About Gazette of the United States

Gazette of the United States

The Gazette of the United States was the leading Federalist newspaper of the early American republic. Founded by John Fenno in New York City, its first issue appeared on April 15, 1789, days before George Washington's inauguration as the first president. It moved to Philadelphia when the federal capital moved there, became a daily, and continued, under Fenno and a succession of later editors, until March 7, 1818.

Fenno intended his paper to unify the country under its new government. Instead it became the semi-official voice of one emerging party — praising the Washington and Adams administrations, publishing Alexander Hamilton's pseudonymous essays and John Adams's Discourses on Davila, and provoking its opponents to found rival papers, the National Gazette and the Philadelphia Aurora, in reply. The battle between Fenno's Gazette and those rivals helped invent American party journalism.

John Fenno and the Founding in 1789

John Fenno was born in Boston in 1751, attended the Old South Writing School, and became a teacher at his old school in 1769. During the Revolution he served as a secretary and orderly to General Artemas Ward. After the war he tried the import business, failed, and moved to New York, then the nation's capital, having previously written for the Massachusetts Centinel. There he launched the Gazette of the United States to support the new federal government and Federalist positions.

The paper was timed for the new regime. An early issue in January 1790 carried, for example, President Washington's signed announcement of North Carolina's adoption and ratification of the Constitution. Fenno adopted a combative motto — to the effect that those not for the paper's cause were against it — and set out to make a national, not merely local, newspaper. His sheet was a small three-column folio, about seventeen by twenty-one inches.

A Semi-Official Federalist Organ

The Gazette praised Federalist policies and attacked the administration's critics, and Federalists in government sustained it in return. Its biggest supporter was Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who granted it financial help in 1790 and 1791, wrote for it under various pseudonyms, and gave Fenno control of the Senate's printing and most of the Treasury Department's printing business. Fenno's first government printing contract was signed in July 1789.

Fenno wanted the Gazette recognised as the government's official paper. That wish was never fully granted, but through his government printing work the paper achieved semi-official status. Opponents saw the arrangement clearly: Thomas Jefferson described Fenno's paper as disseminating doctrines of monarchy and aristocracy and the exclusion of the people's influence, and Democratic-Republicans objected that it resembled a government-sponsored newspaper on the British model.

Discourses on Davila and the Pseudonymous War

The Gazette's most famous serial was Vice President John Adams's Discourses on Davila, his last major work of political theory, published in instalments between April 1790 and April 1791. The first essays appeared in the New York edition and the later ones in Philadelphia after the move. Adams wrote anonymously, though his authorship was an open secret, producing a long commentary on social class, religion and revolution prompted by a French history of civil wars.

Republicans charged that essays such as Davila and John Quincy Adams's Publicola series advocated monarchy and aristocracy. Hamilton, meanwhile, wrote multiple essays for the Gazette under different names, including attacks on the rival National Gazette. Pseudonymous and anonymous contributions from prominent officials were normal for the paper, which functioned less as a neutral news sheet than as a platform where members of the governing faction argued their case before the public.

Money Troubles and the Move to Philadelphia

For all its political importance, the Gazette was a commercial failure nearly from the start. Circulation never exceeded about 1,400 copies, though copies travelled to major cities where other Federalist papers freely reprinted its news and editorials. Some 400 subscribers avoided paying, awaited government contracts arrived slowly, and Fenno fell into debt. Although he had not wanted to publish advertisements, he was forced to include them in November of his first year.

When the capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, the Gazette followed, issuing there from late 1790 and 1791. Even with Hamilton's grants and government printing, Fenno's debts grew until, on September 18, 1793, amid Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic, he stopped publication. Hamilton and Rufus King then raised a sum about equal to his debt — Hamilton had similarly raised some $2,000 to pay off Fenno's creditors — and on December 11, 1793 the Gazette resumed, now as a daily newspaper except Sundays.

The Rival It Provoked: The National Gazette

The Gazette's influence is measurable by the papers founded to oppose it. Angered at its partisanship, Democratic-Republican leaders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison urged Philip Freneau to found the National Gazette in Philadelphia, whose first issue appeared on October 31, 1791. For two years the two papers fought at every turn.

Fenno's responses to Freneau were condescending, often resorting to name-calling and personal attack, and were thought to confirm Freneau's portrait of the Federalists. The intense partisan debate alienated readers and damaged both papers commercially; both suspended in the fall of 1793 during the yellow fever epidemic, Fenno's in September and Freneau's for the last time in October. Jefferson and Madison largely ended their involvement with the press after the episode.

The Second Rival: Bache's Aurora

On November 8, 1794, Benjamin Franklin Bache's Philadelphia Aurora — begun in 1790 as the General Advertiser — took the National Gazette's place as the Gazette of the United States's chief Republican rival, with fierce criticism of the Washington administration. Fenno and Bache's hostility became personal: in their only in-person encounter, the two editors fought each other in the street.

The symmetry of their ends became a grim footnote of the 1790s press wars. Both editors died of yellow fever in September 1798 — Bache during the epidemic that also killed Fenno, whose wife had died of the disease days before him in some accounts of that season. The era's two most opposed newspaper voices in the capital were removed by the same epidemic within days of one another.

After Fenno: His Son and Joseph Dennie

John Fenno died on September 14, 1798. His son John Ward Fenno took over the newspaper, editing it with Joseph Dennie until 1800. Dennie, who served as an editorial assistant, gave the paper what the newspaper historian Frank Luther Mott called a strong literary flavour, before leaving to found the Port Folio. The paper continued under changing names and formats recorded in Library of Congress listings — a reminder that eighteenth-century titles shifted punctuation, subtitles and proprietors frequently.

In 1800 the federal capital moved again, to Washington, but this time the Gazette did not follow. Its influence, and that of the Federalist Party itself, was waning as Jefferson's Republicans came to power. Caleb P. Wayne bought the paper and edited it in 1800–1801.

Enos Bronson, Libel Suits and Decline

Enos Bronson owned and edited the paper from 1801 to 1804, when it was known as the United States Gazette. Several libel lawsuits were brought against the paper under Bronson, a sign of how litigious the partisan press environment remained even as the Federalists declined nationally.

From 1804 the Gazette passed under several other managers and editors. It survived — remarkably, for a paper created to serve a party in power — through the Jefferson, Madison and into the Monroe years, long after the political world of 1789 had disappeared. Its longevity owed less to influence than to the continuing value of a Philadelphia daily with printing facilities, advertising and a recognisable name.

The Final Issue and Consolidation

The Gazette of the United States printed its last issue on March 7, 1818, when it merged with the True American. The combined paper was eventually consolidated into The North American in 1847. With that, a title born with the Constitution itself finally disappeared into the larger Philadelphia newspaper market.

Fenno's larger ambition — a definitive newspaper that would unite the nation — was never realised. The Gazette never achieved the national circulation he sought, never became fully official, and never made money reliably even with government help.

Legacy: The Foundation of Newspaper Politics

Historians nevertheless remember the Gazette as the leading Federalist newspaper of the 1790s and credit Fenno with laying a foundation for American newspaper politics. The model it established — a party-aligned paper sustained indirectly by government printing contracts, jobs and grants from party leaders, filled with pseudonymous argument by officeholders themselves — was copied by its opponents and became the standard structure of the American party press for the next half-century.

The paper also demonstrated the limits of that model. Indirect sponsorship made editors more partisan, readers wearied of the abuse, and both pioneering gazettes of 1789–1791 collapsed commercially in 1793. The Gazette of the United States survived its rival and its founder, but the system it pioneered — fierce, personal, party-funded journalism — outlived it by far.