Cato's Letters, the Newspaper Essays That Taught the Colonies Liberty

A financial scandal, two angry columnists, a pen name and a series that would not stop. If that sounds like a modern media story, it is, except that the columnists were right about the important things and the readers lasted three centuries.

In 1720 London was gripped by one of the great speculative manias in history, and when it collapsed, a pair of essayists took up their pens. They signed themselves Cato, after the Roman senator who preferred death to submission to Caesar. Over the next three years they wrote the most widely read political commentary in the English-speaking world. A generation later, a colonist who wanted to argue about liberty reached for Cato first, and often did not need to reach for anything else.

The bubble

The South Sea Company was a joint-stock company chartered in 1711 with a monopoly on British trade to the Spanish colonies in South America. Its real business was thin. Its financial ambitions were not. In 1720 the company proposed to take over a large part of the British national debt in exchange for its own shares, and the proposal was approved by Parliament after a campaign of favours to ministers and members. Its share price soared, other companies copied it, and the speculation spread to every coffeehouse in London.

Then it crashed. Thousands of investors were ruined in the autumn of 1720. The disaster turned into a political scandal because it was clear that the directors of the company had bribed officials by giving them stock on easy terms, and that some of the ministers had profited. Parliament investigated. A chancellor of the exchequer was expelled from the House of Commons for his part in the affair.

That is the setting in which John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon began, in November 1720, to publish a weekly letter in the London Journal under the name Cato. The letters kept coming into 1723 and were collected in volumes. By the end there were 144 of them, the number the standard editions count.

The authors

John Trenchard (1662-1723) was a country gentleman and a veteran of the Whig opposition to the Stuarts, a man who had seen the reign of James II and hated everything about it. He had already written, in the 1690s, a pamphlet against standing armies. He had money and strong opinions.

Thomas Gordon, a Scot, was the younger man and the better stylist. He came to London as a teacher and a writer, and Trenchard took him on. Together they made a team. Trenchard supplied the rage and the learning, Gordon supplied the polish. When Trenchard died in 1723, Gordon carried on writing for the Whig cause for decades.

The pen name was a statement. Marcus Porcius Cato, called Cato the Younger, was the Roman senator who fought to preserve the Republic against Julius Caesar and killed himself rather than live under a tyrant. To English Whigs, he was the model of the incorruptible citizen. Addison's play Cato, which premiered in London in 1713, had made that figure famous, and it was popular in the colonies. George Washington had the play performed at Valley Forge. The pseudonym said: we stand with the republic, against the man who would take it.

What Cato argued

The Letters ranged over many topics, but three arguments stood out and fed straight into American thought.

Free speech. In Letter 15, titled "Of Freedom of Speech: That the same is inseparable from publick Liberty", Cato wrote the sentence that has been quoted by American printers ever since: "Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech." The essay goes on to argue that in a free country, the people may speak of public matters and that only wicked governors have reason to fear it. It adds that the right is not unlimited; it does not protect the slanderer, and the speaker answers for the harm he does to a private person. But the essay's emphasis is on the subject's right to examine those who govern him. Franklin, as a teenage apprentice in Boston in 1722, reprinted passages of Letter 15 in one of his Silence Dogood essays, No. 8.

Standing armies and the danger of power. Cato warned again and again that rulers will push their power as far as they can get away with. The remedy is to watch them constantly, to keep the military subordinate to the civil government and to keep the militia, a force of the people, as the nation's defence. Trenchard's earlier writing against standing armies had made the point, and it echoes in the Declaration's complaint that the king had kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures, and in the Second Amendment's preamble about a well regulated militia.

Corruption. The great subject, and the one that grew out of the South Sea scandal, was how power corrupts those who hold it and how a government's friends and favourites loot the public. Cato argued that officials who take money and perks from the state's business become the servants of those who pay them. The cure was publicity and vigilance, a free press, and a Parliament of independent members, not a House stuffed with placemen.

Put the three together and you have the Whig theory of liberty in its most readable form: power is dangerous, the press is the check, and the people must keep watching.

How the colonies read it

The historian Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), argued that Cato's Letters were among the most popular and authoritative sources of political ideas in the colonies. That judgment has been debated, but it is based on evidence anyone can check: Cato appears again and again in colonial newspapers, in private libraries, in pamphlets, sermons and letters. Colonial printers reprinted the essays in the 1720s and for decades afterwards. Subscribers wanted them, and printers knew it.

What was it about the Letters that appealed? They were direct, forceful and clear. They spoke of liberty as a natural right and of power as a standing threat. They told a colonist that the rights of an Englishman were worth defending, and they supplied him with arguments. When Britain began to tax and regulate the colonies after 1763, Americans who had been reading Cato for forty years recognised the pattern: the favouritism, the standing army in peacetime, the placemen and customs officers. The theory was ready. They had only to apply it.

Bailyn's point was not that the colonists were persuaded by a book. It was that they had a vocabulary. When they saw a threat to liberty, they knew what to call it. That is why we call it the ideological origin of the Revolution, and why a free press matters more than most people admit: it supplies the words in which a free people notices what is happening.

Picture a hypothetical printer's customer in Philadelphia in 1765, a shopkeeper who has never held office. He has read Cato for years in the weekly paper. When Parliament passes the Stamp Act that year and a tax collector appears with a ledger, he does not need to be taught what to think. Cato told him that rulers push power as far as the people allow, that an army kept in peacetime is a warning light, and that officials who live on the public purse learn to serve whoever fills it. The shopkeeper is not a philosopher. He is simply a reader who has been given a vocabulary, and the vocabulary tells him which pages of the story are the alarming ones.

Gordon and Trenchard also wrote together in a second paper, The Independent Whig, which they wrote in the same years and which attacked the privileges of the established clergy, as the Letters attacked the privileges of ministers. The common thread is hostility to any group that lives on power it does not earn. Readers in the colonies, where churches and governors were frequently at odds, understood the point.

Cato in the courtroom: Zenger

The clearest illustration of the Letters at work is the trial of John Peter Zenger in 1735, which we cover in John Peter Zenger and the Jury That Defended American Press Freedom in 1735.

Zenger was a New York printer. His paper, the New-York Weekly Journal, attacked the royal governor, William Cosby, for what it called arbitrary and corrupt conduct. The paper borrowed freely from Cato, reprinting passages on liberty and the abuses of power. The governor had Zenger arrested and charged with seditious libel. Under the law of the day, truth was not a defence, and indeed the English maxim held that the greater the truth, the greater the libel. The only question for the jury was whether the defendant had printed the words.

Zenger's lawyer, the Philadelphia attorney Andrew Hamilton, argued to the jury that they had the right to decide for themselves whether the words were libellous, and that the truth of the statements ought to count. His argument was bad law and good politics. The jury acquitted Zenger in August 1735.

The acquittal did not change the law at once. Truth did not become a clear defence in libel prosecutions until later. But the verdict showed what a jury of ordinary colonists thought a free press was for, and it set an example that colonial printers remembered. The ideas Hamilton was arguing were Cato's.

The steelman: was Cato as radical as claimed?

A careful critic would say that Cato's Letters were a product of their time and not a prophecy of America. Trenchard and Gordon were Whig partisans writing against ministers they disliked, and some of their attacks were exaggerated. They supported the settlement of 1688, which put an aristocratic Parliament in charge, and they did not suggest that every man should vote. They were also sometimes more concerned with the corruption of Parliament than with the rights of the common man. A reader could say the Letters were the product of a faction that happened to be out of office, and that Americans over-read them.

That is partly right. Cato was not a democrat, and the colonists did not take every sentence. What they took was the principle: power must be watched, speech must be free, and a people that stops reading the record of its rulers will be robbed. Those ideas did not need a democrat to hold them. They needed only to be true.

What it means for the press today

Conservatives sometimes forget that a free press is not the property of a party or a profession. The tradition we have inherited from Cato is that any citizen may examine and criticise his rulers, and that the freedom to do so is the first line of defence against corruption. It is the principle behind the First Amendment, behind the long fight against licensing in Milton's Areopagitica of 1644 Is Still the Best Case Against Licensing Speech, and behind the prosecution of Sidney we covered in Algernon Sidney, the Executed Englishman the Founders Kept Quoting.

It is also the principle that should make us uneasy when those in power, in either party, claim the authority to decide which speech counts as true. The answer of Cato's Letters to such claims is the same as it was in 1720. Let the people hear all sides, and let the officials stand it. Our later experience of the Sedition Act, in The Sedition Act of 1798 Jailed a Congressman Who Won Reelection From His Cell, shows that the lesson had to be learned again within a decade of the Constitution.

Notice also the humour. Cato mocked, and a free press that cannot laugh at ministers has lost something. The tradition of the political columnist, which starts here, runs through Franklin's Silence Dogood and the colonial printers, and every one of them wrote with an eye to a reader who was tired of being told what to think.

The case in brief

1. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon wrote 144 essays as Cato from 1720 to 1723, prompted by the South Sea Bubble and the corruption it exposed.
2. Their central arguments were that free speech is inseparable from liberty, that standing armies and concentrated power are dangerous, and that official corruption is a standing threat.
3. Colonial printers reprinted the Letters for decades, and Bernard Bailyn's 1967 study documented their weight in the ideas of the American Revolution.
4. The Zenger trial of 1735 shows Cato's principles in a courtroom, where a colonial jury refused to convict a printer who criticised a governor.
5. The tradition is a free-speech tradition belonging to every citizen, and it is the best defence against officials who claim to decide what may be said.

What you can do: read Letter 15 of Cato's Letters, the essay on freedom of speech, and then read the First Amendment's speech clause to see how many of Cato's phrases survive in it.