If you haven't read "American Aurora," read Talbot's piece at Salon.com [View All]

[BurtWorm]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/freedom/2003/09/02/franklin/print.html

"I shall not burn my press and melt my letters"
Newspaper publishing in the days of Ben Franklin and his grandson was a filthy, grinding business. Fighting for freedom of the press was even more wretched a task.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Talbot

...


Because of his own impeccable revolutionary heritage, Bache was not awed by the country's first president, whom he viewed as a military fraud and a would-be king. By the end of Washington's term in 1797, Bache was piling heaps of steaming abuse on the nation's patriarch in the Aurora, sending him off on his final day in office with a call for "rejoicing" in the land over the end to "political iniquity" and "legalize corruption."

This growing scorn for America's leadership -- which only increased during the presidency of Washington's successor, John Adams -- proved too much for Bache's old friends in the Philadelphia gentry, who turned on him with a vengeance, snubbing him and his wife on the high-society circuit and boycotting the Aurora. As advertisers abandoned the paper, Bache's losses mounted -- during his eight years as publisher, the Aurora would lose almost $20,000. But Bache and his wife and publishing partner, Margaret, the daughter of a St. Croix sugar planter, persevered, exchanging their blue-blood friends for a "political underworld of journeyman printers, newspaper writers, and street- and tavern-level activists," in Pasley's words, and turning their home and newspaper office, which were housed in the same Market Street building, into a headquarters for radical republicanism.

...


Murder might not have been on the minds of Bache's enemies, but certainly imprisonment was. The following year, the Federalists in Congress pushed through the notorious Sedition Act -- a bill, commented Thomas Jefferson, that was aimed directly at his republican ally, Benjamin Franklin Bache. On June 26, 1798, Bache was arrested by a federal marshal and charged with "libeling the President & the Executive Government." Slapped with a crushing bail of $4,000, Bache was forced to appeal to his friends for help and the Aurora and his family teetered on the brink of ruin.

Adding insult to his financial and legal woes, Bache was then subjected to a relentless barrage of personal attacks by an anti-republican smear artist named William Cobbett. Combining Matt Drudge's contempt for the truth with the defamatory glee of Rush Limbaugh, Cobbett riddled Bache with poison arrows in his aptly named paper, Porcupine's Gazette, calling him a printer "notoriously in the pay of France" and "the prostitute son of oil and lamp-black" who should be dealt with like "a TURK, A JEW, A JACOBIN, OR A DOG" and demanding the suppression of the Aurora.

...


Better yet, read "American Aurora" by Richard Rosenfeld, which will make you rethink the standard image of the early Republic as serene and unanimous. You'll also see some parallels between the plight of Bache's America and the mess we're in now.