Hanover Square
Stories in this Chapter:
• The Headquarters of Colonial News
• Politicians and Printers
• Tories, Whigs, and Radicals
The Headquarters of Colonial News
Hanover Square, or “printers corner,” was the heart of the merchants’ Dock Ward and the leading communications hub in British North America. With package ships and merchant vessels arriving directly from London, New York was often the first to receive and publish European news, filtered via Britain. It then circulated around the colonies, up to Boston and New England, and down to Philadelphia and the South.
During the colonial era, newspapers accounted for nearly 80 percent of all imprints, appearing most often weekly in four pages. They featured “news” (very loosely defined), alongside imperial proclamations, reprinted material, and occasional essays. Advertisements were the most important section of the paper as its financial base, and thus sometimes half the length. Still, few towns could support even one newspaper. By 1763, there were just fifty printers or so in the colonies, mostly in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. And printers were normally editors and often writers, too. They frequently had to supplement their income by working as journeymen, or wage-based “free labor.”
The Stamp Act restricted printing significantly, taxing all paper goods. It also forced printers to get approval from imperial officials before publishing. Printers thus became crucial in mobilizing protests in dozens of big towns like New York, denouncing the legislation as undermining their “rights as Englishmen” and what is now called freedom of the press. After the Great Riot, they distributed notices and broadsides which portended more violence unless it was repealed, many papers reporting, for example, that Fort George would be stormed.
After the Stamp Act crisis, Parliament was intensely divided on America. William Pitt, who succeeded Grenville’s stormy reign as prime minister, urged the law’s repeal, prompting New York’s legislature to vote for erecting a marble statue of him on Wall St. (between the Merchants Coffee House and City Hall). But Pitt soon left to become Earl of Chatham, and over his protest Charles Townshend became head of the Exchequer five months later. Urged by the King, the treasurer proposed a raft of new import taxes for the colonies within months. Like the Stamp Act, it was meant to raise revenue: £40,000, Townshend argued. But like Grenville he also believed that some ambitious colonists wanted independence, and so like the regulations and taxes of 1763-64, the duties on lead, glass, paper, paint, and tea were meant to assert England’s imperial dominance. So was the first of the so-called Townshend Acts — the Suspending Act, dissolving New York’s legislature — which colonists found even more shocking. (Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Right Honorable Charles Townshend, c. 1766-1767.)
But printers had a leading role in the second major wave of protest, too, over the so-called Townshend Acts. The most famous of these laws, passed in June 1767, raised taxes on major colonial imports —- china, glass, paint, lead, tea, and (once more) paper — just a little more than one year after the repeal of the Stamp and Sugar Acts. Far more shocking, however, was the Suspending Act, which dissolved New York’s legislature until it found a way to pay for quartering the British soldiers placed in the city after Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Great Riot. The legislation was unprecedented — considered by Merrill Jensen and other historians the most drastic action Parliament would take until the Coercive Acts, which touched off the war in 1774. It stirred fear, outrage, and solidarity across the colonies. Massachusetts’s House argued that it threatened “political death” by “depriving the people of a fundamental right of the British constitution.” Even Virginia’s legislators said that it had “by all means, to be removed.” Townshend explained that he was making an example of New York to prevent the other colonies from similar rebellion.
New York’s protest was thus far more restrained than it had been with the Stamp Act. In December, after six months of debate about what to do, rebels “chose a committee to devise yet another plan for promoting local manufactures, employing the poor, and encouraging frugality.” Boston took the lead, with Sam Adams drafting a letter on behalf of the Massachusetts House asking the other legislatures to form a united front in protest. Francis Bernard, the governor, claimed that merchants in the port’s Sons of Liberty had made a secret deal with their counterparts in New York, to build pan-colonial support for rebellion, because of London’s focus on the latter. Bernard responded by dissolving Massachusetts’s elected body. And the new minister to North America, Lord Hillsborough, warned that any government that answered the Circular Letter would also be dissolved. Holt’s New-York Journal reported further that London would “send Men of War to all trading Towns on the Continent, and stop all your trade,” plus “a number of Soldiers to humble you.” In April 1768, New York’s merchants agreed to support Boston’s proposal of another import boycott — if Philadelphia joined. But that did not happen until August, weeks after Boston made the first step.
The primary response during this year-long period thus came in the form of print. Nearly everything published denounced the Townshend Acts, the paramount example being John Dickinson’s Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, among the most serialized works of the century. Far more than even during the Stamp Act crisis, printers began cultivating relations with rebel leaders, too, in and out of government. In a few cases, they even joined rebel committees.
Printers thus found their interests aligned with the merchants organizing the rebellion and the maritime workforce most affected by the depression, as businessmen similarly dependent on trade. But while claiming only to be “mere mechanics,” printers offered something of greater value than occasional street protests by stitching together what had been virtually non-exist channels of communication. Precious little news focused on North America in the colonial era, mostly from lack of interest. Each colony was “independent of the other,” as one Finnish visitor to New York wrote, virtually “a state by itself,” with its own “laws and coinage.” But with every ream of paper now costing anywhere from six pence and three farthings to nine shillings, printers had major reasons to protest the Townshend Acts. And like the Sons in 1765-66, they created regional networks for information-sharing and political organizing in 1767-8, when most communication was still oral and local.
While colonial protest over the Stamp Act shocked Parliament, British merchants arguably led the push for its repeal. This English cartoon depicts the few Whigs who still backed the law on the eve of its repeal, one full year after its passage in March 1765. Grenville is depicted carrying the bill in a coffin. Ships in the harbor, named for the Whigs who repealed the legislation, carry unbought goods bound for America supposed to have accumulated during its six months in effect. (Benjamin Wilson, The Repeal: Or the Funeral Procession of Miss Americ-Stamp, 1766.)
Hanover Square’s location was not accidental. Printers established their shops near taverns, coffeehouses, post offices, markets, custom exchanges, and wharves: hives of commerce and correspondence. Newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides, and other material extended the argument in these ports. And printers sought ever-larger markets for their reception.
Politicians and Printers
Printers were not impartial observers. Rather, they embraced partisanship, rarely attempting to provide a fair or balanced view of the news. But they also created a vital “public space,” allowing colonials to imagine themselves as a single entity, independent of the Empire. Printing was, in other words, a business that fostered nationalism. And New York’s press served that function during both the Imperial Crisis and the Critical Period. During the lead-up to war and the conflict itself, leaders on both sides thus came to see printers as important political actors — something of an historical novum, with New York’s first press having only been established in 1725 (at Hanover Square).
But while the return of taxes on paper drew more printers into rebellion, the city’s press reflected the divided landscape over how to respond. John Holt founded the New-York Journal in 1766 to provide a voice for the rebels, and his encouragement soon prompted others to join the cause, like John Anderson’s Constitutional Gazette and Samuel Loudon’s New-York Packet. In 1768 and 1769, the famous “Liberty printer” also published the Journal of Occurrences about the rebellion in Boston, which many others recirculated, especially in the southern colonies, spreading rebellion across the disunited continent.
But most printers, everywhere, were moderates. And “Loyalists” produced an equally imposing commentary. New York was the headquarters for this group, too, who made up perhaps 20 percent of the colonial population in 1776. Like the rebels, their leaders were among the wealthiest, most influential men in North America. And they were “in many cases… more organized and inclusive,” as historian Christopher F. Minty argues. But they also disliked the shifts in policy after 1763. And until the 1770s they were in league with the Sons of Liberty. And they continued to seek greater political representation for the colonies afterward, only becoming Loyalists on the very eve of war.
James DeLancey Jr. was perhaps the richest man in New York, if not all North America, and one of two dominant legislative figures in the city and colony during the Imperial Crisis. His grandfather was a French Huguenot who made a fortune in the Canadian fur trade, before converting to Anglicanism and developing extensive contacts in London (his father tutored by the Archbishop of Canterbury, his uncle the Bank of England’s director). DeLancey counted nearly every wealthy family in New York as relatives, too. And when his father died in 1760, he became the leader of the “DeLancey “faction” in government, a group of elite merchants who vied for control of New York’s assembly during the early Imperial Crisis, against the dominant “Livingston faction.” He lived primarily off realty — not including his 343-acre estate on Bowery Lane (today’s Lower East Side) or his 35-acre farm in Bloomingdale (today’s Upper West Side).
Robert Livingston Sr. (known simply as “the Judge”) was the head of the “party” which dominated New York’s assembly until the late Imperial Crisis, when they inadvertently inherited the rebel cause. A group of landed upriver patroons, they were less dependent upon British trade than the elite merchants in DeLancey’s group, but rivaled their wealth. Livingston’s own estate was “ducal in scale,” covering nearly 1 million acres of the Lower Hudson Valley, making him perhaps the greatest landowner in North America (by contrast, Virginia’s biggest landowner, Thomas Jefferson, had a mere 5,000 acres). It was Livingston’s faction that pressed Colden to fend off the Haudenosaunee and others during Pontiac’s Rebellion. They used the British Army to crush the tenant farmer riots that rocked Albany, Dutchess, and Westchester counties in 1766, too. And they were deeply involved in the slave trade. But the DeLancey faction was also deeply enmeshed in all these sectors. It was a often a fine line separating these elites ideologically, and they were both greatly in fear of the populist elements of the rebellion. Yet the Livingstons subsidized John Holt’s rebel print empire, much as the DeLanceys backed the Sons of Liberty early on.
Rebel merchants in New York, including radicals like Sears, partnered with the “DeLancey faction” during the mid-late 1760s, even though most of its representatives became Loyalists in 1775-76. Headed by the aristocratically wealthy James DeLancey Jr., this group, known as the “popular party,” opposed the Livingston faction, gargantuan landowners upstate, known as the “landlord party.” The two “parties” found no shortage of debate, including whether King’s College (standing on land granted by Trinity Church) would be Anglican or non-denominational, as the Dutch Reformed and Scottish Presbyterian elite wanted. But they differed mainly over the question of whether tax on land or commerce should provide the colony’s revenue. The printers at Hanover Square, and their counterparts in less elite parts of the city, reflected these narrow political differences, even as they helped fuel the growing polarization.
It was the DeLancey faction, in fact, which used the city’s press in the most novel and skillful ways to gain power during the early Imperial Crisis. While the Livingston relied on traditional methods of deference or word-of-mouth, the DeLanceys used the popular resentment over Parliament’s legislation to reach potential supporters in taverns and coffeehouses. And they had the backing of all three weeklies in New York, including the most influential one, Hugh Gaine’s Gazette.
The working-class immigrant from Belfast had established an earlier newspaper in 1745, the Mercury, which he believed reached “every Town and Country Village” in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, and made its way to Nova Scotia, the West Indies, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. After the Townshend Acts, Gaine became New York’s official printer. And rebels would later say that his new paper offered a venue to supporters of “the crown” — earning him the sobriquet “turncoat printer of the Revolution,” routinely denounced as “the greatest liar upon earth.”
But Gaine personally opposed the Stamp and Townshend Acts, and he supported the boycott over each. As a rising gentleman with a large printing establishment — (to which he added 6,000 acres upstate in 1770, plus a Long Island paper mill in 1774) — he strove to keep his paper neutral. But he also express rebel sympathies in print which caused him to lose his status as the King’s printer when the British occupied New York. And during the 1760s he joined the famous rebel printer John Holt in backing the DeLanceys, which gave the faction a monopoly on the press.
By so doing, the merchants in the DeLancey faction were able to dominate the news cycle and present themselves as champions of the public interest during the early Imperial Crisis, when the major landowners in the Livingston faction did not even advertise candidacies. The DeLanceys would replace the Livingstons as the dominant force in the colonial assembly by the 1770s. And to a significant degree, that was because of their adroit use of the press during the Imperial Crisis, publishing lengthier broadsides and pamphlets, plus a large number of pseudonymous essays which targeted readers of “all statuses, intelligences, or reading abilities.”
Tories, Whigs, and Radicals
Expressing political views was hazardous, for everyone involved. John Peter Zenger was famously jailed for printing criticisms of New York’s royal governor and wealthy elite in 1735. And both publishers and writers could still be jailed for criticizing the government. During the Imperial Crisis, therefore, rebels turned to anonymous pamphlets and broadsides, cheaply produced and distributed with limited exposure. These media allowed discontent with British policy to be voiced in far more passionate language.
But as the Crisis worsened, printing arguably became more dangerous. In 1770, Alexander McDougall spent five months in jail for criticizing the DeLancey faction and Lt. Gov. Colden, when they finally agreed to pay for quartering New York’s soldiers, so that the legislature could be reinstated. The event marked the Sons’ break with the “Loyalist” faction and its embrace of the “rebel” Livingstons. But it was a reminder of why so many rebels had to use pseudonyms to criticize British policy, and the men who enforced it.
It was also proof of the criticism that elites in both factions constantly levelled that radicals intentionally used the print to instigate not just protest but riot. McDougall’s broadside spurred not the largest but perhaps the most significant riot of New York’s Imperial Crisis, a street battle with Redcoats that kindled the Boston Massacre, preceded by weeks of tense confrontation over the Liberty Pole near the Barracks. As with the Great Riot over the Stamp Act, rebel merchants found themselves lagging behind popular sentiment — even the radical Sears at first backing the quartering legislation which kicked off this new wave of protest and riot.
Printers relocated during the Revolutionary War, by political affiliation. Joseph Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-89 (2019).
The press also radicalized with each wave of legislation, helping to produce a more discernible line between rebels and Loyalists. Gaine’s support for Parliament would pale in comparison to James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, which became the leading mouthpiece for the “crown” during the Tea Act crisis of 1773-75. Finely written and typographically superior to most journals, it had a weekly readership of 3,50o. For a short while, its editor became a popular fixture in high society, too, cultivating the merchants who funded his large business. Printers on both sides did not stick to high-minded debates over abstract concepts of political theory. They ostracized, demonized, threatened, and occasionally went further. By the mid-1770s, the increasingly fiery rhetoric devolved into more extreme consequences — although mostly for the loyal. After rebels seized control of New York’s government in 1775, Sears led a mob of sailors, soldiers, and tavern-goers on a mission to kidnap their most articulate enemy, Rev. Samuel Seabury. Returning from Westchester that evening, they destroyed Rivington’s printshop at Hanover Square, while onlookers cheered. The “Tory printer” (who loved to mock Sears, and his big ears) had to escape onto a British warship and go into exile, like most Loyalist printers in the colonies. New York’s rebels not only imprisoned Seabury, but attempted to mutilate the president of King’s College, Rev. Myles Cooper, who escaped out the rear window just as the mob came in. Violence against printers was rare. But rebels did not tolerate dissent or uphold free speech often. In March 1776, Trinity’s Charles Inglis — the last of the big three Anglican ministers in New York who provided the greatest opposition in print to independence — responded to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense with his own pamphlet. Rebels burned all 1,500 copies.
A woodcut of James Rivington, the most infamous printer of the Revolution, hanged in effigy and published in 1775 by the man himself. Long vilified as “The King’s Printer,” historians of the past two generations have proven that he became a member of George Washington’s own spy ring, even as he made a small fortune in the occupation government’s service. But in his lifelong political meandering, Rivington well represented the business-first attitude of most printers.
Yet for all the intense hatred and brutality which followed, little distinguished these camps ideologically. Smeared as “Tories” (defenders of feudal privileges in England), Loyalists were often children of the Enlightenment and Whigs, like the rebels. They believed that England had the freest political and economic system on Earth, a perfect balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy — just as John Adams described the US government in his Defense of the Constitution. Living in a world of “absolute” monarchies, they celebrated the “liberties” and “constitution” of Britain, where political legitimacy resided not only with the King and the House of Lords, but with the House of Commons, which contained a few middling landowners and merchants. Both rebels and royals viewed this “separation of powers” as the ideal model for a republic, checking “absolute tyranny.” And most “revolutionaries” shied away from advocating independence until the very eve of war. During the Imperial Crisis, future Loyalists such as New York’s William Smith Jr. also championed a vision of federalized empire that would have granted the colonies independent governance, without challenging the legitimacy of imperial rule. Joseph Galloway echoed this scheme in his Plan of Union at the Continental Congress. Smith was a Livingstonite, but the DeLancey faction petitioned for the same.
In this sense, the Revolution was more a struggle between rival interests or a tactical difference, rather than an ideological one. Terms such as “radical,” “moderate,” and “conservative” mislead. Nearly everyone was a Loyalist until late 1775. But the economic conditions and the political language of the era also unleashed more genuinely democratic sentiments among the “lower sort,” which caused leaders in both camps to grow increasingly alarmed. By the mid-1770s, the “moderate” Whigs in the Livingston faction became the inadvertent champions of rebellion after losing control of the Assembly to the “more conservative” Whigs in the DeLancey faction, who the rebels propelled into office. But leaders in both “parties” were just as panicked over the growing radicalism and power of the street. Gouverneur Morris, a giant landowner and judge in today’s Bronx, who later signed the Declaration and drafted the Constitution’s preamble, worried as much for the dissolution of the social order as Rev. Seabury, the influential minster of Eastchester (also today’s Bronx), who the radicals drove into exile on Long Island. Yet by 1775-76 these camps took up arms against each other.
This plaque at 59 Grove Street honors the Revolutionary icon Thomas Paine, who spent his final years at several boardinghouses in Greenwich Village, including “Reason” (Barrow) St., named in honor of his enormously scandalous 1795 book, The Age of Reason, which attacked organized religion. It is thought no book outside the Bible has spurred more debate and readership in the US than Paine’s Common Sense.
Thomas Paine was an important exception. Although the Englishman authored the most famous Patriot tract of all, he was far more radical than any rebel leader. The Englishman only came to North America in November 1774. But his famous argument for independence, published in January 1776, argued that colonists had a unique opportunity to change the course of history by creating a new sort of government in which people would rule themselves. Paine denied the justice of rule by any king and pushed for a government of legislative supremacy over the checks and balances of the British-US model.
Reprinted in New York weeks after its blockbuster debut, Common Sense sold 100,000 copies in the first three months alone, making it by far the greatest bestseller of the colonial period (most pamphlets selling in the hundreds, or at most several thousand). To many historians, this is strong evidence that beneath the elite channels of “public” discourse there was intense sympathy for a more democratic vision than most leaders had, and proof of an ideological revolution unleased by the new language of “rights” and “liberty.”
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On printers in New York and the Revolution, see Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); Steven Carl Smith, An Empire of Print: The New York Publishing Trade in the Early American Republic (Penn State University Press, 2017); George Edward Cullen, Jr., “Talking to a Whirlwind: The Loyalist Printers in America, 1763—1783,” Ph.D. diss., West Virginia University (1974); Ruma Chopra, “Printer Hugh Gaine Crosses and Re-Crosses the Hudson,” New York History 90, no. 4 (2009): 271–85.
On printers in early American politics generally, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (University Press of Virginia, 2001).
On New York City’s political ferment in this era, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press, 1999).
On James Rivington, see Joseph M. Adelman, “A Loyalist And His Newspaper In Revolutionary New York,” Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, August 25, 2020.
On the development of political factions in the city, see Simon Middleton, From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).