Volume 3, Chapter 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
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
colony's 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 Gaines' 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
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
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 Truman made their case
in the press. The leading statement of the Tory case was written in a series of articles
by Daniel Leonard as Massachusetts Tensis in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Postboy.
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 non-invasive 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 Novanglis.
Adams pointed to the mass support of the American cause and declared it to be in the great British
The 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
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 Sydney, 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, Miles Cooper, Charles Inglis,
and Samuel Seabury of New York, and Jonathan Butcher of Maryland. Cooper tried to form
from a continent-wide 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 at the center of the Anglican
Tory agitation, agitation fostered by the strength of the Anglican church in New York
and 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 King's 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
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
In 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.