Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/133

Rh collaboration, an important event in the history of the American Revolution.

The Boston Gazette printed these documents and they went through all the towns in Massachusetts, becoming the platform of the Province. In 1772, Sam Adams organized the Committee of Correspondence in more than eighty towns, and no town was without its copy of the Gazette.

Never was there more artful journalism than that in which the Boston Massacre was used to inflame the public mind. It might be said that Adams showed himself a consummate reporter. He was always in the court, and followed the trial carefully, consistently taking notes and then printing over the signature of "Vindex," his own review of the case. He was a believer in "shirt sleeve diplomacy." When he sent Franklin a long letter, retailing the grievances of the colonies against the government, he printed the letter in the Boston Gazette.

In a communication to the Gazette in December, 1768, written under the nom de plume of "Vindex," he showed his political sagacity when he pressed home on an English opponent of America the argument that if the colonists admitted they had no right to be represented when taxed, they were admitting that they were slaves, and that their property was not actually their own. However faulty the logic, the point roused the colonists and was the beginning of limitless discussion.

The illegality and uselessness of billeting troops was a theme with which it was easy to stir his readers; and it can be easily imagined what the effect was on those hardy New Englanders, resentful to the core, when they read his appeal:

"I know very well that some of the late contenders for a right in the British Parliament to tax Americans