As the salute of the cannon echoed over New York harbor, and old Andrew Hamilton took his leave, the townspeople could enjoy not only their triumph over a venal governor, but something more profound. Eliot Master’s statement had been correct. The Zenger trial did not change the law of libel, but it told every future governor that the citizens of New York, and every other town in the American colonies, would exercise what, without being philosophers, they believed to be their natural right to say and write what they pleased. The trial was never forgotten. It became a milestone in the history of America. And the people at the time sensed correctly that it was so.

There was one other feature of the trial that was little remarked upon, however.

The rights that Eliot Master believed in, the rights claimed by Andrew Hamilton and exercised by the jury, came from the common law of England. It was Englishmen, alone in Europe, who had executed their king for being a tyrant; it was England’s great poet, Milton, who had defined the freedom of the press; it was an English philosopher, Locke, who had argued for the existence of men’s natural rights. The men who fired the cannon knew they were British, and they were proud of it.

Yet when old Hamilton addressed the jury, he had made one other point that they had liked. An ancient law, he told them, might have been a good law long ago, in England; but it could also become a bad law centuries later, in America. Though no one particularly remarked upon this statement, the idea had been sown. And it would put down roots, and propagate, in the huge American land.

The Philadelphia Girl

1741

THE BOY MOVED cautiously. A May evening. Late shadows were falling, and nothing was safe. Not a street, not a house. If only he had known what was going on when he arrived, he might have acted differently. But he’d only found out an hour ago, when a slave in the tavern had explained: “Ain’t nowhere safe for a nigger in New York. Not now. You take care.”

He was fifteen years old, and the way things were going, this would be the worst year of his life.

Things had been bad when he was ten. That was the year his father had died, and his mother had taken up with another man and left, together with his brothers and sisters. He wasn’t even sure where they were now. He’d stayed behind with his grandfather in New York, where the old man ran a tavern frequented by sailors. He and his grandfather had understood each other. They both loved the harbor, and the ships, and everything to do with the sea. Maybe fate had been the guiding hand at his birth, when his parents had given him the same name as the old man: Hudson.