What Was America’s First Newspaper?

Before the late 1600s, Massachusetts Bay colonists got their daily news all kinds of ways—town meetings and church gatherings, word of mouth, personal correspondence and broadsides tacked up on meetinghouse or marketplace walls. That changed in 1690, when Benjamin Harris, an English printer who had once been fined for sedition back home, arrived in America and decided to print something brand new: the colonies’ first newspaper.

Colonists devoured the first—and only—edition of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick on Thursday, September 25. Just four days later, colonial authorities shut it down, they said, for publishing without a license. The real problem, however, was probably the paper’s mix of royal gossip and sharp criticism of an English military commander and his company’s treatment of French prisoners during King William’s War, the first of the French and Indian Wars between the English and French colonies in North America.

Benjamin Harris had already made a name for himself in London in the 1680s as a pugnacious pamphleteer who relished challenging authority. One anti-Catholic tract—opposing James II’s coronation—earned him a sedition charge and a fine, according to the New England Historical Society. So, he set sail for New England and opened Boston’s London Coffee-House, a popular gathering place for merchants, ship captains and intellectuals.

When word of the Glorious Revolution—the overthrow of the Catholic King James II of England—reached Boston, colonists ousted the king’s governor, Sir Edmund Andros, and reinstated the Puritan former governor, Simon Bradstreet. Harris, likely assuming Bradstreet would be more open-minded, decided to revive his publishing ambitions. He miscalculated.

In the preface to Publick Occurrences, Harris promised a “Faithful Relation” of “Memorable Occurrences of Divine Providence,” both local and international. He wanted to inform and enlighten readers—and maybe shape their thinking along the way.

That first (and last) issue covered a striking range of stories: two missing Chelmsford children, ages 9 and 11, reportedly “fallen into the hands of the Indians;” an elderly man in Watertown who hanged himself after his wife’s death; and a report that Boston’s deadly smallpox outbreak had “very much abated.” Harris chronicled several fires—including one that consumed a rare printing press—and devoted major space to the Western Expedition against Canada, an English attempt to wrest territory from the French. He even included a letter from “Captain H. K.,” newly arrived from the English colony of Barbados, adding a dash of international intrigue.

Harris hadn’t applied for a license to print his paper, but that wasn’t his only problem. Two of his stories—one local, one international—struck officials as particularly offensive. The paper criticized English officer Fitz-John Winthrop, and his Native American Mohawk allies for treating French prisoners “in a manner too barbarous for any English to approve.” Another item claimed that France’s King Louis XIV was having an affair with his son’s wife.

Governor Bradstreet and the Council of the Massachusetts Bay Colony called the stories “Reflections of a very high nature.” They ordered all 200 or so copies of the paper confiscated and destroyed—though not every one was, says Vincent Golden, curator of newspapers and periodicals at the American Antiquarian Society. Harris returned to running his coffeehouse, and a few years later, sailed back to London.

It took 14 years for another publisher to step up to the plate and try again. In 1704, Boston’s postmaster John Campbell launched the Boston News-Letter—this time, with official approval from the royal governor. “He was much more successful,” Golden says. “He would put copies of his papers with post riders who then delivered them to subscribers in other towns.”

Campbell’s pro-government paper thrived for decades, surviving until 1776, when Boston fell under Patriot control during the American Revolution and Loyalist publications went silent.