Hanover Square

Part I: Imperial Crisis

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Here at the old “printers’ corner” of Hanover Square, you are visiting the leading communications hub of colonial North America. With package ships and merchant vessels arriving directly from London, New York was often the first to receive and publish European news, which then circulated up north and down south via the other major centers of print, Boston and Philadelphia. The Stamp Act, however, and the Townshend Acts which followed its repeal, put this business and many others at risk, levying a tax on all paper, held in monopoly by the King. Under the Stamp Act, printers also had to get permission from royal officials to publish news and opinion, which radicals called an infringement of what is now termed “freedom of the press.”

Hanover Square

  • New York’s printers thus became major proponents of resistance — the city home, for example, to John Holt, the “Liberty Printer” who established a paper for rebels in 1766 that soon inspired others. During the Imperial Crisis, politiical leaders came to view these newsmen as important political actors — something of an historical novum. New York’s first press was established only in 1725 (at Hanover Square). And expressing political views was still very hazardous. Opinion was the smallest part of any gazette, and news was defined very loosely.

    But anonymous pamphlets and broadsides, cheaply produced and distributed with limited exposure, allowed discontent to be voiced in far more passionate language. And printers sought ever-larger markets. So, like the merchants in the Sons of Liberty, they helped stitch together lines of communication that had previously been non-existent, coordinating rebellion.

    Those who came to be known as Loyalists, however, made up an estimated 20 percent of the colonial population, and New York was their headquarters, too. Nowhere were they more united, numerous, or powerful. The city’s extraordinarily wealthy merchants thus also used New York’s influential press to dominate news and opinion as British legislation spurred revolt from the Sons of Neptune and the Sons of Liberty. By the mid-1770s, men like the “Tory printer” James Rivington would see their printshops destroyed or be forced into exile. In New York, mobs kidnapped and chased out the most notorious enemies of rebellion in print, the Anglican ministers Charles Inglis, Samuel Seabury, and Myles Cooper.

    But until the 1770s, even the most radical New Yorkers stood in loose alliance with these future Loyalists. For everyone in the city the end of lavish military spending coupled with new (or newly enforced) rules on shipping and commerce led to not just economic depression and massive protest but ideological shock, marking a sudden break with at least half a century of “salutary neglect” in British colonial policy.

    New York hosted the first gathering of colonial leaders in 1765 to protest the Stamp Act. And when London agreed to repeal, merchants in the city raised an enormous gold-plated statue of King George outside the Fort in gratitude, while rebels put up a far more controversial Liberty Pole near the Barracks. But the import-tax on paper remained, and the second Townshend Act dissolved the colony’s legislature, until they paid for the soldiers left in North America to guard Native land in 1763.

    By 1766, British soldiers could be found in every port, but nowhere more than in New York, where the commander of the British army was headquartered. The Suspending Act chilled protest, delaying a second boycott New York’s extraordinarily influential Sons of Liberty helped spread up and down the coast in 1768-69. But resentment intensified over the large number of soldiers in the city, as the depression continued. In these years, New York’s printers grew more rebellious and exerted their influence across the colonies. Hanover Square’s rebels would contribute directly to one the greatest turning points in the Revolution with the events at Golden Hill.

James Rivington

James Rivington was the heir of prominent booksellers in London and came to New York in the early 1760s, possibly to escape gambling debt. He established successful operations in the other major print centers during the early Imperial Crisis, largely ignoring politics.

But in March 1773 he launched his own paper, the New-York Gazette. Hoping to gain merchants in the wider region, the editor and writer started blasting rebel leaders and defending imperial officials. Using Loyalist networks, his own trade contacts, and the imperial post office, James quickly produced one of the most staunchly pro-British organs in the colonies, and perhaps the most circulated (3,500 weekly readers) from his bookstore at Queen (Pearl) & Wall St. “Rivington’s Lying Gazette,” as rebels called it, made its way throughout the colonies and to London, where it also carried great weight. He remains the most infamous printer of the Revolution, “the very soul & Life” of the “Tory faction.” Yet he also contracted with Patriots, even selling the journals of the First Continental Congress — which did not make him unusual in the business.

  • Rivington’s fortunes would change several times again before the end. He escaped kidnapping in May 1775 by hiding in a chimney when rebels broke into his shop. But when Isaac Sears, the “king of the mob,” learned that he would be publishing a rebuttal of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense by the famous rector at Trinity, New York’s most elite church, rebels broke into his printshop again to destroy the half-printed copies, the manuscript, Rivington’s sets of type, and his press.

    His most valuable equipment destroyed, Rivington fled to England weeks later, but returned as the “King’s Printer” when New York fell to British occupation, after the printers at Hanover Square escaped north to other big towns along the Hudson. During the war, he became a member of Washington’s spy ring, which protected him from vengeance after Independence. But he died a poor bookseller in 1802.

There is no historic marker at Hanover Square, all of its buildings destroyed in the Great Fire of 1835. But you can view the old printers corner, which did so much to power the rebellion against England, here at Queen Elizabeth II Garden, ironically enough. There is a small plaque at 81 Pearl St., too, for William Bradford, the “father of American printing,” who established New York’s first newspaper at Hanover Square in 1725, trained men like Peter Zenger, and was himself enmeshed in a very early case of “freedom of the press.”