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EPITAPH on the Cruel Death of CRISIS,
HERE to the flames poor CRISIS was configu’d,
His body is consum’d, but not his mind,
For, from his ashes, many forms shall rise,
TRUTH may be burnt alive, but never dies.1
So observed the Morning Post about The Crisis, one member of the London press lamenting the passing of another, even as it sought to reassure readers that the quest for truth would not be deterred. As it turned out, The Crisis did not die a “cruel death,” despite the efforts of government authorities to suppress it.2 The third issue, which appeared on 4 February 1775, had been burned publicly at the order of Parliament. And yet, The Crisis continued to be printed for more than another year and a half, ninety-two issues in all, much to the irritation, no doubt, of those who hoped the public burning, followed by the prosecution of one of the publication’s presumed printers, would crush it.
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But the men behind this weekly, men every bit as shadowy now as they were then, had made it clear that they would not be easily intimidated. “The CRISIS will be carried on with spirit, in defiance of Lawless Power, upon the true principles of the Constitution,” they informed London readers as they prepared the first issue for publication. They pledged “even at the risk of every thing that is dear to man, to rescue the Liberty of the Press, the Natural Rights of mankind, and the Constitution of the British Empire in England and America, from that Ruin with which they are now threatened.”3 That they continued to print The Crisis each Saturday for so many months to come, was a testament to the growing power of the press and to the rise of a public whose political voice could not be silenced by legislative fiat or judicial decree.
The Crisis pursued its political objectives with a vituperative intensity that set it apart from its contemporaries in the London press. The Crisis oozed sarcasm from its pages; its sardonic tone most likely added to the anger of policy makers even as it fed the appetite of readers who relished the irreverence. It cleared the literary ground that others, perhaps most famously Thomas Paine in his Common Sense, would later seed. Nonetheless, different plants grew from this rhetorically similar soil. Paine criticized one king as a first step toward condemning monarchy altogether; the men behind The Crisis never went that far. For all of their complaints against crown and parliament, for all of their warnings that the wrongs committed against Americans might next be visited upon Britons, they did not advocate overthrowing George III. When rebellious Americans decided on an independent republic as the solution to their imperial problem, they and the authors of The Crisis parted ways. However hard The Crisis had worked to create a transatlantic community of protest, however much it drew on a philosophical tradition equally appealing to dissident colonists, their social circumstances and the political ideology that grew out of them were fundamentally different. Thus The Crisis provides a study of contrasts between what became revolution in America but remained protest in Britain.
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Just as Paine was not the first to put the call for “common sense” to good polemical use, there were others who had already titled their efforts at political consciousness-raising The Crisis. More than sixty years earlier, Richard Steele’s pamphlet of that title urged readers to rely on their “common sense” and support the Hanoverian succession, thereby upholding the principles of the Glorious Revolution and preventing any return of Stuart absolutism. Parliament, Steele instructed readers, embodied the notion that all legitimate government was based on consent; the authority of the crown, he admonished, had to be limited because “absolute Power in one person” was but “clandestine tyranny;” and the people, he stressed, could justifiably resist any attack on their constitutional rights because those rights came from nature, not government.4
Where Steele focused on the British Isles, the anonymous author of The Crisis published in 1766 looked beyond them, to the larger empire, when protesting against the Stamp Act and the flawed thinking that led to its passage. He condemned any attempt to tax the colonists directly as unconstitutional, but he, like Steele before him, appealed to reason rather than emotion and avoided ad hominem attacks; stylistically, neither anticipated what would be done in The Crisis reprinted here.5
That far more strident Crisis debuted in London on 21 January 1775 and appeared weekly, without interruption, through 12 October 1776. More like a brief pamphlet than a true newspaper, a typical issue ran six pages with perhaps three thousand words in total, each issue composed of a single essay with nothing else to accompany it: no general news and
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no advertisements placed by others. It had to compete for readers in a city bustling with printers and publishers. Imperial affairs, and their implications for Britons, had become increasingly prominent in the press, with some writers—anonymously, as was the fashion—defending government as vigorously as others condemned it. As an anti-government weekly The Crisis followed in the wake of John Wilkes’ The North Briton and, later, The Whisperer.6 Failed attempts to silence them probably only added to their readership and emboldened those who eventually brought out The Crisis.
Important, too, were the bi- and thrice-weekly newspapers that carried essays critical of government policy. These essays were necessarily briefer than what appeared in a free-standing weekly like The Crisis because they had to be squeezed into the columns of four-page sheets, where usually half of the overall space was given over to advertisements. Still, those newspaper essays could deploy their fewer words to equal effect. Most notable among these stood the “Junius” series that
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ran in the Public Advertiser.7 Earlier essayists like Richard Steele had been no less didactic, but much more deferential. Nonetheless, caustic as “Junius” or John Wilkes or The Whisperer could be, none were as unrelentingly strident or as witheringly personal as what would be printed in the pages of The Crisis.
London, on the eve of the American rebellion, with its population of nearly a million, had just under twenty papers. Boston, by comparison, with a population of fewer than twenty thousand, had five weekly newspapers—an indication of higher literacy rates and a higher standard of living in the provincial town’s laboring classes than in the imperial capital. The divisions that marked pro- and anti-government newspapers were not quite as pronounced in London as in Boston,8 and yet there were tendencies in the London press that would distinguish a Public Advertiser (which had run “Junius”) or St. James Chronicle from the more staid London Gazette.9 None printed more than thirty-five hundred copies per issue; most printed far fewer than
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that. The Crisis, with its weekly output of around two thousand, stood somewhere near the middle.10
All, regardless of size, were involved in a conscious effort to shape public opinion; even more, they were part of a reshaping of the public sphere itself.11 By the time that The Crisis became part of London’s political scene the expectation that opinion out-of-doors should play a role in shaping the policy made indoors at Whitehall and Westminster had grown increasingly insistent. The London coffeehouses, where so many newspapers were left for distribution and sale, grew in political importance as proceedings in the House of Commons were now being summarized regularly, whereas less than a decade before Parliament had banned such reporting.12 Still barred from reporting debates in the House of Lords, the press nonetheless leaked news of the proceedings there, as peers passed along notes, even speeches, as their colleagues in the Commons had been doing for years. Consequently, what has been said about the American press and the rise of colonial protest could also be said of the press in London: just as colonists developed a greater sense of danger through what essayists in the press claimed imperial policies portended for their future, Britons, too, came to worry about tyranny anticipated as much as tyranny experienced. It was that agitated state of mind that The Crisis sought to heighten.13
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The Crisis caught the attention of Parliament at the same moment as a just-published pamphlet with a similar title, The Present Crisis. Superficially they appear to be an odd pairing in parliamentary minds: The Crisis condemned the king and his men for doing too much, for oppressing the colonists with unconstitutional policies; The Present Crisis, by contrast, called on the king to do even more, to exercise his prerogative powers more aggressively and drive disobedient colonists back into line.14 The pamphlet offended one group in Parliament, the weekly another, but they concurred that these attacks on the crown could not be tolerated. The House of Lords led, and the Commons followed, in a joint condemnation of both publications. With the third issue of The Crisis as their evidence, they censured the weekly “as a false, daring, infamous, seditious, and treasonable Libel on His Majesty, designed to alienate the Affections of His Majesty’s Subjects from his Royal person and Government, and to disturb the Peace of the Kingdom.” They chastised The Present Crisis with equally harsh language, adding that it was “an audacious insult on His Majesty, tending to subvert the fundamental Laws and Liberties of these Kingdoms, and to introduce an illegal and arbitrary Power.”15
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To underscore their disgust, the Lords and the Commons had also agreed that the pamphlet and the offending issue of the weekly should be destroyed by the “common hangman.” Handbills circulated around London, announcing “The Last DYING SPEECH of the CRISIS,” which would be burned at the gate to the entrance of Westminster palace yard on the afternoon of March 6th, and the next afternoon in front of the Royal Exchange. The Present Crisis would join it in the blaze.
Authorities may have come away from the first staged display of governmental prowess feeling that they had made their point; not so the second. At Westminster, the sheriffs of the city of London and Middlesex County carried off their duties with no difficulties. The crowd of hundreds that gathered did nothing to disrupt the proceedings, beyond uttering some “Hissings and Shoutings.” The hangman stacked wood, started a fire, and tossed copies of the offending pamphlet and disreputable weekly on the little pyre, with a ring of constables forming a circle around it.16
The orderly affair of that day was followed by chaos the next. The Royal Exchange, site of the second burning, was located on Threadneedle Street in the heart of London, across from the Bank of England and close by the lord mayor’s mansion house. That was an area where crowds could more easily turn into mobs. Sure enough, events there were “abundantly more diverting,” as one newspaper put it wryly afterward. The crowd that gathered was larger than at Westminster, the number of constables, smaller. The hangman had difficulty getting a fire started because people interfered with him; insults were hurled, dead cats and dogs and other
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The Royal Exchange, as viewed from Cornhill Street in London. From a copper line engraving by John Green of the scene produced by painter and illustrator Samuel Wale. Originally printed in London and its Environs Described, 6 vols. (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1761), where it appeared between pp. 280–81 in the fifth volume. Later removed and colored by hand. The attempt to burn a copy of the third issue of The Crisis here the day after another had been burned in the yard at Wesminster Palace produced a riot.
John Collyer’s engraving of Westminster Hall, as reproduced on copper plate for and printed in John Noorthouck’s A New History of London (London: R. Baldwin, 1773), p. 692. The third issue of The Crisis was publicly burned in the yard here without incident on 6 March 1775.
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debris were flung at anyone representing authority; one of the sheriffs was pulled from his horse and beaten; the stack of wood and tinder was broken apart before the offending pieces were fully burned, smoldering bits being scattered along the street; three men seized by the sheriffs or constables were freed by the crowd so that no one could be charged with creating a public disturbance. What was intended to be a demonstration of governmental resolve instead turned into embarrassing street theatre.17
With that, parliamentary action against The Present Crisis ceased. No legal case against it was pursued. The real test for The Crisis still lay ahead. Parliament exercised its authority to direct Attorney General Edward Thurlow to prosecute those responsible for it. That freed Thurlow from the need to seek a grand jury indictment, which he knew he was not likely to get in London anyway because any attempt to stifle the press would be unpopular with the public.
When the men behind The Crisis had claimed, in their very first issue, that freedom of the press was a bulwark of English liberty, they repeated a widely shared sentiment. “The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state,” wrote William Blackstone in his influential Commentaries on English law. Nonetheless, Blackstone’s notion of a free press differed from that of most printers and high court judges sided with him, not the printers. Printers believed that truth should be a mitigating factor in any defense; Blackstone limited press protection to freedom from prior restraint. As Blackstone explained it, “provocation, and not falsity” was the key issue. Any printer who published “what is improper, mischievous, or illegal” must accept “the consequence of his own temerity.” Any writing that demonstrated “a pernicious
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tendency” and threatened “good peace and order” ought to be held legally liable for any resulting public unrest, its instigators punished for any harm done; such could be “the only foundation of civil liberty,” Blackstone concluded.18
The use of prior restraint had ended by 1695, after Parliament allowed a licensing act that it first passed thirty-three years before to lapse. That 1662 act had expressed a concern that “heretical, schismatical, blasphemous, and treasonable books, pamphlets and papers” threatened the peace of the kingdom. Parliament therefore directed that no book be published without a proper royal license. It provided a second line of defense as well: no book concerning religion could be published without approval by the Archbishop of Canterbury; no book on the common law could be printed without first being reviewed by a lord chief justice.19 Those printers who published without a license from the crown faced the possibility of being tried for and convicted of seditious libel, which meant that in an extreme case they could receive the same sentence as those convicted of high treason: death.
In the years since the end of licensing, seditious libel had been gradually reduced from a capital crime to a relatively minor offense. Guilty verdicts would usually result in a judge’s sentence that involved jail time and possibly a fine rather than a long prison term or execution. Threat of prosecution for seditious libel nevertheless became the favored tool of government to combat its opponents in the press; after all, the stamp duties and advertising taxes imposed on printers increased costs but did
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not necessarily curtail criticism.20 Attorney General Thurlow and Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn understood that an allegation of seditious libel against The Crisis or any other publication had to involve more than simple defamation of a public official. Prosecutors needed to prove malicious intent, with a further intention to incite public unrest. Convincing jurors that they had made their case would be their most difficult task, particularly since they were responding to a parliamentary directive rather than proceeding on the basis of a grand jury indictment. Moreover, there was increasing pressure for judges to allow jurors in libel trials to determine questions of law (whether a libel actually occurred) as well as matters of fact (whether the accused wrote or printed the text in question).21
Deciding not to risk overshooting the mark, Thurlow and Wedderburn made no mention of treason in their formal charge against The Crisis, despite the complaint by the Lords and the Commons that it had committed
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a “treasonable Libel.” And even though “Printed and published for the Authors, by T. W. Shaw” appeared on every issue of The Crisis, from the first through the last, Shaw was not prosecuted. Instead, another London printer, Samuel Axtell, was taken to court. It is indeed possible that more than one printer was involved and that the only witness the prosecution could muster agreed to testify against Axtell, with no mention of Shaw.22 The real reasons remain elusive. London printers had become adept at keeping their presses from prying eyes. Listing the place of publication could be a ruse or even an act of hiding in plain sight, with journeymen doing the actual work and master printers not in the shop. Experience taught prosecutors that going after any of them legally could prove to be more trouble than it was worth. Axtell, for his part, was tried in absentia in June 1775, Axtell apparently choosing not to attend his own trial. Found guilty of being a “wicked[,] seditious[,] malicious and ill-disposed person” who “unlawfully[,] wickedly[,]” and “maliciously” maligned both crown and Parliament, the Court of King’s Bench sentenced him to ninety days in jail.23
The Crisis continued to be published each week, trial regardless—as indeed had happened with other writers or printers charged with seditious libel over the past decade. Like them, the men funding The Crisis reaffirmed their commitment to a defense of English liberties. They repeated their warnings about how those liberties were in jeopardy, but they made no mention of Axtell’s trial in their weekly. Perhaps
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they foresaw that the days of book-burnings and prosecutions were ending, though English law did not formally abandon the charge of seditious libel until 2009. Interestingly enough, when Parliament that year finally discontinued seditious libel as the basis for a criminal prosecution, it tied itself to notions of press liberty and to deeper notions of freedom that The Crisis had relied on in its defense to the public over two centuries before.24
We now know slightly more than Attorney General Thurlow did about authorship of The Crisis, but only because three names appeared on essays published after Axtell’s prosecution: William Stewardson, Philip Thicknesse and, most intriguingly, Thomas Shaw, the printer who was identified at the end of every issue. Stewardson, apparently a Southwark sailmaker by trade, had his name attached to issue No. 67. The tone of this piece was not as harsh as many of the others that bracketed it. Stew-ardson, if he was indeed the author, condemned bad policies and foolish ministers, but he was not so caustic in his criticism of the king. This was most likely the same Stewardson who also took an excursion into pamphlet writing on his own.25
Philip Thicknesse, identified as the author of No. 30, was one of the more colorful characters of his age. Thicknesse comes down to us as
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a quarrelsome, eccentric gadfly who made friends and enemies with equal ease. As a youth he sought adventure abroad, first in Georgia, then in Jamaica. He bought a commission in the Royal Marines after returning to England, retired to Bath after a middling military career, and then moved to a cottage outside of town, still a contentious contrarian.26 An inheritance case that he lost on appeal to the House of Lords was the focus of issue No. 30, which stands as the great exception to an otherwise single-minded obsession with Britain, America, the empire, and a king failing to do his duty. Why, exactly, The Crisis took up Thicknesse’s cause remains a mystery, like so much else about the weekly and the people who started it and kept it going.27
Shaw signed his name as the author of one piece, and to part of a second, phrased as if he were responding to another author who had written for the weekly. Unlike Thicknesse, Shaw kept the focus on larger concerns—on the issues that The Crisis had made its raison d’être.28 That Shaw could affix his own name to the essay, roughly a month after Axtell’s conviction, suggests that he did not fear prosecution, even if his tone was as harsh and his condemnations as sweeping as anything printed in earlier numbers. In the second essay he reaffirmed his determination “to support FREEDOM of the Press” and defend the “CHARTERED
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RIGHTS and CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTIES of the BRAVE Americans” as well as the rights of Englishmen at home.29
Shaw’s first essay used the same literary tactics as others in the series, ranging through the past to find examples that could be used for the present. Having already printed numerous pieces that decried the corruption and fall of republican Rome, Shaw railed against “Neronian Cruelty,” knowing that previous issues had set the stage for his historical allusion. Likewise, he could warn that conspiracies were afoot to destroy English and American liberties, and simply mention the king and his ministers without having to explain which particular ministerial or parliamentary actions he had in mind; those points too had already been raised. He placed God and Magna Carta on the side of good, arrayed against pensioners and placemen who personified the bad; he juxtaposed liberty and progress against slavery and ruin. These were all familiar tropes, words evoking symbols, symbols incarnated in the political reality he constructed for his readers. Although Shaw reminded those readers of their duty to defend their rights, when he called for Englishmen to rise up and fight oppression he did not mean literally, as the colonists were doing. Rather, he expected them to be able to make subtle distinctions, to know what separated Britons from Americans as well as what joined them in common cause.
The Crisis is notable for the assumptions that Thomas Shaw and the other men behind it had about the intellectual world of their readers.30 They played off Britons’ deepest fears, capitalizing on a state of mind that they did not create but sought to reinforce. Conspiracy theory was as popular then as ever; not surprisingly, conspiracies loomed large in the Anglo-American political world described by The Crisis. Conspiracy against American rights marked imperial policy; conspiracy
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against the rights of Englishmen, in England itself, would come next, readers were warned. The weekly reserved its sharpest, harshest comments for those most responsible for these dark designs: Lord North, “engendered in the womb of hell,”31 who headed a depraved ministry; the Earl of Bute, long out of power but still active behind the scenes, corrupting others with his baneful influence;32 Lord Chancellor Apsley and Chief Justice Mansfield, who twisted the law to serve unjust ends; secretary of state for American affairs Lord George Germain and his predecessor, the Earl of Dartmouth, who endorsed and passed along the nefarious policies that brutalized Americans; General Thomas Gage, who in his dual role as army commander in North America and governor of Massachusetts, set loose the troops to murder and plunder; Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, mercenaries whose pens were for hire, defending the indefensible actions of “A Bloody Court, A Bloody Ministry, And A Bloody Parliament.”33
Unlike other newspaper essays and pamphlets that attacked George III obliquely through his ministers, The Crisis targeted the King directly and repeatedly, utterly undeterred by Axtell’s conviction in court. The authors did not mince words, even likening George III to Charles I and suggesting that he deserved the same fate. One issue addressed him derisively as his “TYRANNIC MAJESTY—the DEVIL” and ticked off a litany of his wrongs before concluding that in his case there could be only one proper judgment: the”Wages of these Sins is Death.”34 Nevertheless, The Crisis still held out hope that the empire could be restored and the nation saved if George III found his better
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self—that is, if he embraced Viscount Bolingbroke’s notion of the patriot king.35 Remembering what George III himself had stated over the years about his commitment to serving his subjects, Shaw and his compatriots dismissed their flesh and blood monarch as a perversion of Bolingbroke’s ideal of the people’s king who would selflessly protect them and uphold the principles of the Glorious Revolution.36 Asking, rhetorically, “are we not Descendants” of those patriots who overthrew James II and restored balanced government, The Crisis urged its readers to denounce Tyranny “in the Name of those Ancestors.”37
Although the authors associated with The Crisis stood by the idea of mixed and balanced government within a monarchical system, they reflected the republican tendencies of what historian Caroline Robbins called the “commonwealth” tradition.38 There lay an inherent tension between their own brand of libertarianism and their desire to preserve, even strengthen, constitutional government. Like so many of their generation, including those whose politics may have differed from theirs, the authors who wrote for The Crisis took it as a given that fundamental
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rights came from God and through nature, that all legitimate government depended on the consent of the governed, and that even though the king-in-parliament reigned supreme, no one stood above the law and no power short of God’s could be unlimited. The Glorious Revolution had restored principles going back to the ancient constitution of Britain, historically difficult to reconstruct but no less real because of it, disappearing into a foggy Saxon past for some and back to even earlier Gothic antecedents for others.39
Where modern scholars have attempted to separate intellectual threads, The Crisis was typical of the age in weaving them all into its own ideological fabric. For example, one issue alluded approvingly to the great medieval jurists Henry de Bracton and Sir John Fortescue. “The king must not be under man but under God and under law, because law makes the king,” de Bracton had written, adding that there “is no rex where will rules rather than lex”—a position on limited government not so different from what The Crisis would champion five hundred years later.40 That so many of the pen names of the authors in its pages—Junius, Brutus, Casca—were drawn from the history of republican Rome was indicative of the tendency to run ancient and modern together, to
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deal in archetypes when advising those living in the present on how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Americans had been right, insisted The Crisis, to resist the foolish policies pursued by Lord North and, before him, the unconstitutional connivings of George Grenville. Virtual representation arguments had been a canard; Americans should have been allowed to tax themselves, which better and worthier men like Lord Camden and the Earl of Chatham—when Chatham was true to his principles, that is—understood.41 Oppressed by crown and parliament, Americans had the right, even the duty, to resist, as indeed did all people who suffered from tyranny.42 The Crisis hinted broadly that any conflict between mother country and colonies would eventually draw in France and Spain, a geopolitical awareness shared by dissident colonists across the Atlantic.43
When The Crisis first went to press it had not been difficult to draw analogies between British and American conditions, to speak of the common cause, a transatlantic association of the aggrieved. To those who defended government and contended that protesting Americans would not be satisfied with anything less than full independence, The Crisis countered that discontented colonists only wanted those rights guaranteed them as Englishmen: they would not leave the empire unless driven from it. Early on, Shaw and his associates seemed to believe that reconciliation was still possible, that the empire could serve the needs and meet the aspirations of Americans as well as Britons.
After the shooting started, The Crisis joined a chorus of those calling for commissioners to be sent out from London to negotiate a
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peaceful settlement.44 When, after more than a year of bloodshed, it became evident that no accommodation could be reached, that Americans who had once argued they only wanted their rights within the empire now insisted they could only secure them outside it, The Crisis did not denounce them as disingenuous or as traitors to the common cause. It printed the Declaration of Independence, though basically without comment. Only seven more issues appeared thereafter, essentially to reaffirm traditional Whig principles as exemplified by the texts from which its authors drew.45 It accepted, however reluctantly, a different future, where America could become a haven for the oppressed, separated from Britain, not united with it.46 Indeed, the final issue closed with the men behind The Crisis stating that they themselves had decided to sail for more hospitable American shores.47
Some of the earlier issues of The Crisis garnered American notice and were reprinted in New York, Newport, Philadelphia, and a few other places.48 For modern readers unaware of the transatlantic nature of imperial protest, that by itself may well seem impressive; for those seeking
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a more coordinated, systematic sharing of ideas, its circulation around the empire probably appears fairly hit-or-miss. To be sure, The Crisis did not enjoy the reprint success of Paine’s Common Sense or, earlier, of John Dickinson’s Pennsylvania Farmer Letters. But then the actual influence of writers on readers, appealing as it is among historians to try and prove, is inherently elusive.
Even though The Crisis stood as a publication apart in its acerbic language and combative tone, it should also be considered alongside others that made their rights arguments less intemperately. They were all products of the same philosophical and political traditions. In the world that The Crisis shared with other defenders of English freedoms, fundamental law was real and basic human rights were antecedent to those bestowed by any government. Moreover, all legitimate government was a compact between ruler and ruled, the duties of the ruler being as great as the responsibilities of the ruled. In the British empire the rights of Englishmen extended fully to the colonies, with nothing lost through transatlantic migration. Charters, for colonists, were constitutions, just as they claimed, not mere contracts, revocable by crown decree.49 If British-Americans were obliged, because of British tyranny, to rise in rebellion and eventually turn to revolution, The Crisis accepted that they did what men of conscience had always had the right to do. Ultimately the former colonists would point to their successful revolution as evidence of their exceptionalism, even as proof of their peculiar destiny in the larger world. It is curious if not ironic that a weekly British paper dedicated to saving the empire from itself promoted that very-American state of mind.
