Why the debut issue of America’s first newspaper was also the publication’s last

Once you get over the archaic language, the first newspaper published in North America seems largely innocuous, the pages filled with reports on dramatic events such as a smallpox outbreak, a devastating fire and troop movements. Yet Publick occurs both abroad and domestically-published in Boston by English expat Benjamin Harris on September 25, 1690 – the colonial authorities were so angry that they closed the newspaper after just four days. The first issue of the four-page publication also turned out to be the last, and that lasted too another 14 years that homegrown journalism is returning to British America.

“It is not surprising … that Harris’s bold attempt failed,” wrote historian Charles E Clark in 1991. “Seventeenth-century assumptions about printing and authority combined with the deeply uncomfortable political atmosphere of the moment to produce a publication like Public events simply unbearable.”

Harris was a publisher and writer who had fled England because of criticism of the printing of anti-Catholic pamphlets. After settling in Boston in 1686, he had a popular coffeehouse where the locals gathered discuss current events and the latest books. As colonial printer and historian Isaiah Thomas said laterHarris was “a lively supporter” of the right to free speech, as well as “the most ingenious and innocent companion I had ever met.”

Encouraged by the success of his coffee house, Harris decided to publish a monthly newspaper. Like him wrote on the front page, the publication had several goals: to ensure that “momentous events” were not “neglected or forgotten”; to “educate people everywhere [so they] can better understand the circumstances of public affairs, both abroad and at home”; and to debunk the “many false, malicious reports” circulating in the British colonies at the time.

Public eventsThe first and only issue covered a wide range of topics, from the suicide of a “pious man” whose wife had recently died to the ongoing war between Great Britain and France to another Thanksgiving day celebrated by ‘the Christianized Indians in some parts of Plymouth’. But it was a few salacious stories that caught the attention of the authorities.

Harris wrote that during a recent expedition at French Acadia, Britain’s Mohawk allies had captured French prisoners, “whom they used in a manner too barbaric to be approved of by an Englishman.” The publisher then accused British leaders of having “too much faith” in the Mohawk. Rather than reserving his criticism for the British, Harris also turned his attention to France, accusing Louis XIV of having sexual relations with his son’s wife. This incestuous act, Harris wrote, had led the king’s son to decide to “deprive him of his life and kingdom.”

A order of the Governor and Council of Massachusetts prohibiting future issues of Public events followed quickly, appearing just four days later on September 29. It referred to the Mohawk and Louis XIV stories in vague terms, citing the newspaper’s “several doubtful and uncertain reports.” But the colonial authorities mainly called Harris out for publishing his newspaper without a license. In the future, they wrote, anyone who wants to publish news in the colony must first obtain explicit permission.

Cotton Mathera Puritan preacher who would soon play a prominent role in the Salem witch trials, defended Harris in a letter writing that the publisher had said nothing about the Mohawk “but what we ought to say to them, or we bring guilt upon ourselves.” As for the French tyrant, nothing is mentioned about him, except a rumor that had already been circulated in print in the colonies.

Despite Mather’s disapproval, officials remained firm in their decision. “Some members [of the council] feared free publishing and its possible consequences,” to write William D. Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams in The Early American Press, 1690-1783. Amid raids by neighboring Native American groups and a collapse of “internal order,” the authors explain, many Massachusetts residents “rejected the authority of the government and the courts,” leaving the council “particularly sensitive to criticism, especially if it was expressed in the context of the law. public print.”

Harris, for his part, was not deterred by the closure of Public events. He loved print public documents, this time approved by the colonial government, before returning to London in 1695 continued his career as a publisher, during which he occasionally found himself at odds with censors due to his outspoken religious views.

Back in British America, the first of the colonies continuously published newspaper, John Campbell’s Boston Newsletterdebuted on April 24, 1704. This time the publisher took no chances. Decorated on the front pageJust below the newspaper’s name were the words “published by authority” – a clear sign of the government’s approval. It wasn’t until 1791, with the ratification of the First Amendment, that the right to a free press was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.