In the early 1720s, two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, mounted the world's first-ever systematic defense of free speech as a secular, political right. It was part of a wildly successful newspaper column they wrote, known (on account of their pseudonym) as Cato's Letters. In it, they dispensed easy-to-read pronouncements on liberty, religious freedom, human nature, and the purpose of government. The column's overall political theory was fairly derivative, yet its arguments about freedom of speech and the press were strikingly novel.
Up to this point, free speech had mainly been conceptualized in terms of a classical rhetorical tradition (that is, offering frank counsel to a superior), or as part of Protestant arguments for religious toleration (that is, free debate on theological matters). “Liberty of the press” had also recently become a fashionable political slogan in England, following the lapse of prepublication government censorship in 1695 and the explosion of news and partisan debate that ensued. But the concept remained a largely empty, untheorized one. Works of political theory ignored it, and even radical writers showed little interest in defining its principles. At most, as did the author Daniel Defoe, they distinguished vaguely between the beneficial liberty of the press, which enabled people to discuss public affairs—and press license (or licentiousness), such as spreading lies, slander, or dangerous ideas, which was harmful and ought to be punished. The exact boundary between the two was never explored in detail: it remained essentially a distinction in the eye of the beholder. As historians nowadays point out, there was as yet no set of intellectual tools, “no language to justify the free press.”Footnote 1
Cato's new conception of political speech as an inalienable personal right, the foundation of all liberty, was therefore extraordinary.Footnote 2 Here are the stirring opening lines of Gordon's first essay on the subject:
Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech, which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.
This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech, always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of the Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.Footnote 3
Cato's Letters became one of the most influential political texts of the eighteenth century, especially in North America, where it was endlessly quoted, discussed, and reprinted. No other work more profoundly influenced colonial ideas about liberty, print, and speech. In 1776, the free speech and press clauses that the rebellious states included in their declarations of rights carried the unmistakable imprint of its absolutist, antigovernmental theory of speech; so too, a few years later, did the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.Footnote 4
For all these reasons, Trenchard and Gordon's theory of free speech has been much studied and celebrated. What has gone unnoticed is how partial, contradictory, and misleading its arguments were. Yet that oversight is not surprising. Historians are accustomed to spotting and critiquing types of censorship, but they usually take for granted that freedom of speech and press is simply the natural, desirable inverse of such unnatural constraints: the one advances as the other retreats. Cato's case proves the opposite. Freedom of speech is not something that emerges straightforwardly from the lessening of restraint: it is itself an artificial, invented concept. It always has a shape. It flows more easily in certain directions than in others; it aggregates around existing forms of power. This is not just true of its practice, as is abundantly clear in the present day, but equally of its history and theory.Footnote 5
I have elsewhere set out in detail the extraordinary and previously unknown story of how and why Trenchard and Gordon came to put forward their radical new way of thinking in the early 1720s, how it related to earlier theories of speech and press liberty, and how profoundly (and perniciously) it was influenced by their covert personal and political motives.Footnote 6 In what follows, I explore further how the nominally neutral new ideology of free speech as a political right was in fact deeply partial—in the way it conceived of the differences between men and women, and in its treatment of race and slavery. I highlight how those biases were intrinsic to the original text, and how they developed further in the slave societies of the Americas.
To reveal the hidden shapes of Cato's free speech ideals, one needs to consider not just the text's printed words but its silent elisions, and its creators’ unspoken presumptions. Very little has hitherto been known about Trenchard and Gordon personally, and nothing at all about their first publisher, Elizée Dobrée. Uncovering the histories of these men reveals telling connections between their biographies and the distinctive shape of Cato's arguments about free speech. The opening section briefly surveys how Trenchard and Gordon's construction of the “public” consciously gendered the division between private and public affairs, and the scope of free speech; the remainder of the article addresses their conceptions of slavery and race.
Like many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political tracts, Cato's Letters continually condemned enslavement, the antithesis of liberty. Slavery was precisely what freedom of speech and print was meant to prevent. Yet at the same time, the text condoned the actual bondage of Black people, and Trenchard, Gordon, and Dobrée were personally connected to slave ownership in the Americas. Both in its original and most of its later eighteenth-century articulations, freedom of speech was a racialized ideology—in much the same way that early newspapers, the most self-conscious and celebrated exponents of press liberty in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglophone world, were also important tools of enslavement and white supremacy.Footnote 7
In practice, free speech could take other shapes, too. It was always a contested ideal that could be appropriated by the weak as well as the strong. Women and slaves had their own notions of liberty and could never be completely silenced. Yet both in its initial formulation and, even more unsettlingly, in its transplantation across the Atlantic, the new concept of free speech was always shadowed by the reality of racial unfreedom.
Male and Female Speech
Cato's Letters is a male text—written by men, about men, for men. Female subjects and voices are conspicuously absent from its countless references to ancient and modern examples, and from its entire 350,000-word philosophy of liberty. This was hardly unusual for an eighteenth-century political tract, but it profoundly shaped Trenchard and Gordon's theory of speech.
Implicit in their text was a stark view of sexual difference. Women were disregarded because Cato's central theme, “publick liberty,” was presumed to be a solely masculine concern. The work's many metaphors, similes, and personifications were likewise almost exclusively male. Just once, Trenchard wrote a letter as “A Woman,” with a long reply by Cato, critiquing mercenary marriage and depicting wives as invariably profligate, properly subordinate, and interested only in household matters. The essay's argument was that marriage, by providing men with domestic felicity, allowed them to focus on the great cause of public liberty and happiness.Footnote 8 That was the only connection between women and public liberty.
This conceptual distinction between the public and the domestic world also characterized Cato's model of free speech. Freedom of speech was foundational to “publick Liberty” because it allowed private citizens to critique “the Administration of Government.” Its ambit was to “publickly” examine the transacting of “publick Matters” and “publick Proceedings” by “publick Ministers”—“when they are Honest, they ought to be publickly known, that they may be publickly commended; but if they are Knavish or Pernicious, they ought to be publickly exposed, in order to be publickly detested.”Footnote 9 The realm of free speech, in other words, was only the public discussion of public matters. It emphatically did not extend to private affairs: to “writing that hurts particular Persons, without doing good to the Publick”; to speech about “private and personal Failings,” or “private Offences”; or to libels “against private Men,” or concerning “purely personal” matters. All of that, Trenchard and Gordon affirmed, was not liberty but “Licentiousness,” and rightly punishable. Even “the private Vices or Weaknesses of Governours” were off-limits, unless they affected their public actions.Footnote 10
This was a deeply gendered theory. Cato took for granted that women did not engage with public affairs: their speech was entirely domestic, trivial, and inferior. In 1724, Gordon's eulogy on the death of his coauthor reproduced this hierarchy precisely. It extolled Trenchard's speech and writing as pellucid, rational, and eloquent. And then it drew a contrast. As for women, “he treated them with great Niceness and Respect; he abounded in their own Chit-Chat, and said a world of pleasant Things.” In other words, male discourse was “strong, fine, and useful,” and concerned with public welfare, while female conversation consisted of sweet, airy nothings.Footnote 11
The biographical evidence I have been able to piece together about both authors fits this conventional, chauvinist outlook. “A Family is a small State,” Gordon once wrote, reproducing an age-old trope: the husband was its “Master or Prince.”Footnote 12 He himself had three children with a woman whose very name is lost to history.Footnote 13 His daughter was killed by childbirth; her husband had a teenaged mistress. Gordon's elder son, Tom, likewise left behind a mistress and several illegitimate children.Footnote 14 Trenchard's first wife, Grace Peck, seventeen years his junior, also died in labor.Footnote 15 A few months later, aged almost fifty, Trenchard allied himself with another hugely wealthy and powerful man, the merchant and member of Parliament Sir Thomas Scawen, by offering to marry his eighteen-year-old daughter, Ann, though he barely knew her. Within a fortnight, they were wed; four months later, she slit her throat.Footnote 16 Undeterred, Trenchard set off for Bath, the great matchmaking resort, once more on “business . . . to find out a wife.” This time he settled on fourteen-year-old Ann Blackett: again, they were married within a few weeks. He claimed to like her spirit; she was, moreover, a fatherless heiress who brought him an immense additional fortune.Footnote 17 (Ann Blackett was thirty-six years younger than Trenchard: when he died in 1723, leaving her still richer, she was only eighteen. A quarter-century later, safely past childbearing age, she would marry the widowed Thomas Gordon, fifteen years her senior, whom she then also long outlived. Almost nothing is now known about her beyond these male connections.)Footnote 18
All this is typical of the patriarchy of eighteenth-century propertied society. Yet to conclude only that the shape of Trenchard and Gordon's free speech model reflected the intrinsic gendering of contemporary culture, notable though that is, would be to overlook a crucial additional point. In the early 1720s, when they put forward their theory, Anglophone public discourse was not a solely masculine preserve. On the contrary, over the preceding decades, female authors had become increasingly commonplace in the world of print, and the unjust masculine silencing of women was a major theme of their writing. As well as poets, novelists, and playwrights, women were also journalists, satirists, philosophers, and essayists: among the leading political authors of the age were Delarivier Manley, Susanna Centlivre, and Mary Astell. In addition, women were central to the production and distribution of political discourse, as printers, publishers, booksellers, and retailers of books and newspapers. Without their efforts, no one would have read Cato's Letters.Footnote 19 Furthermore, women, like men, were avid and opinionated consumers and discussants of political news. As one of Trenchard's closest intellectual associates deplored in 1716, “the Ladies . . . turn their Heads to Politicks too much.”Footnote 20 Thus, in putting forward their gendered model of speech and the public sphere, Trenchard and Gordon, though claiming to describe reality, were in fact concocting a wishful fiction.
Their proto-Habermasian notion of public discourse as a separate, masculine domain was also fairly novel. Though “private” and “public” were concepts of growing fascination in eighteenth-century society, the presumption that they were essentially distinct was still far from dominant. The more traditional way of thinking stressed instead that personal and communal affairs were intimately intertwined, and that honest public conduct depended on virtuous domestic life. This was in line with the most fashionable early eighteenth-century model of elite discourse, politeness, in which female sociability and conversation were portrayed as superior, and beneficial to men, rather than as separate, inferior domains.Footnote 21
Were Trenchard and Gordon consciously repudiating this prevailing view of social and sexual relations? One remarkable piece of evidence suggests that they were. When the two of them started writing together, the most popular essayists and coauthors in the English-speaking world were Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. These men, in their massively successful and influential periodicals, the Tatler and the Spectator (1709–1714), had done more than anyone to popularize the ideals of politeness and superior female refinement. In other ways, too, their shadow must have loomed large, especially to the young, ambitious, but penniless Gordon. Both were rich, successful politicians as well as best-selling authors; and Addison's hit play, Cato, a Tragedy (1712), probably inspired the name of Trenchard and Gordon's column. So it is notable how forcefully Gordon responded in the summer of 1721 when a senior government minister, secretly meeting with him in hopes to flatter the youthful upstart polemicist into switching sides, invoked the towering example of the recently deceased Addison, saying he “deserved a Statue of Gold for his endeavours to mend private & domestick manners.” To this, Gordon scornfully replied: “and I told his L[ordshi]p that Mr Addison wrote well upon little ordinary subjects relating to men & their wives, but to do good to the world he began at the wrong end, since whoever would mend mankind must begin w[i]th the Publick, & the methods of Government[,] in which is contain'd all virtue or vice, happiness or misery, & that wherever the Government is bad, private manners will be necessarily bad.”Footnote 22 It was a strikingly self-confident repudiation of Addison and Steele's authority and their underlying presumptions about gender and worldly affairs.
Trenchard and Gordon were entirely conventional in distinguishing between male and female language and elevating public over private matters. These were much-discussed themes throughout the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Spectator, too, alongside its advocacy of polite conversation between the sexes, had stressed “that Men and Women ought to busie themselves in their proper Spheres, and on such Matters only as are suitable to their respective Sex.” Yet while decrying as unfeminine women's political partisanship, it also repeatedly acknowledged passionate female engagement with politics and other undomestic affairs.Footnote 23
Cato's Letters, by contrast, willfully ignored this reality. In doing so, its new and influential theories of liberty and of political freedom of speech helped harden the presumption that politics was a solely masculine preserve. By 1800, it had become commonplace to distinguish between private and public domains of life, and to presume that these corresponded to essentially male and female spheres. Though this ideology gained in strength, however, it was perennially contradicted by the actuality of female interest and participation in public affairs.Footnote 24 The notion that women were absent from the public sphere, and that freedom of speech was hence inevitably only a male concern, was always only an argument, masquerading as a neutral description of the supposedly natural state of affairs. But that is how patriarchy works and continually, invisibly, reinforces itself. Cato's Letters are part of that story.
Freedom and Bondage
The essential purpose of free speech, Cato declared, was to prevent tyranny and servitude: “Freedom of Speech is the great Bulwark of Liberty; they prosper and die together.” Whenever oppressors managed to curb free expression, the people became “enslaved,” and their “Minds . . . degenerated into all the Vileness and Methods of Servitude: Abject Sycophancy and blind Submission.”Footnote 25 This claim was about far more than speech: how to maintain liberty and avoid slavery was the central theme of Trenchard and Gordon's entire political philosophy. Throughout their text, as in other contemporary works of literature and philosophy, slavery was a ubiquitous concept, the antithesis of English freedom. After all, argued Cato, most peoples across the globe (including “all Asia and . . . all Africa”) lived in “enslaved Countries,” subject to the whims of tyrants—“We are Men, and They are Slaves.”Footnote 26
How did Trenchard and Gordon's use of this idiom relate to the reality that their own society enslaved human beings? How did it affect their philosophy of free speech, which became so popular in the slave-holding societies of America? Similar questions have long been asked about John Locke's theory of liberty, which likewise employed the language of slavery and was widely read by colonial and revolutionary Americans.Footnote 27 They have not been posed before about the obscure makers of Cato's Letters. But their lives and writings, too, were implicated in the enslavement of Black people across the North Atlantic world. At its inception, free speech was a racialized ideal.
By the 1710s, when Trenchard and Gordon began their writing partnership, British readers and writers took colonial slavery entirely for granted.Footnote 28 Their great journalistic rival Daniel Defoe was among those who invested money in it and wrote propaganda on behalf of slave traders. As he declared in 1711, complaining about a recent rise in the cost of enslaved Africans, “furnishing the Plantations with sufficient supplies of Negroes at moderate Prices” had long been “a most Profitable, Useful, and absolutely necessary Branch of our Commerce.”Footnote 29 The growing popularity of Cato's Letters between the 1720s and 1750s coincided with the continued British expansion of the transatlantic slave trade.Footnote 30 London's newspapers openly marketed “Black” and “Negro” humans for sale, advertised for the capture of escaped slaves, and referred casually to “the Negro Trade.”Footnote 31 On 16 September 1721, the London Journal opened with Cato's stirring pronouncement that “Men are naturally equal”; the next sheet updated readers with the happy news that hundreds of “very fine Slaves” had been loaded onto English ships and were on their way to the Americas.Footnote 32
Peoples who lived in liberty, like the Greeks and Romans, Gordon explained, were innately superior, “another Species of Mankind.” Slaves, on the other hand, were but “sheep”: for “they who are us'd like Beasts, will be apt to degenerate into Beasts.” He never differentiated between the vassals of tyrants and those of the Romans and other “free” societies like his own.Footnote 33 In a deeply hierarchical culture, where “slave” could refer to an owned human being, or a victim of tyranny, or simply a morally inferior person, it was easy to slip from notions of English superiority to contempt for oppressed, “slavish” nations to the presumption that some peoples or individuals were slaves by nature.Footnote 34 Trenchard and Gordon's hero Algernon Sidney was among those who took for granted that “the base effeminate Asiaticks and Africans, for being careless of their Liberty, or unable to govern themselves, were by Aristotle and other wise men called Slaves by Nature, and looked upon as little different from Beasts.”Footnote 35
Thus the text of Cato's Letters, too, repeatedly argued that unfree government was a species of slavery that corrupted even tyrants themselves (“A Prince of Slaves is a Slave; he is only the biggest and the worst”Footnote 36), yet also casually condoned the slave trade—indeed portrayed it as a support to English liberties. One of Trenchard's eulogies to political freedom celebrated the industrious “English planters in America, [who] besides maintaining themselves and Ten times as many Negroes,” generated such prosperity for their homeland: “Such are the Blessings of Liberty.”Footnote 37 Another lauded the economic benefits of “Colonies planted in proper Climates, and kept to their proper Business”—“particularly many of our own Colonies in the West-Indies” whose inhabitants balanced their exports by importing goods “for themselves and their Slaves.”Footnote 38 Trenchard's exposition borrowed heavily from the arguments of his and Locke's old associate, the Bristol merchant and West-Indies trader John Cary, whose well-known Essay on the State of England (1695) had enthused about the triangular slave trade as “the best Traffick the Kingdom hath” and urged its expansion, given the cheapness of African slaves and the productivity of enslaved plantation labor across the Caribbean and North America.Footnote 39
There were also personal connections between Cato's creators and the business of slavery. Elizée Dobrée's extended family bought and sold African people. (Olaudah Equiano mentions them in his autobiography: he was first brought to England on a vessel they owned; his enslaver was intimate with them.)Footnote 40 Trenchard had served as a colonial administrator in Ireland and invested in the South Sea Company, which trafficked in slaves.Footnote 41 His estate, where many of Cato's Letters were written, wound up in the hands of a millionaire whose fortune came from Jamaican slave plantations.Footnote 42
Before he became a writer, Gordon almost emigrated to the Caribbean, too: in 1713, the chief minister Robert Harley, an enthusiastic promotor of the slave trade, had proposed to send him as a spy to the East or West Indies.Footnote 43 In 1719, Gordon's A Modest Apology for Parson Alberoni, the best-selling satire that launched his literary career, became one of the first books to be (re)printed in Jamaica.Footnote 44 And all three of his offspring were drawn into the empire. In 1740, his younger son, Bill, sailed to India on an East India Company ship.Footnote 45 A decade later, his other two children emigrated to Jamaica, Britain's most profitable colony, the rich, brutal epicenter of its inhuman commerce. The youngest, Patty, married a sugar planter and became thereby the mistress of (as her husband put it) hundreds of “Negroes, Mules, Horses, Cattle,” and other chattels.Footnote 46 Her brother Tom, a barrister and justice of the peace, likewise ended up the rich and powerful owner of large numbers of slaves, the most valuable one of whom he named Cato.Footnote 47 Tom Gordon married into the local plantocracy and fathered children on an enslaved woman, Tilla, “my Mulatto wench.”Footnote 48 In 1760, he supported the bloody suppression of Tacky's Revolt, the largest uprising of enslaved people the British Empire had ever faced. He spent his life defending the interests of other slaveholders and the principles of slavery, in due course becoming the chief justice of Port Royal, the attorney-general of Jamaica,Footnote 49 an assemblyman, and a member of its ruling council.Footnote 50
Jamaica was one of the foremost centers of print in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world: Tom Gordon amassed a library of two thousand volumes. It is likely that Cato's Letters were reprinted in many local newspapers and imported in book form, as they were on the American mainland, though the surviving evidence is too sparse to know exactly how popular they became in the Caribbean.Footnote 51 Yet their racist implications unmistakably took on additional force when transplanted across the Atlantic. In the early Americas, the ideology of free speech mainly buttressed white supremacy.
For eighteenth-century white male colonists, freedom of speech was both a potent political ideal and a constant practical marker of their superiority over others. Their law and politics were transacted through oral rituals—like the taking of oaths, the giving of evidence, the making of speeches, or the formal debate of policy—from which lesser human beings were automatically excluded. That meant women, Jews, Catholics, and Quakers, as in Britain—as well as all people of color. The words of mulattoes, Indians, and free Blacks were always inferior to those of whites, while the mass silencing of Black people was central to slavery itself.Footnote 52
Indeed, racialized presumptions about speech came to be central to eighteenth-century European definitions of humankind itself. That the eloquence of slaves and Africans proved their equal humanity was one of the arguments that critics of slavery put forward with increasing force throughout the century.Footnote 53 But other Europeans and colonists urged the opposite—that Black utterances were inherently inferior. Among those espousing this position was the philosopher David Hume, whose ideas about British press liberty and “slavery” had also been influenced by Cato's Letters.Footnote 54 Setting out to prove in 1753 that all “negroes” were “naturally inferior to the whites,” Hume dismissed a seemingly contrary West Indian example: “In Jamaica indeed, they talk of one negro, as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admir'd for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”Footnote 55 No Black voice could ever be more than a bestial squawk.
Hume's assertion became tremendously influential: it made him the favorite authority of white supremacists throughout the later eighteenth and the nineteenth century.Footnote 56 Although he disdained to name him, the subject of his contempt was no slave but an unusually rich and privileged free Black Jamaican, Francis Williams, who had been educated in England, was an accomplished Latin poet, and owned slaves himself. In the early 1720s, Williams was living in London and so was doubtless familiar with Cato's Letters—in the autumn of 1721, Thomas Gordon even referred to him in one of them as an “ingenious gentleman . . . a Black,” who had been rejected by the Royal Society because of the color of his skin. A generation later, Williams and Gordon's son Tom were fellow luminaries of Jamaica's capital, Spanish Town.Footnote 57
Contemporary descriptions of the younger Gordon often highlighted his rhetorical skill: he was “fam'd in wordy war,” “the ablest speaker,” “eloquence [flowed] from his tongue.” That he made “very moving” speeches when sentencing people to death was reported as far away as Boston.Footnote 58 As the proud, self-confident heir of Thomas Gordon,Footnote 59 and as a leading colonial lawyer and politician, he took for granted, like his British and North American counterparts, that freedom of speech was a cornerstone of liberty.Footnote 60
Williams, too, was legally skilled, assured, and articulate. Yet exactly the same values that were admirable in a white man were unbecoming in a Black one. Because white West Indians were so heavily invested in trying to make the distinction between slavery and freedom synonymous with the supposedly straightforward difference between dark and pale bodies, it was deeply aggravating that (as one leading planter complained) Williams “had not the modesty to be silent” and instead publicly insisted that skin color was irrelevant to intelligence. (“Virtue and understanding,” he wrote, “have no color; there is no color in an honest mind, nor in art.”)Footnote 61 Barred because of his color from practicing law or holding public office, he instead opened a school for free Black children, instructing them in reading, writing, Latin, and mathematics. White Jamaicans tried repeatedly to quiet his voice, but never with complete success. When, in 1730, the island's government passed a law degrading his legal rights (as a dangerously uppity Negro), Williams successfully petitioned the imperial authorities in England (as a citizen with established “Libertys and Priviledges”) to overturn it. He knew that how words were received, and what force they carried, depended on their audience as well as their author.Footnote 62
It was likewise because colonists essentially equated liberty of speech with white supremacy that they put so much effort into silencing enslaved people. In 1748, the very notion that enslaved Jamaicans might be allowed to complain about gross maltreatment (“castration or other mutilation or dismemberment,” for example) was so repugnant to white settlers that it inspired a satirical “petition of negro slaves,” whose form and content underlined how threatening the notion of slaves writing and speaking up for themselves was.Footnote 63 Indeed, slaves were not normally permitted to read or write at all. Teaching them literacy was a terrible mistake, warned the London magistrate Sir John Fielding, in the aftermath of Tacky's Revolt—exposure to such “Sweets of Liberty” led directly to “those Insurrections that have lately caused and threatened such Mischiefs and Dangers to the Inhabitants of, and Planters in the Islands in the West-Indies.”Footnote 64 Instead, the enslaved were branded with the language of their oppressors, through the marks of ownership burned into their bodies and the forcible renaming of their persons. Their own speech was continually policed; they were often punished by being physically muted. As a young, recently arrived African on a Virginia plantation in the mid-1750s, Equiano was terrified by the appearance of a Black house slave who moved around fixed in an iron muzzle, “which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak; and could not eat nor drink.” Some slave owners ordered such equipment from London, others improvised their own degrading tortures. In Jamaica, in Tom and Patty Gordon's day, the overseer Thomas Thistlewood would sometimes force one slave to “shit” in another's mouth and then “immediately put in a gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.”Footnote 65
Yet even in such conditions of extreme violence and unfreedom, the words of enslaved men and women remained ever-present, irrepressible, and potentially transgressive. Spoken words were both representations and actions: their utterance was the most ubiquitous way in which the boundaries between liberty and bondage were constantly reinforced, negotiated, or contested. In that sense, as Miles Ogborn has recently argued, even the speech of the unfree was always free: though liberty of speech was theorized in exclusionary terms, the practice of speaking freely was much harder to constrain. And Black speech fueled continuous Black resistance. In Jamaica alone, we know of major plots, involving hundreds and sometimes thousands of slaves, in 1673, 1676, 1678, 1685–1687, 1690, 1745, 1760, 1766, 1776, 1791–1792, 1808, 1815, 1819, 1823–1824, and 1831–1832—as well as full-blown wars in 1728–1739 and 1795–1796 between the settlers and different bands of Maroons, the runaway slaves and their descendants who controlled semiautonomous strongholds in the island's mountainous interior.Footnote 66 As the British recognized, Black societies, too, put great store in oaths, orations, and invocations, both between people and as a connection to the all-powerful spirit world. To be prevented from speaking, an Akan proverb warned, was akin to being murdered: to silence another unjustly was a grievous crime. If the British Empire was partly an oral creation—sustained through spoken as much as through written and printed words—then that was even truer of the spiritual, legal, and political cultures that African slaves and their descendants created in their transatlantic purgatories. For all these reasons, slave owners obsessed about slave talk. They could never completely control it, yet feared its power to bind and inspire—as everyone knew, oaths and whispers bred insubordination, conspiracy, and revolt.Footnote 67
Despite the profound imbalances of power in colonial societies, the ongoing effort to racialize freedom of expression was therefore persistently undermined by non-white defiance. Just as women's participation in public debate belied the misogynist claim that free speech was the exclusive preserve of men, so too the subaltern peoples of slave societies, by asserting their own liberties of speech and writing, challenged the colonists’ attempts to treat their voices as essentially inferior.Footnote 68 Long before he used his pen to attack the slave trade, Equiano's words repeatedly frustrated his white oppressors: they “answered that I talked too good English. I replied, I believed I did.”Footnote 69 Enslaved men and women employed language all the time to subvert the rules of their bondage, to assert their own identities, to gain more agency than they were supposed to have.Footnote 70 Rebellious slaves marshalled the power of talk and, even in the face of death, spoke out defiantly against white supremacy.Footnote 71 Francis Williams refused to be quiet. One of his favorite pupils, a young free Black man called Brown, employed his talents as a writer to forge passes for runaway slaves. So, too, in the early 1730s, did two white servant boys (“one named John Done or Dun . . . the other Charles”) who aided the Jamaican rebel guerillas.Footnote 72
None of this amounts to an explicitly articulated alternative ideal of free speech. It is much easier to see how people of color and their allies consciously reappropriated the general notion of liberty than it is to find equivalent theorizing about speech or print, at least before the last quarter of the eighteenth century. And yet the conceptual impact of these subversive speech acts was nonetheless profound. In countless, mainly unrecorded ways, they continually limited and destabilized white efforts to cement hierarchies of speech, freedom, and race.Footnote 73
Publishing and Power
The force of words is never intrinsic. It depends on their author, their audience—and their medium. Spoken utterances can be potent, so too handwritten documents. But ever since the invention of print, techniques of mass communication (printed, broadcast, or digital) have had the greatest reach. To understand the shape of free speech, in any age, we need also to attend to this fact. Which voices are amplified, how, and why? The clout of the media is never evenly distributed.
The most spectacularly successful communications innovation of Trenchard and Gordon's day was the public newspaper. There had been printed news before, but never the cacophony of competing dailies and weeklies that followed the collapse of licensing in England in 1695. First in London, and then across the Anglophone world, the explosion of newsprint transformed how people consumed information, and helped create a new kind of addictive, fast-paced, mass-media world. From its earliest beginnings, it was a vicious, cutthroat marketplace, in which titles competed fiercely for survival and most new ventures swiftly failed. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, politicians constantly bribed and bullied writers and publishers for favorable coverage. Every paper claimed objectivity, denounced its competitors as hopelessly biased—and pushed its own partisan views.Footnote 74
Cato's Letters, and their radical new arguments about free speech, epitomized this new world. Continually asserting their impartiality while secretly advancing their own agenda, they first won fame by savagely attacking the government and its response to the South Sea stock market crash. Week after week, Cato whipped up public outrage, hinting at dark conspiracies, calling for bloodshed and lynchings. The column's sensational popularity turned the London Journal into the most-read journal in Europe. No other paper went so far: repeatedly, the government tried but failed to shut it down. Yet after giving Trenchard and Gordon this unprecedentedly powerful platform, and sticking with them in the face of huge ministerial pressure, the Journal suddenly dropped them a few months later, at the height of their fame: overnight, their column was spiked, and the paper turned against them, warning readers that Cato had been leading them dangerously astray. To understand this dizzying sequence of events, we need to follow the money—and uncover the motives of our third protagonist, the shadowy figure who owned the newspaper.
In the autumn of 1720, when Thomas Gordon sent the London Journal his first, unsigned piece, its new proprietor was a young capitalist named Elizée Dobrée, junior member of a Huguenot merchant dynasty from the Channel Islands. Like Gordon, he was still in his twenties and unmarried. His paper, barely a year old, had started off specializing in foreign, not domestic, news and had always staunchly supported the government. Most of the work was done by its young editor, Benjamin Norton Defoe, the illegitimate son of Daniel Defoe.Footnote 75 Floating some money in the fashionable new world of media start-ups was probably an amusing diversion at first, but just as Trenchard and Gordon began to write for his paper, Dobrée's prospects shattered. The one close relative on whose patronage he depended (“the only person of whom I expect something of consequence, and am much in his favour”) lost his fortune in the South Sea debacle. Suddenly, all Dobrée had was his newspaper, and so, “carried away by my extreme pain,” he permitted Trenchard and Gordon's angry, bitter attacks on the perpetrators, and rejoiced at the Journal's rising popularity.Footnote 76
Within a few months, as its circulation and advertising revenue soared, Dobrée felt secure enough to marry.Footnote 77 Shortly after, he set about cashing in his unexpected windfall: he was a businessman, not an ideologue. In the course of 1722, with Cato's Letters at the pinnacle of its success, he secretly switched sides, abruptly stopped running the column, and sold the Journal to the government.Footnote 78 Of Trenchard and Gordon's four essays directly on freedom of speech and press, Dobrée had published the first two. Their annoyance about being suddenly de-platformed inspired the second pair, a vindication of “what are usually call'd Libels,” which appeared a few weeks later in the new paper they hurriedly launched, the British Journal.Footnote 79
Gordon and Trenchard's lofty theory of free speech was deliberately silent about the pervasive influence of money on writers and publishers—just as it was on the role of the media more generally, treating all communication, whether spoken, written, or printed, as essentially equal.Footnote 80 But Dobrée's actions, as first a facilitator and then a suppressor of political criticism, tell a different story—as does the history of his and the column's intertwined afterlives in America.
The astonishing American popularity of Cato's Letters began with its canonization by the first colonial newspapers. In 1719, there had been only one American paper; by 1733, there were at least a dozen. In colonial contexts, where extra cachet attached to metropolitan writers, and press controls and sensitivity to printed criticism tended to be more acute than in the home country, Cato's free-speech essays provided a prestigious, ready-made defense of political journalism itself. They were the first, the boldest, and thus the go-to statement for any early eighteenth-century colonial printer or writer wanting to attract readers or assert their independence.Footnote 81
That was why Benjamin Franklin and his brother James reprinted them repeatedly when their New-England Courant ran into trouble with the Massachusetts Council in the early 1720s.Footnote 82 So did Andrew Bradford, whose American Weekly Mercury, Philadelphia's first newspaper, took a similarly populist line.Footnote 83 A decade later, in 1733, a faction of New York merchants and lawyers opposed to their new, assertive governor, William Cosby, decided to launch a newspaper to stir up popular hatred against him. The colony already had one, the government-controlled New-York Gazette, printed by Bradford's father, William. The anti-Cosby clique hired his former apprentice, the printer John Peter Zenger, to produce what became the first overtly partisan media channel in America, the New-York Weekly Journal.Footnote 84
The ensuing paper war between the Gazette and the Journal, culminating in Zenger's trial, became the foundational moment of press liberty ideology in America.Footnote 85 The arguments it rehearsed about political speech were not original: they replayed the English debates begun by Cato in 1720 and already recycled by London's leading opposition paper of the later 1720s and early 1730s, the Craftsman.Footnote 86 The difference was that, in America, Trenchard and Gordon's assertions gained much more sway than they ever did in England—even the Gazette defensively acknowledged their authority.Footnote 87 In 1735, a jury acquitted Zenger of printing “seditious libel,” following the new logic of Cato's ideals (that truth could never be libelous, and that juries could judge that) rather than the established letter of the law. From there on, through endless further commentary, quotation, republication, and exemplification, Trenchard and Gordon's words and ideals took on a life of their own and moved into the mainstream of American political and legal thought—eventually influencing the free speech and press provisions that most of the rebellious colonies included in their Declarations of Rights between 1776 and 1784, and thence the peculiar shape of the First Amendment itself.Footnote 88
The person most responsible for popularizing Cato's ideas in North America was the lawyer James Alexander, the founder and lead author of the New-York Weekly Journal. Gordon and Trenchard were his main intellectual inspiration. He launched his paper with a long essay on press liberty, purportedly by Cato himself, in which, saluting Gordon by name, he paraphrased his heroes’ arguments for the “Colonies and Plantations.” “Truth will always prevail over Falshood,” he declared, and only tyrants and traitors sought to restrain print, for “No Nation Ancient or Modern ever lost the Liberty of freely Speaking, Writing, or Publishing their Sentiments, but forthwith lost their Liberty in general and became Slaves. LIBEERTY [sic] and SLAVERY! how amiable is one! how odious and abominable the other!”Footnote 89 For weeks on end, Alexander republished Gordon and Trenchard's columns on speech and libel, together with his own commentary.Footnote 90 When the governor had Zenger arrested, Alexander immediately reran Cato's defense of free speech—and Lewis Morris, Jr. (the son of his main coconspirator, the powerful lawyer Lewis Morris) declaimed it in the State Assembly.Footnote 91 “This is a state of slavery, and so no libel,” Alexander noted privately about his attacks on the governor.Footnote 92 Even though Zenger's acquittal did not technically change the law, it bolstered press freedom, and Alexander's 1736 pamphlet account of it became the best-known early eighteenth-century American defense of libertarian free-speech ideals.Footnote 93
“Every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honor you,” Zenger's lawyer had appealed to the jury.Footnote 94 Probably there were Black faces in the room when he spoke, for enslaved people made up a fifth of New York's population. Alongside its constant appeals to “liberty” and denunciations of “slavery,” the New-York Weekly Journal, like most American papers, regularly advertised slave sales. Like other colonial printers, Zenger sometimes acted as a middleman in such transactions.Footnote 95 Like them, too, he may well have owned and traded slaves, and used them in the production and distribution of his paper.Footnote 96 When copies of the Journal were publicly burned on the governor's orders, it was an unfree “Negro” man who carried out the task.Footnote 97 James Alexander, an immigrant from Scotland, owned Black New Yorkers and helped his son become an enthusiastic shipper and trader of African slaves; Lewis Morris, descended from Caribbean planters, and an equally “devoted reader” of Cato's Letters, was the largest slaveholder in all of the northern colonies. Even to term this constant juxtaposition of slavery and liberty a “paradox,” as American historians habitually do, is to whitewash the truth. Keeping other humans in bondage was never in contradiction with early white Americans’ views on freedom of speech or action: it sustained it. Alexander, one of the richest people in New York, spoke contemptuously of “the pampered Insolence of the Slaves” who toiled all around him. “Negroes,” Morris once warned his son, were inveterate thieves and “both stupid and conceited”: they were not fit to look after, or speak for, themselves.Footnote 98
Every day of their lives in the West Indies, Thomas Gordon's children, too, made manifest that free speech, as they understood it, was a racist ideology. We can only surmise how far Gordon himself would have approved of this interpretation of his writings. Neither he nor Trenchard ever crossed the Atlantic. But Elizée Dobrée did.
In the autumn of 1722, Dobrée had had the world at his feet. Just a few days after surreptitiously transferring ownership of the London Journal to the government, he and his new wife, Eliza, proudly baptized their first child, Mary. Elisha (as he called himself in English) enjoyed his new proximity to the corridors of power, and used his profits to set up as a merchant-banker in the City—the family career he had been trained for “since my Infancy.” Yet though he was fluent in French, had beautiful handwriting, and could keep accounts, he was not very good at business. Soon he went bankrupt. He and his wife were forced to move to cheaper lodgings. They had more children. Casting about, he tried to restore his fortunes with a fanciful plan to recoin Guernsey's currency. But before his youngest turned two, he had had enough. Leaving his family behind, he embarked for America.Footnote 99
He made for Charleston, South Carolina, the capital of continental slavery, and tried to set up as a trader.Footnote 100 Things did not go well. Soon he was forced to flee south, to the brand-new colony of Georgia, the hardscrabble frontier of British settlement. But within days of his arrival in Savannah, his creditors caught up with him, and he was again declared bankrupt.Footnote 101
“I . . . came into these American parts in hopes to better my fortune,” he later wrote, “but all in vain.” Despite concocting endless hare-brained schemes to make money—planting exotic crops, exporting timber, building a ship, keeping cattle, panning for salt—Elisha Dobrée spent the rest of his life essentially living by his pen. He wrote letters and petitions, translated papers, and cast accounts for others. Merchants, lawyers, and local administrators employed him as a scrivener and bookkeeper, in their offices or for piece rates. He thought repeatedly about composing a manuscript newsletter, a weekly “journal of events,” for Georgia's Trustees, and begged them for employment as a clerk, accountant, or other kind of “Penman”—being “not strong enough for a Sawyer or any hard working Trade.”Footnote 102 Eventually, as his dreams of trade and prosperity faded away, together with his hopes of ever seeing his family again, his skill as a writer was all he had left.
Whatever he thought of Trenchard and Gordon's idea that liberty of speech prevented slavery, he surely reflected on how his power as a scribe and his “freedom in writing” elevated him, not just beyond less-educated whites but especially above the darker-skinned people he saw all around him. Half of Charleston's population was Black, yet South Carolina's laws, like those of other colonies, prohibited the movement of “any Negroe or Slave” without a written “ticket” from their owner, and empowered “any white Person, to beat, maim or assault . . . [or] kill” any enslaved person who refused to produce one. It was illegal to counterfeit such a pass, or even to teach a slave to write. As in the West Indies, enslaved people were denied literacy, yet their lives could hinge on the production—or forgery—of letters.Footnote 103
Though Georgia had been founded without slavery, to encourage the industry of poor European settlers, its white colonists almost immediately began to complain that this infringed their “rights,” “privileges,” and “natural liberties” as British subjects, making them “greater Slaves” than any “poor Africans” would be.Footnote 104 Following a vociferous campaign, slavery was legalized in 1750. Yet from the colony's inception, enslaved Indians and Africans had already been everywhere in Georgia: on the run to freedom in Spanish Florida, on hire from South Carolina, or illegally imported by settlers championing their own “Liberty of Getting Negroes.”Footnote 105 Dobrée personally relied on their forced labor. He did business with slavers. One of his closest companions on the American frontier, Francis Moore, had spent years with the Royal African Company, buying enslaved people on the Gold Coast. With the colony's “most noted Freeholders,” Dobrée discussed drawing up a petition for Georgia's whites “to have Negroes” too. He wrote himself to the Trustees in London, urging them to permit it. He criticized Savannah's governors for treating whites “more like Slaves than Christian Freemen.”Footnote 106 He was a weak, wheedling, endlessly self-pitying man, whose wife, Eliza, refusing to emigrate, dismissed him as “whimsical,” feckless, and improvident.Footnote 107 But, as was the case with so many American colonists, racialized unfreedom buoyed up his own sense of liberty and self-worth.
The other ironic twist of Dobrée's later life was that, barely a decade after he had so successfully deployed the power of the mercenary press against others, first to attack the government and then to sell out his own journalists, he came to experience its negative effects for himself. He did not like it. In July 1734, Savannah's bailiff advertised Dobrée's insolvency in the new South-Carolina Gazette, the region's first newspaper. For months afterward, Dobrée fumed about “the great Damage I Suffered & still am like to Suffer” from “the Advertisement in the Carolina Gazette, w[hi]ch spreads through all America.” He had been ruined, he spluttered: “The Discredit & Ill Character of Persons thus Advertised is a Barbarous way of Murthering a Man in his Reputation[,] the Loss of which is one of the greatest Loss a person can Suffer in this World.”Footnote 108
He was right about the reach of newsprint: even in London, people read about his latest dishonor.Footnote 109 But when he opened the weekly Gazette in those lonely early months on the American frontier, he also would have found, alongside intermittent notices about his own bankruptcy, some startling reminders of the new free-speech ideals that he himself had helped usher into the world—and of the explicitly racialized shapes that such ideas of liberty and bondage were taking on in America. Just as he arrived in Charleston, the Gazette had relaunched itself—with a précis of Cato's first letter on free speech. The New-York Weekly Journal circulated in the south, so, throughout 1734, Dobrée quite likely also followed its extraordinary championing of Cato's views. If not, just a few days after complaining about his own appearance in the Gazette's columns, he would have read in them what was happening to Zenger and his paper. Over the page in the same issue was a report about a slave rebellion, an advertisement for a large slave plantation, and another offering a reward for the return of an escaped “Negro Man, named Cato”—a name very often given to slaves in the British colonies. The following year, when the Gazette reprinted the London Cato's first essay on free speech, extolling it as the foundation of public liberty and “the Right of every Man, as far as by it he does not hurt or controul the Right of another,” its next sheet advertised the usual cargoes of “choice Negro slaves,” and African “runaways” called “Flora,” “Sancho,” and “Sampson”—men and women whose speech was so unfree in the eyes of white people that even their very birth names had been taken from them.Footnote 110
The last trace I have been able to find of Dobrée is that, early in 1750, he wrote, witnessed, and proved the will of a New York tavern-keeper called Affy Crawford. That suggests he may also have known her recently deceased husband, Hugh, who a decade earlier as a New York constable had taken an active part in the bloodiest racial episode of that city's colonial history.Footnote 111 Following a string of fires over several weeks in the spring of 1741, the colonists feared their slaves were plotting to rise up against them. Along with a few suspect whites, more than two hundred enslaved and free Black men and women were swept up in the ensuing investigation. Scores were put on trial; thirty Black people were hanged or burned to death; eight-four more were sold into a living death as plantation slaves in the West Indies. Among those tried were four men named Cato. Three of these were executed; one lied his way to a pardon.
To warn his readers against Black people's “great deal of Craft; their unintelligible Jargon,” and inveterate deceitfulness, the city's chief attorney printed the shackled speech of the almost twenty enslaved people who had been forced to testify. One of them, a teenager named Sandy, initially refused to volunteer anything, even after he had been “for a long time argued with.” “They told him, if he would speak the Truth, the Governor would pardon him . . . [and] save his life”—to which “He answered, That the Time before [i.e., during an earlier uprising] after that the Negroes told all they knew, then the white People hanged them.” That had been in 1712, before Sandy was born: he must have been taught this hard-won lesson by his elders. In the face of white justice, Black people knew, neither truth, lies, nor silence could necessarily save them.Footnote 112 Dobrée was in New York at this time, working as a scribe in various government bureaus: the Customs House, the Treasury, the Naval Office, the Secretary's office. So he almost certainly lived through this episode, witnessed the executions, and knew those involved in its violent upholding of white liberty.
In fact, in almost twenty years crisscrossing the Eastern seaboard in search of work, from New York all the way down to Frederica, the southernmost outpost of British territory, Dobrée interacted, Zelig-like, with a remarkable collection of people—James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, who for years employed him as his confidential scribe; Richard Peters, the leading Philadelphia intellectual and secretary of Pennsylvania; John Wesley, the creator of Methodism, whom he impressed with his piety. But by far his longest association, probably the most enduring employment of his life, was with none other than James Alexander, the foremost American exponent of Cato's philosophy, mastermind of the New-York Weekly Journal's partisan appeals for free speech and liberty—and rich, untroubled exponent of actual human slavery.
When they first got to know each other, Alexander, as one of New York's leading attorneys, was helping to lead the slave trials and executions of 1741–42.Footnote 113 For at least eight or nine years thereafter, he met intermittently with Dobrée, sent money to his wife in England, and paid him handsomely to copy thousands of pages of sensitive legal documents for him and his associates.Footnote 114 By this time, New Jersey had become the main focus of his legal and political life: his friend Lewis Morris, the other leader of the anti-Cosby agitation of the past decade, was now its governor. Alexander doubtless appreciated Dobrée's skill as a scrivener: among the surviving colonial records of those decades must still be untold numbers of anonymous documents—scribed letters, business accounts, legal minutes—in his clear and florid hand. Yet it is hard to imagine that was the only reason for his lengthy patronage of the man. Surely he also valued Dobrée as the former proprietor of the London Journal—the unsung third creator of Cato's Letters, whose ideals had so inspired him, and which he himself had done so much to popularize among his free, white, newspaper-reading, slave-owning fellow Americans.
Conclusion
In the autumn of 1739, a group of enslaved African men and women in South Carolina staged the most audacious bid for freedom that British colonists on the North American mainland had ever seen. On the outbreak of war with Spain, up to a hundred slaves escaped from their plantations, seized arms and ammunition, and tried to make their way south through Georgia to liberty in Florida. Before they were hunted down and executed, they killed about twenty-five white settlers and alarmed thousands more. One reason why New Yorkers were so jittery about slave conspiracies in 1741 was the knowledge of what had happened in Stono, near Charleston, just a few months earlier.Footnote 115
Most of what we know about this event comes from a single, detailed, seven-page document composed in Savannah, Georgia, soon after it occurred. Without this text, the name of the rebels’ captain, Jemmy, would have gone unrecorded, and so too the indelible image of their company marching along at daybreak “with Colours displayed and two Drums beating,” new recruits running to join them on the road, and all of them “calling out Liberty”—Liberty, Liberty! Other contemporary accounts suggest the brutality of the white response. Dozens of rebels were shot, hanged, and gibbetted alive; some planters “cutt off their heads and set them up at every Mile Post they came to.”Footnote 116 But this particular narrative was composed to sway public opinion in England: it was expressly sent to London to be published in the newspapers there. Though the rebels were “shot on the spot,” it stressed, this in fact redounded “to the honour of the Carolina Planters . . . [who] did not torture one Negroe, but only put them to an easy death.” That these “Negroe Slaves” had been “brought” from Africa, and likely were fellow Christians, was noted in passing; what mattered was “the Humanity” shown them by the colonists. Even when slaughtering Blacks for resisting enslavement, the superiority of white people shone through. This document was penned by Elisha Dobrée.Footnote 117
The enslaved rebels themselves had no newspapers, no pens, no paper. Their speech is lost to posterity—all but that single, exhilarating word they chanted together during their brief moment of freedom: “Liberty!” They lived in a society that prized freedom of speech, writing, and publishing primarily as markers of free, white, male, property-owning citizenship. As I have shown in this essay, Cato's Letters, its first and most influential model, consciously privileged certain types of speaker, and certain forms of speech, over others. Despite its universalist language, the gendered and racial shape of liberty was already implicit in Trenchard and Gordon's text, and in the lives of its creators. When those ideals were transplanted across the Atlantic, it was not hard for them to be racialized still further. The makers and consumers of early newspapers celebrated them for advancing unfettered speech, and so do modern historians: but they were also powerful tools of slavery and white supremacy. In addition to facilitating the slave trade, and endlessly reinforcing notions of non-white inferiority in their columns, another of their uses was to advertise and thus help recapture absconded slaves—a function pioneered not by colonial printers but by the earliest, late seventeenth-century English papers.Footnote 118 Newspapers were never neutral or universal conduits of opinion. And the shape that abstract values like free speech take on, across time and space, is likewise always politicized. The free speech of some is established through the silencing of others.
Yet that also means the meaning of such terms is never completely settled. They can be appropriated, extended—or ignored. The asserting of ideals of free speech required a perpetual labor of indoctrination, because of the agency of those who contested its presumptions and, secretly or openly, raised their own voices and pens in defiance: servants, women, non-whites, slaves. “Though he is my property,” seethed the Charleston enslaver Joshua Eden, his Black man Limus had run away, with his “saucy and impudent Tongue . . . he has the audacity to tell me, he will be free, that he will serve no Man, and that he will be conquered or governed by no Man.”Footnote 119
“Servitude marrs all Genius,” Cato's Letters had disdainfully asserted, “nor is either a Pen or a Pencil of any use in a Hand that is manacled.”Footnote 120 That was the rhetoric of free people: but it was not true. The unfree could never be permanently silenced, and they themselves knew that. In the oral tradition of the Stono rebellion that was passed down by its enslaved survivors, its leader had been a slave—called Cato—who knew how to read and write. Long before the uprising, he used this power and “wrote passes for slaves and do all he can to send them to freedom.”Footnote 121
That was what Francis Williams's favorite pupil, Brown, had done, too. And there were many like him. In the early summer of 1729, a few years after New York acquired its first newspaper, James Alexander placed an advertisement in its columns. He was in his late thirties, already a rich and powerful politician, the father of seven young children and stepchildren, the possessor of grand houses, large estates, and other human beings. To his great annoyance, one of them, a Black American his own age, “a sensible cunning fellow” named Yaff whom he had acquired only recently, had dared to escape.Footnote 122 Alexander offered a large reward for his recapture. His enslaved servant had absconded around 9 June, and the ad ran for weeks, until the end of July—perhaps that means that he managed to remain at large.
Yaff was literate: he had probably forged himself a pass to get away. He was wearing livery—he may have been Alexander's butler. Who knows if he had had the chance to browse in Alexander's library, the finest in New York, or if he had ever flicked through its prized volumes of Cato's Letters. No matter. He understood the power of words, and of writing. He'd already been sold twice in his life. He knew what freedom really was, that white people controlled its shape—and that he refused to let them.Footnote 123
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