Hugh Gaine: Enlightenment Printer

In press:

Hugh Gaine (1726-1807) was printer-editor of the widely-circulated conservative newspaper The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury from 1752 through 1783 and one of the most important and prodigious book publishers in the late colonial era and the earliest years of America’s independence. In both roles, he served to further the American enlightenment by putting his printing press at the service of its authors. He also changed sides in the first year of the Revolution, from the Americans to the British, and thereby earned the opprobrium of many of his contemporaries and the reputation in history of being a turncoat.

Gaine was born in Portglenone, a village about thirty-four miles northwest of Belfast, and at the age of fourteen he began a five year apprenticeship at the Belfast printing house of Samuel Wilson and James Magee. On becoming a journeyman in 1744, he emigrated to New York, where he found work in the shop of James Parker.

In 1752, Gaine opened his own printing shop and on August 3 of that year he issued the first number of The New-York Mercury. According to the New York historian James Grant Wilson, The Mercury “became by far the best newspaper in the colonies.” Like other publishers of the day, Gaine was a printer-editor; he had no staff of reporters and he rarely wrote for the newspaper himself; to fill the newspaper’s columns, he reprinted items from other colonial newspapers and, especially in the early years, those from England. Readers found stories of fires, crimes and natural disasters, proclamations of the governors, reports of parliamentary debates, declarations of the king and minor court gossip. For businessmen, he printed commodity prices and a list of the latest ship arrivals and departures. He printed columns of advertising that supported the newspaper, including notices for the goods of his own shop: stationery items, medicines, and books he printed himself and those he imported from England.

A staple of Gaine’s Mercury, as for other newspapers of the day, was the familiar essay. He reprinted many that had appeared in other newspapers, both English and colonial, and printed original essays offered to him by local writers on all manner of subjects, especially scientific topics, religion, philosophy and relations between the sexes. Perhaps because of favorable reaction to those, in mind-August of 1754 he attempted to establish a literary magazine, The Plebean, but it died within the year.

Gaine originally resisted involvement in political battles, but inevitably in the charged atmosphere of the day, politics was forced upon him. In The Mercury’s first year, the colony’s Presbyterian faction attacked him for supporting the Episcopalian faction in a dispute over the financing and administration of King’s College (later Columbia University). Subsequently, however, he sold space on the front page of The Mercury to the Presbyterians to carry out a year-long propaganda assault on the Episcopalians; he was “a fickle fellow, and easily intimidated,” one of the Presbyterian writers observed. At the same time, however, he opened the pages of the newspaper to counter arguments from the Episcopalians.

In the long propaganda war on Britain that began with opposition to the Stamp Act, Gaine and The Mercury followed an erratic course. He printed essays condemning the Stamp Act, and after the act became effective on November 12, 1765, he defied it by printing his newspaper throughout the month on unstamped paper with the heading “No Stamped Paper to be Had.”
Following enactment of the Townshend Acts in 1766, he printed the eloquent series “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” by John Dickinson, and he supported the nonimportation agreement to boycott British goods. But when duties on all goods but tea were repealed, he opposed continuation of the boycott.
In 1768, he was named public printer of the province of New York. He changed the name of the newspaper to The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury and began publishing political essays with a more conciliatory tone toward Britain. As Whig responses to Britain’s efforts to tax America grew more violent, he ignored riots in New York and Boston or printed Tory versions of the incidents.
With passage of the British East India Company Act in 1773, Gaine gave perfunctory support to the resistance movement, but he reacted to the violence of “tea parties” in New York and Boston by printing essays abjuring violence and advocating an accommodation with the mother country. When the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, he carried essays that continued to argue for accommodation, but after the battles of Lexington and Concord, he filled his columns with essays that supported Whig positions.
In 1776, he was a fence-sitter on the question of independence until Congress passed the Declaration of Independence. He printed copies of the document for distribution in New York printed essays on behalf of the independence movement in The Mercury. When the British were preparing for their invasion of New York, he fled to Newark with his family and printed the newspaper there for two months before returning home. In the meantime, Ambrose Searle, secretary to Admiral Lord Richard Howe, had taken over Gaine’s shop and had been printing a pro-British Mercury, and he retained editorial control until sailing with Howe’s fleet in 1777. Gaine’s change of sides and his whole-hearted conversion to the British cause won him the hatred of Americans and he was denigrated viciously in print; even Philip Freneau satirized him in his “Hugh Gaine’s Life.” James Grant Wilson expressed succinctly the enduring view of him: “When with the Whigs, Hugh Gaine was a Whig; when with the Royalists, he was loyal; when the contest was doubtful, equally doubtful were the politics of Hugh Gaine.”
At the end of the war, Gaine ceased printing the Mercury and devoted himself to job printing and to publishing books. In 1802, he teamed with the bookseller Matthew Carey of Philadelphia in founding the American Booksellers Association and was elected its first president.