The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett

Central to Cobbett’s argument was a denial of Priestley’s claim to be seeking asylum in America from the allegedly repressive and tyrannical authorities in Britain. Priestley had been an enthusiast for the French Revolution, unwavering in the face of the Jacobin excesses that had horrified public opinion in his native country. Middle-class Dissenters who had welcomed the Revolution’s campaign for religious tolerance and equality had formed debating clubs and societies throughout England to propagate French ideas and send messages of support to the revolutionaries. In Priestley’s home town of Birmingham, as in many other cities, a dinner had been organised to commemorate the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, an event that sparked off a major riot lasting for four days. During the disturbance Priestley’s house and library were burnt to the ground, to the gratification of many, including King George III. Priestley fled to London and three years later emigrated to America to join his sons, already resident there.

In Cobbett’s eyes Priestley’s hypocrisy lay in seeking ‘asylum’ from a supposedly tyrannical system which he claimed had denied him protection or redress. In fact, following the Birmingham riot, eleven of its ringleaders were indicted, of whom four were found guilty and two executed. In the meantime Priestley sued the Birmingham city council and was awarded damages of £2502.18s. to compensate for the loss of his property:

If he had been the very best subject in England in place of one of the very worst, what could the law have done more for him? Nothing certainly can be stronger proof of the independence of the courts of justice, and of the impartial execution of the laws of England than the circumstances and result of this case. A man who had for many years been the avowed and open enemy of the government and constitution, had his property destroyed by a mob, who declared themselves the friends of both, and who rose on him because he was not. This mob were pursued by the government whose cause they thought they were defending: some of them suffered death, and the inhabitants of the place where they assembled were obliged to indemnify the man whose property they had destroyed. It would be curious to know what sort of protection this reverend Doctor, this ‘friend of humanity’ wanted. Would nothing satisfy him but the blood of the whole mob? Did he wish to see the town of Birmingham, like that of Lyons, razed and all its industries and inhabitants butchered; because some of them had been carried to commit unlawful excesses from their detestation of his wicked projects? BIRMINGHAM HAS COMBATTED AGAINST PRIESTLEY, BIRMINGHAM IS NO MORE.

Such an extract is enough to show Cobbett’s clear, strong invective – his meaning immediately clear, his mastery of the language absolute. En passant he could not avoid indicting Priestley, not only for his political and religious failings, but for writing bad English: ‘His style is uncouth and superlatively diffuse. Always involved in minutiae, every sentence is a string of parentheses in finding the end of which, the reader is lucky if he does not lose the proposition that they were meant to illustrate. In short, the whole of his phraseology is entirely disgusting; to which may be added, that, even in point of grammar, he is very often incorrect.’

Cobbett’s energies however were in the main directed, not just in the Priestley pamphlet but in all his American writings, to attacking the Democrat party, and particularly, during his first years, to supporting the treaty with Britain that Washington, along with his Chief Justice John Jay, was desperately trying to get the Senate to ratify. The British government, now at war with revolutionary France, was naturally keen to stop America allying itself with the enemy. But such were the strong pro-French feelings among the Democrat politicians and the Philadelphians that it was proving a difficult task. A hysterical enthusiasm for France and the French Revolution was then the dominant political passion in the United States, and especially in Philadelphia. France had assisted America with troops and money during the War of Independence, and many Americans felt that their own revolution had inspired the French. None of the excesses of the French Jacobins could dampen the enthusiasm. Street names which included the words ‘King’, ‘Queen’ or ‘Prince’ were changed, democratic societies were formed, and men cut their hair in the ‘Brutus crop’.

Cobbett noted how some Americans even adopted the French habit of referring to one another as ‘Citizen’ and wore tricolour cockades. ‘The delirium seized even the women and children. I have heard more than one young woman, under the age of twenty, declare that they would willingly have dipped their hands in the blood of the Queen of France.’

As the birthplace of American independence, Philadelphia was one of the main centres of revolutionary pro-French frenzy. Following the execution in January 1793 of Louis XVI (formerly the ally of America), a celebratory dinner was held in the city at which a pig was decapitated and the head carried round for all the diners to mutilate with their knives. When France declared war on England the following month the French Ambassador to the United States, Edmond Genet, sent to win over America to the French cause, was given an ecstatic welcome by the Philadelphians. He had been preceded by the French frigate Ambuscade which sailed up the Delaware and anchored off the Market Street wharf flying a flag with the legend ‘Enemies of equality, reform or tremble!’. When Genet himself arrived two weeks later the citizens went wild with excitement. John Adams recalled: ‘Ten thousand men were in the streets of Philadelphia day after day, threatening to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government, or compel it to declare in favour of the French, and against England.’ At a dinner given at Oeller’s Hotel toasts were drunk to ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’, a special ode recited and the Marseillaise sung – with everyone joining in the chorus (‘I leave the reader to guess,’ wrote Cobbett, ‘at the harmony of this chorus, bellowed forth from the drunken lungs of about a hundred fellows of a dozen different nations’).

The bulk of Cobbett’s early journalism was concerned with combating such hysteria. In gruesome and gory detail he catalogued all the excesses of the Jacobins in France, poured scorn on their supporters such as Thomas Paine and, generally speaking, commended those Americans, like Washington, who advocated neutrality in the dispute between France and England. In ‘A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats’ (1795), published under his pseudonym ‘Peter Porcupine’, he savaged those American republicans who were currently predicting an English revolution. The following year he published a much longer pamphlet with a much longer, if self-explanatory, title: ‘The Bloody Buoy, Thrown Out as a Warning to the Political Pilots of America: or a Faithful Relation of a Multitude of Acts of Horrid Barbarity, Such as the Eye Never Witnessed, the Tongue Never Expressed, or the Imagination Conceived, Until the Commencement of the French Revolution, to Which is Added an Instructive Essay, Tracing These Dreadful Effects to Their Real Causes’. Although they went against the general mood, these pamphlets enjoyed an immediate success. Three editions of ‘A Bone to Gnaw’ were published in less than three months, and Cobbett’s other pamphlets were constantly reprinted in both England and America.

In the meantime, Cobbett had become a father again, and this time the child was destined to live. A daughter, Anne, was born on 11 July 1795, at a time of great heat in the city. His wife Nancy, who was having trouble breastfeeding, was also unable to sleep because of the incessant barking of the Philadelphia dogs:

I was, about nine in the evening sitting by the bed. ‘I do think’ said she ‘that I could go to sleep now if it were not for the dogs.’ Downstairs I went, and out I sallied, in my shirt and trousers, and without shoes and stockings; and going to a heap of stones lying beside the road, set to work upon the dogs, going backward and forward, and keeping them at two or three hundred yards distance from the house. I walked thus the whole night, bare-footed, lest the noise of my shoes might possibly reach her ears; and I remember that the bricks of the causeway were, even in the night, so hot as to be disagreeable to my feet. My exertions produced the desired effect; a sleep of several hours was the consequence, and, at eight o’clock in the morning, off I went to a day’s business, which was to end at six in the evening.4

Cobbett went to enormous pains to help his wife with the baby: ‘I no more thought of spending a moment away from her, unless business compelled me, than I thought of quitting the country and going to sea.’ Apart from the dogs, Nancy was alarmed by the frequent and violent thunderstorms in Philadelphia. Cobbett used to run home as soon as he suspected a storm was on the way. ‘The Frenchmen who were my scholars, used to laugh at me exceedingly on this account; and sometimes when I was making an appointment with them, they would say, with a smile and a bow, “Sauve la Tonnerre toujours, Monsieur Cobbett.”’5

Such devotion to his wife’s needs was all the more commendable in someone who was, as always, intensely active. Cobbett was now doing so well from his journalism and teaching that he decided to set up on his own as a publisher and bookseller. In May 1796 he moved with wife and baby into a house-cum-shop at 25 North Second Street, opposite Christ Church and near the terminus for the coaches to Baltimore and New York. He was taking a considerable risk. For the first time he was emerging in public from the cloak of anonymity, and setting up shop in the centre of town. ‘Till I took this house,’ he wrote later, ‘I had remained almost entirely unknown as a writer. A few persons did, indeed, know that I was the person, who had assumed the name of Peter Porcupine: but the fact was by no means a matter of notoriety. The moment, however, that I had taken a lease on a large house, the transaction became a topic of public conversation, and the eyes of the Democrats and the French, who still lorded it over the city, and who owed me a mutual grudge, were fixed upon me. I thought my situation somewhat perilous. Such tracts as I had published, no man had dared to utter, in the United States, since the rebellion. I knew that those truths had mortally offended the leading men amongst the Democrats, who could, at any time, muster a mob quite sufficient to destroy my house, and to murder me … In short, there were, in Philadelphia, about ten thousand persons, all of whom would have rejoiced to see me murdered: and there might, probably, be two thousand, who would have been very sorry for it: but not above fifty of whom would have stirred an inch to save me.’

As the bookshop’s opening day approached Cobbett’s friends, from among the fifty, urged him to be cautious, to do nothing to provoke retaliation. He, however, like Nelson, decided that the bravest course was also the safest. His shop had large windows, and on the Sunday prior to opening he filled them with all the prints he possessed of ‘Kings, Queens, Princes and Nobles. I had all the English ministry; several of the bishops and judges; the most famous admirals: and in short, every picture that I thought likely to excite rage in the enemies of Great Britain. Never since the beginning of the rebellion, had any one dared to hoist at his window the portrait of George the Third.’

On Monday morning Cobbett took down his shutters and opened the shop. Although a large crowd collected, nothing happened. The only threat of violence came in the form of an anonymous letter to his landlord John Oldden, a Quaker merchant of Chesnut (sic) Street:

Sir, a certain William Cobbett alias Peter Porcupine, I am informed is your tenant. This daring scoundrell [sic] not satisfied with having repeatedly traduced the people of this country; in his detestable productions, he has now the astonishing effrontery to expose those very publications at his window for sale … When the time of retribution arrives it may not be convenient to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. Your property may suffer. As a friend therefore I advise you to save your property by either compelling Mr Porcupine to leave your house or at all events oblige him to cease exposing his abominable proclivities or any of his courtley [sic] prints at his window for sale. In this way only you may avoid danger to your house and perhaps save the rotten carcase of your tenant for the present.

Cobbett used the letter as the pretext for another fiery pamphlet, ‘The Scarecrow’ (1796). But although he affected great indignation he actually enjoyed engaging in controversy with his opponents. There was to be more than enough of this now that he had come out into the open and revealed the true identity of Peter Porcupine. Several pamphlets resulted: Cobbett was accused of being a deserter, a British government spy and a criminal who had fled to America to escape the gallows. They said he had been whipped when he was in Paris – hence his hatred of the French.

Cobbett was astute enough to realise that all such attacks were not just good for business but a tribute to the success of his campaign. He also knew that he was a better writer than any of his critics. In reply to them he quoted a letter to his father: ‘“Dear Father, when you used to get me off to work in the morning, dressed in my blue smock-frock and woollen spatterdashes, with my bag of bread and cheese and bottle of small beer slung over my shoulder on the little crook that my old god-father Boxall gave me, little did you imagine that I should one day become so great a man as to have my picture stuck in the windows and have four whole books published about me in the course of one week” – Thus begins a letter which I wrote to my father yesterday morning and which, if it reaches him, will make the old man drink an extraordinary pot of ale to my health. Heaven bless him. I think I see him now by his old-fashioned fire-side reading the letter to his neighbours’ – an unlikely scenario, in view of the fact that George Cobbett had been dead for four years. It would have been most unlike Cobbett to deceive his readers about this, and the assumption must be that, having been out of the country since early 1792 he had not been in touch with his family. This in turn suggests that, contrary to the impression he liked to give, Cobbett had never been close to either his father or his three brothers.

In 1796, as part of his continuing campaign to answer his critics, Cobbett published his short autobiography The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, in which he gave the Americans a vivid and appealing account of his boyhood in Farnham, his escape from home and his army career. It is one of his best pieces of writing, and served its purpose in showing that he was not just a hack pamphleteer but a writer with a genuinely independent spirit. The following year, 1797, he launched a daily newspaper, Porcupine’s Gazette, and closed down his monthly periodical the Political Censor. The paper was an immediate success, Cobbett claming in the first issue that he already had a thousand subscribers. By November three thousand copies were being printed. The paper flourished for the simple reason that, as the sales figures suggest, the American public, even though they might disagree with Cobbett’s views, enjoyed his writing – the robust straightforward style, the knockabout, the jokes and the nicknames.

As a journalist Cobbett was at his best when he could focus his animosity on a particular individual rather than a set of principles or ideas. This is not to say that he was uninterested in ideas, only that he needed someone, like Dr Priestley, to personify the particular variety of political hypocrisy he was attacking at any time. Labelled with appropriate nicknames, these favoured targets (mentioned at every opportunity) lent a powerful spice to his political journalism, making it compulsive reading even for his enemies. Many of the victims of his most savage attacks were not necessarily his political opponents, but had aroused his indignation by being humourless, puritanical in their attitude to morality or, above all, vain. Priestley was one such. William Wilberforce would later be another. A third was Noah Webster (1758–1843) of Webster’s Dictionary fame, a lexicographer, a grammarian, the author of a spelling book for American schools and the man responsible for the differences between American and English spelling (‘color’ for ‘colour’, etc.). Webster came from a family of strict Puritans and was highly industrious in any number of fields – though Jefferson called him ‘a mere pedagogue of very limited understanding’. Cobbett was even ruder, despite the fact that Webster supported the federalists, and missed no opportunity to call him names:

despicable creature … viper … mean shuffling fellow … were this man indeed distinguished as being descended from a famous race, for great learning and talents, for important public services, for possessing much weight in the opinions of the people, even his vanity would be inexcusable but the fellow is distinguished, amongst the few who know him, for the very contrary of all this. He comes of obscure parents, he has just learning enough to make him a fool, his public services have all been confined to silly, idle projects, every one of which has completely failed, and as to his weight as a politician, it is that of a feather, which is overbalanced by a straw, and puffed away by the gentlest breath. All his measures are exploded, his predictions have proved false, not a single sentiment of his has become fashionable, nor has the Federal Government ever adopted a single measure which he has been in the habit of recommending.6

Webster later saw a chance of revenge following the passing of a Sedition Act by Washington in 1798 which made it illegal ‘to write, print, utter or publish any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States’. Although the Act was intended to be used against French writers – by this time the USA had broken off relations with France and was preparing for war – Webster decided it could equally well be used against people like Cobbett. Affecting, like many of his type, not to have personally seen the attacks, he wrote to the Secretary of State Timothy Pickering: ‘The violence and resentment of the English knows no bounds. They are intolerably insolent and strive, by all possible means to lessen the circulation of my papers.’ (He need not have bothered, as by that stage proceedings were already under way.)

A more formidable opponent than Webster was Thomas McKean (1734–1817), a lawyer of Scottish descent who involved himself in politics, became one of the most ardent advocates of separation prior to the war with Britain, and was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The following year McKean became the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania (a post he occupied for twenty years), and he was elected President of Congress in 1781. Though a keen Democrat and francophile, McKean was deeply conservative in matters of law, besides being, in the words of his contemporary Thomas Rodney, a man ‘of great vanity, extremely fond of power and entirely governed by passions, ever pursuing the object present with warm, enthusiastic zeal without much reflection or forecast’.7 A recent biographer describes him as ‘almost pathological in his insistence upon deference in his political and judicial capacities’. Among other insults, Cobbett called him ‘a little upstart tyrant’, or ‘Mrs McKean’s husband’ (the suggestion being that he was under the thumb of his dominating wife).

Already needled by these jibes, McKean was only too happy to act when his prospective son-in-law Don Carlos Martinez de Yrujo, the Spanish Ambassador, complained of certain disobliging comments which Cobbett made about himself and the Spanish King Charles IV, who had appointed him. On 18 August 1796 Cobbett was arrested and charged with criminal libel (the first of a long series of such setbacks). In a lengthy indictment McKean expressed his distaste not just for Cobbett but for all forms of satire against public figures (such as himself): ‘where libels are printed against persons employed in a public capacity they receive an aggravation, as they tend to scandalize the government by reflecting those who are entrusted with the administration of public affairs’. Political journalism had got quite out of hand, in McKean’s view:

Everyone who has in him the sentiments of either a Christian or a gentleman cannot but be highly offended at the envenomed scurrility that has raged in pamphlets and newspapers … in so much that libelling has become a kind of national crime, and distinguishes us not only from all the states around us, but from the whole civilized world …

Impressed with the duties of my station, I have used some endeavours for checking these evils, by binding over the editor and printer of one of them, licentious and virulent beyond all former example, to his good behaviour; but he still perseveres in his nefarious publications; he has ransacked our language for terms of reproach and insult, and for the basest accusations against every ruler and distinguished character in France and Spain, with which we chance to have any intercourse, which it is scarce in nature to forgive …

McKean created something of a precedent by appearing as both judge and witness at the trial, but despite this the jury sided with Cobbett by a majority of one. Not content with the verdict, McKean now made efforts to have Cobbett deported from the United States as an undesirable alien. When these failed he compiled a selection of Cobbett’s writings, including various alleged libels on public figures. Following a trial Cobbett was bound over for $4000 to be of good behaviour, at which point a more prudent man might have left McKean alone. Cobbett however was determined not to be silenced. He was especially eager to prove that despite the First Amendment the American press was no more free than the British. In a pamphlet, ‘The Democratic Judge’ (1798), he railed against the iniquity of the proceedings, pointing out (inter alia) that his comments about the King of Spain and his Ambassador were mild stuff compared to some of the scurrilous comments on George III and his allies which McKean had allowed freely to circulate. In the English edition (copies of which no doubt reached America) Cobbett tore into McKean in what must be one of the most defamatory attacks ever launched against a public figure:

His private character is infamous. He beats his wife and she beats him. He ordered a wig to be imported for him by Mr. Kid, refused to pay for it, the dispute was referred to the court of Nisi Prius; where (merely for want of the original invoice which Kid had lost) the Judge came off victorious! He is a notorious drunkard. The whole bar, one lawyer excepted, signed a memorial, stating, that so great a drunkard was he, that after dinner, person and property were not safe in Pennsylvania. He has been horsewhipped in the City Tavern, and kicked in the street for his insolence to particular persons; and yet this degraded wretch is Chief Justice of the State!

McKean, a proud, vain man, was not the sort of person to forget such an attack. In 1797, following the second of two outbreaks of yellow fever in Philadelphia, a further opportunity for prosecution arose as a result of Cobbett’s libels of another of the city’s most distinguished citizens, Dr Benjamin Rush. Rush (1745–1813) was, like McKean, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, a close friend of Noah Webster and a fanatical republican. He had begun his career as a lawyer but changed to medicine, studying at Edinburgh University and St Thomas’s Hospital, London (where he met Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds). Returning to Philadelphia, he began to practise medicine and had already made a name for himself when the War of Independence broke out. Rush was appointed Surgeon General to the armies, but quarrelled with George Washington and returned to his medical practice. Though a pioneer in many medical and veterinary fields (he has been credited with the possibly dubious distinction of being the founder of American psychiatry), his approach to more conventional medical matters was misguided, to put it mildly. Following the lead of the famous Edinburgh physician John Brown, Rush came to believe that nearly all ailments, even the common cold, sore throat or headache, were caused by ‘a state of excessive excitability of a spasm in the blood vessels’, and hence in most cases called for the one treatment of ‘depletion’ through bleeding and purging. ‘This conception was so simple that it came to hold for his speculative mind all the fascination of an ultimate panacea.’8