[In the following excerpt, Smith discusses Bache as a journalist and printer, describing Benjamin Franklin's role in setting him up in the business as well as in his political activities.]

The main target of Federalist wrath in 1798 was Benjamin Franklin Bache, a man who had been introduced into the printing trade by his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin. A Jeffersonian editor in Philadelphia, Bache was educated under Franklin's supervision. He became a doctrinaire proponent of Enlightenment and revolutionary principles—particularly those of Benjamin Franklin's protégé, Thomas Paine. Unlike his grandfather, who had talents and ambitions in many fields, Bache made newspaper writing an almost exclusive occupation, as it was possible to do in the United States by the 1790s. Fully prepared to see the journalist as one who performed missionary service for knowledge, justice, and democracy, Bache represented the epitome of libertarian press theory and practice in eighteenth-century America.

Benjamin Franklin formed an emotional attachment to his grandson years before meeting him. When Franklin's daughter, Sarah, gave birth to the boy in 1769, Franklin was on an extended stay in England. The glowing letters he read about the child in Philadelphia reminded him of his own son Francis who had not been inoculated and had died of smallpox in 1736. “All who have seen my Grandson, agree with you in their Accounts of his being an uncommonly fine Boy,” Franklin wrote to his sister Jane Mecom in 1772, “which brings often Afresh to my Mind the Idea of my Son Franky, tho' now dead 36 Years, whom I have seldom since seen equal'd in every thing, and whom to this Day I cannot think of without a Sigh.” Among those who kept him informed about the boy's progress was Franklin's wife Deborah who delighted in her grandson's behavior and wrote frequently about her little “Kingbird.” The grandfather shipped presents for “Benny-boy” and supplied the latest medical information on inoculation. When Franklin finally returned in 1775, his wife was dead and his son William was ready to side with the British. In 1776, with the colonies at war with England, seven-year-old Benjamin was told that he was to sail to France with his illustrious grandfather.¹

Bache spent nine years in Europe. French became his language, his manners were refined, and he met an array of famous men. Franklin took him to the aged Voltaire who placed his hands on the boy's head and uttered the benediction: “God and Liberty.” Franklin spent generous sums on his schooling, but was otherwise austere and demanding. When the grandfather became wary of Bache's being educated in France, a Catholic monarchy, he sent him off for four years of school in Geneva so that he would live “where the proper Principles prevail.” Franklin often made it clear that he wanted Bache to be diligent and obedient. “I shall always love you very much if you continue to be a good Boy,” he wrote in one letter to his grandson. Bache trusted and revered Franklin and did what he could to live up to the high expectations. When he returned from Geneva his grandfather arranged for him to receive expert instruction in printing and typefounding. “I have determin'd to give him a Trade that he may have something to depend on,” Franklin explained to Bache's father in America, “and not be oblig'd to ask Favours or Offices of anybody.”²

Bache returned to Philadelphia with his grandfather in 1785 and received his help in starting a printing business. Franklin set up joint ventures in the politically safe areas of typefounding and children's books, but both proved unprofitable. In 1788 they started the Franklin Society, a mutual aid and insurance organization for printers. In 1790, six months after his grandfather's death, Bache began publishing a daily newspaper he named the General Advertiser, and Political, Commercial, Agricultural and Literary Journal. The first issue, which appeared a month after the new state Constitution was adopted and a year before the federal Bill of Rights was ratified, summarized the foundations of libertarian press theory:³

The Freedom of the Press is the Bulwark of Liberty. An impartial Newspaper is the useful offspring of that Freedom. Its object is to inform.

In a Commonwealth, the people are the Basis on which all power and authority rest. On the extent of their knowledge and information the solidity of that Foundation depends. If the people are enlightened the Nation stands and flourishes: thro' ignorance it falls or degenerates.

After three weeks of daily publication, the twenty-two-year-old editor admitted to his readers he was having difficulty finding enough newsworthy information on European affairs for his paper. “As to domestic politics,—no party disputes to raise the printer's drooping spirits; not a legislature sitting to furnish a few columns of debates; not even so much as a piece of private abuse to grace a paper,” he said. “Zounds, people now have no spirit in them.” Bache found more than enough controversy within a few years as national parties began to form and assail each other. Sustained by early encouragement from Thomas Jefferson and eventually by a loan from James Monroe, Bache became a strident opponent of the Washington and Adams administrations. His grandfather's efforts to direct him into less contentious areas of printing as well as his scorn for the injustices of the “Court of the Press” were ignored. “Public men are all amenable to the tribunal of the press in a free state; the greater, indeed, their trust, the more responsible are they,” Bache editorialized in 1794. “It may also with truth be said, that the brighter their virtues are, the fairer their characters will appear after a public investigation of their conduct.”⁴

Bache was only one of a number of Republican journalists who espoused such sentiments in the face of Federalist outrage at the opposition press, but he went further than his fellow editors in putting his principles into practice. He published sensitive diplomatic papers—including the undisclosed texts of Jay's Treaty in 1795 and of Talleyrand's letter to the American envoys in 1798—which proved embarrassing to the Federalists. He also reprinted letters forged by the British during the Revolutionary War to discredit George Washington. Washington, who complained bitterly to his friends and cabinet members about Bache's paper, was described regularly as a vain and inept man with monarchical tendencies. Washington planned to devote a portion of his Farewell Address to the abuse he received in the press, but changed his mind. He did, however, spend part of his last day in office writing a lengthy letter for the files of the State Department denying that he had anything to do with the forged letters Bache had published. At the time Washington retired, Bache's paper compared him to George III and complained that he had “debauched” and “deceived” the nation. “Let the history of the federal government instruct mankind,” the paper observed, “that the masque of patriotism may be wore to conceal the foulest designs against the liberties of a people.”⁵

Bache thus became the country's best-known Republican journalist. To reflect his radical orientation and perhaps his unstinting support for the French republic, he changed the name of his newspaper to the Aurora. In announcing the new name, he declared that “neither the frowns of men, or allurements of private interest shall make him swerve from the line of his public duty.” The Aurora would, he said, seek to dispel ignorance and thereby “strengthen the fair fabric of freedom on its surest foundation, publicity and information.”⁶

His opponents saw other motives in Bache's journalistic conduct. Federalist papers accused him of taking money from the French and of indulging in gutter journalism to build circulation. When Bache's initial reaction to the Adams administration was favorable, the president wrote to his wife Abigail that he would “soon be acquitted of the crime” of the Aurora's praise. As Adams and the Federalists responded to a series of naval and diplomatic insults from France by preparing for war, the Aurora and other Republican newspapers exploded with invective and were denounced as traitorous in return. War hysteria and partisan aspersions intensified from the beginning of the Adams administration in 1797 through the summer of 1798. Bache was twice physically assaulted and twice had his house menaced by mobs. Federalists excluded him from the floor of the House of Representatives where he and other reporters had taken notes. When a boycott of his business began, Bache watched his finances deteriorate. In the spring of 1798 the majority party began discussing a sedition law to use against Republican newspapers. “Bache's has been particularly named,” Jefferson reported to James Madison. In Congressional debate on the Sedition Act in July, the Aurora was used as a prime example of a dangerous publication and its editor was pointed to as a close associate of the Republican vice president, Thomas Jefferson.⁷

Bache was not silenced. He depicted the steps taken against him as attacks on freedom of the press and he remained committed to what he regarded as his journalistic duty. In issue after issue, he portrayed the Federalists as warmongers and Adams as unfit for office. Apparently unable to wait for the passage of the Sedition Act, District Judge Richard Peters had him arrested in June on a federal common law charge of seditiously libelling the president and the executive branch of government. Bache published statements interpreting the federal Constitution to mean that only state courts could have jurisdiction in libel cases, but he predicted in his newspaper that his case would be settled on the basis of “The Liberty of the Press.” The day after he made his initial appearance in court, he affirmed in the Aurora “that prosecution no more than persecution, shall cause him to abandon what he considers the cause of truth and republicanism.” Others were less optimistic about Bache's prospects. “What will be the issue of the prosecutions and persecutions cannot yet be determined,” commented Thomas Adams, a Republican editor in Boston, “as the term Libel, has been so variously defined.” The trial was set for October and Bache, with the help of friends, posted $4000 bail.⁸

For the next two months Bache and his correspondents turned their attention to the Sedition Act which was signed by President Adams on July 14. Bache hammered on several themes: that the law was passed for political purposes, that it was a clear violation of the First Amendment's restriction on Congress, and that it conflicted with the principle of popular sovereignty. “If the administration emanated from itself there would be some reason for abridging the rights of the people for its own security,” he wrote, “but as the government is the will of the people, for their own happiness and comfort, it is treason against their will to impose restrictions upon them which they did not authorise.” By August Bache was fearing Federalist violence and the overthrow of the Constitution. The Aurora advised Republicans to arm themselves “for the tenets preached up by the wretches who follow in the train of our administration are calculated to convert the people of these free states into only two classes—Janisaries and Mutes!”⁹

In September citizens began fleeing Philadelphia, but not out of fears about civil disorder. An epidemic of yellow fever was spreading through the city. Bache refused to leave his newspaper and fell ill with the disease. He put his affairs in order and died calmly on September 10. He was eulogized in Republican newspapers in other states and in the Aurora which was continued by his wife, Margaret, and his employee, William Duane. The widow printed a notice addressed to the “friends of civil liberty and patrons of the Aurora” which described her husband as “a man inflexible in virtue, unappalled by power or persecution.” Federalist newspapers insisted that the editor had been merely a product of his philosopher grandfather and a tool of the Republicans. Benjamin Russell, the Federalist editor of Boston's Columbian Centinel, remarked that his correspondents thought Bache's “memory ought to be held up to the execration of the whole earth, as a monster, who clutched a dagger prepared to stab the vitals of his country.” The editor of the Aurora, Russell said, had labored in the cause of “anarchy, sedition, and French robbery.”¹⁰

Bache died before he could be brought to trial. In the two years before the “Revolution of 1800,” most of the other prominent Republican journalists in the country were either driven from their jobs or convicted of seditious libel and imprisoned. The First Amendment had not prevented vindictive Federalists from writing and enforcing a law to punish criticism of government. To a large extent, parties had begun to finance and direct newspaper publishers as they would for most of the nineteenth century.¹¹ The last decade of the eighteenth century thus represented an inauspicious beginning for a constitutionally protected press in America, but Jefferson, Madison, and other Republicans worked to advance the idea that the newly formed American political system could and should accommodate critical, aggressive journalism. Libertarians had long believed that a free press was a natural and necessary adjunct to a free government, but after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, they could argue as Bache did that this relationship was recognized by the Constitution of the United States.

Notes

1. BF to Jane Mecom, January 13, 1772, in PBF, 19: 29. On Bache's early childhood, see [Claude-Anne] Lopez and [Eugenia] Herbert, The Private Franklin, [(New York, 1975)] pp. 142, 169-71, 215.

2. A. Owen Aldridge, Voltaire and the Century of Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 399-400; James D. Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora” (Ph.D. dissertation, Wayne State University, 1973), pp. 35-70; BF to John Quincy Adams, April 21, 1779, in WBF, 7: 289; BF to BFB, August 14, 1779, ibid., p. 369; BF to Richard Bache, November 11, 1784, in WBF, 9: 279. A diary kept by Bache indicates that he had a reporter's talent for description at a young age. B. F. Bache, Diary, August 1, 1782 to September 14, 1785, B. F. Bache Papers, APS.

3. Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” pp. 71-102; Constitution of the Franklin Society ([Philadelphia]: Stewart and Cochran, 1792); GA, October 1, 1790. For a statement on postal regulations which made similar observations on the relationship between a free press and self-government, see GA, December 1, 1791. Bache said in his first issue that he intended to give more attention than other newspapers to the sciences, literature, and the useful arts—a plan which was “coinciding with the advice which the Publisher had received from his late Grand Father.” Ibid., October 1, 1790. This advice suggests that Franklin had begun to appreciate the approach Samuel Keimer had attempted sixty years before with his Universal Instructor. During his mission to France, Franklin was among several persons appointed by the Academy of Sciences to look into a project for establishing a European periodical of science and arts. They recommended support, and the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Arts was published for ten years. Aldridge, “Benjamin Franklin and the Philosophes,” p. 54.

4. GA, October 23, 1790; January 1, 1794. Jefferson demonstrated an interest in Bache's career as early as 1788 when the printer was nineteen. BF to TJ, October 24, 1788, in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Carl Van Doren (New York: Viking Press, 1948), p. 761. Monroe had difficulty collecting the money he had given to Bache. James Monroe to BFB, January 28, 1798, Etting Papers, HSP. Bache originally promised to make the newspaper impartial. B. F. Bache, Proposals for Publishing … The Daily Advertiser ([Philadelphia, 1790]).

5. James E. Pollard, The Presidents and the Press (New York: Macmillan Co., 1947), pp. 14-27; AU, December 23, 1796. For examples of libertarian press theory in the Republican newspapers of the 1790s, see Donald H. Stewart, Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1969), pp. 444-46. On the impact of the Jay Treaty controversy, see Joseph Charles, “The Jay Treaty: The Origins of the American Party System,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 12 (October 1955): 581-630. On the disclosure of government documents at this time, see Daniel F. Hoffman, “Contempt of the United States: The Political Crime That Wasn't,” American Journal of Legal History 25 (October 1981): 343-60.

6. AU, November 8, 1794.

7. Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” pp. 556-657, 673-75; John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 24, 1797, in Letters of John Adams to His Wife, ed. Charles F. Adams, 2 vols. (Boston: Little and Brown, 1841), 2: 254; Bache, Truth Will Out!, pp. ii-iii; TJ to JM, April 26, 1798, in Jefferson, Works, 8: 412.

8. AU, June 27, 30, 1798; Bache, Truth Will Out!, p. iii; Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” pp. 701-4; James Morton Smith, “The Aurora and the Alien and Sedition Laws, Part I: The Editorship of Benjamin Franklin Bache,” PMHB 77 (January 1953): 18-20; IC, July 5, 1798. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually decided that federal courts did not have jurisdiction over common law crimes. U.S. v. Hudson and Goodwin, 7 Cranch 32 (1812). Thomas Adams was indicted under the Sedition Act later in 1798. IC, October 25, 1798.

9. AU, June 29, July 3, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, August 3, 6, 30, 1798; Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” pp. 671-82. For examples of a similar treatment of the Sedition Act, see IC, July 5, October 25, 1798.

10. Tagg, “Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora,” pp. 706-13; CoC, September 19, 1798. Margaret Bache's handbill announcing her husband's death was reprinted in IC, September 17, 1798. In the same issue of the Centinel which expressed loathing of Bache, a news item reported that the toasts at a gathering honoring President Adams at Quincy included one to the liberty of the press: “May it be preserved by a timely correction of its licentiousness.” In July, Bache had reported on a number of Independence Day celebrations around the country where Republicans drank toasts to liberty of the press. AU, July 7, 12, 16, 19, 20, 26, 1798.

11. On parties and the press, see Sloan, “The Early Party Press,” pp. 18-24. On the growth of patronage for the press, see Culver H. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage, The American Government's Use of Newspapers, 1789-1875 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1977); Carl E. Prince, “The Federalist Party and Creation of a Court Press, 1789-1801,” Journalism Quarterly 53 (Summer 1976): 238-41.

List of Abbreviations

APS American Philosophical Society

BF Benjamin Franklin

BFB Benjamin Franklin Bache

HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Jefferson, Works, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, 12 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904–1905)

JM James Madison

PBF The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, William B. Wilcox, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959-).

PMHB Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

TJ Thomas Jefferson

WBF The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth, 10 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co. 1905–1907).

WMQ William and Mary Quarterly

Newspapers

AU [Philadelphia] Aurora

CoC [Boston] Columbian Centinel

GA [Philadelphia] General Advertiser

IC [Boston] Independent Chronicle