Across eras, New York disseminated news and produced creative content in a plethora of publications, ranging from newspapers, monthly reviews, and annuals to niche magazines covering political, social, or aesthetic matters. This history served as the focus of an NEH Summer Institute “City of Print: New York and the Periodical Press,” which I directed in 2015. That summer, twenty-five faculty participants came to better understand the evolution of New York’s periodical press, the shaping of readerships and genres, and the significance of place and literary space in the production of periodical literature. My current book project incorporates the themes and issues raised by the Institute, relating to the recovery of lost space and the relationship between the printed page and the topography of the city. The book is divided into six parts, each section covering a particular era in the history of New York’s colorful and varied printscapes. Invoking the term ‘printscape,’ rather than print culture, each section attends to a dynamic field of actors, ideas, and type in motion, addressing issues of lived and imagined space, interpretive networks, evolving technologies, as well as the legacies of a range of progressive concerns from press liberties to social and political equality for women, workers, and minority groups.
Another innovative component of my book and the focus of this essay considers the transnational aspects of New York’s varied printscapes. Of particular relevance is the work of Wai Chee Dimock, particularly Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time and her new anthology of American literature comprised of selective work illustrating her concerns. In her introduction to Through Other Continents, Dimock writes:
For too long, American literature has been seen as a world apart, sufficient unto itself, not burdened by the chronology and geography outside the nation, and not making any intellectual demands on that score … what we call “American” literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for a much more complex tangle of relations. Rather than being a discrete entity, it is better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures. These are input channels, kinship networks, routes of transit, and forms of attachment – connective tissues binding America to the rest of the world. Active on both ends, they thread American texts into the topical events of other cultures, while also threading the long durations of those cultures into the short chronology of the United States.1
In her book and edited anthology, Dimock utilizes the term “deep time” that at once “thickens” conceptions of American literary culture and “lengthens” its chronological borders to include world events that antedate and/or coincide with founding moments such as 1620, the year of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence.2
This essay incorporates the work of transnational scholars while adding theoretical concerns advocated by periodical scholars. To Dimock’s thickening and lengthening framework, I hope to add a concern for texts beyond the strictly literary and the inclusion of influential cultural actors still not found in any American literary anthologies, not in Myra Jehlen’s and Michael Warner’s landmark The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, nor, for that matter, in Dimock’s collection. At the moment, only Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives Before 1800 edited by Oliver Scheiding and Martin Seidl offers a good mix of undervalued American texts and authors in a ‘thick’ and ‘long’ globalized context. Its singular shortcoming, however, is that it is limited to the genre of the short narrative. This essay, in contrast, refers to newspapers and prints of the early American colonial era produced by three remarkable men (with help from their three remarkable wives): 1) William Bradford, New York’s first printer; 2) John Peter Zenger, Bradford’s famous – and famously misunderstood – German apprentice; and 3) John Holt, whose patriotic New-York Journal (named after Zenger’s newspaper) helped unite thirteen individual states into a formidable union, and subsequently, the world’s first postcolonial nation.
The study of early colonial literature often features excerpts from Of Plimmoth Plantation by New England’s pilgrim founder William Bradford before moving on to Benjamin Franklin and his autobiography, deemed the representative text of the American Enlightenment. Entirely skipped is the English Quaker William Bradford, the first printer of Pennsylvania, and subsequently, in 1693, of the colony of New York. Franklin in his autobiography refers to him as the “crafty old sophister” but he is much more than that.3 First of all, it is Bradford’s well-established connections in the print world that allow Franklin to get his first job in Philadelphia in the shop of Samuel Keimer. William Bradford in fact personally escorts Franklin to his first employer, an act more of espionage than altruism as Franklin makes note of in his autobiography. Like Franklin, Bradford was also from humble beginnings but by 1723 had already developed an expertise in printing as well as in papermaking, having partnered with the German entrepreneur William Rittenhouse to establish America’s first paper mill. Newspaper and almanac publisher, postmaster, government printer, job printer, stationer, wholesale paper merchant, book publisher, retail and wholesale bookseller, Bradford is in fact America’s first great print entrepreneur and, perhaps even more significant, progenitor of an important cast of subsequent New York printers and publishers that, like him, fought vigorously for press freedom and the rights of colonists as freeborn Englishmen.
As Russell Reising writes, American critics from V. L. Parrington to Perry Miller to Sacvan Bercovitch helped forge a literary canon that placed Puritan origin theories at its base ultimately limiting the ways in which scholars, into the present moment, think about and teach American literature. Instead of a Puritan-centric focus, we need, Reising writes, an approach capable of integrating a wider body of “religious, historical, political, and sociological research into literary investigation.”4 Including the printer William Bradford alongside the pilgrim William Bradford, I propose, is one such crucial step. An examination of his own unique legacy allows for a fuller, ‘thicker’ picture of the colonial era that substitutes national mythologizing with an investment in alternative cultural and religious traditions.
Born in Leicestershire, England in 1663, Bradford was the son of a Quaker printer who, on occasion, fell into trouble with licensers. Until the expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695, printers of tracts critical of the Anglican church or political authorities were regularly fined or placed in jail. Despite these restrictions, Quakers – in particular – remained undeterred in getting the word out to spread their views and win converts. Following the death of his father, William was apprenticed to none other than Andrew Sowle, famed printer to the London Quakers. Sowle, in turn, had been apprenticed to radical publisher Ruth Rathow, who in 1644, printed John Milton’s landmark essay, “Areopagitica,” opposing licensing and censorship. In Sowle’s shop, William Bradford overheard, and likely participated, in the religious debates of the times and was introduced to prominent leaders of the Quaker movement including its founder George Fox and William Penn. He would also find a bride in Sowle’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, who worked in the shop as a compositor alongside her sister Tace, who herself would gain renown for her work as a London book publisher in the 1700s.
Bradford’s marriage proposal coincided with an invitation from Penn to accompany him on board the ship Welcome to see if he could ply his skills in his new colony. Equipped with a press and printer supplies, “many Primers and new books,” and a letter of introduction from Fox addressed to the Society of Friends, the twenty-two-year-old set up shop on the outskirts of Philadelphia in the fall of 1685. More difficult than the hard work of printing itself and finding customers, Bradford’s greatest challenge was the threat his trade represented to those in power. In one of his first printed works – an almanac – the author Samuel Atkins used the term “Lord Penn” in reference to the proprietary governor. As Quaker tenets prohibited the use of honorary titles, the Provincial Council quickly summoned the culprits of the offending line before it. In one of the earliest examples of censorship in the colonies, Atkins was ordered “to blot out ye words Lord Penn” on each almanac and Bradford, “ye printer,” was charged “not to print anything but what shall have lycence from ye Council.”5
More trouble ensued when Bradford printed the Charter of the Province at the request of a dissenting member of the Council who wished the city’s freeholders to be cognizant of their rights. This time, the Council threatened Bradford with a penalty of £500 for any future transgressions. In a defense of his act, Bradford insisted that printing “is my imploy, my trade and calling, and that by which I gain my living…; and if I may not print such things which come to my hand which are innocent, I cannot live. I am not such a person that takes advice from one party or other…. If I print one thing today, and the contrary party bring me another tomorrow, to contradict it, I cannot say I shall not print it.” To this early defense of press freedom, he also submitted the progressive claim that “printing is a manufacture of the nation and therefore ought rather to be encouraged than suppressed.”6 Bradford ultimately was acquitted not by his eloquent defense but when the evidence in question, a type casing containing the document, was dropped by a jurist. In what remains one of the great prosecution foibles in the history of libel law, four pages of type flew out with a crash, scattering across the courtroom floor leaving Bradford a free, albeit highly disgruntled Philadelphia freeholder.
Leonard W. Levy rightly calls Bradford “the first American martyr to the cause of a free press and the earliest advocate of the jury’s power to decide the law in libel cases.”7 His ‘martyrdom’ at the hands of the Philadelphia Quakers, in turn, benefited the neighboring colony of New York, whose magistrates quickly hired him in 1693. As the licensed royal printer of New York, Bradford was extremely busy publishing approximately fourteen works a year, and adding, as Michael Kammen writes, to “the steady growth of literacy in early New York.”8 His early publications are an impressive list of firsts that reveal a city growing in both size and political and cultural importance, developments partly tied to Bradford’s publishing efforts. In his first year as printer, Bradford published the first book in New York City entitled, New England’s Spirit of Persecution Transmitted to Pennsylvania, a detailed description and defense of his libel trial in Philadelphia. He subsequently printed the first publication calling for the abolition of slavery in the colonies, entitled An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping Negroes written by George Keith. Helping to induce literacy, he printed the widely circulated A New Primmer, or Methodical Directions to Attain the True Spelling, Reading & Writing of English and The Secretary’s Guide, Or, Young Man’s Companion … Containing the Ground of Spelling, Reading and Writing of True English. In 1725 he began the city’s first newspaper, the New-York Gazette, which ran until 1744. He also published the first historical work about New York’s native population (Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations), the first play (Robert Hunter’s Androboros: A Biographical Farce in Three Parts), as well as the first poem by a female in America, written by his wife, Elizabeth. Reflecting the linguistic and cultural diversity of colonial New York, he published works in French, Dutch, as well as a book of religious instruction entirely in Mohawk (Ne Orhoengeneneoni Yogaraskhagh Yondereanayendaghkwa, 1715).
It is a true wonder that a critical understanding of Bradford’s time in Philadelphia and the many cultural productions from his New York press is practically nonexistent in early American literary studies. With this erasure has been lost an important chapter in press liberty, Quaker printing culture in Philadelphia and London, as well as Bradford’s contributions to the growth of literacy and cultural refinement in colonial New York. One aspect of Bradford’s legacy, however, has not been lost: the training of his apprentice John Peter Zenger as well as his own paper’s subsequent opposition to Zenger’s famed New-York Weekly Journal.
In contrast to Bradford’s absence, the story of Zenger remains a fixture in American history and journalism courses, though far less often, in literature courses, a reminder that part of the work of transnational periodical studies is to also encourage the crossing of disciplinary boundaries. To briefly recap this well-known history, Zenger was part of the first newspaper war in the colony, occurring in 1734–1735. His wealthy patrons, James Alexander and Lewis Morris, paid to use his newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal, to criticize then Governor Cosby (see fig. 15.1). Recently arrived, Cosby was a haughty leader, who used his position to enrich himself, rig the judicial system, reward his ‘court’ cronies, while firing his James Comey-like adversary Chief Justice Morris. Week after week, anonymous articles appeared in Zenger’s newspaper highlighting Cosby’s many perceived abuses of power and general incompetence. Though the pieces were penned by Morris and other members of the ‘country’ faction, Governor Cosby eventually had Zenger arrested for printing seditious libel. Rather than reveal the authors and stop printing, Zenger, however, willingly stayed in prison, for eight long months. He was finally exonerated by a jury verdict of ‘not guilty,’ setting up an important precedent for liberty of the press not only in America but across the Atlantic.
New-York Weekly Journal (Monday, November 24, 1735)
Courtesy American Antiquarian Society
Credit for Zenger’s victory in court is generally given to his eloquent, gifted attorney Andrew Hamilton and the entire trial is enshrined in a folio pamphlet penned by James Alexander and published by Zenger in 1736. Little credit is in fact given to John Peter Zenger himself. Jill Lepore, in a recent book on colonial New York, writes about the importance of the famous trial, while claiming that in the battle for press liberty Zenger merely served “to set the type.”9 For other historians, Zenger also seemed to have little say in this history-making event, some claiming he could barely speak never mind write in English.
Once again it is an Anglocentric view of early American literary history that has distorted historical facts and, in the case of Zenger, almost fully eradicated his agency. A proper understanding of this remarkable printer requires us, this time, not to obliterate national boundaries but to highlight Zenger’s own national and ethnic origins, as well as the historical forces that brought him and so many other German refugees to the colony New York in the first place.
Zenger was born in 1697 to a schoolmaster and his wife in the village of Rumbach, part of the Palatinate region of Germany. Recurrent invasions by the forces of King Louis XIV caused an exodus of approximately 30,000 Palatines to seek refuge in England. Many of these migrants ultimately hoped to go to America, drawn in part by pamphlets such as Josua Kocherthal’s Außführlich- und umständliche Bericht von der berühmten Landschaft Carolina (Complete and detailed report of the famed district of Carolina). Filled with descriptions of riches and ease of life in America, pamphlets such as these created what Benedict Anderson refers to as “imagined communities” allowing masses of readers to contemplate newer, better sociopolitical situations and geographies. Arriving in a steady stream from May to November of 1709, the new arrivals, living in tents surrounding London, caused a highly politicized crisis. It was left to Whig supporters such as Daniel Dafoe to defend the immigrants as deserving new homes. Works such as Dafoe’s A Brief History of the Poor Palatine Refugees, for example, helped create a truly imagined people: the ‘poor Palatines’ besieged by a Catholic oppressor. Though they heralded from a variety of German territories, did not speak the same dialect, nor attend the same churches (some in fact were Catholics themselves), the arrivals willingly took on this identity for settlement in England, or better yet, passage to the golden land. In the end, 2,814 Palatines were transported in ten ships to New York, the largest single emigration to America at the time.
The plan, proposed by New York Governor Robert Hunter, was to have a handful of these immigrants indentured to artisans in the city and the remainder settled in villages along the Hudson Valley (now the county of New Paltz) trained to produce much needed naval stores for the building and maintaining of English ships. The two-month voyage was brutal – one quarter of the passengers dying of typhus. One of the victims was Zenger’s own father, but he and his mother (Johanna) and two siblings (Anna Catharina and Johannes) arrived, in August of 1710, at Governor’s Island, where the immigrants were first quarantined.
A year later, upon turning fourteen, John began a seven-year apprenticeship in William Bradford’s shop. After living and working in Maryland, John returned to New York in 1722 to partner with Bradford before opening up his own print shop in 1726, which quickly began to thrive, mostly producing sermons and religious tracts in either Dutch or German.
When Zenger agreed on November 5, 1733, to begin issuing from his press, the New-York Weekly Journal, the first colonial newspaper published exclusively as an oppositional political organ, he had a host of reasons. The common consensus among historians is that Zenger started his paper exclusively for monetary reasons, as his patrons were some of the wealthiest New Yorkers in the colony. The risks of taking on the king’s governor suggests, however, that other reasons – equally imperative – pressed the German printer into the oppositional newspaper business. On the one hand, like many working-class freeholders who had begun to enjoy the relatively benevolent reign of Governor Hunter, Zenger would have found the new Governor’s disregard for the larger welfare of the colony galling. As an educated German immigrant and prominent member of the Dutch Reformed Church, he also apparently had great disdain for the anti-immigrant biases Cosby tended to exhibit as well as his expressed contempt for non-Anglican worshipers. A ‘deeper’ understanding of Zenger’s willingness to take on the new Governor thus should acknowledge Zenger’s class, ethnicity, and training as a print worker. In other words, Zenger was hardly the stereotype of the German immigrant as a “low farmer or dumb pioneer” which Oliver Scheiding discusses in reference to another important German print pioneer Christopher Sauer.10 Like Sauer, Zenger was both an enlightened and pragmatic printer, who, in publishing the New York Journal, simultaneously filled his pockets with precious Geld while using his paper to help his fellow New Yorkers imagine a more inclusive, rights-oriented community of freeholders.
Zenger’s voice in fact continued to be heard in his paper throughout his incarceration, with help of his wife, Anna Catherine. As he explains to his readers, though in jail “I have had since that time the liberty of speaking thro’ the hole of the door [of my prison] to my wife … and hope for the future … to entertain you with my weekly Journal as formerly.”11 The printer’s apology was the first of a stream of letters from his prison cell.
Published on a weekly basis, they led to an outpouring of public sympathy for his cause and the focus of media attention across the colonies. Though generally written off as a ‘mere mechanik’ like so many other printers of the colonial era, attention to transnational concerns as well as the actual contents of his paper written expressly by him shows that Zenger was in fact very much complicit in the import of his actions.
In “Transnational Periodical Cultures: Key Terms in Current Research,” Oliver Scheiding writes of the need to better historicize periodical studies while also “looking at the longue durée of periodical environments understood as a relational and associative web of overlapping socio-economic conditions, institutions, publics, identities and translations.”12 With these two ideas in mind, this essay concludes with an analysis of another overlooked printer who also deserves critical attention. I refer to John Holt, who followed in Zenger’s footsteps during the Revolutionary Era. He in fact intentionally used the title of Zenger’s paper as his own, to continue the fight to not simply imagine but help realize a community based on modern progressive ideals.
With William Bradford, I have suggested that we need to expand our national borders to better understand our literary past; paradoxically, with John Peter Zenger, I have argued that we need to pay close attention to national borders and ethnic origins. The newspaper work of John Holt provides a happy medium between these two seemingly antithetical arguments. His work on a newspaper that was elucidating the importance of a national identity underscores how an understanding of borders can be crucial as long as we also understand that notions of both national borders and identities evolve. When John Holt first began publishing his New York Journal in 1766, he was a decided Englishman. His paper advertised predominantly English goods, regularly reported on English news, and celebrated English liberties, established by the English Bill of Rights. His strong allegiance to England was even exhibited in his masthead, which from 1766 to 1774, depicted the British Royal Coat of Arms. Yet as British atrocities mounted first against Massachusetts, then against other colonies, his British allegiance diminished while his allegiance to the colonies strengthened.
During the seizure of Boston’s port by the English in 1768, the beleaguered New England patriot Sam Adams fed Holt stories of British abuses. We can read these reports in the New-York Journal in a section called the “Journal of Occurrences.” The reports were also reprinted in newspapers that circulated across the colonies. Each occurrence was written anonymously in diary form as the following sample entry dated November 9, 1768 shows:
A married woman living in Long Lane, returning home in the night, was seized by the neck and almost strangled, she was then thrown upon the ground, and treated with great indecencies: Another woman at New Boston was rudely handled. Mr. N – w – l of Needham, passing near the town gates, was struck with a musket and without the least provocation, received another stroke from a drunken guard, which stunned him.13
Accounts such as these were part of a propaganda war aimed at stirring patriotic sentiment and compelling action even as many of the reports were highly embellished or made up entirely.
In these accounts appearing in his newspaper, Holt helped rally anti-British sentiment across the colonies. As Robert G. Parkinson has written, Holt’s newspaper accounts “fostered a sense of sameness, simultaneity, and belonging … a critical component of forming intercolonial unity and making the cause common.”14
As the British occupation continued, the newspaper’s anti-British content increased. Also changed was Holt’s masthead. In June of 1774, for example, Holt drops the Royal Coat of Arms for Benjamin Franklin’s famous cartoon of a severed snake, first used in 1754 (see fig. 15.2). Holt’s version is an almost exact replica of Franklin’s, with a subtle difference in that he changes “Join or Die” to “Unite or Die” (see Minty). The idea, of course, is colonial unity against a common enemy.
New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser (July 7, 1774)
Courtesy American Antiquarian Society
After the Continental Congress met in December of 1774, Holt changed his masthead again (fig. 15.3). In it, he included an image of the Magna Carta, held up by twelve hands (representing each of the colonies) and encircled by the formerly severed serpent. First printed in 1215, the Magna Carta put a limit on the king’s power, provided protection of individual liberties, and increased the powers of Parliament. Holt, knowing the important legacy of the charter, included it atop of his publication to remind colonial readers of their own rights.
New-York Journal; or, General Advertiser (December 29, 1774)
Courtesy American Antiquarian Society
To emphasize this point, inscribed onto the snake, are the words: “UNITED NOW ALIVE AND FREE … EVER BLESS OUR LAND … FIRM ON THIS BASIS LIBERTY SHALL STAND.”
In referring to the colonies as “our land” Holt calls for a full break from the mother country. With the printing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in August of 1776, Holt’s proclamation became a reality. In Holt’s efforts to bind what were essentially thirteen separate nations, we see some of the tenets of postcolonial studies. In his evolving political position vis-à-vis England, as reflected in his evolving content and changing mastheads, we see Holt’s hope of a newly imagined community defined, in part, by British ideals. As Paul Jay writes, “the post-colonial marks a break in the history of the nation-state but not a break from that history.”15 Also familiar to postcolonial writing, we see in Holt’s paper the anxiety of separation as well as the insistence on sovereignty, that is, the demand for inclusivity in a new national fabric rather than persistent exclusivity.
In looking at Bradford, Zenger, and Holt, this essay has shown how transnational periodical studies can usefully problematize the boundaries of American literature, allowing for more fluid contours. Its practice can serve to destabilize national mythologies and the literary canon in favor of broadened cultural, religious, and ethnic realities that were always there in the first place. The lines of association connecting Holt, Zenger, and Bradford, in turn, reveal dedicated individuals committed to burgeoning modern ideals. A final irony relating to the progressive efforts of Bradford, Zenger, Holt, however, requires addressing. It is imperative to note that all of their newspapers were funded in part by advertisements for the sale and/or capture of enslaved persons. In the global expansion, or “worlding” of American literatures, we need to also acknowledge these ads as revelatory texts in and of themselves. Windows into the forced displacement of millions of black bodies, these ads remind us of yet another “connective tissue” binding America to the rest of the world.
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Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Dimock, Wai Chee, ed. American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
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Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. New York: Cornell University Press, 2010.
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Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. New York: Knopf, 2005.
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Parkinson, Robert G. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
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Scheiding, Oliver, and Martin Seidl, eds. Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.
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