1735. A jury decided that truth was a defense. It wasn’t the law. They said it anyway.
The Person
He came off a ship at thirteen with nothing. His father had died before the family reached New York harbor. 
The year was 1710, and the Zenger family were German Palatines — refugees of Louis XIV’s wars, displaced across an ocean, landing in a colony that owed them no welcome. The governor had promised apprenticeships for their children. That was the deal. John Peter Zenger (October 26, 1697 – July 28, 1746) was bound over to William Bradford, the colony’s printer. Eight years of labor in exchange for a trade.
He learned to set type. He learned to ink the press. He learned to bind and fold and stack. He was not a political man. He was a craftsman — a man who understood paper and ink the way a carpenter understands wood. By 1726 he had his own shop. By November 1733 he had a newspaper. The New York Weekly Journal was not, at first glance, a revolutionary document. It was four pages. It ran essays, notices, and opinion. But it had an enemy in mind.
Zenger was not its author. The attacks on Governor William Cosby were written by men of standing — lawyers James Alexander and William Smith, the deposed Chief Justice Lewis Morris, Rip Van Dam. They needed a printer willing to put his name on the masthead. Zenger said yes. That yes would cost him nearly a year of his life. It would also purchase something that outlasted him by centuries.
The Context
Governor William Cosby arrived in New York in August 1732. He had been appointed by King George II. He had already destroyed one posting — in Minorca, where his misrule had been so flagrant the Crown forced him to make restitution. New York was his second chance. He used it the same way he had used the first.
His first act was to demand half the salary of acting governor Rip Van Dam, the seventy-one-year-old senior member of the provincial council who had held the post during the interregnum. When Van Dam offered to share equally — which by the math would have made Cosby the debtor — the governor refused and moved the case to a court sitting without a jury. Chief Justice Lewis Morris dissented from the bench. Cosby removed him from office.
That removal was the spark. Morris and his allies needed a way to fight back publicly. The New York Weekly Journal published the fight — Cosby’s election tampering, his manipulation of the courts, his corruption laid out week by week. Cosby moved to shut it down. Two grand juries refused to indict Zenger. Cosby had copies of the paper ordered burned by the sheriff’s personal servant, a deliberate act of symbolic intimidation. City officials refused to cooperate. He finally used a legal instrument called an ‘information’ — a prosecutor’s tool that bypassed the grand jury entirely — to have Zenger arrested on November 17, 1734, on charges of printing and publishing a false, scandalous, and seditious libel against His Excellency the Governor.
The legal landscape was constructed to guarantee conviction. Under English common law, truth was not a defense against seditious libel. The operative doctrine was blunt: the greater the truth, the greater the libel. Accurate criticism was more dangerous to authority than false criticism because it was more likely to make citizens lose faith in their governors. The law did not want accurate criticism. The law wanted silence.
Zenger sat in jail for nine months. His wife Anna Catharina continued publishing the Journal through the cell window, passing copy and instructions between the bars. He wrote to his readers from prison. The paper did not miss a week.
The Decision
Cosby’s men were thorough. When Zenger’s original attorneys, Alexander and Smith, appeared in court and audaciously challenged the composition of the two-judge panel Cosby had hand-picked, Chief Justice James DeLancey — Cosby’s own appointee — disbarred them in open court. Zenger was left with an inexperienced attorney sympathetic to the governor. The trap seemed complete.
It was not complete. Alexander and Smith had sent word to Philadelphia. Andrew Hamilton — sixty years old, perhaps the finest legal mind in the American colonies — arrived in court and announced he would take the case. The courtroom understood immediately that something had changed.
Hamilton’s strategy was surgical and bold. He conceded at the outset that Zenger had printed the articles. He did not contest the fact. He drove straight at the law itself. He argued that the jury had the right — and the duty — to decide not merely whether Zenger printed the words, but whether those words were true, and whether truth ought to constitute a libel. Then he turned from the bench to the twelve men in the jury box and spoke past the judge entirely:
“It is not the cause of one poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequence affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America. It is the cause of liberty.”
Chief Justice DeLancey instructed the jury to ignore him. The jury’s only function, the judge ruled, was to determine the fact of printing. The question of whether the words constituted libel was for the court alone. Hamilton had already planted something the judge could not extract: the idea that an unjust law need not bind a just jury.
The jury withdrew. Foreman Thomas Hunt led them out. They were back in ten minutes. The clerk asked for the verdict.
“Not guilty.”
The courtroom erupted. Three huzzas and shouts of joy. Chief Justice DeLancey threatened the crowd with arrest. It didn’t matter. He left the courtroom to the jubilant crowd, defeated.
The Aftermath
Hamilton was carried through the streets of New York on shoulders. The phrase ‘Philadelphia Lawyer’ entered the American vocabulary that afternoon — a synonym for brilliance under pressure.
Zenger was freed. He returned to his shop. He published the full trial transcript — The Tryal of John Peter Zenger — in 1736. Every argument, every ruling, every word of Hamilton’s address to the jury. That pamphlet circulated through the colonies and across the Atlantic to England. It was reprinted multiple times. It became a handbook for understanding what a free press was supposed to mean and what government overreach looked like when it tried to strangle one.
What the trial did not do was change the law. Seditious libel remained on the books. Subsequent royal governors pressed it when they could. The verdict’s formal legal force was limited to the room where it was rendered. But its political force was something else. Prosecution of the press became dangerous after Zenger. Juries might simply refuse. That fear mattered.
Gouverneur Morris — whose grandfather Lewis Morris was the judge Cosby had removed — would later write: ‘The trial of Zenger in 1735 was the germ of American freedom, the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America.’ The two principles Hamilton argued — that juries could rule on both law and fact in libel cases, and that truth was a defense against libel — were eventually enshrined as legal doctrine and became bedrock First Amendment foundation.
Zenger died July 28, 1746. He was forty-eight. The New York Assembly had made him its official printer. New Jersey had followed. He had outlived Cosby, who died in 1736. He was remembered not for his words — he wrote little — but for being willing to stand behind the words of others when the cost of doing so was a cell.
You can stand where it happened. Federal Hall National Memorial in lower Manhattan, managed by the National Park Service, marks the site of the trial. The full transcript and legal record are maintained by the New York State Unified Court System.
The Meaning
Zenger’s story is not the story of an eloquent man who faced power with eloquence. It is the story of a working craftsman who was asked whether he would lend his name and his press to the truth, knowing what would happen if he did.
He was not the author of the words. He was the printer. In the eyes of the law, that distinction was irrelevant. The law did not care who wrote the criticism. The law cared who could be arrested. Zenger was the man at the press. He was the man who could be taken.
The courage in this story is particular. It is not the courage of the battlefield or the platform. It is the courage of the ordinary professional — the tradesman who understands that the machine he operates and the product he produces have the capacity to change things, and who accepts that consequence without demanding to be the one remembered for it.
He spent nine months in a cell. His wife ran the paper. The law changed not because of the verdict but because of the demonstration — because a jury of twelve ordinary men looked at the apparatus of political prosecution and said no. Foreman Thomas Hunt and eleven other men from the colony looked at a judge appointed by the Crown, heard his instructions, and quietly decided that justice outranked the law as written. That is what jury nullification means at its best: not lawlessness, but conscience refusing to ratify the abuse of law.
When governments call accurate reporting an attack on the state, they are making the same argument William Cosby made. When prosecutors use instruments that bypass the grand jury, they are deploying the same tool Richard Bradley used in 1734. The machinery is old. The argument for silence is always the same. What changes is whether there are enough people willing to say no — at a press, in a jury box, or anywhere else the moment finds them.
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Next: Episode — Matthew Lyon
The ‘Spitting Lyon.’ If Zenger’s acquittal showed that juries and public custom could protect speech from a corrupt governor, Matthew Lyon’s prosecution under the Sedition Act of 1798 shows the opposite: a federal statute passed by Congress itself, used to criminalize political criticism of the president. How did a printer’s victory in 1735 fail to stop the United States government from arresting its own congressmen for speech just sixty years later? That is the question Episode #21 answers.
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