10/18/2024
2024 isn't the first time that a powerful U.S. politician regarded a journalist as an enemy. It's happened before -- and the journalist spent six months in the slammer because the politician didn't like what he had said. Here's the story:
In 1800, a controversial newspaper editor in Northumberland, Pa., went to jail because President John Adams didn’t like being criticized.
Adams had succeeded George Washington to become the country’s second president, and the Federalist Party struggled mightily against the Democratic-Republicans to elect Adams to a second four-year term. The Democratic-Republicans wanted to elect Thomas Jefferson, who had served as Adams’ vice president.
Nobody had opposed George Washington’s re-election in 1792, and the notion of challenging a sitting president – as Jefferson was doing – was a novelty.
Equally novel was the notion that Thomas Cooper, editor of the Sunbury & Northumberland Gazette, and other newspaper editors not only had the freedom but also the right to publish articles that criticized an incumbent president. Cooper ran afoul of Adams when he exercised this right.
Many issues complicated the 1800 election campaign, and these included the Alien & Sedition Acts enacted in 1798. The Democratic-Republicans contended that the Sedition law would suppress free speech. Here’s where Cooper came in.
Born in London in 1759 and educated at Oxford University, Cooper became a lawyer and political activist. A friend of Dr. Joseph Priestley, he emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1794 and settled in Northumberland.
Priestley was well-connected politically, and when Adams took office in 1797, Priestley asked Adams to appoint Cooper to a government post. Adams declined, and Cooper subsequently became editor of the Gazette.
Soon, Cooper was writing articles highly critical of the president. Since Northumberland and Sunbury were small country towns, The Gazette had a limited circulation, but editors of other newspapers readily reprinted Cooper’s commentaries.
One of them was the Reading, Pa., Advertiser, which in late 1799 reprinted a handbill that Cooper had printed. The Reading editor characterized Cooper’s piece as “cunning and insidious” and written with “impudence.”
Cooper responded by printing a fiery rebuttal that, among other things, charged that Adams had “entrenched his public character behind the legal barriers of the sedition law.”
The Adams administration reacted in late 1799 by indicting Cooper for libeling the president. He pleaded innocent, and went on trial in Philadelphia in April 1800. Since he was a lawyer, Cooper decided to represent himself. The prosecutor was William Rawle, the U.S. attorney for Pennsylvania.
Cooper wanted to call John Adams as a hostile witness because he thought that he could compel Adams to acknowledge the accuracy of the disputed writing. But Rawle objected, and Judge Samuel Chase agreed, saying that it would have been both “improper and … indecent” to subpoena Adams.
Rawle told the jury the prosecution’s evidence proved that Cooper had “published a false, scandalous and malicious attack on the character of the president of the United States, with an intent to excite the hatred and contempt of the people of this country against the man of their choice.”
For his part, Cooper argued, “I have published nothing which truth will not justify.”
The editor declared: “You, and all who hear me, well know that this country is divided, and almost equally divided, into two grand parties, … whether properly or improperly, Federalists and Anti-Federalists; and that the governing powers of the country are ranked in public opinion under the former denomination. Of these divisions, the one wishes to increase, the other to diminish, the powers of the executive. The one thinks that the people … has (sic) too much, the other too little, influence on the measures of government.”
Cooper also lambasted the Sedition Law: “A defendant, such as I stand before you, is placed in a situation unknown in any other case. Directly or indirectly, the public, if not the private, character of the president of the United States is involved in the present trial. Who nominates the judges who are to preside? The juries who are to judge of the evidence? The marshal who has the summoning of the jury? The president.”
In Cooper’s case, both the judge and the prosecutor had been appointed by President Washington.
Cooper was convicted, and used the six months he spent in jail in Philadelphia to write a book: “An Account of the Trial of Thomas Cooper, of Northumberland: On a Charge of Libel Against the President of the United States.”
Published in late 1800, it came down hard on Judge Chase: “It is not part of a judge’s duty to argue a case against a defendant on a personal prosecution, to notice omissions of an attorney general, to dwell on circumstances of aggravation, to omit strong points of the defense, or to let the jury perceive a bias in the mind of the court.”
Cooper’s trial, which voters followed closely, and his subsequent book didn’t help Adams win re-election. The vote was so close that the Electoral College had to select the next president. In early 1801, as Jefferson was sworn as the third president, Adams headed home to Massachusetts.
When the Sedition Act expired in 1801, Jefferson and his political allies didn’t renew it.
Although Cooper is obscure today, author Charles Slack, who has written a book about the Alien and Sedition Acts, said Cooper is an authentic American hero.
“His arrogance and condescending tone infuriated enemies and alienated potential friends. He wasn’t even a ‘real’ American, according to Federalist writers who labeled the British-born Cooper an imported agitator,” said Slack.
The author visited Northumberland a decade ago to research Cooper’s life.
Slack said that “when America faced its first great constitutional crisis over the Sedition Act, Cooper understood the stakes better than most native-born residents. He stood up to the most powerful figures in the land, enduring withering ridicule and months in jail for the sake of his First Amendment rights.”
“His courage helped America come to its senses just in time to correct a potentially fatal error,” Slack said. “For that if nothing else, Thomas Cooper belongs in the pantheon of American heroes, right alongside his Northumberland friend and neighbor, Joseph Priestley.”
