Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

sick wife; the lower house finally bowed to an upsurge of public sympathy for
the printer and did not resume its harassments.
Daniel Fowle, outraged at the injustice of the whole affair, wrote a pamphlet
about the case, A Total Eclipse of Liberty (1755), and then bravely
proceeded to sue the Speaker of the house, the house's messenger, and its jailkeeper
for illegal imprisonment. But the inferior and superior courts ruled
against the unfortunate Fowle. Government officials have rarely been liable
for any deed done in their official capacity, these official duties apparently
being enough to invoke a double standard of justice and criminality—one for
ordinary citizens and the other for government officials.
The best-known and most highly touted case concerning freedom of the
press in the colonies was the trial of John Peter Zenger in New York. Historians
have been prone to wild exaggeration of the importance and significance
of the Zenger case. A typical example: the case was a "monument to freedom"
and "established the freedom of the press in North America." Actually
it did nothing of the sort.
Before the Zenger case, there was little freedom to speak or publish criticism
of the government. In the early eighteenth century the main enemy of
freedom of criticism was the Assembly. Between 1706 and 1720 the New
York Assembly prosecuted four such cases, one of which involved the mass
arrest of nine people and another of seventeen grand jurors for "seditious"
remarks about the New York Assembly. As for the press, the first newspaper
in New York was the New York Gazette, founded in 1725. The only paper
in the colony, the Gazette was the licensed and pampered organ of the government,
its editor William Bradford also serving as the official public printer.
The arrival in 1732 of William Cosby as governor of New York soon set
off a bitter factional dispute in the politics of the province. The historical
zealots for Zenger have grandiloquently referred to the opposition to Cosby as
the "popular party"; in reality the dispute was strictly between two factions
of the landed oligarchy and the trouble was raised over extremely petty issues.
The opposition was headed by such oligarchs as Lewis Morris, the Livingstons,
and the Stuyvesants, while the Cosby faction was led by DeLancey and
Phil¡pse. There were here no great liberal issues or principled liberal opposition.
To advance their cause, •the Morris faction established the New York
Weekly Journal in 1733, with the learned lawyer James Alexander as its
editor and John Peter Zenger, of Palatine-German descent, as printer.
While the Morris faction was not rooted in vital issues, the slashing, bitter
nature of the Weekly Journal's attacks on the administration was in itself a
bracing exercise of the freedom of the press in an America that badly needed
such an example. Furthermore, the corollary exposes of Cosby's tyrannies and
misdeeds had a liberal eñect even though not so intended by the authors. The
articles were anonymous and written by various members of the Morris faction.
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