American Aurora Read online

  GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER

  [T]he front window of the office of the Aurora was, on Friday evening, successfully assailed by three stones of the size of a man’s fist or larger. Several panes of glass were consequently broken, and this is the third attack of the kind for which Mr. Bache has been indebted to the friends of regular government.

  Mr. Adams, before taking his oath of office, made a long exordium … that, although the constitution makes no distinction in favour of the Christian religion, yet that he (Mr. Adams) in nominating to public offices would always have a special eye to that point. This truth was thereafter sent to the press. In July or August last … in plain terms, when [former Secretary of the Treasury Mr. Alexander) Hamilton came to Philadelphia to vindicate his character by a confession of adultery, this identical and most Christian president invited him to a family dinner with Mrs. Adams. Such is his selection of company for the entertainment of his wife! Oh, Johnny! Johnny!

  [O]ne of the members … read in Congress the far famed letter said to be written by Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson to Mr. Mazzei … The substance of it is a complaint [by Mr. Jefferson) of an American aristocracy and of the growth of the principle of monarchy …

  A word of explanation about each of these items from this morning’s Philadelphia Aurora:

  On the breaking of the Aurora’s windows …

  Public anger against the Philadelphia Aurora and Benjamin Bache really began last May 16th. That’s when President Adams warned Americans that French sympathizers were a threat to the nation’s security. President Adams was addressing an extraordinary session of the current U.S. Congress (the Fifth) which he had convened to consider relations with France.

  Relations with France first began to deteriorate under the presidency of George Washington, who, having declared neutrality in the war between Britain and France, sought to end British interference with American shipping by signing the pro-British (and anti-French) Jay Treaty of 1795, and by firing America’s friendly Ambassador to France, James Monroe, who had publicly criticized Washington’s anti-French actions. These events upset France, provoking her to increase her seizures of U.S. shipping and not to accept James Monroe’s ambassadorial replacement, Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.

  In his speech to Congress of May 16th—a speech that France found very insulting—the President’s “rage almost choked his utterance,”50 as he excoriated the French for rejecting his ambassador, urged defensive measures against French dangers from abroad, and warned about French dangers at home. He cautioned,

  [France] evinces a disposition to separate the people of the United States from the [American] Government, to persuade them that they have different affections, principles, and interests from those of their fellow-citizens whom they themselves have chosen to manage their common concerns, and thus to produce divisions fatal to our peace. Such attempts ought to be repelled with a decision which shall convince France and the world that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.51

  Following that May 16th diatribe, the President’s supporters saw his critics as the “miserable instruments of foreign influence” producing “divisions fatal to our peace.” They saw French sympathizers such as Benjamin Bache and even Vice President Thomas Jefferson as “degraded people.” Thomas Jefferson himself remarked, “Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way lest they be obliged to touch their hats.”52 A friend of Ben Bache wrote, “What a pity … At the time of Dr. F[ranklin]’s death, Benjamin [Bache] was universally beloved and esteemed, and now he is as much despised, even by some who are warm Democrats.”53 Now, the President’s supporters break Benjamin Bache’s windows.

  That presidential speech was almost a year ago. Since then, Adams has sent a new three-man delegation (including the rejected Pinckney) to meet with French Foreign Minister Talleyrand in Paris. Last night, Mr. Adams received his first dispatches from those envoys. The news is not good.

  On Mr. Alexander Hamilton’s adultery …

  Lawyer Alexander Hamilton, who was George Washington’s first Treasury Secretary, founded the Federalist party and still leads it from the relative anonymity of his private New York life. To the chagrin of his party, however, Mr. Hamilton publicly confessed last August to some adultery he had committed several summers earlier with one Maria Reynolds, wife of a convicted securities swindler. The liaison included several libidinous encounters in Hamilton’s own home while his wife, Betsy, and the Hamilton children were in upstate New York visiting Betsy’s father.54 The article in this morning’s Philadelphia Aurora connects Mr. Hamilton’s adultery to President and Mrs. Adams and can only anger our very prudish and very Christian President of the United States.

  On Vice President Jefferson’s letter to Mr. Mazzei …

  Last spring, the American press published a private letter that Vice President Thomas Jefferson had written a year earlier to his Italian friend and former neighbor Philip Mazzei. This letter claimed that George Washington and John Adams’ Federalist party preferred monarchy and aristocracy to American democracy and, therefore, were returning America to British influence.55 Mr. Jefferson never dreamt the following of his words would be made public:

  The aspect of our politics has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of that noble love of liberty & republican government which carried us triumphantly thro’ the war, an Anglican monarchical & aristocratical party has sprung up whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance, as they have already done the forms, of the British government … Against us [Republicans] are the [Federalist-controlled] Executive, the Judiciary, two out of three … of the legislature, all the officers of the government, all who want to be officers, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants & Americans trading on British capitals, speculators, & holders in the banks & public funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption & for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model. It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field & Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England. In short, we are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained only by unremitting labors & perils.56

  Jefferson’s letter to Philip Mazzei rebukes Federalist party leaders like Alexander Hamilton and John Adams for their monarchical, aristocratic, and pro-British sympathies. More shockingly, the letter’s charge of apostasy to “men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council” clearly aims at George Washington!

  Today, President John Adams sends a message to the Congress of the United States. The Annals of Congress report:

  RELATIONS WITH FRANCE.

  The following Message, with the documents accompanying it, were received from the President of the United States:

  Gentlemen of the Senate and Gentlemen of the House of Representatives,

  The first dispatches from our envoys extraordinary [to France] since their arrival in Paris were received at the Secretary of State’s office at a late hour the last evening—They are all in a character, which will require some days to be decyphered, except the last which is dated the 8th of January, 1798. The contents of this letter are of so much importance to be immediately made known to the Congress, and to the public, especially to the mercantile part of our fellow citizens, that I have thought it my duty to communicate them to both houses without loss of time.

  JOHN ADAMS

  UNITED STATES, March 5, 1798

  PARIS, January 8, 1798

  [To U.S. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering]

  DEAR SIR: We embrace the unexpected opportunity to send you the “Redacteur” [a Paris newspaper] of the fifth instant, containing the Message of the Direct
ory [France’s five-man executive council] …

  We can only repeat that there exists no hope of our being officially received by this Government or that the objects of our mission will be in any way accomplished …

  CHARLES C. PINCKNEY

  J[OHN] MARSHALL

  E[LBRIDGE] GERRY

  [TRANSLATION of the Le Redacteur report]

  Message of the Executive Directory to the Council of Five Hundred [the larger chamber of France’s legislature].

  4th January, 1798

  Citizen Representatives: … The English Government … has violated … the law of … neutral powers. It has caused to be seized the provisions, grain, and commodities which it supposed to be destined for France. It has declared contraband [not just military supplies as permitted under the law of neutral powers but] everything which it thought useful to the [French] Republic. It desired to starve it. All the citizens demand vengeance upon it …

  The Directory thinks it urgent and necessary to pass a law declaring that the condition of [vessels as] … neutral or enemy shall be determined [no longer by their national flag but] by their cargo … In consequence, every vessel found at sea having on board English merchandise and commodities as her cargo, in whole or in part, shall be declared to be good prize …

  P. BARRAS, President.57

  By these documents, the “mercantile part of our fellow citizens” knows that, under the proposed French decree, France will seize and confiscate any ship carrying British goods, whether or not it flies the American flag and regardless of its destination. American merchant-traders will want to arm their merchantmen.

  TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 1798

  GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER

  The prejudices which have been excited against France … have greatly deceived the American public. It is believed that the French deserve to be viewed in a light very different [and more favorable] from what was lately pretended to be just …

  From the beginning of the present war [betwee n Britain and France] down to this time, the conduct of our executive [the President] has been a series of ill offices toward France …

  Benjamin Bache’s Philadelphia Aurora is the leading opposition paper in the United States.58 Its location in the nation’s capital provides immediate access to national and international news.

  Readership of the Aurora is perhaps the largest in the country, far larger than its subscriber base of 1,700 might suggest. With newspaper franking privileges to mail the Aurora cost-free to fellow publishers, the Aurora inflates its readership by a network of papers throughout the nation which share its views and reprint its news and opinion as part of their daily fare. The Aurora’s popularity among the lower classes also multiplies its readership, because such people tend to pass a newspaper from hand to hand, and family to family, and leave it in local taverns, which serve as libraries for the poor.59

  The Aurora is manufactured six days a week in a two-story wooden print shop in the courtyard behind 112 High. Compositors and binders work on the first floor; pressmen on the second. Though the newspaper owns type fonts from Baskerville, Caslon, Fournier, and Didot (specimen books display sixty different fonts),60 the Aurora emphasizes simple Petite Texte-Romain as its standard face.

  American newspapers are printed on the English common press,61 with its vintage profile of two upright pieces of timber, seven feet tall and four feet apart, joined at their upper ends by a heavy crossbeam from which the square wooden platen (plate) descends to force paper against type and joined at their midpoint by a long horizontal carriageway on which paper and type travel to their proper place beneath the platen’s descent.

  To print a daily Aurora, platens have to descend about eight thousand times, and the Aurora’s pressmen dance and wrestle in a bath of perspiration to achieve that production. To make an imprint on one side of a newspaper sheet, two pressman have to coordinate thirteen steps in agreed roles as Puller and Beater.

  The Puller takes a sheet from the heap of paper and lays it on top of a parchment, of equal size, stretched across a wooden frame (the tympan), which is hinged to the end of the press. To hold the edges of the paper to the edges of the tympan, the Puller overlays a metal frame (the frisket), which is hinged to the other end of the tympan. He then lowers the paper (sandwiched between the tympan and the frisket) onto the locked bed of metal type (the form), which resides on a large flat stone within a wooden box (the coffin) on the carriageway. The Puller then pulls a three-and-a-half-foot overhead iron bar across the press, lowering the platen to force half a side of paper against half of the inked type form. He then returns the overhead bar to raise the platen, rotates a sidehandle (the rounce) to position the remaining half sheet beneath the platen, pulls the overhead bar to imprint the remaining half sheet, and returns the bar to raise the platen. Next, he rotates the rounce to remove the carriage, paper, and form from beneath the platen, raises the printed sheet (still sandwiched between frisket and tympan) off the form, hinges the frisket back from the tympan to release the sheet, removes the sheet from the tympan, places it onto a heap, and examines the form for problems of registration and foreign particles.

  While the Puller is performing this list of tasks and in close coordination with him, the other pressman, as Beater, mixes (rubs) a mound of lampblack (soot from burning oil) and varnish (linseed oil thickened by boiling), which together compose printer’s ink, slices away any film that has dried on the surface of the ink, dips two wooden-handled, leather-covered balls of wool into the ink, presses (beats) the inked leather-balls along the form of type for uniform ink distribution, and reviews the latest printed sheet for imperfections (picks) in inking.

  Though Puller and Beater exchange roles every two or three tokens (a token being 250 sheets), each pressman performs the entire series of described procedures in fewer than fifteen seconds, thousands of times each day, six days a week.62

  THURSDAY, MARCH 8, 1798

  GENERAL * AURORA * ADVERTISER

  A custom has crept into the United States of publishing toasts. A club of any tolerable number can hardly meet and get drunk without incumbering the newspapers of the next morning by a long string … [I]n the Concert Hall in Boston, on Mr. Washington’s late birthday … toasts were drank to the bottom of the glass. Thirty-five glassfuls … [T]he majority must have been in a beastly pickle before the end of the entertainment. Even of Yankee rum diluted into grog, so many cubic inches would make an enormous belly full. It is no wonder that the toasts … leave room for criticism …

  Mr. Dawson [Republican, Virginia] proposed a resolution for amending the rules of the house [of representatives] … “Resolved, That … persons attending this house to take down its debates and proceedings for the purpose of publication shall be permitted to take their seats within the bar of the house.” The Speaker [Mr. Dayton] said he would state to the house that this was the case except as to one person who had abused the privilege … Mr. Bache having been driven from his place within the bar of the house by the single mandate of the Speaker, Mr. Dawson moved the above resolution that he might be admitted there …

  Many charges and much abuse have issued from the Gazette of the United States and Porcupine’s Gazette … To charges so general and so vague, however, it is impossible to give any other than a general answer which may be effectually done by these two words: prove them!

  No. V.

  [I]n the [French] decree proposed in [this] January 1798, the unwarrantable proceedings of the English government are the avowed foundations of the French measures … It is really time … to acknowledge and admit the extravagance and unwarrantableness of the … British … [and to] take a correct and candid view of the course of English proceedings from 1792 to 1797 which have contributed to bring on the measures of the French Government.

  Today, Thomas Jefferson writes former U.S. Minister to France James Monroe:

  At length the charm is broke, and letters have been received from our envoys at Paris. Only one of them has been communicated, of which I e
nclose you a copy with the documents accompanying it. The decree therein proposed to be passed has struck the greatest alarm through the merchants … You will see in Bache’s paper of this morning the 5th. number of some pieces … in which the proposed decree is well viewed.63

  Thomas Jefferson praises the Philadelphia Aurora. Federalist gazettes hurl charges and abuse.

  John Fenno’s well-established and quasi-official Gazette of the United States and William Cobbett’s new and reactionary Porcupine’s Gazette are the two leading papers for the views of John Adams’ Federalist administration. Like the Aurora, these papers are published in Philadelphia six days each week and copied by like-minded publishers throughout the country. Unlike the Philadelphia Aurora, these papers serve highborn readers and, as late-afternoon papers, enjoy the last journalistic word each day.

  John Fenno, publisher of the Gazette of the United States, is a former Boston merchant of pure English ancestry who, following a business failure, moved to New York in January of 1789 to undertake a new life and a new newspaper when the federal government was beginning its operations, initially at New York. Accompanying John Fenno were his wife, Mary (he calls her “Polly”), their then-eleven-year-old son, John Ward (the family calls him “Jack”), and the other Fenno children. With financial help from fellow Bostonian and then Vice President-elect John Adams, and from New Yorker and then U.S. Senator Rufus King,64 John Fenno started the Gazette of the United States in mid-April of that year. He has published that paper ever since.

  In the autumn of 1790 when the federal government moved to Philadelphia, John Fenno, his family, and his newspaper followed, becoming a Philadelphia institution (Mary alone would justify this with her birthing of fourteen children). Fenno gets the lion’s share of federal government printing, is printer to the United States Senate,65 and, when problems arise, gets help from Federalists like Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton,66 and his confidential friend John Adams.67 This support upsets Benjamin Bache,68 but not nearly so much as John Fenno’s strict adherence to the ideology of his government sponsors.