Liberty, Slavery, and Biography: The Hidden Shapes of Free Speech Fara Dabhoiwala
Liberty, Slavery, and Biography: The Hidden Shapes of Free Speech Fara Dabhoiwala
Liberty, Slavery, and Biography: The Hidden Shapes of Free Speech Fara Dabhoiwala
230
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Fara Dabhoiwala
Abstract The first substantive theory of free speech as a secular political right was con-
cocted by two anonymous London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in
their best-selling, endlessly reprinted newspaper column, Cato’s Letters (1720–1723).
Though its ideals became hugely influential, especially in the American colonies, Trench-
ard and Gordon’s motives and the peculiar biases of their theory remain unexplored.
John Locke’s theorizing of personal liberty while accepting patriarchy and slavery has
been much studied; that of Cato’s Letters, a comparably significant text, not at all.
Drawing on a wealth of newly discovered materials in British, Caribbean, and American
archives, the author explores the telling roles of gender and especially race in early
Anglophone ideals of free speech, connecting them to the lived experiences of
Gordon, Trenchard, and their shadowy publisher, Elizée Dobrée. The article thus
reframes our understanding of one of the most important Anglo-American political
works of the eighteenth century, and exemplifies how to approach free speech histori-
cally, as both a theory and a practice. Freedom of expression does not simply arise
from the lessening of “censorship” and restraint, nor is it ever equally accessible to
all. Visibly and invisibly, like every kind of liberty, it always has a particular shape.
I n the early 1720s, two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trench-
ard, 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 dis-
pensed 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
Fara Dabhoiwala is Senior Research Scholar in the Department of History at Princeton University. This
essay was largely written at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021. For helping him
obtain images of manuscripts in closed or inaccessible repositories, he is grateful to Diane Baptie,
Geneva Smith, Victoria Pickering, and the staffs of the English, Scottish, Jamaican, and American archives
cited in the footnotes. He also thanks John Harpham, Jill Lepore, the journal’s referees, and the virtual
audience of the University of Chicago British and Imperial History Workshop, convened by Steven
Pincus, for helpful suggestions. Please direct any correspondence to fnd@princeton.edu.
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.”1
Cato’s new conception of political speech as an inalienable personal right, the foun-
dation of all liberty, was therefore extraordinary.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 Free-
ness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.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
1
Alex Barber, “‘Why Don’t Those Lazy Priests Answer the Book?’ Matthew Tindal, Censorship,
Freedom of the Press and Religious Debate in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” History 98, no. 333
(2013): 680–707, at 681. For examples, see British Library, London, Add. MS 4295, fols. 49–50 (this
repository is hereafter abbreviated BL); [Matthew Tindal], A Letter to a Member of Parliament, Shewing
that a Restraint on the Press is Inconsistent with the Protestant Religion (London, 1698); [Daniel Defoe],
An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (London, 1704); [Joseph Addison?], The Thoughts of a Tory
Author Concerning the Press (London, 1712), esp. 13; [Francis Atterbury], English Advice to the Freeholders
of England (London, 1714), 28, 31; Karl Tilman Winkler, Wörterkrieg: Politische Debattenkultur in
England, 1689–1750 (Stuttgart, 1998), 407–12.
2
See Leonard W. Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (Oxford, 1985), esp. 109, 115; Leonard W. Levy, intro-
duction to Freedom of the Press from Zenger to Jefferson: Early American Theories, ed. Leonard W. Levy (Indi-
anapolis, 1966), xxvi–xxviii; Wendell Bird, The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to
the First Amendment and Fox’s Libel Act (New York, 2020), esp. 11, 126–28. Bird critiques Levy’s overall
argument but attaches even greater importance to Cato’s model.
3
London Journal, 24 December 1720 (CL 15). Editions of Cato’s Letters traditionally number the
columns 1 to 138, in chronological order, conventionally abbreviated CL; references throughout are to
the original newspaper publication, followed by the CL number in parentheses.
its absolutist, antigovernmental theory of speech; so too, a few years later, did the
First Amendment of the United States Constitution.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 straight-
forwardly 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 aggre-
gates around existing forms of power. This is not just true of its practice, as is abun-
dantly clear in the present day, but equally of its history and theory.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 per-
sonal and political motives.6 In what follows, I explore further how the nominally
4
Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty
(New York, 1953); Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmis-
sion, Development, and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the
War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, MA, 1959), 115–25; David L. Jacobson, ed., The English Lib-
ertarian Heritage: From the Writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in The Independent Whig and
Cato’s Letters (Indianapolis, 1965); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political
Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 467–77; Marie P. McMahon, The
Radical Whigs, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon: Libertarian Loyalists to the New House of Hanover
(Lanham, 1990); Shelley Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740 (Cam-
bridge, 1992), chaps. 4–6; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enl. ed.
(Cambridge, MA, 1992); Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cam-
bridge, 2004); Heather E. Barry, A “Dress Rehearsal” for Revolution: John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon’s Work in Eighteenth-Century British America (Lanham, 2007); and the works cited in note 2
above. For its enduring popularity in England, see Eckhart Hellmuth, “Towards Hume—The Discourse
on the Liberty of the Press in the Age of Walpole,” History of European Ideas 44, no. 2 (2018): 159–81;
Eckhart Hellmuth, “After Fox’s Libel Act: Or, How to Talk about the Liberty of the Press in the
1790s,” in Reactions to Revolutions: The 1790s and Their Aftermath, ed. Ulrich Broich et al. (London,
2007), 137–75, at 153–54.
5
For example, see Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA, 1993); Stanley Fish, There’s
No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too (Oxford, 1994); Robert C. Post, ed., Censorship and
Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (Los Angeles, 1998); Frederick Schauer, “The Boundaries of the
First Amendment,” Harvard Law Review 17, no. 6 (2004): 1765–1809; Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in
Hate Speech (Cambridge, MA, 2012). Aside from the jurisprudence of the First Amendment, which
focuses almost exclusively on the past hundred years, most recent historical scholarship on free speech con-
centrates on the period before 1700. See Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen, eds., Free Speech in Classical
Antiquity (Leiden, 2004); David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge,
2005); Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens (Cambridge, 2006); Michel
Foucault, Discourse and Truth and Parrēsia, ed. Paul-Henri Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Nancy
Luxon (Chicago, 2019); Irene van Renswoude, The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2019). Notable exceptions are Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion
in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (Oxford, 2009); Elizabeth
Powers, ed., Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea (Lewisburg, 2011)
6
Fara Dabhoiwala, “Inventing Free Speech: Politics, Liberty and Print in Eighteenth-Century
England,” Past and Present 257, supplement no. 16 (2022): 39–74.
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 pre-
sumptions. Very little has hitherto been known about Trenchard and Gordon person-
ally, 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 con-
tinually 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 con-
doned 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.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 Atlan-
tic, the new concept of free speech was always shadowed by the reality of racial
unfreedom.
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 disre-
garded 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
7
Simon P. Newman, Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (London, 2022);
David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in
Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 243–
72; Jordan E. Taylor, “Enquire of the Printer: Newspaper Advertising and the Moral Economy of the
North American Slave Trade, 1704–1807,” Early American Studies 18, no. 3 (2020): 287–323.
8
London Journal, 2 December and 23 December 1721 (later combined into CL 58). Unbeknownst to
its readers, this essay was an in-joke, composed on the anniversary of Trenchard’s third marriage, with an
encomium by Gordon.
9
London Journal, 4 February 1721 (CL 15).
10
London Journal, 10 June 1721 (CL 32). See also British Journal, 20 October 1722 (CL 100).
11
[John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon], Cato’s Letters, 4 vols. (London, 1724), 1:xxix–xxx. See also
Thomas Gordon to William Simpson, 28 December [1723], Letters received by Sir William Simpson,
Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, MS G23, fol. 42v.
12
The Independent Whig: or, a Defence of Primitive Christianity, 5th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1732), 2:531.
13
I have been unable to trace her maiden name, their marriage, or the births of their two elder children,
but her first name was probably Martha: their youngest child was called Patty, which matches baptismal
entries for a daughter of “Thomas Gorden & Martha,” 14 May 1732 at St. Andrew Holborn (register
of baptisms, 1724–1740, London Metropolitan Archives P82/AND/A/001/MS06667/009), and a daugh-
ter of “Thomas & Martha Gordon,” 24 May 1735 at St. Mary, Hornsey (parish register 1683–1812,
London Metropolitan Archives, DRO/020/A/01/003) [this repository is hereafter abbreviated as
LMA]. She may have been the “Martha Gorden” buried on 22 July 1741 at St. Giles in the Fields,
Holborn (burial register 1739–1762, LMA, P82/GIS/A/04/005). See also Thomas Gordon to Patrick
Lindsay, 29 November 1736, 1 July 1740, 12 July [1740?], 12 September 1747, Papers of the estate of
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 chil-
dren.14 Trenchard’s first wife, Grace Peck, seventeen years his junior, also died in
labor.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.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 four-
teen-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.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.)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
Eaglescarnie, East Lothian, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Adv. MS.23.3.26, fols. 60–65,
70–71.
14
See notes 46 and 48 below.
15
Allegation and bond for the marriage licence of John Trenchard and Grace Peck, 20 June 1709,
Lambeth Palace Library, London, VM I/48 and VM II/39; Thomas Rawlins to [William Simpson], 6
July 1709, University of Kansas Libraries, MS G23, fol. 50r; Joseph Lemuel Chester, The Marriage, Bap-
tismal, and Burial Registers of the [. . .] Abbey of St Peter, Westminster (London, 1876), 42; funeral monument
to Grace Trenchard, d. 30 October 1717, Little Sampford Church, Essex.
16
St. Stephen Walbrook parish register 1557–1716, 29 April 1700, LMA, P69/STE2/A/001/
MS08319/001; All Saints Banstead parish register 1616–1789, 19 July 1718, Surrey History Centre,
MS 2375/1/2; John Trenchard to [William Simpson], 24 November [1718], University of Kansas Librar-
ies, MS G23, fol. 3r; Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke
of Portland, 10 vols. (London, 1891–1931), 5:573; s.v. “Scawen, Sir Thomas,” The History of Parliament:
The House of Commons, 1715–1754, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 2 vols. (1970), 2:410.
17
Trenchard to Simpson, 21 September 1719, University of Kansas Libraries, MS G23, fols. 15v–16r
(“business”); see also will of Sir William Blackett, proved 1 February 1706, The National Archives,
London, PROB 11/486/334 (this repository is hereafter abbreviated as TNA); St. James Piccadilly mar-
riage register 1700–1723, 24 November 1719, City of Westminster Archives Centre, STJ/PR/7/57;
G. J. Armytage, ed., Allegations for Marriage Licences [. . .] 1543 to 1869 (London, 1886), 249;
[Matthew Tindal], “The Criterion: Or Certain Tests to Judge of the Designs of Private Men in Censuring
Publick Persons & Measures, With Remarks on the Character of the Independent Whig,” BL, Add. MS
61705, fol. 17; Mark Blackett-Ord, s.v. “Blackett, Sir William, First Baronet,” Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, 23 September 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/61542; genealogy of Sir
William Blackett, https://www.theblacketts.com/tree/individual.php?pid=I4636&ged=Main%20Black-
ett%20Tree.
18
Will of John Trenchard, proved 26 February 1724, TNA, PROB 11/596/42; Petersham parish reg-
ister, 1570–1786, 15 June 1747, Surrey History Centre, MS P48/1/3; London Magazine, June 1747, 292–
93. Thomas Gordon died in 1750 and was buried at the estate that Ann had inherited from Trenchard,
Abbot’s Leigh in Somerset (Holy Trinity, Abbot’s Leigh, marriage and burial register, 1703–1813, 6
August 1750, Bristol Archives, P.AL/R/2/a). She lived until 1783 (will of Ann Gordon, proved 23 June
1783, TNA, PROB 11/1104/355). At some point between 1724 and 1744, she commissioned Maria
Verelst to paint a striking portrait of her, two versions of which survive: one at Wallington Hall in North-
umberland, the other in private hands.
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 con-
trary, over the preceding decades, female authors had become increasingly common-
place 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.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.”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.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 coau-
thors in the English-speaking world were Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. These
men, in their massively successful and influential periodicals, the Tatler and the Spec-
tator (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
19
See documents relating to the printing and distribution of the London Journal, August 1721, TNA, SP
35/28, fols. 10, 13, 15, 18r–v; Karl Tilman Winkler, Handwerk und Markt: Vetriebsewesen and Tagesschrift-
tum in London, 1695–1750 (Stuttgart, 1993), esp. chaps. 6–8; Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street:
Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford, 1998). In 1734–35, sim-
ilarly, Catherine Zenger took over the printing of the New-York Weekly Journal, Cato’s great American
champion, while her husband, John Peter Zenger, was in jail awaiting trial for seditious libel.
20
Robert Molesworth, unpaginated dedicatory epistle to [Mary Monck], Marinda: Poems and Transla-
tions upon Several Occasions (London, 1716). See also Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in
Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge, 2006), chaps. 1–4; Elaine Chalus, “‘Ladies Are Often Very Good at Scaf-
foldings’: Women and Politics in the Age of Anne,” Parliamentary History 28, no. 1 (2009): 150–65.
21
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Dario Casti-
glione and Lesley Sharpe, eds., Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and
Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1995); Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity
and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996); Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite
Society: Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001). For its many gendered ironies and contradictions, see Fara-
merz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (New York, 2012), 181–90.
large, especially to the young, ambitious, but penniless Gordon. Both were rich, suc-
cessful 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 youth-
ful 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.”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-dis-
cussed 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 pas-
sionate female engagement with politics and other undomestic affairs.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 actu-
ality of female interest and participation in public affairs.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.
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
22
Gordon to Trenchard, 1 August [1721], University of Kansas Libraries, MS G23, fol. 9v. See also
London Journal, 13 May, 22 July 1721 (CL 29, CL 38).
23
Spectator, 5 May 1711; see also Spectator, 2 June 1711, 7 December 1711, 13 February 1712; Rachel
Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester,
1999).
24
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class,
1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987); Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, eds., Women in British Politics, 1760–
1860: The Power of the Petticoat (New York, 2000)
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.”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.”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.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.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.”29 The growing popularity of Cato’s Letters
between the 1720s and 1750s coincided with the continued British expansion of the
transatlantic slave trade.30 London’s newspapers openly marketed “Black” and
“Negro” humans for sale, advertised for the capture of escaped slaves, and referred casu-
ally to “the Negro Trade.”31 On 16 September 1721, the London Journal opened with
Cato’s stirring pronouncement that “Men are naturally equal”; the next sheet updated
25
London Journal, 4 February 1721 (CL 15).
26
London Journal, 14 October 1721 (CL 48). See also London Journal, 22 July 1721 (CL 38).
27
See esp. David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political
Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27; James Farr, “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery,” Political
Theory 36, no. 4 (2008): 495–522; Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Recon-
sidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (2017):
1038–78; Mark Goldie, “John Locke and Empire,” Carlyle Lectures, University of Oxford, 9 January–23
February 2021.
28
John Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay (New York, 2004), esp. chap. 1;
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, 2006); Simon
Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, 2011).
29
[Daniel Defoe], An Essay Upon the Trade to Africa (London, 1711), 5, 34; Tim Keirn, “Daniel Defoe
and the Royal African Company,” Historical Research 61, no. 145 (1988): 243–47.
30
William Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave
Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill, 2013).
31
For example, see London Journal, 3 June 1721, 2 September 1721, 3 August 1723, 7 September
1723, 21 September 1723, 22 February 1729; British Journal, 26 December 1724; “For Sale,”
Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom, and Race in the Eighteenth Century, University of
Glasgow, https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/for_sale/.
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.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.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.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 dif-
ferent from Beasts.”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”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.”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.”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 tri-
angular 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.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
32
London Journal, 16 September 1721 (CL 45).
33
London Journal, 20 January 1722 (CL 62).
34
Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach, eds., Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British
Imagination (Farnham, 2013).
35
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (London, 1698), 6. See also Steven Jablonski,
“Ham’s Vicious Race: Slavery and John Milton,” Studies in English Literature 37, no. 1 (1997): 173–90.
36
London Journal, 14 October 1721 (CL 48). See also Peter A. Dorsey, Common Bondage: Slavery as
Metaphor in Revolutionary America (Knoxville, 2009).
37
London Journal, 24 February 1722 (CL 67).
38
British Journal, 24 November 1722 (CL 106).
39
John Cary, An Essay on the State of England, in Relation to its Trade [. . .] (Bristol, 1695), 47, 65–86;
Jonathan Duke-Evans, “The Political Theory and Practice of the English Commonwealthsmen, 1695–
1725” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1980), 22, 26; Kenneth Morgan, s.v. “Cary, John (1649–
1719X22),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 4 October 2007, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/
4840.
40
Will of Michael Henry Pascal, proved 8 May 1786, TNA, PROB 11/1142/88; “Bonamy Dobrée,”
Legacies of British Slave-ownership Database, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs (this repository is hereafter abbreviated
as LBS); “Harry Hankey Dobrée,” LBS; Voyage ID 77536, Slave Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings,
ed. Vincent Carretta (New York, 1995), 68–69, 91, 105, 255n145, 270n304; Doug Ford, “A Respectable
Trade or Against Human Dignity?,” Heritage Magazine [Jersey] 2006, 7. Another branch of the family
was based in Nantes, the French slaving capital: see Robert Stein, “The Profitability of the Nantes Slave
Trade, 1783–1792,” Journal of Economic History 35, no. 4 (1975): 779–93.
41
Trenchard v. Wanley, 1721, TNA, C 11/41/13.
42
“Philip John Miles,” LBS.
43
T[homas] G[ordon], untitled retrospective account of his dealings with Harley, Beinecke Library, Yale
University, MS Osborn c502, p. 59.
44
The Calve’s-Head Club; or, A Modest Apology for Parson Alberoni (Kingston, Jamaica, 1719).
45
Gordon to Lindsay, 1 July 1740, National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS.23.3.26, fol. 63r; Journal and
pay ledger of the “Halifax,” 1740–1742, BL, IOR/L/MAR/B/651C and /651H; Anthony Farrington,
Catalogue of East India Company Ships’ Journals and Logs, 1600–1834 (London, 1999), 294. Bill was
alive in 1750 but seemingly not by 1767 (will of Thomas Gordon, proved 8 August 1750, TNA,
PROB 11/781/344, and will of Thomas Gordon of Jamaica, proved 17 December 1781, TNA, PROB
11/1085/244).
46
With her husband, Edward Bullock, she had two daughters. In 1765, she died giving birth to a son,
who did not long survive her. Her husband then married his teenaged mistress, Elizabeth-Saville Trower,
and fathered two more children before his own death in 1771; see will of Edward Bullock, proved 12
December 1771, TNA, PROB 11/1084/356 (quoted); will of Thomas Gordon of Jamaica, TNA,
PROB 11/1085/244; inventory of the estate of Edward Bullock, 3 February 1772, Jamaica Archives,
Spanish Town, 1B/11/3/52, fols. 218b–223 (hereafter this repository is abbreviated as JA); inventory of
the estate of Mary Bullock, 30 April 1802, JA, 1B/11/3/95, fols. 188v–190; inventory of the estate of
Edward Bullock [Jr], 13 January 1827, JA, 1B/11/3/143, fols. 52–53; inventory of James Jones, 6 Decem-
ber 1838, JA, 1B/11/3/153, fols. 195b–197; Accounts Produce Books 1773–1786, returns for Fair Pros-
pect estate, JA, 1B/11/4/7-11; baptism of Elizabeth-Saville Trower, St. Catherine’s parish register, 4
November 1751, JA, 1B/11/8/3/1; entries for 1, 24, 27 September 1765; 7 December 1768; 12 February
1769; 15 December 1771; and 24 April 1772, St. Catherine’s parish register 1764–1808, JA, 1B/11/8/3/
48; St. Catherine’s vestry minutes, 1759–1768, JA, 2/2/4; “Edward Bullock of Kingston Jamaica, ????–
1771,” LBS; “Edward Bullock, 1772–1824,” LBS; “Fair Prospect estate, St. Thomas-in-the East,” LBS.
numbers of slaves, the most valuable one of whom he named Cato.47 Tom Gordon
married into the local plantocracy and fathered children on an enslaved woman, Tilla,
“my Mulatto wench.”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,49 an assemblyman, and a member of its ruling council.50
47
Inventories of the estate of Thomas Gordon, 13 May and 24 August 1772, JA, 1B/11/3/51, fols. 73–
77, 151–52b; Land Patents, JA, 1B/11/1/31, fols. 98r–v (original foliation); Declarations of Lands Held,
St. Catherine’s, JA, 2/2/26, p. 147; “Thomas Gordon Esquire [3771],” LBS; “Grace Gordon [3751],”
LBS; Gazette of Saint Jago de la Vega, 3 May 1781, 13 September 1781.
48
He called her this when making his will in 1767. In it, of all his “real Estate and Slaves with the Issue
and Increase of the Female Slaves,” he named (in a codicil) only Tilla, asking his wife, Grace, “in conve-
nient time and on continuance of good behaviour,” to manumit her two unnamed children. (He and Grace
had no children of their own, though he secretly had a daughter, Harriet, with his white mistress, Mary
Davis.) His 1772 probate inventory lists only Tilla and “Sally McKenzie her daughter.” Almost a
decade later, in her own will of 1781, Grace freed “Sally a Quadroon.” She also bequeathed “Tilla &
her child Oliver” to Tom’s niece, Patty, and stipulated that Tilla would be manumitted after Patty’s
death. Patty was still living in 1825 when her husband, James Jones, made his will; there is no record
of Tilla or Oliver ever having been freed. See will of Thomas Gordon, proved 17 December 1781,
TNA, PROB 11/1085/244; Alexander Grant to Sir Archibald Grant, 27 May 1760, Papers of the
Grant Family of Monymusk, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, GD 345/1166/58 (hereafter
this repository is abbreviated as NRS); inventories of the estate of Thomas Gordon, 13 May and 24
August 1772, JA, 1B/11/3/51, fols. 73–77, 151–52b; inventory of the estate of Grace Gordon, 29 Septem-
ber 1781, JA, 1B/11/3/62, fols. 182b–83b; Manumission Books, JA, 1B/11/6/13-58; Lease between Alex-
ander Fullerton and James Jones, JA, BRA 1235, no. 38; “James Jones of Great Baddow,” LBS. See also
Christer Petley, “‘Legitimacy’ and Social Boundaries: Free People of Colour and the Social Order in Jamai-
can Slave Society” Social History 30, no. 4 (2005): 481–98; David Beck Ryden, “Manumission in Late
Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” New West Indian Guide 92, nos. 3–4 (2018): 211–44.
49
He probably had known his father’s fellow propagandist for Walpole in the late 1720s and early
1730s, Matthew Concanen, who served as Jamaica’s attorney-general from 1732 to 1743 and then
returned to London until his death in 1749, while Tom was training as a barrister. See James Sambrook,
s.v. “Matthew Concanen (1701–1749),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://https://doi.org/
10.1093/ref:odnb/6053; Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, vol. 1,
ed. H. A. C. Sturgess (London, 1949), 327; Middle Temple, “Minutes of Parliament, 1703–1747”
(1970, typescript deposited at Middle Temple Archive, London), 388–89.
50
Minutes of the Council, May 1760, JA, 1B/5/3/16; minutes of the Council, June 1765, December
1766, December 1767, JA, 1B/5/3/17; minutes of the Council, JA, 1B/5/3/18, fols. 2, 5b, 11b, 65b–
66b, JA; journals of the Council, JA, 1B/5/4/10–12; St. Catherine’s vestry minutes, 1759–1769, JA, 2/
2/4-5; St. Catherine’s poll tax and deficiency rolls, JA, 2/2/22; St. Catherine’s list of freeholds, JA, 2/2/
27, pp. 37, 59; Kingston vestry minutes, 1763–67, JA, 2/6/4, pp. 10, 27b, 31b, 71b, 108b, 145b; Kings-
ton vestry minutes, 1768–70, JA, 2/6/5, pp. 9b, 38, 91b, 130b; Sir Archibald Grant to Thomas Gordon,
19 December 1752, 17 July 1755, 31 May 1756, NRS, GD345/1161/4/65, /1163/3/102–3, /1164/3/38;
Gordon to Sir Archibald Grant, 27 June 1752, 12 July 1753, 6 January 1756, NRS, GD345/1162/4/7,
/1162/5/28, /1164/3/38; John Gillespie to Sir Archibald Grant, 14 July 1763, NRS, GD345/1169/3/
18; miscellaneous letters to Sir Archibald Grant, 1762 and 1766, NRS, GD345/1170/3 and /1171/5/
75; census of St. Jago de la Vega, 1754, East Sussex Record Office, SAS/RF/20/7, fol. 7r; Gordon to
Rose Fuller, 28 August 1755, East Sussex Record Office, SAS/RF 21/23; petition of inhabitants of
St. Jago de la Vega, TNA, CO 137/37, fol. 185r; Patrick Browne, The Civil and Natural History of
Jamaica (London, 1756), list of subscribers (unpaginated); Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 14 vols.
([Kingston] Jamaica, 1811–1829), 4:487, 528, 627–28, 650, 662–23, 672, 695, 700, 703, 714;
5:247, 250–54, 447–49, 525, 532, 576, 599–603; 6:112, 114, 116–17, 183; Betty Wood, ed., “The
Letters of Simon Taylor of Jamaica,” in Travel, Trade and Power in the Atlantic, 1765–1884, ed. Betty
Wood and Martin Lynn (Cambridge, 2002), 1–164, at 49, 85, 106; Anne M. Powers, ed., A Parcel of
Ribbons: The Correspondence of an Eighteenth-Century Family in England and Jamaica (n. pl., 2012), 124,
147, 157, 160, 173.
51
Roderick Cave, Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies (London, 1987); James Robertson,
“Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’s Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism,” History 99, no. 337 (2014): 607–31.
That liberty of the press was, in general, a topic as keenly discussed in the West Indies as in Britain and
North America, and that “Cato” became a common reference there, too, is suggested, for example, by
the Barbados Gazette, 6 November 1731; Remarks on Zenger’s Tryal, Taken out of the Barbados Gazette’s
([Philadelphia], [1737]); Antigua Gazette, 12 April 1755; Dominica Mercury, or Free-Port Gazette, 3 Sep-
tember 1768; Barbados Mercury, 13 October 1770.
52
Miles Ogborn, The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World (Chicago, 2019);
Jack P. Greene, “Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century
West Indies,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 1 (2000): 1–31.
53
For an early example, see A Letter from a Merchant at Jamaica [. . .] To which is added, A Speech made by
a Black (London, 1709), 29.
54
David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, 1987),
9–13, 604–5.
55
Hume, Essays, 208, 629–30 (a note added in 1753 to an essay first published in 1748). His final, 1777
edition sharpened the anti-black contrast by leaving out a passing reference to the “four or five” other
human “species” to whom whites were also inherently superior. Despite professing “disgust” at how
“domestic slavery, in the American colonies” corrupted slave owners, Hume also repeatedly adopted the
perspectives of “our planters,” for example, that “we [are] obliged to exercise a rigorous military
government over the negroes.” See Hume, Essays, 383–84, 389–90, 429, 639. For his contempt for Afri-
cans and support of slavery, see David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, ed. David
Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2007), paras. 2.2.8.14 and 3.2.3.10; J. Y. T. Greig, ed.,
The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932), 2:113–14; Felix Waldmann, ed., Further Letters of
David Hume (Edinburgh, 2014), 65–68.
56
Richard H. Popkin, “Hume’s Racism,” in Richard H. Popkin, The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed.
Richard Watson and James E. Force (San Diego, 1980), 251–66; Aaron Garrett and Silvia Sebastiani,
“David Hume on Race,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack (New York,
2017), 31–43.
57
London Journal, 21 October 1721 (CL 49). See minutes of ordinary meetings, 25 October 1716,
Royal Society Archives, London, JBO/12/86, and minutes of Council, 8 November 1716, Royal
Society Archives, CMO/2/268; Gentleman’s Magazine 41 (1771): 595–96; Ogborn, Freedom of Speech,
58–59; Vincent Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?,” Early American Literature 38, no. 2 (2003):
213–37; John Gilmore, s.v. “Williams, Francis (c. 1690–1762),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
8 January 2015, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/57050; John Gilmore, “The British Empire and the
Neo-Latin Tradition,” in Classics and Colonialism, ed. Barbara E. Goff (London, 2005), 92–106.
58
Gillespie to Grant, 14 July 1763, NRS, GD345/1169/3/18 (“ablest”); minutes of the Council, 13
December 1766, JA, 1B/5/3/17; Gentleman’s Magazine 46 (1776): 37 (“famed”; “eloquence”); “very
moving” is in all of the following: New-York Gazette, 11 June 1764; Providence Gazette, 16 June 1764;
Boston Evening-Post, 18 June 1764; Newport Mercury, 18 June 1764; New-London Gazette, 22 June
1764; Pennsylvania Gazette, 28 June 1764.
59
See Thomas Gordon, A Cordial for Low Spirits: Being a Collection of Curious Tracts, 3rd ed., 3 vols.
(London, 1763), 1:v; Keith W. Murray, ed., “A Manuscript by Lord Adam Gordon,” Genealogist, new
ser. 14 (1898): 11–16, 85–90, 163–65, 216–21, at 15.
60
For his invocation of it, see Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial and Constitutional
History (Charlottesville, 1994), esp. chaps. 8, 14; Jack P. Greene, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on
Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity (Charlottesville, 2013), chap. 8.
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.”)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 math-
ematics. 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 author-
ities 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.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.63 Indeed, slaves were not normally per-
mitted 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—expo-
sure 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.”64 Instead, the enslaved were branded with the lan-
guage 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.”65
61
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica [. . .], 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2:478, 480 (my translation from
Latin).
62
“A Short State of the Case of Francis Williams of the Island of Jamaica,” and ancillary documents,
1731, TNA, CO 137/19, fols. 29r–35v, 73r–74v, at 29r; Acts of the Privy Council of England: Colonial
Series, 6 vols. (London, 1910), 3:344–45. See also Brooke N. Newman, “Contesting ‘Black’ Liberty
and Subjecthood in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1730s–1780s,” Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 2 (2011):
169–83. I am preparing a biography of Francis Williams, based on newly discovered materials.
63
James Robertson, “A 1748 ‘Petition of Negro Slaves’ and the Local Politics of Slavery in Jamaica,”
William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2000): 319–46, at 323.
64
John Fielding, Extracts from Such of the Penal Laws [. . .] (London, 1762), 143–44. See also Ogborn,
Freedom of Speech, 175.
65
Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 1, 41, 62–64, 92, 107, at 63; Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and
Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, 2004), 104, at 260–
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 utter-
ance 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 contin-
uous Black resistance. In Jamaica alone, we know of major plots, involving hun-
dreds 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.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.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.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.”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
61. See also Margaret Williamson, “Africa or Old Rome? Jamaican Slave Naming Revisited,” Slavery and
Abolition 38, no. 1 (2017): 117–34.
66
Dates here are compiled from Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British
West Indies (Ithaca, 1982); Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge,
MA, 2020).
67
Ogborn, Freedom of Speech (proverb at 41); Craton, Testing the Chains; Brown, Tacky’s Revolt.
68
For the doubled erasure of enslaved female voices in the surviving records, see Saidiya Hartman,
“Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1–14; Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women,
Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, 2016).
69
Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 94, 158–59, at 159; Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography
of a Self-Made Man (Athens, 2005); John Bugg, “The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano’s
Public Book Tour,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1424–42.
they were supposed to have.70 Rebellious slaves marshalled the power of talk and,
even in the face of death, spoke out defiantly against white supremacy.71 Francis Wil-
liams 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.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.73
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, broad-
cast, 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.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
70
See also Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake
and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), esp. 313, 464, 560–80.
71
Ogborn, Freedom of Speech, 91–108; Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 106–7, 111, 145, 155–56, 220, 242.
72
“Confession of Scyrus a negro,” 1733, TNA, CO 137/20, fol. 179r–v; [John Lindsay], “A Few Con-
jectural Considerations upon the Creation of the Humane Race,” 1788, BL, Add. MS 12439, fol. 196v.
73
See also Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment,” Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–14;
Brown, Tacky’s Revolt; Ogborn, Freedom of Speech, chap. 5.
74
For this paragraph and the next, see Dabhoiwala, “Inventing Free Speech.”
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.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 newspa-
per, 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.76
Within a few months, as its circulation and advertising revenue soared, Dobrée felt
secure enough to marry.77 Shortly after, he set about cashing in his unexpected wind-
fall: 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.78 Of Trenchard and
75
It began as the Thursday’s Journal (6 August–24 December 1719), then became the London Journal; or
the Thursday’s Journal (26 December 1719–7 May 1720), and finally on 14 May 1720 was renamed the
London Journal, at the same time as it changed publishers, presumably due to Dobrée’s acquisition.
76
E[lizée] D[obrée] to [Charles Delafaye], 8 January 1721, TNA, SP 35/30, fol. 16 (my translation
from French).
77
Marriage of Elisha Dobrée and Elizabeth Lowther, 14 May 1721, All Hallows register of marriages
1692–1732, LMA, P69/ALH5/A/007/MS05087; Dobrée to Richard Peters, 28 September 1741, RG-
021-4, box 3, item 355, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg; Ashworth P. Burke, Family Records
(London, 1897), 223–26. His unnamed relative was doubtless the merchant and banker William
Dobrée (1674–1760), the first of the family to emigrate to London, who lost money in the South
Sea crash and had moved to Botolph Lane in 1721 or 1722: see Daily Post, 3 August 1720; London
Journal, 17 August 1723; “William Dobree, bankrupt, 1754,” https://www.priaulxlibrary.co.uk/arti-
cles/article/william-dobree-bankrupt-1754. Elizée always wrote to the government from this address,
even after he and his wife had set up house in a much humbler location nearby; see Sun Insurance
Office Policies, 1722–23, LMA, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/014, pp. 216, 286–87, and
/MS11936/015, p. 120. According to https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/family-tree/person/tree/
153233181/person/192282509215/facts, Elizée was born on Guernsey in January 1692 (which is
very plausible), and died in 1758, though this source cites no evidence for either date (and is incorrect
about other biographical details).
78
Letters from Dobrée to Delafaye, January–May 1721, TNA, SP 35/30, fols. 16, 28, 88–89 and TNA,
SP 35/31, fols. 32, 38, 81, 194, 204; statement of the Journal’s finances, 1721, TNA, SP 35/68/2, fol. 103.
Charles Delafaye, the undersecretary of state who negotiated this deal with Dobrée, later became the
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.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.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 pres-
tigious, 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.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.82 So did Andrew Bradford, whose American Weekly Mercury, Phila-
delphia’s first newspaper, took a similarly populist line.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.84
London agent of Jamaica’s government and was involved in Francis Williams’s appeal against its 1730 Act;
see Alured Popple to Delafaye, 1 July 1731, TNA, CO 137/47, fol. 100; Delafaye to Popple, 17 July 1731,
TNA, CO 137/19, fols. 73–74; Popple to Delafaye, 20 July 1731, TNA, CO 138/17, fols. 165v–166r;
Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations: Preserved in the Public Records Office, 14 vols.
(London, 1920–1938), 6:216, 219.
79
British Journal, 20 October 1722 (CL 100) (“Libels,”); British Journal, 27 October 1722 (CL 101).
80
Dabhoiwala, “Inventing Free Speech.”
81
See Elizabeth Christine Cook, Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704–1750 (New York,
1912), esp. 81–83, 89–90, 106, 113, 125–26, 129, 137, 257, 263; Rossiter, Seedtime, 141–42, 145–
47, 298–300, 357, 492n120; Jacobson, introduction to English Libertarian Heritage, xlviii–lx; Bailyn, Ideo-
logical Origins, esp. 35–37, 44–45, 52–53, 57–62, 86, 132–33; Chad Reid, “‘Widely Read by American
Patriots’: The New-York Weekly Journal and the Influence of Cato’s Letters on Colonial America,” in Peri-
odical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris (Knoxville,
2005), 109–42; Barry, “Dress Rehearsal.”
82
New-England Courant, 11 September 1721, 9 July 1722, 16 July 1722; J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of
Benjamin Franklin, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 2006–09), 1:85, 111, 150, 155, 158–65, 188, 453.
83
For example, see American Weekly Mercury, 26 February 1723, 12 March 1734, 4 April 1734, 25 April
1734, 6 November 1740.
84
As Cosby himself noted of the “weekly . . . false and scandalous libels printed in Zengers Journal,”
“there is nothing more common with writers of seditious libels than for them to tell the world they
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.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 Crafts-
man.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.87 In 1735, a jury acquitted Zenger of printing “sedi-
tious libel,” following the new logic of Cato’s ideals (that truth could never be libel-
ous, 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—even-
tually influencing the free speech and press provisions that most of the rebellious col-
onies included in their Declarations of Rights between 1776 and 1784, and thence
the peculiar shape of the First Amendment itself.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!”89
For weeks on end, Alexander republished Gordon and Trenchard’s columns on
speech and libel, together with his own commentary.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.91 “This is a state of slavery, and so no
speak the sentiments of the people”: E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the
State of New-York: Procured in Holland, England, and France, 15 vols. (Albany, 1853–1887), 6:4–7.
85
James Alexander, A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger [1736], ed. Stanley Nider
Katz (Cambridge, MA, 1963); Levy, Freedom of the Press; see also Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty,
Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York, 2005).
86
Winkler, Wörterkrieg, chap. 11; S. R. Varey, “The Craftsman, 1726–1752” (PhD diss., Cambridge
University, 1977); Alison Olson, “The Zenger Case Revisited: Satire, Sedition, and Political Debate in
Eighteenth-Century America,” American Literature 35, no. 3 (2000): 223–45, esp. 231–32.
87
New-York Gazette, 4 February 1733/4; New-York Weekly Journal, 11 February 1733/4; see also
American Weekly Mercury, 4 November 1734.
88
See notes 2 and 4, above; also Fara Dabhoiwala, Inventing Free Speech (forthcoming).
89
New-York Weekly Journal, 12–19 November 1733.
90
New-York Weekly Journal, 11 February–4 March 1734; see also New-York Weekly Journal, 7–14 January
1734, 15 April 1734.
91
New-York Weekly Journal, 11 November–9 December 1734; see also New-York Weekly Journal, 30
December 1734, 27 January 1735, 19 December 1737–17 January 1738.
libel,” Alexander noted privately about his attacks on the governor.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 eigh-
teenth-century American defense of libertarian free-speech ideals.93
“Every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honor you,”
Zenger’s lawyer had appealed to the jury.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 transac-
tions.95 Like them, too, he may well have owned and traded slaves, and used them
in the production and distribution of his paper.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.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 Amer-
icans’ 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.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
92
Alexander, Brief Narrative, 143.
93
Olson, “Zenger Case Revisited”; Amy Watson, “The New York Patriot Movement: Partisanship, the
Free Press, and Britain’s Imperial Constitution, 1731–39,” William and Mary Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2020):
33–64.
94
Alexander, Brief Narrative, 99.
95
For example, see New-York Weekly Journal, 31 December 1733–14 January 1734; 28 January, 15
April, 22 July, and 5–14 October 1734; 27 January–10 February, 28 April–26 May 1735.
96
For example, see South-Carolina Gazette, 14 June 1740; Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in
America, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Albany, 1874), 1:xxv, 63, 99, 101, 130, 133, 163, 343–44; 2:48; Lepore,
New York Burning, 72; Cave, Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies, 31–33; Hennig Cohen, The
South-Carolina Gazette, 1732–1775 (Columbia, 1953), 6; David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benja-
min Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004).
97
New-York Weekly Journal, 2 December 1734.
98
New-York Weekly Journal, 13 February 1737/8 (“pampered”); Paul David Nelson, s.v. “Alexander,
James (1691–1756),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004, https://doi.org/10.
1093/ref:odnb/68428; Thomas L. Purvis, s.v. “Morris, Lewis (1671–1746),” Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, 23 September 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/68712; Eugene R. Sheridan,
Lewis Morris, 1671–1746: A Study in Early American Politics (Syracuse, 1988), chap. 1 (“devoted
reader”; “Negroes”); Paul David Nelson, William Alexander, Lord Stirling (Tuscaloosa, 1987), 11–12.
Their great friend and patron, Robert Hunter, was the governor of Jamaica who oversaw its 1730 act
degrading the rights of Francis Williams and other free Blacks. For the historiography, see esp. Edmund
S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 3–
6; see also Lepore, New York Burning, xii, xx.
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.99
He made for Charleston, South Carolina, the capital of continental slavery, and
tried to set up as a trader.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 set-
tlement. But within days of his arrival in Savannah, his creditors caught up with him,
and he was again declared bankrupt.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
99
Baptism of Mary, daughter of Elisha Dobrée and Elizabeth, St. Olave Hart Street, 16 September
1722, LMA, P69/OLA1/A/003/MS17818; Tower Ward Land Tax assessments 1722–25, LMA, CLC/
525/MS11316/071, p. 52, /074, p. 50, /077, p. 53, /080, p. 49; baptism of James, son of Elisha
Dobrée and Elizabeth, St. Botolph without Aldgate, 25 January 1729, LMA, P69/BOT2/A/008/
MS09225/003; baptism of Susannah, daughter of Elisha Dobrée and Elizabeth, 7 June 1732, LMA,
P69/MIC1/A/003/MS06988/01; Dobrée to Delafaye, with enclosures, 27–28 June 1723, TNA, SP 43/
66; commission of bankruptcy against Elisha Dobrée, 30 July 1725, TNA, SP B4/5, p. 23; petition of
Elisha Dobrée, TNA, SP 36/155/1/122A-123; Whitehall Evening-Post, 1 December 1724; London
Gazette, 7 August 1724, 21 August 1724, 30 November 1725; Philosophical Transactions 33 (1726):
411–32, at 431; Dobrée to Benjamin Martyn, 9 July 1735, TNA, CO 5/637, fol. 177 (“Infancy”).
100
My account of Dobrée’s time in South Carolina and Georgia is based primarily on the following:
Georgia correspondence of the Board of Trade, 1734–46, TNA, CO 5/636–41; correspondence of the
Trustees for Georgia 1732–40, TNA, CO 5/666–67; Georgia land grants, instructions, petitions, etc.,
1732–52, TNA, CO 5/670–71; journal of the Trustees for Georgia, 1737–45, TNA, CO 5/687;
minutes of the Council of the Trustees for Georgia, 1732–36, TNA, CO 5/689; Earl of Egmont
papers, Hargrett Library, University of Georgia, Athens, MS 746; transcripts of the Earl of Egmont
papers, Hargrett Library, MS 1786; Allen D. Candler et al., eds., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia,
1732–1784, 39 vols. (Athens, 1904–1989); Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Manuscripts
of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of Viscount Percival afterwards first Earl of Egmont, 3 vols. (London, 1920–
1923); [Thomas Stephens], A Brief Account of the Causes that have Retarded the Progress of the Colony of
Georgia [. . .] (London, 1743), 59; Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa [. . .]
(London, 1738); Francis Moore, A Voyage to Georgia Begun in the Year 1735 (London, 1744);
W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds., The Works of John Wesley, vol. 18, Journals and
Diaries (1735–38) (Nashville, 1988), 361, 408, 448; Frank Baker, ed., The Works of John Wesley, vol. 25,
Letters (1721–39) (Oxford, 1980), 452–54.
101
Messrs Beale and Cooper to Dobrée, 9 November 1734, TNA, CO 5/636, fol. 57; Patrick Houston
to Peter Gordon (1 March 1735), and Gordon to Trustees (7 May 1735), TNA, CO 5/637, fols. 11r–v,
18r; minutes of the Council of the Trustees for Georgia, 10 May 1735, TNA, CO 5/689, p. 176; “A
List of Persons who went from Europe to Georgia,” Hargrett Library, MS 4132 (printed as E. Melton
Coulter and Albert Saye, eds., A List of the Early Settlers of Georgia (Athens, 1949)), entries for Dobrée
and his seven servants; South-Carolina Gazette, 27 July 1734.
102
Dobrée to Peters, 28 September 1741, Pennsylvania State Archives (“in vain”); Dobrée to Trustees,
13 February 1735 and 28 March 1735, TNA, CO 5/636, fols. 201v, 300r (“journal of events”); Dobrée to
Martyn, 9 July 1735, TNA, CO5/637, fols. 177–78 (“Penman”).
103
Quoting extracts printed in South-Carolina Gazette, 4 May 1734, while Dobrée was in Charleston;
and see Thomas Cooper and David J. McCord, eds., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 10 vols.
(Columbia, SC, 1836–1841), 7:343–427; Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charles-
ton,” Perspectives in American History, n.s. 1 (1984): 187–232. For Dobrée’s invocations of scribal freedom,
see TNA, CO 5/636, fols. 33, 106, 164, 190v, 300 and TNA, CO 5/637, fols. 174, 177.
104
Andrew C. Lannen, “Liberty and Slavery in Colonial America: The Case of Georgia, 1732–1770,”
Historian 79, no. 1 (2017): 32–55, at 39–40, 47.
105
Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens, 1984), 18 and generally; Brown, Moral
Capital, 78–87; Noeleen McIlvenna, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South
(Chapel Hill, 2015); Anthony F. Moffett, “Runaway Slaves and the Making of Georgia” (PhD diss., Uni-
versity of Florida, 2015), chap. 3.
He criticized Savannah’s governors for treating whites “more like Slaves than Chris-
tian Freemen.”106 He was a weak, wheedling, endlessly self-pitying man, whose wife,
Eliza, refusing to emigrate, dismissed him as “whimsical,” feckless, and improvi-
dent.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 adver-
tised Dobrée’s insolvency in the new South-Carolina Gazette, the region’s first news-
paper. 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.”108
He was right about the reach of newsprint: even in London, people read about his
latest dishonor.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
106
Dobrée to Trustees, 27 January 1735, 6 February 1735, [February?] 1737, TNA, CO 5/636, fols.
165, 190v, and TNA, CO 5/639, fols. 178–79.
107
Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, 2:379 (“whimsical”); Harman Verelst to Dobrée, 19 April 1737,
TNA, CO 5/667, fol. 14v. His wife, born Elizabeth Lowther, who single-handedly maintained herself and
their three children, may have been the “Eliz[abe]th Dupre,” aged seventy-eight, interred at Union Street
Independent burial ground in Southwark on 22 July 1783 (register of burials, 1773–87, TNA, RG 4/
4358).
108
Dobrée to Trustees, 15 January 1735, TNA, CO 5/636, fol. 106r–v; see also 28 March 1735, TNA,
CO 5/636, fol. 300v; South-Carolina Gazette, 27 July 1734.
109
Benjamin Martyn to Bailiffs and Recorder of Savannah, 28 October 1734, TNA, CO 5/666, fol.
38v; Cohen, South-Carolina Gazette, 10–11; Jeffery A. Smith, “Impartiality and Revolutionary Ideology:
Editorial Policies of the South-Carolina Gazette, 1732–1775,” Journal of Southern History 49, no. 4
(1983): 511–26.
and women whose speech was so unfree in the eyes of white people that even their
very birth names had been taken from them.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.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.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 con-
fidential 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
110
South-Carolina Gazette, 2 February 1734 (approvingly reprinted by James Alexander in New-York
Weekly Journal, 4 March 1734); 27 July 1734; 18 January 1735 (fugitive Cato); 12 June 1736 (other
quotes); 14 August 1736; 21 August 1736; 16 July 1748.
111
Will and probate of Affy Crawford, 1750, J0038-92, subseries 2, no. 511; will and probate of Hugh
Crawford, 1745–49, J0038-92, subseries 2, no. 592, New York State Archives, Albany; Minutes of the
Common Council of the City of New York, 1675–1776, 8 vols. (New York, 1905), 5:2, 45, 141, 143, 189,
194; New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 72, no. 4 (1941): 292–3, and 75, no. 1 (1944): 19.
112
[Daniel Horsmanden], A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy (New York,
1744), iii, 32; Lepore, New York Burning, esp. 163–65, 168, 173–75, 188–89.
CONCLUSION
In the autumn of 1739, a group of enslaved African men and women in South Caro-
lina 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.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,
113
Lepore, New York Burning, 79–83, 121, 165–66, 200, 212. Lepore’s misinterpretation of Alexan-
der’s attitudes is corrected in Brendan McConville, “Of Slavery and Sources,” Reviews in American
History 34, no. 3 (2006): 281–90, and proved by James and William Alexander Papers, New Jersey His-
torical Society, Newark, MG 70, box 3, esp. 71–72 [penciled pagination].
114
Lawrence Smyth to Alexander, 10 March 1742, New-York Historical Society, MS 8; Small Scrap-
book, New-York Historical Society, MS 531, items 75, 76, 80, 82, 83, 96, 98; General Board of Proprietors
of the Eastern Division of New Jersey: deed books of exemplified copies (scribed by Dobrée), New Jersey
State Archives, Trenton, PEASJ002, vols. 1–10; Alexander Papers, New Jersey Historical Society, MG 70,
box 3; James Alexander Papers, Princeton University Library, C0024, boxes 3–4; The Minutes of the Board
of Proprietors of the Eastern Division of New Jersey, 4 vols. (Newark, 1949–85).
115
Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebel-
lion (New York, 1974), chap. 12; John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” Amer-
ican Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1101–13; Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and
Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia, SC, 2005); Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great
Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York, 2010); Lepore, New York Burning, 53, 163; Jane
Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999), chaps. 1–2. See also Oglethorpe to Trustees,
28 May 1742, TNA, CO 5/641, fol. 145.
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 dis-
played 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.”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.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 lan-
guage, 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 adver-
tise and thus help recapture absconded slaves—a function pioneered not by colonial
printers but by the earliest, late seventeenth-century English papers.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 con-
tested its presumptions and, secretly or openly, raised their own voices and pens in
116
Smith, Stono, at 8; Boston Weekly News-Letter, 8 November 1739; Pennsylvania Gazette, 8 November
1739.
117
“An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” TNA, CO 5/640, fols. 392–96, printed
in (and previously known to historians only via) Colonial Records of the State of Georgia 22:232–36. It was
enclosed in a letter (also scribed by Dobrée) of 9 October 1739 from James Oglethorpe to Harman Verelst,
accountant of Georgia’s Trustees. Verelst received it on 13 March 1740; it was printed in the London Daily
Post, 17 March 1740; Weekly Miscellany, 22 March 1740, London Magazine 9 (1740): 151–52; Gentleman’s
Magazine 10 (1740): 127–29.
118
See note 7 above.
119
South-Carolina Gazette, 7–28 November 1775. See also Waldstreicher, Runaway America, esp.
chap. 1; Betty Wood, “‘High Notions of their Liberty’: Women of Color and the American Revolution
in Lowcountry Georgia and South Carolina, 1765–1783,” in African American Life in the Georgia Low-
country: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, ed. Philip Morgan (Athens, 2010), 48–76.
120
London Journal, 3 March 1721 (CL 68); see also London Journal, 31 March 1722 (CL 70).
121
Smith, Stono, 55–56; David Ramsay, The History of South Carolina: From Its First Settlement in 1670,
to the Year 1808, 2 vols. (Charleston, 1809), 1:110–13 also records “their black captain, named Cato.”
122
New-York Gazette, 7–21 July 1729.
123
Yaff was born in America around 1694, apparently to a mother enslaved by Richard Ingoldsby, the
governor of New York in 1691–92 and 1709–10, who died in 1719. He was subsequently made the butler
and valet of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant and slave trader, William Trent, who had recently moved to
New Jersey (where he established Trent-town, i.e., Trenton, now the state capital). After Trent’s death in
December 1724, Yaff was acquired by Alexander, one of Trent’s executors, at some point after April 1726.
See Lepore, New York Burning, 287n39; and the documents and information about Trent and Yaff at The
Trent House Association website, https://www.williamtrenthouse.org. For countless other similar exam-
ples, see Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways”; Graham Russell and Alan Edward Brown, eds.,“Pretends
to Be Free”: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey, rev. ed.
(New York, 2019); for a Jamaican instance, see Daily Advertiser [Kingston, Jamaica], 12–15 January 1791.