Governor Cosby had suffered a crushing rebuke. His sword had turned into a boomerang. Having confidently looked for an end to the obnoxious newspaper, he found it justified in the most complete and unanswerable way—by the judgment of a group of men typical of those he governed. No longer was there any hope of silencing his critics, or of arguing with any kind of plausibility that they were guilty of seditious libel. His defense was shattered on both fronts, for New York was sure to have a moral for London. The trial he forced with such demanding arrogance undermined him, and a modest German printer became the symbol of his catastrophe—something the great Lewis Morris had been unable to engineer in face-to-face conferences with the British authorities. The verdict seems to have broken Cosby’s will. Already a sick man, suffering from pneumonia, he made no attempt to rouse himself for a renewal of the battle that had gone on from the beginning of his administration. He had never collected the salary from Van Dam, he had lost the critical elections, Alexander was still unpunished, Peter Zenger was beyond his reach, and a free press was definitely established in New York. Cosby was defeated, and he knew it. He did strike one last blow at the old enemy who had started the trouble: he suspended Rip Van Dam from the Council. Characteristically, the obstinate Dutchman refused to acknowledge the suspension, and challenged George Clarke, the next ranking member of the Council (and a Cosby man), for the executive power in New York. William Cosby was, appropriately enough, the prime mover in the quarrel, but this time he was not personally involved, for he died—a discredited man, but still Governor of New York—on March 10, 1736. XIII. Andrew Hamilton The lawyer who won the acquittal for Peter Zenger was, like his friend James Alexander, a Scot. The year of Andrew Hamilton’s birth is a matter of some debate, an old story holding that he was in his eighties when he appeared in the New York courtroom, while later evidence makes him around 65 at that time. His life holds other mysteries. For one thing, we do not know why he left Scotland. It has been said that he was forced to flee after fighting a duel; again, the motive has been called political, which prompts the surmise that he was implicated in the 1715 Jacobite rising—a pleasing theory in that it allows us to imagine him and Alexander together on the same Scottish battlefield with no presentiment that their place in history lay twenty years ahead and three thousand miles away. We have too little evidence about this phase of Hamilton’s life to speak authoritatively about it.