Heresies! Charges that Washington and Adams were warring against the French Revolution because they were enemies to democracy, and had been even during the American Revolution; that Washington was not the “father of his country,” but an inept general who would have lost the American Revolution had Benjamin Franklin not gotten France to intervene; that Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and other founding fathers had denied Franklin his credit (partly by understating France’s), had mythologized Washington’s, and had adopted a British-style constitution to avoid Franklin’s design (and many Americans’ hopes) for a democracy; and that Adams, Hamilton, and other “Federalists” really wanted an American king.

  The more I read, the more I wondered. The more I wondered, the more I read. Finally, the curtain of time seemed to lift, and I saw the America these editors saw. It was then that I shared their fears.

  American Aurora is the story of Bache and Duane, the story of their newspaper, and the story of America’s beginnings that these editors wanted us to know. It is written from Duane’s radical Democratic-Republican point of view.

  A word about methodology. William Duane, himself an historian, found great difficulty in writing a history of his time. He cited the following:

  The epoch of a great revolution is never the eligible time to write its history
. Those memorable recitals to which the opinions of ages should remain attached cannot obtain confidence or present a character of impartiality if they are undertaken in the midst of animosities and during the tumult of passions; and yet, were there to exist a man so detached from the spirit of party or so master of himself as calmly to describe the storms of which he has been a witness, we should be dissatisfied with his tranquillity and should apprehend that he had not a soul capable of preserving the impressions of all the sentiments we might be desirous of receiving.5

  Today’s historian who writes of Duane’s times is on the other horn of Duane’s dilemma. He or she gains from the passage of time but loses from not having experienced the “animosities … the tumult of passions … the spirit of party … the storms.” How can he or she convey “the impressions of all the sentiments we might be desirous of receiving”? Won’t readers be “dissatisfied with his [or her] tranquillity”? The dilemma poses important questions about historical writing as reality, narrative, drama, literature, and more.

  To resolve William Duane’s dilemma and reanimate his time, American Aurora allows the Philadelphia Aurora to report its own story, its own times, its own trials and tribulations, through day-to-day excerpts from the paper, same-day responses from opposing (evening) gazettes, same-day reactions from such avid Aurora readers as Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, and same-day writings of other government officials, legislative and court reporters, neighbors, friends, etc. To provide background, where needed, for this firsthand testimony (and to provide leitmotif reminders that American Aurora embodies Duane’s point of view), American Aurora imagines William Duane to be its narrator and its historian (chooser-of-fact), granting him the advantage of these intervening years but grounding his narrative assertions (which can be read as the author’s) in endnoted sources. At the midpoint of this work, William Duane becomes the editor of and speaks through the Philadelphia Aurora and thus becomes (as much as possible) the actual narrator of and speaks through this work. From that point, readers can compare Duane’s actual voice with the posited one, traveling the path of free inquiry from the imagined to the real, from the given to the tested, which lies at the heart of our First Amendment and which survived its most formidable test at the time of the American Aurora.

  RICHARD N. ROSENFELD

  The Library at Philadelphia in 1798.6 Founded in 1730 by Dr. Benjamin Franklin.

  THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 1731

  The Pennsylvania Gazette

  Being frequently censur’d and condemn’d by different Persons for printing Things which they say ought not to be printed, I have sometimes thought it might be necessary to make a standing Apology for myself and publish it once a Year to be read upon all Occasions of that Nature …

  I request all who are angry with me on Account of printing things they don’t like calmly to consider these following Particulars

  1. That the Opinions of Men are almost always as various as their Faces …

  2. That the Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men’s Opinions; most things that are printed tending to promote some, or opposite others …

  4. That it is unreasonable in any one Man or Set of Men to expect to be pleas’d with every thing that is printed …

  5. Printers are educated in the Belief that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter …

  8. That if all Printers were determin’d not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed …

  DR. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, EDITOR

  THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE, 1729–1748

  Aurora General Advertiser (Philadelphia) in 1798.

  If 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.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON,

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1789–17977

  [George Washington] is very jealous of Dr. Franklin & those who are governed by Republican Principles from which he is very averse.

  PAUL WENTWORTH, BRITISH SPY8

  I knew [Benjamin Franklin] had conceived an irreconcilable hatred to me and that he had propagated and would continue to propagate prejudices, if nothing worse, against me in America from one end of it to the other. Look into Bache’s Aurora and Duane’s Aurora for twenty years and see whether my expectations have not been verified.

  JOHN ADAMS,

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1797–18019

  High-street (to the left) crossing Third-street, in Philadelphia, 1798.10

  AURORA

  This country should not forget, either for the country’s honor, for the honor of republican justice, or for an example to others … the free and manfully conducted Press [of the Aurora] in the hands of Benjamin Franklin Bache …

  [W]hen to take this paper was denounced by the administration and their partizans as sufficient cause for persecution and proscription; when men who professed to be republicans and applauded the virtue of Benjamin Franklin Bache dared not or feared to stand by him and their common country whose cause he espoused; when the menaces of power and the money of the country were employed to overwhelm him; … when bodily injury done on him was countenanced and rewarded; when few men had courage enough to read free opinion in a country where the Constitution guaranteed its freedom; … when those readers were so few as by their subscription not to afford means adequate to the ordinary expences for the support of this Paper; … [t]hen and thus circumstanced, upheld by conscious virtue alone, he stood forward and … upheld the drooping liberties of America …

  Under persecution and desertion of friends—under the sacrifice of fortune and the menaces of assassins and even on the bed of death—the same spirit actuated and the constant assurance was impressed on his mind, that by perseverance the cause of virtue must at length prevail.

  WILLIAM DUANE, EDITOR, 1798–1822,

  AURORA GENERAL ADVERTISER11

  High-street (to the left) crossing Second-street, 1798, with one of the market buildings (an old courthouse) immediately to the left.12

  CHAPTER ONE

  REIGN OF WITCHES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The New Theatre in Chestnut-street at Philadelphia, 1798.21

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

  THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 1798

  GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER