That John Peter Zenger, of the City of New York, printer (being a seditious person; and a frequent printer and publisher of false news and seditious libels, both wickedly and maliciously devising the administration of His Excellency William Cosby, Captain General and Governor in Chief, to traduce, scandalize and vilify both His Excellency the Governor and the ministers and officers of the king, and to bring them into suspicion and the ill opinion of the subjects of the king residing within the Province), on the twenty-eighth day of January, in the seventh year of the reign of George the Second, at the City of New York did falsely, seditiously and scandalously print and publish, and cause to be printed and published, a certain false, malicious, seditious, scandalous libel entitled _The New York Weekly Journal_. The major departure from Alexander’s text remains to be mentioned, since it is not involved in these passages—namely, the excision of some parts and the summarizing of others. Summaries are used when a faster pace seems advisable, for example at the start, when the preliminary maneuverings of the Governor are described. The excisions concern mainly the technicalities of the law. The long quotations from dusty legal tomes, the appeal to long-past precedents, can be of little interest to any except those trained in the law, and so only those passages have been retained that are necessary to the intelligibility of the arguments. But that in itself means a solid core, enough to show the dialectic of the lawyers moved, how the prosecution set up positions, and how the defense knocked them over. Four fifths of the _Brief Narrative_ are here—including all the passages-at-arms between Andrew Hamilton on the one side, and Bradley and Delancey on the other, and all of the defense attorney’s splendid peroration on liberty that clinched the acquittal for Peter Zenger. NOTE: Editorial summaries are enclosed within brackets. Other changes are not indicated, and anyone interested in them should consult the original. In particular, blank lines do not necessarily stand for the deletion of material: they are there mainly for convenience in following the case step by step. Part Two. The Trial 1. Dramatis Personae James Alexander, a lawyer for the Defendant Richard Bradley, Attorney General John Chambers, Counsel for the Defense James Delancey, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Andrew Hamilton, Counsel for the Defense Francis Harison, Recorder for the City of New York Frederick Philipse, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court William Smith, a lawyer for the Defendant JOHN PETER ZENGER, the Defendant 2. Preliminaries