A Loyalist and His Newspaper in Revolutionary New York
By Joseph M. Adelman
New York in the 1760s was a divided town, riven by local factions as well as imperial politics. Local elections were fiercely contested, as they had been for decades. The imperial crisis didn’t help. To be sure, New York was no hotbed of radical unrest like Boston — many among its merchant class remained broadly loyal to the British imperial government, or at the very least kept their qualms to themselves in order to smooth the flow of commerce. And the British had seated their American military headquarters at New York at the end of the Seven Years War, among other imperial offices that lined the streets of southern Manhattan Island.
In the maelstrom of the imperial crisis — or perhaps because of it — the city also germinated the stories that have become classic elements of New York life: the immigrant establishing himself; commercial success built on controversy; even a dispute with arrogant New Englanders crossing the colony’s border from Connecticut to meddle in a situation the city’s leaders thought they should control. In some cases these elements even converged in one person’s narrative.
James Rivington, Sr. (ca. 1724-1802). New-York Historical Society.
The figure at the center of this particular tale was James Rivington. The scion of a prominent London bookselling family, Rivington arrived in New York in the early 1760s — possibly to escape gambling debts back in England. Using his connections in the book trade, Rivington established successful shops in New York as well as Boston and Philadelphia within the decade. As he did so, for the most part he remained outside of partisan politics even as they heated up in New York and more broadly in North America.
As he expanded his trade from bookselling to printing, Rivington joined a collegial but competitive group of printers already active in the city. They were not a particularly radical bunch. Hugh Gaine had been a printer in the city since the 1750s and took a cautious tone in his New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury. Samuel Inslee and Anthony Carr, printers of the New York Gazette and Post Boy, took on that paper from James Parker at his death in 1770. Only John Holt, the prodigal son-in-law of a prominent Virginia businessman and printer of the New-York Journal, hewed strongly to the position of the Sons of Liberty.
Rivington's New-York Gazetteer; or The Connecticut, New-Jersey, Hudson's-River, and Quebec Weekly Advertiser. The American Antiquarian Society.
In the early 1770s, Rivington made his move into politics by starting his own newspaper, Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, the fourth in the city. With an expansive geographic view — he subtitled the paper the Connecticut, New-Jersey, Hudson’s-River, and Quebec Weekly Advertiser — Rivington aimed for a paper that would draw merchants as a major source of its customer base. To attract them, he printed prices current and information about customs clearances — information to which he had solid access because of his imperial connections. He likewise represented the Gazetteer as the most reliable source of fresh information from London, a claim his networks likewise helped him reinforce.
Rivington quickly achieved two milestones, producing one of the most widely read newspapers in the British North American colonies and also one of the most staunchly Loyalist. He began to excoriate anti-imperial leaders, decrying their protests and defending King George III, his ministers, and the imperial officials in the colonies. Within months Rivington had tapped into loyalist networks, his own printing trade contacts, and made use of the imperial post office to make the Gazetteer among the most-circulated newspapers in all of British North America. His version of the news traveled not only throughout the colonies but also back to the imperial center in London, where officials gave his accounts weight commensurate with the support he received in correspondence from imperial officials in New York.
Rivington published a woodcut of himself being hanged in effigy. Via Journal of the American Revolution: https://allthingsliberty.com/2014/03/james-rivington-kings-printer-patriot-spy/
The mere existence of a Loyalist newspaper angered many Patriots; its popularity pushed them over the edge. Sons of Liberty in New York City as well as surrounding colonies as far away as Rhode Island discussed and plotted how to undermine Rivington’s newspaper for years. One letter addressed to Newport activists, for example, described him as a “Pensiond Servile Wench” who was “Insulting, Reviling And Counteracting this whole Continent.”[1] Active violence against Loyalist printers was rare, however, before the war. Patriots would threaten them, attempt to ostracize them, and demonize them in their own newspapers, but not usually attack them.
For Rivington, business continued to be good, and ironically, he continued to do a thriving business in trade with his fellow printers and booksellers, including those who were Patriots or Sons of Liberty themselves. He even sold copies of the journals of the First Continental Congress in the winter of 1775, which he had acquired from Philadelphia printer (and leader of the Sons of Liberty there) William Bradford. For printers, this was standard practice. Throughout the imperial crisis, even the most hardened partisans continued to act in concert with their fellow tradesmen and women when it served their commercial interests.
That shifted when the Revolutionary War started in 1775. Rivington kept up his strong Loyalist position in the Gazetteer, and local anti-imperial leaders fumed. In November, a group of Sons of Liberty from New Haven, Connecticut, led by Isaac Sears, decided that it was time to take matters into their own hands. They traveled to New York City, where they attacked Rivington’s office. They destroyed his sets of type (the most valuable possession of a printer) and his press. Just a few weeks later, Rivington abandoned the city for England.
It’s a New York City story, remember? When the city’s Patriot leadership found out about the attack, they were upset … at Sears and his Connecticut band, for taking on a matter that they felt was properly theirs. Sears had anticipated this, justifying himself by arguing that “it wou’d not otherwise have been done, as there are not Spirited & Leading men enough in N. York to undertake such a Business, or it wou’d have been done long ago.”[2]
Rivington’s story did not end with that trip to England because the British Army captured New York City just a few months later and made it its North American headquarters for the duration of the Revolutionary War. Seeing an opportunity, Rivington returned to his old printing office, armed with an appointment as King’s Printer. He resumed the Gazetteer as one of two Loyalist newspapers in the city — all its other printers evacuated to towns north along the Hudson River — and explicitly adopted the British position in his newspaper. Reports from American newspapers were labeled as from “Rebel Papers.” At the same time, he was likely also an active member of the Culper Spy Ring, which passed information about British strategy to George Washington (and now memorialized in fiction through the AMC show, TURN).
With the British evacuation in November 1783, Rivington lost his political protection. He’d been preparing for the moment for months, toning down his coverage of Congress and the Continental Army. New Yorkers, however, had not forgotten his Loyalist affiliations, and they pushed him to end the run of the Gazetteer. He remained in the bookselling and other trades for about a decade longer, and died in New York in 1802. Rivington, like many New Yorkers who came before and would come after, tried to capitalize on the new opportunities available across the Atlantic. But with the birth of the new nation, his New York story came to a disappointing close.
Joseph M. Adelman is the author of Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 (JHU Press, 2019). He is an associate professor of history at Framingham State University.
[1] “Freinds of America” to Stephen Ward and Stephen Hopkins, December 5, 1774 (postmarked at Newport, January 9, 1775), Ward Family Papers, ser. 4 [MS 776], Rhode Island His-
torical Society.
[2] Isaac Sears to Roger Sherman, Eliphalet Dyer, and Silas Deane, November 28, 1775, Feinstone Collection, David Library of the American Revolution.