Benjamin Harris and his Publick Occurrences

On September 25, 1690, the first issue of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick hit the streets of Boston.  With that issue, Benjamin Harris published the first attempt at an American newspaper.

Harris intended for his newspaper to be printed monthly. It contained four pages — three with printed news and a blank one for readers to jot down personal reports before passing it along to family or friends. However, the first issue was printed without license and featured several eye-brow-raising reports, such as the King of France’s alleged affair with his daughter-in-law. The newspaper was immediately banned and all issues burned under the order of Governor Thomas Hinckley. No second edition was ever printed. In fact, the only original copy known to survive is held by the British Library, likely the issue sent back to the homeland by the Governor Hinckley. The issue’s three pages of printed news are shown above — click to enlarge.

With this one-issue-only asterisk next to its title in the history of journalism, Publick Occurrences is debated as the first American newspaper. Many historians give the title of first American newspaper or at least first successful American newspaper to the Boston News-Letter, which began publishing in 1704, almost 14 years after Benjamin Harris’s attempt. Check out the previous post to see a 1716 sample of the Boston News-Letter, when it was still the only newspaper being published in the colonies.

As a short digression, the reason for the 14-year gap partially falls on journalism trends and American reader interests during this time.  Copies of the popular London Gazette, which began publishing in 1665, were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean – usually taking four to eight weeks per voyage – to provide English and European residents in the New World with reports from their homelands. An intense hunger for news  from the motherland, satisfied by the thriving transatlantic readership of the London Gazette is, in part, the reason why we didn’t see the first successful newspaper printed on American soil until 1704.

Back to Benjamin Harris, whose career in publishing began in England during the 1670s. When strict press censorship under the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 temporarily lapsed from 1679 to 1685, Benjamin Harris was quick to begin printing news. On July 7, 1679, Harris launched the twice-weekly Domestick Intelligence newspaper that, as the title suggested, focused on local topics. Below are two photos from the October 31, 1679 issue of Harris’s Domestick Intelligence. Not long after the revival of the act, in 1686, Harris moved to Boston to avoid severe punishment for his politically- and religiously-charged reporting. According to The Public Prints (Clark, 1994):

“The timing could not hardly have been accidental. For violating the revived act, in fact, he had been pilloried and imprisoned just before coming to Boston in 1686. Prior to that, as an associate of Titus Oates, the vehement anti-Catholic publicist, and opponent of the accession of James, he had been prosecuted under common-law seditious libel proceedings during the earlier hiatus in the act. In Boston, he set up shop as a publisher, opened the London Coffee House, and engaged the printers of the town to print books and an almanac.”

The London Coffee House was a public place for people to read foreign newspapers (i.e., London Gazette) and books.  After Harris’s unsuccessful attempt at publishing an American newspaper in 1690, he continued to run the coffeehouse until 1695 when he packed his bags and moved back to London.  According to Clark:

“Boston printers, however, continued to produce broadsides, presumably with governmental sanction, that occasionally reported public events by printing excerpts from the London newspapers. In addition, the postmaster of Boston, a Scottish bookseller named Duncan Campbell, began exchanging news of Europe and the colonies with correspondents elsewhere in America. Thus the familiar devise of the hand-written newsletter took its place in the American communications chain in the 1690s.”

Duncan Campbell’s son John succeeded him as postmaster in 1702 and soon transitioned the handwritten newsletters into the printed and appropriately titled Boston News-Letter, the first successful newspaper in the colonies.

For more history on the first newspapers, check out our Beginning of Newspapers collection.