Why the Debut Issue of America’s First Newspaper Was Also the Publication’s Last

Once you get over the archaic language, the first newspaper published in North America seems largely innocuous, its pages filled with reports on dramatic events like a smallpox outbreak, a devastating fire and troop movements. Yet Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick—issued in Boston by English expatriate Benjamin Harris on September 25, 1690—so angered colonial authorities that they shut down the paper after just four days. The first issue of the four-page publication also proved to be its last, and it took another 14 years for homegrown journalism to return to British America.

“It is hardly surprising … that Harris’ bold attempt should have failed,” wrote historian Charles E. Clark in 1991. “Seventeenth-century assumptions about printing and authority combined with the extremely uneasy political atmosphere of the moment to make a publication like Publick Occurrences simply intolerable.”

Harris was a publisher and writer who had fled England amid backlash for printing anti-Catholic pamphlets. Settling in Boston in 1686, he’d opened a popular coffeehouse where locals gathered to discuss current events and the latest books. As colonial printer and historian Isaiah Thomas later said, Harris was “a brisk asserter” of the right to free expression, as well as “the most ingenious and innocent companion that I had ever met with.”

Encouraged by the success of his coffeehouse, Harris decided to start publishing a monthly newspaper. As he wrote on the front page, the publication had several goals: to ensure that “memorable occurrences” were not “neglected or forgotten”; to educate “people everywhere [so they] may better understand the circumstances of public affairs, both abroad and at home”; and to debunk the “many false reports, maliciously made,” circulating in the British colonies at the time.

Publick Occurrences’ first and only issue covered a wide range of topics, from the suicide of a “pious man” whose wife had recently died to the ongoing war between Great Britain and France to a new day of Thanksgiving celebrated by “the Christianized Indians in some parts of Plymouth.” But it was a pair of more salacious accounts that caught authorities’ attention.

Harris wrote that during a recent expedition to French Acadia, Britain’s Mohawk allies had captured French prisoners, “whom they used in a manner too barbarous for any English to approve.” The publisher then accused Britain’s leaders of having “too much confided” in the Mohawk. Far from reserving his criticism for the British, Harris also turned his attention to France, accusing Louis XIV of having sexual relations with his son’s wife. This incestuous act, Harris wrote, had led the king’s son to resolve “to depose him of his life and kingdom.”

An order from the Massachusetts governor and council banning future issues of Publick Occurrences quickly followed, appearing just four days later, on September 29. It alluded to the Mohawk and Louis XIV stories in vague terms, referencing the newspaper’s “sundry doubtful and uncertain reports.” But the colonial authorities mainly called Harris out for publishing his paper without a license. In the future, they wrote, anyone hoping to publish news in the colony must first obtain explicit permission.

Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman who would soon play a prominent role in the Salem witch trials, defended Harris in a letter, writing that the publisher had said nothing of the Mohawk “but what we ought to say to them, or else we bring guilt upon ourselves. As for the French tyrant, nothing is mentioned of him” besides a rumor that had already circulated in print in the colonies.

Despite Mather’s disapproval, officials remained steadfast in their decision. “Some members [of the council] feared free publishing and its possible consequences,” write William D. Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams in The Early American Press, 1690-1783. Amid raids by neighboring Native American groups and a breakdown of “internal order,” the authors explain, many Massachusetts residents “rejected the authority of the government and the courts,” leading the council to be “especially sensitive to criticism, particularly any made in public print.”

Harris, for his part, was not dissuaded by the closure of Publick Occurrences. He kept printing public documents, this time sanctioned by the colonial government, before moving back to London in 1695. There, he continued his publishing career, occasionally finding himself at odds with censors over his outspoken religious views.

Back in British America, the colonies’ first continuously published newspaper, John Campbell’s Boston News-Letter, debuted on April 24, 1704. This time around, the publisher didn’t take any chances. Emblazoned on the front page, just below the newspaper’s name, were the words “published by authority”—a clear sign of the government’s approval. It was only in 1791, with the ratification of the First Amendment, that the right to a free press was enshrined in the United States Constitution.

Meilan Solly | | READ MORE

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's senior associate digital editor, history.