Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/180

154 States—his mind should turn as it did. On April 15, 1789, there appeared in New York, the seat of the new government, a newspaper, the Gazette of the United States, superior in plan and make-up to any paper then in existence. Its prospectus proclaimed its ambition to be the organ of the government; it would print the debates and the important papers; it would contain from time to time serious and thoughtful articles on government; it wished for the patronage of people of wealth and culture because they would find there such reading as would please them, and it did not neglect to add that it also wanted the good-will of the "mechanics"—Lincoln's "plain people" were then addressed as mechanics.

The editor and publisher of this paper was John Fenno of Boston, a school teacher—a man without a biographer, although it was his paper and the articles appearing therein that brought about the famous quarrel between Jefferson and Hamilton. All that is known about him is that he was a native of Boston, born August 12, 1751, and that he was a teacher for several years in the Old South Writing School, Boston. Why it was that this man—unknown in New York, undistinguished either as printer or writer, and apparently without means—came to New York to establish a national organ for the party of which Hamilton was the most conspicuous leader, is not revealed in any of the docimients of the correspondence of the time, with one single exception.

The exception is a letter from Christopher Gore of Boston, introducing Fenno to Rufus King, a leading Federalist—later to be one of the first United States Senators from New York. Gore stated that Fenno had conceived a plan for a newspaper "for the purpose of demonstrating favorable sentiments of the federal