Biography
John Peter Zenger was the New York printer whose acquittal on a charge of seditious libel became the founding episode of the American free press. Born in the Rhenish Palatinate on October 26, 1697, he came to New York in 1710 as a boy among the Palatine refugees and was apprenticed to William Bradford, the colony's official printer. In November 1733 he began printing the New-York Weekly Journal, the paper of the faction opposing Governor William Cosby, which attacked the governor for removing a chief justice who had ruled against him and for rigging elections. Cosby could not persuade two successive grand juries to indict, so his attorney general, Richard Bradley, proceeded by information instead, and on November 17, 1734 the sheriff arrested Zenger and jailed him in the cells at New York's City Hall. Bail was fixed at 400 pounds; Zenger swore that his entire estate apart from his tools and his clothes came to less than 40, and so he stayed in prison for more than eight months awaiting trial. The Journal missed a single issue: his wife, Anna Catharina Maulin Zenger, kept it printing, taking his directions, by the standard account, through a hole in the door of his cell. His own lawyers, James Alexander and William Smith, were disbarred by Chief Justice James DeLancey for challenging the judges' commissions, and the aged Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton came north to take the case. Under the law as it stood, truth was no defence — the more truthful the libel, the greater the offence — and DeLancey refused to let Zenger prove that what he had printed was true. Hamilton conceded the printing and appealed over the judge's head to the jury, telling them the question was the liberty of exposing and opposing arbitrary power. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty in about ten minutes on August 5, 1735, and Zenger walked out after 261 days inside. The verdict changed no law, but no royal governor in America tried a printer for seditious libel with much confidence afterwards. Zenger later became public printer for the colonies of New York and New Jersey, and died in New York City on July 28, 1746.
