Weekly Mercury (1719), the Boston New England Courant (1721), started by Benjamin
Franklin's elder brother James, and Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, which he acquired in
- There was also an Annapolis paper, the Maryland Gazette (1727), and the Charlestown
South Carolina Gazette (1732). It is significant that Zenger, or rather his lawyer, Andrew
Hamilton of Philadelphia, put forward truth as his defense. That would not have been admitted in
an English court where anything was criminally libelous, whether it was true or not, which
fosteredan ill opinion of the government.' Indeed, it was an axiom of English law, in seditious libel, thatthe greater the truth, the greater the libel.' In Zenger's case the judge tried to overrule
his defense, but the jury acquitted him all the same-and that was the last of such prosecutions.
This in itself was an indication of what critics of society could get away with in the heady air of
colonial America-prosecutions for criminal libel continued in England until the 1820s and even
beyond.
Not all these cities were booming or bustling. Charleston, the only city in the South for more
than a century, had little over 8,000 people in 1750, but it was spacious, tree-shaded, elegant, and
free-spending, with a recognizable gentry living in town mansions and parading in their
carriages. Annapolis was another gentry town, though even by 1750 it had only 150 households.
It was brick-built with paved streets, as good as any in Boston, and had fine shops selling
silverware, gold, well-made furniture, and paintings. Not only did it have its own newspaper, it
also sported a bookstore-publisher from 1758. By the 1740s it was holding regular concerts and
claimed its own gifted composer, the Rev. Thomas Bacon (1700-68 ), who also compiled The
Laws of Maryland. In June July 1752 it had a theatrical season in which visiting professional
players performed Gay's Beggar's Opera, the great London hit, and a piece by Garrick. A
permanent theater was opened in 1771, the first in all the colonies to be brick-built. Its opening
night was attended by a tall young colonel called George Washington. Its Tuesday Club,
attended chiefly by clerics and professional men, was the center of scientific inquiry.
Williamsburg, which became the capital of Virginia Colony in 1699, developed into a similar
place, small, elegant, select, with a conscious air of cultural superiority, generated from its
William and Mary College, the second oldest in the colonies (1693). Its main building was
designed by Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul's Cathedral in London.
These miniature red-brick cities were adorned by the rich of the Chesapeake with fine town
houses. Many of them were modeled on one built in Annapolis by the secretary of Maryland
Colony, Edmund Jennings, a magnificent building set in 4 acres of gardens at the foot of East
Street. Another with splendid gardens-and no fewer than thirty-seven rooms-was built by
William Pace. The chimneys of James Brice's mansion towered 70 feet above street-level. Many
of the finest houses were the work of the local architect-craftsman William Buckland, credited
with turning the place into the `Athens of America.' Annapolis had an English-style Jockey Club
from 1743, which supervised the regular race-meetings and was the meeting-place of local
breeders. By the third quarter of the century over 100 English-bred horses of Arab strains had
reached the Chesapeake and the gentry could attend races held near both these elegant cities-they
were within commuting range. City artisans had cockfighting. But, as in England, the artisans
went to the races if they could afford it, and the gentry certainly attended cockfights.
For boom you went to Baltimore, then the fastest-growing city in America, probably in the
world. In 1752, it was nothing much-twenty-five houses, 200 people. Less than twenty years
later it was the fourth-largest city in America. Its jewel was its magnificent harbor, which made it
the center for Virginia-Maryland tobacco exports to Glasgow (European end of the trade), all-
purpose trade with the West Indies, and ships loaded with imports from all over Europe. On top