Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/74

48 his son and one in New York owned by himself, he purchased a large paper factory in Elizabethtown and thus rendered both establishments independent of the British manufacturers. Bradford edited his own paper until he was eighty years of age, when he retired, transferring it to James Parker, by whom it was conducted after 1743.

Bradford's very partisanship had its usefulness to the opponents of the Colonial Government, and when the crisis came,—as it did over a mere matter of salary—it was from his office and by his apprentice, John Peter Zenger, that the most effective blow was struck at the despotism of the government.

Between the death of Gk)vemor Montgomery, on June 30, 1731, and the arrival of Governor Cosby on September 18, 1732, Rip Van Dam, the senior member of the Council, occupied the executive chair. Over a dispute as to who should receive the fees of the office, which amounted to about £6000, the Governor pro tern, and Cosby went to court. In order to carry his case, the Governor removed Chief Justice Morris and appointed James DeLancey in his place, an act of arrogance that caused a great deal of acrimony among the colonists. Cosby showed his contempt for them in other ways, calling them, in an official report, "A lazy, good-for-nothing crowd, filled with the spirit of insubordination," who were drawing their inspiration, he declared, from trouble makers in Boston. The opposition decided to have their own paper, and on the isth of November, 1733, they brought out the first number of the New York Weekly Journal under the auspices of John Peter Zenger, an apprentice of Bradford, who had come to him as a poor young immigrant.

The records of Zenger's life are very meager. He