from 1753 to 1755, by Samuel Kneeland, but the journal of Edes and Gill, the journal which was to make American history, did not appear until April 7, 1755, after Kneeland's paper had passed away.
The name of Daniel Fowle, however, is entitled to further mention, for in a persistent fight with the authorities he proved that the printer was no longer a poor fellow at whom any representative of the government might bark. In October, 1754, he was arrested for printing an anonymous pamphlet, supposed to be an attack on the House of Representatives. He was accused of printing the libel and was sent to jail, but as the prosecution failed to establish his guilt, the case was dropped. The following year he brought suit for £1000 damages for illegal imprisonment, and finally in 1766, after continued litigation, he was awarded £20—establishing, if not the right of the printer to a fair trial, at least a monument to his combativeness and his insistency.
"Living in the family of Daniel Fowle's brother," says Isaiah Thomas, himself a notable printer and the first historian of printing in America, "I early became intimately acquainted with the whole transaction, and deep impressions were then made upon my mind in favor of the liberty of the press."[1]
It is easy to understand how a long, bitter fight by an apparently humble printer against the powerful government had its effect on the imagination of other printers and writers.
With so aggressive an adversary as Samuel Adams in the field, and one proving himself to be so capable a journalistic combatant, the defenders-of the crown were driven to the use of his own weapons. One of the most loyal of these defenders was the old News-Letter, which
- ↑ History of Printing in America, i, 337.
