Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [93]
Fletcher pressed his anglicization program still further by persuading the Assembly to hire thirty-year-old William Bradford of Philadelphia as public printer. Over the summer of 1693 Bradford opened a printshop at the Sign of the Bible in Dock Street (now Pearl) and promptly ran off a glowing testimonial to Fletcher’s martial exploits by Nicholas Bayard and Charles Lodwick. It may have been the first book ever printed in New York.
Because of its close association with dissent, and of the thin line that seemed to separate dissent from sedition and revolution, printing had always been closely controlled in England (as elsewhere); the duke of York, not long before ascending to the throne as James II, warned Governor Thomas Dongan to let no one operate a printing press in his province since “great inconveniences may arise by the liberty of printing.” After the Glorious Revolution, though, Parliament virtually eliminated restrictions on the press and the expression of opinion. Well before the end of the century, as a result, the English-speaking world was awash in books, pamphlets, journals, magazines, and newspapers.
Bradford’s shop connected New York to this burgeoning print world, attuning its residents to every nuance of British social and political discourse (although his audience was narrow by modern standards: in 1700 no more than one out of five residents of the city could read, and by 1750 no more than two out of five). Over the next thirty or forty years, he served up a steady diet of English-language almanacs, religious tracts, courtesy books, and excerpts from English newspapers (most often the London Gazette). His editions of Richard Lingard’s Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University Concerning His Behavior and Conversation in the World (1696) and Francis Daniel Pastorius’s A New Primmer, or Methodical Directions to Attain the True Spelling, Reading & Writing of English (1698), as well as his own Secretary’s Guide, or, Young Man’s Companion (1698), were obvious attempts to promulgate British standards of correct behavior. So, too, the first American edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer would come off Bradford’s press in 1710. In 1725 he would launch New York’s first newspaper, the weekly Gazette.
As the government’s mouthpiece, Bradford issued a stream of official edicts, statutes, ordinances, petitions, and notices that imparted legitimacy as well as substance to the imperial order. His annual edition of the Assembly’s journals was the first publication of its kind anywhere in the colonies, for nowhere else did government have a more urgent need to inform and instruct the literate classes. Similarly, in 1698, Bradford would issue the first locally printed account of Leisler’s Rebellion, an anonymous anti-Leislerian diatribe entitled A Letter from a Gentleman of the City of New York to Another, Concerning the Troubles Which Happen’d in the Time of the Late Happy Revolution. (True freedom of the press was an idea whose time hadn’t yet come, though: the Leislerian response—another anonymous polemic, entitled Loyalty Vindicated—had to be printed in Boston.)
In this increasingly anglicized climate the city acquired its first coffeehouse. Created by Puritans in the mid-seventeenth century, coffeehouses were now quite fashionable in London as alternatives to the taverns and gin mills frequented by the lower classes. They offered men of affairs a comfortable place to talk business, discuss current events, and peruse the latest books and newspapers. Lieutenant John Hutchins, an officer who had come over with Sloughter, decided that New York was ready for a coffeehouse of its own. In 1696 he opened for business at the sign of the