Next, sensational stories and the American Revolution.

Discover the newspaper battles of the 18th century and the ways in which the press twisted the truth to control the colonists.

- Newspapers, particularly Boston, are working hand in hand with the Sons of Liberty.

Find out how the press ignited outrage and fanned the flames of rebellion after fire broke out and almost wiped out New York City.

Drive By History starts now.

[Theme Music] Made possible by the Preserve New Jersey Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the New Jersey Historic Trust, State of New Jersey.

Every day, thousands of motorists pass by countless history markers and say to themselves, “One of these days Im going to stop and read that.

One of these days, I'm going to find out what happened and why it mattered.” Well, this is that day.

- I'm headed to a history marker that commemorates an important media organization known for its high profile gossip and aggressive reporting.

- No scandal got past this paper.

- And you know who read it all the time?

- George Washington.

Im Ken Magos, and this is Drive By History.

[Music] Today's investigation, part of our special series focused on the American Revolution, begins in Chatham, New Jersey.

Located about 45 minutes west of New York City, and two hours north of Philadelphia, today Chatham is a picturesque and somewhat quiet community.

In the 1770s, however, it was a little less tranquil.

In fact, it was Information Central, a mecca of media.

- So here's the history marker -- it says: New Jersey Journal.

During the Revolution former soldier Shepard Kollock printed the New Jersey Journal on this site to maintain the cause of freedom and to serve the Army in Morristown.

The Journal, North Jersey's only wartime newspaper founded in 1779, later thrived in Elizabeth from 1786 to 1991.

- I'm off to find out more.

[Music] When we talk about how the Patriots won independence, we often hear about big battles, or celebrated statesmen.

Rarely do we hear about newspapers, and yet they mattered just as much.

And that takes me to Shepard Kollock Park in Chatham, where I find Drive By Historys Anthony Bernard gathering the facts and getting the story on the history of this Patriot paper.

- So Anthony, I just came from a history marker that talks about the New Jersey Journal, established at the time of the American Revolution in support of the cause of freedom.

- Fascinating history, and one you'll be glad to hear fits into the national narrative.

- Yes, that's something I like to hear.

- Now, I'm intrigued by this park, Shepard Kollock Park, what's the connection?

- Well, there are interpretive markers here but there's something else about this spot.

- Oh, yeah?

- It's a surprise.

- I hope it's a good surprise.

- It's a very good surprise.

- I'll get to it.

- But first I want to talk about Shepard Kollock and the New Jersey Journal.

- Okay.

- It's not the same thing as The Jersey Journal.

- Theyre two separate and distinct things.

- I want to point that out.

- Well, that's good to know, because I think a lot of us will remember The Jersey Journal, but these are not the same newspapers.

- No, not at all.

- Do you know the year that the New Jersey Journal started?

- I think it was 1779.

- Right in the midst of the American Revolution.

- And that's probably no coincidence, it would have been a good time to start a paper, and the public was hungry for news.

- Yes, and they weren't just getting news, they werent getting regular news, at least.

- The New Jersey Journal was giving them Patriot news.

- So we have a patriotic publisher on our hands here.

- I wouldn't exactly say that.

- So some historians say it was a propaganda paper.

- I think the stories were selected editorially.

- The printer had served in the Continental Army.

- Oh yes, the history marker said that.

- Shepard Kollock fought at the Battle of Monmouth, wintered at Valley Forge.

- So that put him in George Washington's orbit, if I'm following correctly.

- Now its starting to rain here so let's start heading up.

- Maybe we can finish this over by the picnic table.

Naturally, just as soon as Anthony and I took cover, the off and on rain switched off.

- Let's get back to the history.

- So Shepard Kollock is a soldier and a printer.

- Am I following?

- 100%.

- Now, when he resigned, he wanted to go back to printing.

- If you'll read between the lines, I think it's entirely possible that he wasn't the only one that wanted it to turn out that way.

- George Washington.

- Exactly.

- So there is an agenda.

- Washington is feeding the news, but Washington and his commanders are also making news.

- So that's a blurry line.

- Exactly.

- Now let's go back to that date, 1779.

- Right, the Continental Army, including George Washington, are encamped at Morristown at Jockey Hollow.

- We dove into that history already.

- And Morristown is only a stone's throw from Chatham.

- So it's easy access.

- Now, according to my research, by 1780 there were over 700 copies of that paper in circulation.

- So The New Jersey Journal is a fairly large newspaper for the time.

- Yes.

- All right, it's clearing up.

Let's move on.

- Lets do it.

- Readers must know that the stories are coming from Washington, and if the readers know it, the British must know it, too.

- Yes, I think they do.

- Here, let's check out the research.

- It says they target Shepard Kollock as the rebel printer.

- It's part of why he's in Chatham.

- The thought is, Chatham is just far enough away from New York to be safe.

- But as it turned out, Kollock had to evacuate his press in June of 1780 during British incursions near Springfield.

- So what's the surprise connection?

- That George Washington had large brick baking ovens built right here.

- And...?

- Well, he wasn't just baking bread.

- He was creating a diversion.

- He wanted the British to think that he'd be staying for a while, when really, he secretly marched on Yorktown.

- And won the war.

- Now, that's just the kind of story that a Patriot press would pick up on.

- Kollock was printing important information, but also misinformation, too.

- It must have been a big story in one of his issues.

- Yeah, fascinating.

- Now, Kollock set up camp near the Continental Army so that he could print stories that benefited the Patriots and influenced the public.

- You know, Ken, they say the Revolution was won not only by the sword but by the pen, and thats where the next leg of this investigation begins.

[Music] To find out more, Anthony sends me to South Street Seaport, to Bowne and Company, a printer that first opened its doors in colonial New York on the eve of Revolution in 1775.

Im met by CUNY professor Benjamin L. Carp, who focuses on 18th century America.

He tells me, at the time of the American Revolution, this print shop was smack in the thick of things, with information constantly coming and going, crossing the shores of the Hudson at rapid speed.

- Yeah, sure, news would come in on horseback, it would come in by ship, you know, it would come in by, you know, someone you knew who had just heard something at the tavern that was super important.

- So, so yeah, you've got information coming in from a lot of different directions.

Benjamin Carp has made a study of the exchange of information, particularly in the seaport cities of eastern North America.

He tells me the colonists living in and around the waterfront, right where we are now, had to parse through lots of different news items.

And the Patriots, also called Whigs, interpreted the same events very differently from their pro-British counterparts, also known as Tories.

- Starting in the 1760s, a paper tended to have an opinionated slant.

- Okay.

- And especially as you get closer to the American Revolution, you definitely had papers that were known for being more Whig in their orientation and others that were more Tory.

Today, it's not unusual for media to bias liberal or conservative.

Arguably, that phenomenon first surfaced in our nation about ten years before the Revolution due to a very specific event.

- When it really starts to reach a level of intensity is 1765, when Parliament passes the Stamp Act.

- The Stamp Act has a direct impact on the newspaper printers.

- Of course.

- And so, and so a lot of the newspapers began kind of really printing a lot of material that's trying to raise the alarm about the unconstitutionality of these acts and how much of a danger they are.

The Stamp Act required colonists to pay a tax on nearly all printed paper, including legal documents, playing cards and newspapers.

You'd expect the publishers to be up in arms, but the general public shared the outrage, with events amplifying the cry to break from England.

The newspapers found themselves with many new allies and many new readers.

- And then for the next 10 years and more, right, like this trend continues of having a lot of kind of heated opinion pieces appearing in the newspapers.

The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, but as Ben Carp just mentioned, the foundations had been laid.

The Stamp Act had galvanized the press, with many papers dropping neutrality.

Publishers began shaping the narrative rather than simply reporting it.

Many papers sought out stories that their readers wanted to hear, stories that advanced the case for independence.

Of course, it begs the question: if many papers were taking a a strong pro Patriot stance, did any papers bias in favor of the British?

- Oh yeah, I mean, particularly in New York City, you had people who were, who were disgusted with the increasing radicalism of the Patriots.

- And so, yeah, you start to see a kind of counterprogramming against, against what the Whig Patriots were trying to say.

By 1775, there were newspapers up and down the colonies, serving both sides, Patriot and Loyalist.

That included the Boston Gazette, a mouthpiece for the Sons of Liberty, the Massachusetts Gazette, which viewed independence-minded leaders as colonial radicals, The Pennsylvania Gazette, owned and operated by Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, and the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, which celebrated British battlefield victories while mocking Patriot leaders.

For more on the power of the papers an overlooked slice of Revolutionary Era history, I traveled to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, to the home of Philip Mead, a celebrated historian renowned for his expertise in 18th century America.

- So I'm curious, Phil, how important were the Patriot papers to the day-to-day developments during the time of the war?

- Really indispensable.

- Yeah?

- I mean the press was a kind of fifth column for both sides.

- It was an essential part of the weaponry of war.

You might think by the onset of the American Revolution people had chosen sides, with most colonists pro-independence and a few pro-British.

But that wasn't the case.

A large chunk of the population was in the middle, undecided, and winning their support meant winning the war.

- Both sides are seeking the help and assistance of people who are not really sure which is the best one for their interests, and the press can help prod them or point them in one direction or another.

- Often it's by inflating the significance of a victory or by understating a problem, whether it's supplies or a loss.

- So it sounds like they were influencing a portion of the public.

- Oh, sure.

Absolutely.

You might also think that at the time the public wasn't well educated, so they were easily manipulated.

That's not the case either.

At the time of the Revolution, 70 to 90% of the population was literate.

Do you think that the public was aware of any slant, an editorial slant that those papers might have had?

- Oh, 100%.

- Yeah?

- People, people were very sophisticated consumers of news.

- But, you know, they also were influenced.

If the public was sophisticated, largely aware that papers had an agenda, then how did the papers influence readers as much as they did?

[Music] The answer is fascinating.

It takes us to the very heart of the newspaper business in the 1770s.

- There isn't a sort of dedicated investigative journalist profession that can help people navigate what's real and what's false.

Colonial newspapers really were very different from newspapers today, especially when it comes down to what was printed and what qualified as news.

- Right, and a lot of this news has to be derived from letters that happen to come to the printing office from an officer in the field or, you know, things that are shaped by generals who are trying to convince the public of one direction or another.

- In other cases, they have writers who aren't really reporters.

- Theyre really more like political analysts or editorialists, we think today who are frequently contributing essays.

- I mean, the most famous being probably Thomas Paine.

- Right.

The papers were also printing stories from elsewhere in the colonies.

Reprinting them is what I should say.

Well, copying them.

- There was sort of an understanding that most people would allow that unless you specifically said, don't print this.

The papers were also printing sermons, with clergy playing a powerful role in colonial life.

And, as Phil Mead mentioned earlier, publishers such as Boston's Benjamin Edes were publishing essays.

- Newspapers, particularly in Boston, are working hand-in-hand with the Sons of Liberty and the Patriot cause.

- Benjamin Edes, in particular, was working so closely with Sam Adams that Adams had to adopt something like 25 different nom de plumes, so that people wouldn't understand how dominant he was in that particular newspaper.

- And that newspaper, Governor Bernard of, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, attributed with the flames of Revolution.

- He said, that's what really did it.

The way I see it, the colonists knew the papers had an agenda.

That was their appeal.

The colonists were looking to understand events through the lens of the papers themselves, and whichever stories made the most sense to them, whichever essay seemed reasonable, whichever sermons hit home, those were the papers that won them over.

Those were the papers that won the war.

Another aspect of this history that interests me personally is the way in which these papers were printed.

Once the information made it to the print shop, it had to be crafted into a story.

Then movable metal type had to be placed by hand, letter by letter, onto a press.

For the most part, newspapers were four pages printed on two sheets of paper, front and back, and then folded in half.

The printing process was incredibly labor intensive.

It's something historian Benjamin Carp showed me at Bowne and Company in New York City.

- This is a cast iron printing press.

- Yeah.

- It was patented in 1813, so its from after the Revolution, and it's a lot heavier than what the Revolutionary printers would have used.

- Revolutionary printers would have used something that was made of wood.

- But the, but the mechanism and the size of it are pretty similar to what a Revolutionary printer would have used.

- OK, how does it operate?

- We can work the mechanism.

- Here, grab this from me.

- Okay.

- And if you pull that, what youve just done down here is you've pressed the paper into the metal type, the metal letters with ink on them, and you've created an issue of the newspaper.

- And if you do that enough times, then you've got a run of newspapers to be able to distribute your message far and wide.

- Wow.

Seeing this press really drives home an important aspect of this history: Patriot printers had to be strong.

- The thing that strikes me, though, is you've got printers who are having to flee quickly, depending on who's occupying or what the situation is.

- They would have to disassemble this machine and carry it off.

- This is heavy.

- Yeah.

- I mean, a wooden press is not quite as heavy as this, but still heavy, youd need help.

Printers fled with their printing presses because their papers were that valuable.

They were shaping public sentiment, which shifted much more often than we realize today.

The impact can't be overstated, and is particularly evident in the coverage of a terrible blaze that decimated New York City in the early days of the Revolution.

Benjamin Carp detailed the history in his book, The Great New York Fire of 1776.

The inferno broke out less than a week after British forces crushed the Americans in the Battle of Brooklyn and took control of New York City.

- The British had occupied New York City on September 15th, 1776.

- Then six days later, in the middle of the night, fires break out all over the city.

As Benjamin Carp just mentioned, events began to unfold in the black of night under the cover of darkness.

In 1776, homes and buildings in New York City were built right on top of one another and mostly out of wood.

The flames jumped easily from one structure to the next.

The Community Bucket Brigade proved to be no match for the sprawling blaze.

- And British soldiers and sailors try and help to fight the fire, but there's only so much that they can do.

- The Trinity Church burns down.

Its a serious fire.

Minute after minute, hour after hour, buildings were consumed by flames.

Friends and neighbors poured onto the streets, clutching whatever they could carry.

At least 400 structures were decimated by the inferno.

- And they end up destroying 20% of the city, 20% of the city's buildings burned to the ground.

It wasn't until sunrise that the fire even started to subside, and that was largely due to good luck: a fortuitous weather pattern.

- If it hadn't been for the wind blowing things out towards the Hudson River maybe the entire city would have been burned down Even as the colonists were still battling smoldering hotspots and charred flare ups, the newspapers were hurling incendiary accusations one side to another.

The British accused the Patriots of arson.

- In the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, they tell their version of the fire.

- They say it broke out in several places at once, we caught New England captains in the act setting this fire.

- It was clearly a pre- concerted scheme.

- They are convinced that the rebels have done this.

Meanwhile, the Patriot press reported events in an entirely different light.

They suggested the fire could have had a natural cause, and they used events to stir up outrage that otherwise had simmered.

- If you look at the Patriot papers, they say, well, we're not sure how it happened and don't believe anything that the Loyalists tell you.

- And by the way, when the British occupied the city, they were committing this kind of atrocity and that kind of atrocity, and they must have arbitrarily executed some people for having set New York City on fire.

- So you get totally different versions depending on whether you're reading a Patriot or a Loyalist paper.

The British interrogated over 200 suspects, but no one was ever charged.

And on a related note, Nathan Hale was arrested on the day the fire started and later hanged as a spy.

His arrest linked him circumstantially to the fire, although that connection has never been proven.

According to Benjamin Carp, today many historians believe the blaze was not an accident.

[Laughter] - The truth is that the rebels almost certainly did it, right, and that the, and then they tried to cover it up using their newspapers.

It's worth noting that not all historians see events this way.

Benjamin Carp, however, has spent years researching the Great Fire, and his scholarship has uncovered compelling evidence for his thesis.

- And we even have a letter from Colonel Henry Jackson in Boston writing to Henry Knox, who was one of Washington's chief artillerists.

- And he basically says, the newspaper items that you sent me in Boston, I made sure that they got in the paper this week, and people are starting to believe them.

- And then if you look at these Boston newspapers they're totally the American version of events, and this then gets reprinted in five other New England newspapers.

In other words, the Continentals likely framed events, telling themselves that the ends justified the means.

That's an important aspect of this history as we look at media at the time of the Revolution.

- Well, one of the legacies from the story is just the amount of misinformation that newspaper printers were able to get out there, right?

- If the Americans didn't like the version of the story of the fire that the British were telling, they're going to make sure to flood the zone with their version of events and the things that they thought their readers ought to know.

[Snare Drums] The legacy of this history is something Phil Mead and I talked about as well, during my visit to his Pennsylvania home.

He sees the newspapers as providing crucial perspective on the past.

- In many ways, it's easier to see these as just documents of fact, these papers.

- But when you understand them as an argument, you see a very different picture of the Revolution.

- It's interesting to learn just how eager the British and the Patriot sides were to leverage the media at the time of the American Revolution.

[Music] As the investigation draws to a close, I find myself intrigued by what I've discovered.

They say American independence was won not only with the sword, but also with the pen.

And now I'd add ink, newspaper ink.

For this special episode on the American Revolution, I've asked historian Michelle Craig McDonald, another one of our nation's great authorities on the Revolutionary era, to help me digest it all.

- This is something that's going to very much appeal to you, Ken, given your interest in Drive By History.

- But these newspaper stories really were the vehicle by which local information helped to form a national identity.

- That's what I like.

- So what would happen is newspapers would take individual episodes that happened within your town, or within my town, and they would send them to different colonies to ensure that this information was broadly circulated.

- In fact, most places set up what they called a Committee of Correspondence, literally designed to write letters to make sure that different cities were aware of what was happening in their community and could connect it with what was happening at home.

- So there really was an overarching idea that was governing the information that was being disseminated.

- It was crucial.

- If you didn't have these organizations working together these citizens and populations working together, you wouldn't have a successful Revolutionary effort.

- So, to ensure to make that happen, newspapers were the way that information became more than just a local story.

- It became a national cause.

see you next time.

Made possible by: the Preserve New Jersey Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the New Jersey Historic Trust, State of New Jersey.