In 1725 he joined William Bradford in a brief partnership, so brief that they published only one book jointly before splitting up, for what reason we do not know. The next year Peter Zenger went into business for himself, thus becoming the second printer in New York, and the first rival of his former master. There was room for two. Bradford, the official printer, worked for the Governor, the Council, and the Assembly. He was an honest man, but understandably reluctant to jeopardize his position by turning out anything of which his patrons might disapprove. That was where Zenger came in. Proprietor of a second-class printing shop, cut off from government work, he could keep his head above water in only one way, by taking the trade of New Yorkers who had some motive for avoiding the official press, especially those who were dissatisfied with the situation in either Church or State and wanted to say so. For six years he supplemented his staple output (mainly religious tracts) with critical pamphlets and open letters. Gradually the logic of his predicament pushed him into the position of “official” printer to those writers whose material Bradford could not, or would not, touch. Such was Zenger’s status in the fall of 1732 when affairs in New York began to boil up into a political crisis that first involved him as a partisan in a duel of contending factions, and ultimately landed him in jail. II. A Colonial Feud The powder train for the explosion had been laid during the previous decade in the form of a savage feud between two of the most powerful families in New York—the Morrises and the Delanceys, led by the patriarchs Lewis Morris and Stephen Delancey. Fundamentally, the conflict was the primordial one between landed gentry and business tycoons, and the occasion produced two perfect representatives to act as leaders. Lewis Morris—territorial aristocrat, councillor, assemblyman, chief justice of the Supreme Court—was the model of the wealthy, influential, proud, and ambitious colonial magnate. He made his family great, and handed on the tradition to his more famous grandsons, Gouverneur Morris and the Lewis Morris who signed the Declaration of Independence. He was a commanding figure in the politics of both New York and New Jersey, headstrong in defense of himself, his family, and his class, and a power for any governor to reckon with. Stephen Delancey stood for the ever-increasing authority of money. He was New York’s leading merchant prince, a self-made man who accumulated a fortune in trade with Canada. French by birth, he was a Huguenot by religion, with all the tenacious acquisitiveness and flinty Puritan morality of his sect. In the Assembly he spoke for the powerful mercantile clique, and that alone would have made him—hardly less than Lewis Morris—a dangerous man to cross.