Rivington's Royal Gazette of New York.

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After the Gazette had somewhat improved in its typographical appearance, Freneau proceeded :

From the regions of night with his head in a sack
Ascended a person accoutred in black.

"My mandates are fully complied with at last,
New arms are engraved, and new letters are cast;
I therefore determine and fully accord,

This servant of mine shall receive his reward."
Then turning about, to the printer he said,
"Who late was my servant, shall now be my aid;
Kneel down! for your merits I dub you a knight;
From a passive subaltern I bid you to rise-
The inventor, as well as the printer, of lies."

Although Rivington discontinued the Gazette soon after the peace of 1783, he uninterruptedly traded largely in books and stationery for several years subsequent to that period. He finally failed in that business, and retired. He died in July, 1802, at the age of seventyeight. One of the old thoroughfares of New York City is still named Rivington Street.

In August, 1773, the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser appeared. It was published by William Goddard, the old printer of the ephemeral and sensational Constitutional Courant at "Peter Hassenclever's Iron Works," and the Pennsylvania Chronicle in 1767. Goddard was one of the itinerant journalists of his day.

The Norwich (Connecticut) Packet was published for the first time in October, 1773.

Isaiah Thomas, like Franklin, and Goddard, and Parks, and Rind, did not confine his enterprise to one paper. He established others wherever he thought he could accomplish any thing. On the 4th of December, 1773, he issued the Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet, or the Massachusetts and New Hampshire General Advertiser. It was published in Newburyport. Thomas had for partner in this enterprise Henry Walton Tinges. In a few months Thomas sold his share to Ezra Lunt, and in two years and a half the whole concern passed into the hands of John Mycall, who published the paper for a number of years-twenty or more.

CHAPTER IX.

THE CLOSE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

INCREASE OF NEWSPAPERS.-NAMES.-LINES ON THE DEATH OF WARREN. - WILLIAM GORDON, THE HISTORIAN OF THE REVOLUTION. - DEATH OF JAMES OTIS.-PUBLICATION OF HISTORIES AND GEOGRAPHIES. — NEWSPAPERS IN NEW JERSEY AND VERMONT.—THE GREENBACKS OF THE LAST CENTURY.

ANNO DOMINI 1775 not only inaugurated the Revolution, giving birth to a new nation, but it imparted new life to journalism. Newspapers had become an important institution in the colonies. It was the vox populi of that eventful period.

No great wealth had been acquired by either printers or editors, but many became easy in their circumstances. Not much capital was required to carry on an establishment then. Journalists run no expensive expresses; they employed no European correspondents; they did not enjoy the luxury of a staff of paid writers. The Atlantic cable, with tolls at five, three, or two dollars a word, was not then laid; they had not even dreamed, as Shakspeare had, of Puck's "putting a girdle around about the earth in forty minutes." It is positive that the expense of a common news-boat would have ruined John Campbell and the News-Letter outright, and sent him to an insane asylum, if there had been one in Boston at that time. But the spirit of the colonies was revolutionary. Wonderful achievements of the Press were in the womb of time. They were beginning to develop themselves in the increase of newspaper readers, and the consequent increase of newspapers and newspaper enterprise. The progress was slow, but sure. No less than eight newspapers were established during the first year of the Revolution. Four of these appeared in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress sat, and where Thomas Paine and Philip Freneau lived. John Dunlop published the Pennsylvania Packet, or General Advertiser; James Humphreys, Jr., the Pennsylvania Ledger, or the Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey Weekly Advertiser; B. Towne the Pennsylvania Evening Post; and Story and Humphreys the Pennsylvania Mercury and Universal Advertiser, the latter endeavoring evidently to outstrip the Ledger, which modestly asked, in its title, for advertisements from four provinces only. Another German paper in Philadelphia was established at this time.

The Constitutional Gazette was issued in New York in 1775, its

The Independent Chronicle of Boston.

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first number appearing in August. John Anderson was its publisher.

The other paper originating in this year was A New Hampshire Gazette, called so because there was a newspaper then in existence entitled The New Hampshire Gazette. The latter was sometimes called Freeman's Journal, or New Hampshire Gazette, and sometimes Fowle's Gazette. It appears to have been the custom in those days to repeat the names of papers, regardless of principle, proprietorship, meaning, property, or originality. The only two papers published in Virginia before the Revolution bore the same name, the Virginia Gazette, and were issued at the same time and in the same town. Occasionally a weekly paper would be styled the Journal. Time, and experience, and necessity, and genius, perhaps, have made an improvement-a change, at all events, in the title-pages of the Press, for our newspapers now display many curious and some very ludicrous names.

The New England Chronicle, which had been published in Cambridge, and afterward sold to Powers & Willis by Samuel Hall, appeared in the summer of 1776 under the title of The Independent Chronicle. In November of that year Universal Advertiser was added to its name. The Chronicle was a strong Whig paper. With all the papers of the last century, it had a pictorial device at the head of the paper, with the motto, " Appeal to Heaven. Independence." John Hancock, William Gordon, and Samuel Adams wrote for its columns. It was influential in the cause of the Revolution, and powerful in its support of the principles of that great struggle. After the Boston Gazette and Massachusetts Spy, no paper in New England accomplished more for the cause of the country and its independence than the Chronicle. In one of its numbers it published a few verses on the death of Warren on Bunker Hill, one of which we give, embracing the sentiment" of his soul marching on" of the famous John Brown song. It embodied the spirit of the times: Columbia, forbear! not a sigh to alloy, For thy Warren, so justly beloved; Thy griefs shall be changed into triumphs of joy, Thy Warren's not dead, but removed.

The sons of the earth, the proud giants of old,
Have broke from their darksome abode;

And this is the news-for in heaven it is told-
They are marching to war with the gods.

A council was held in the chambers of Jove,

And this was the final decree,

That Warren should soar to the armies above

And the charge was entrusted to me.

On the second year of the publication of the paper, early in 1777,

the proprietors said:

The Printers and publishers of the Independent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser, (to keep pace with others of their profession of more ancient standing) beg leave, through this channel, to congratulate their customers on the arrival of the New Year,-being the first that has rolled over since their publication.

At the same time that they welcome in the New Year, they cannot pass over, in silent forgetfulness, the cruel, inhuman treatment, that America has experienced, during a series of months, without mentioning the desolating conflagration of Charleston, Falmouth, Norfolk, &c. from those, whom she once embraced as her bosom friends; and whose interest would, to this day, have been considered as inseperably connected with her own, had not a sincere love to America, in general, and to the great and good law of self-preservation, dictated a total seperation: Which the Grand Council of these Confederated States, in their Wisdom, have seen fit for ever to dissolve.

That America may prove victorious, and all, who have spirit, resolution, fortitude, and virtue, sufficient to assist her much injured (though glorious) cause, obtain what the whole collective wisdom of these States say they have an "inalienable right" to, viz. "PEACE, LIBERTY, and SAFETY" is the ardent wish of the Public's much obliged, and most devoted, humble servants,

THE PRINTERS.

One of the contributors to the Chronicle, the Rev. William Gordon, was the author of the first "History of the American Revolution.” He was chaplain of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, and took a great interest in the Constitution of that state, a draft of which was then before the Convention.

The Chronicle was published by Powars and Willis till near the close of the war, and by Willis alone till the end of 1783.

Samuel Loudon, in January, 1776, issued the New York Packet and American Advertiser. It was a revival in name of the Pacquet of 1763. Loudon was born in Ireland, and settled in New York several years before the Revolution, establishing himself there as a shipchandler. He bought a printing-office and material of Frederick Shober, a German, in 1775. With this material he opened a bookstore in Water Street, near Old Slip, and started the Packet. He was a decided Whig. Just before the British took possession of New York he removed with his press and types to Fishkill, where he published his paper till the peace of 1783, when he returned to the city. The Packet, having been established in January, 1776, was the last paper started in New York before the Declaration of Independence.

There was a paper published in Boston in 1776 under the title of The Continental Journal and Weekly Advertiser. Its first number was issued on the 30th of May of that year by John Gill, the former partner of Edes, of the Boston Gazette. Gill was a sound Whig, and aided the Revolutionary cause so far as he could. When James Otis was killed by lightning in Andover in 1783, a fate which, it seems, he singularly desired, Thomas Dawes wrote a poem on his death which was published in the Journal. Otis, a master-spirit of the Revolution, was one of the glorious band which gave the Gazette so much influence in shaping the policy of the colonies in their

Newspapers in New Jersey and Mississippi. 139

struggle with England. Here is an extract from Dawes's apotheosis:

When flushed with conquest and elate with pride,
Britannia's monarch Heaven's high will defied,
And, bent on blood, by lust of rule inclined
With odious chains to vex the freeborn mind,—
On these young shores set up unjust command,
And spread the slaves of office round the land;
Then OTIS rose, and, great in patriot fame,
To listening crowds resistance dared proclaim.
From soul to soul the bright idea ran,
The fire of freedom flew from man to man;
His pen, like Sydney's, made the doctrine known,
His tongue, like Tully's, shook a tyrant's throne:
Then men grew. bold, and, in the public eye,
The right divine of monarchs dared to try;
Light shone on all, despotic darkness fled,
And, for a sentiment, a nation bled,

Hark! the deep thunders echo round the skies!
On wings of flame the eternal errand flies;
One chosen charitable bolt is sped,

And Oris mingles with the glorious dead.

It was considered enterprising to publish histories and geographies in full in the columns of the papers. The Journal, for instance, like the Spy, published the whole of Robertson's History of America. It took two years to accomplish this typographical feat.

The first regular newspaper issued in New Jersey was published there on the 3d of December, 1777, the New Jersey Gazette. In 1758, James Parker, the New York printer, established a literary periodical, called the New American Magazine, which was edited by Samuel Nevil, a judge of the Supreme Court of that state, and who had been editor of the London Evening Post. But the first newspaper was published in 1777 by an enterprising Quaker named Isaac Collins, a printer, for a number of years, in that remarkable and respectable province. It was regularly issued till crowded out of existence by other more pretentious papers in November, 1786. Collins, like Franklin in Pennsylvania, printed the paper money of that state, the greenbacks of the last century, with this important exception: the greenbacks of this century are redeemed; those of the Revolution are in public and private museums and collections of curiosities, and unredeemed.

There was a paper, entitled the New Jersey Journal, established at Chatham, N. J., in 1778, by David Franks. It was continued till the close of the Revolution. Franks afterward removed to New York, and issued a weekly paper there. He also published, in connection with Shepard Kollock, the first Directory of that city. He then returned to New Jersey and his first love, and revived the Journal at Elizabethtown, and remained its editor till 1818.