Word: rivingtons
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This zeal may be getting out of hand. Last November the Sons of Liberty destroyed the press and type of New York Gazetteer Publisher James Rivington, who had attempted to print articles on both sides of the independence issue. A few months later, Portsmouth Printer Daniel Fowle, self-professed champion of press freedom, was summoned before the New Hampshire House of Representatives to answer for an article in his Gazette attacking independence; his paper has not appeared since. New York Packet Publisher Samuel Loudon reports that he was warned recently by the local Committee of Safety not to distribute...
...Jemmy" Rivington might well sweat printers ink in the grave over such atrocities against the First Amendment as these...
Predictably, they hung him in effigy. Rivington ran a wood-cut of the hanging and advised the revolutionary ruffiians that "The Printer....has considered his press in the light of a public office," and therefore he would print-and-the-Sons-of-Liberty-be-damned...
...name of freedom, the Sons of Liberty mobbed him and all but destroyed his presses. Rivington rolled up his fine cambric sleeves and went on printing. When the Revolutionary War finally broke out, Rivington was arrested and forced on pain of permanent prison to sign a loyalty oath to our young and proudly free nation. Broken at last, he did, and died a bookseller in New York...
...this bread-and-butter-and-bombs idea of the press across? History has not taught us well. After all, clearly "Jemmy" Rivington's importance was that he exposed the excesses of the Sons of Liberty and protected the rights of the grumbling Tories: the small, individual, daily citizen's rights. Yet who but a few journalism majors ever heard of Rivington...