New York weekly journal; Zenger, John Peter, 1697-1746
Harison had a fine time thinking up jibes like this. It would have been
poetic justice if he had been around to suffer—with Governor Cosby and
the rest of the Court party—through the acquittal Peter Zenger won so
triumphantly on August 4, 1735. But by that time New York had become too
hot for this particular member of the faction, and he was on the other
side of the Atlantic.
The arrest of Peter Zenger was one of Cosby’s gross mistakes. No one in
the Colony could miss the fact that he was bent on revenge, for the
public bodies—Assembly, Common Council, grand juries—had all refused to
have anything to do with proceedings that they recognized as strictly
the Governor’s private affair. Nor could there be any doubt that his
purpose was to silence a critic who had been uttering unpalatable
truths. Popular feeling was exacerbated by the fact that Cosby’s
vindictive wrath fell, not upon the powerful men of the opposite
faction, but upon an insignificant German immigrant who plied the trade
of printer in the city.
The way the thing was done added to the animosity that Cosby provoked.
Zenger’s bail was placed at so high a figure that he could not meet it,
his lawyers were disbarred for protesting against the Governor’s
hand-picked court of Chief Justice James Delancey and Associate Justice
Frederick Philipse, the prisoner had to linger in his cell for nine
months before he was given his day in court, and Cosby tried for a
packed jury in so blatant a way that his own chief justice had to
disavow him. None of this could be kept secret; when the trial was
finally held local sentiment had turned against the Governor to the
point where he had only his closest friends with him.
X. Van Dam’s Indictment of the Governor
As the Zenger case developed step by step in New York, Cosby was being
forced to a more energetic defense on the London front, where Van Dam
was waging a pamphlet war against him, and where Morris was present in
person.
Months before the newspaper war began Van Dam had resolved to keep the
New York public and the London authorities informed of the way in which
the Cosby suit for half of his salary was going, and he began to publish
successive accounts, with Peter Zenger doing the printing for him just
as for the rest of the Popular party. Zenger’s business got better as
the political controversy got worse. In the summer of 1733 he turned out
for Alexander and Smith their arguments against the validity of the
equity court. Shortly afterward Van Dam gave him the job of handling two
protests in which the stubborn old Dutchman expressed his personal
indignation at the way he was being treated by the Governor.
These partial attacks on Cosby were followed by a general indictment, a
full bill of particulars drawn up to expose him point by point with the
most meticulous exactitude. Almost everything that could be alleged
against him with any degree of plausibility at all was set down in Van
Dam’s _Articles of Complaint_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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