AMERICAN AURORA: A Democratic-Republican Returns The Suppressed History of Our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It. By Richard N. Rosenfeld . St. Martin's Press: 990 pp., $39.95

By ESMOND WRIGHT

May 11, 1997 12 AM PT

Esmond Wright is the author of "A History of the United States of America," "Franklin of Philadelphia" and "The American Dream." He is emeritus professor of United States history at the University of London

When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein campaigned after Watergate to undo and even to compel the resignation of a president; when Anonymous, writing “Primary Colors,” drew shamelessly on the alleged misdoings of another president; and when Woodward, in “The Agenda,” revealed what went on behind the scenes in the Clinton White House, none of them, perhaps, realized how much vicious criticism of That Man in the White House is entrenched in the American tradition. For freedom of speech and the Bill of Rights mean, most of all, the freedom to have a go at the presidency.

The tradition, if “tradition” it is, began early. Washington was an incompetent who had blundered in the French-Indian frontier wars of the 1750s, winning the War of Independence not because of his skill in warfare (he never won a battle) but because of French aid. “His serene Highness,” John Adams, was a monarchist and Anglophile at heart, preoccupied with prerogatives, titles and a parade of power that suggested that he wanted to be a king, and his wife, Abigail, wanted to be decorated with queenly tiaras. She complained in a letter to her sister about Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Bache, the editor of the Philadelphia Aurora: “Bache is cursing and abusing daily. If that fellow is not suppressed, we shall come to a civil war.”

The editors of the Philadelphia Aurora, which did this vitriolic campaigning, were arrested by the newly created federal government. Bache died at 29 of yellow fever in September 1798, while awaiting trial, and legislation was passed, the Sedition Act of 1798, to prevent such poison from being circulated. Federal prosecutors filed sedition charges against 17 people, four of them the editors of newspapers, including the Aurora, that supported the Democratic Party. They won 10 convictions. The law expired in March 1801, but for three years, there had been no freedom of speech. In 1798, Vice President Thomas Jefferson called this period “a reign of witches.” It was a special time in the American Story.

If there was a true founding father, he was Benjamin Franklin, who died at 84 in 1790 and who got little recognition--or so the Aurora editorialized. In Franklin Court, the house in which he died, and on the same printing press that he had used to put out the Gazette and the Poor Richard’s Almanacks, a tradition of free speech and prompt criticism continued, voiced now by Franklin’s grandson, Bache, and by Bache’s associate editor and successor, the Irish immigrant William Duane, who married Benjamin Bache’s widow, Peggy. Their offices on Market Street in Philadelphia were only a few doors away from the president’s home, for this was the first decade of American history, when Philadelphia was the national capital. It made it easy for neighbor to spy on neighbor. Not that the way of life of the neighbors was hard to overlook: Washington traveled in an elaborate gilded coach, drawn by four cream-colored horses. His formal weekly levees were semi-regal receptions, in which he bowed stiffly to his visitors and found relaxation difficult. And Adams was even more keen on style and titles: If he favored as a title High Mightiness of the United States, the Protector of their Liberties, to his critics, he was simply “His Rotundity.” The taste for monarchy was all too clear. It made the passage of the Sedition Act, the Alien Act and the Naturalization Act (which extended the residence period of immigrants seeking citizenship from five to 14 years) all the more sinister.

Richard Rosenfeld’s story, which reads almost like fiction, is about the nation’s leading opposition newspaper from 1790 to 1800, when parties and partisanship were, if not new, certainly very vigorous. He has probed the original issues of Bache’s newspaper and has chosen as his heroes and narrators its two young editors, Bache (familiarly known as Lightning-Rod Junior) and Duane. Their motto was “Truth, Decency, Utility.” Bache, who was 20 when his grandfather died, had attended school in properly Protestant Geneva “to be a Presbyterian and a Republican.” He spent the final two years of his grandfather’s ambassadorship in Paris, where he learned his trade as a printer. He lived his life with, and in the shadow of, the grand old man and was with him at Franklin Court when he died. From him, he derived much of his radicalism; his opinions of Washington, Adams, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton were probably acquired from listening to Franklin’s own verdicts on them.

Bache and Duane’s comments in their own newspaper, however, were comments on Washington’s and Adams’ presidencies, whereas Franklin’s comments were directed toward a mother country-turned-enemy and were made mainly in Paris during the war. As a result of their inflammatory articles, which Washington called “partisans of war and confusion,” “cowardly, illiberal and assassin-like” and “outrages on common decency,” both editors were arrested, and Bache died in an epidemic that killed many others. The paper was briefly silenced under the Sedition Act, in which it was specifically named. Nevertheless, the Aurora was eventually successful in helping to curtail Washington’s presidency--such was the vehemence of the criticism; he envisioned serving only one term, was persuaded to serve a second and refused a third because of the Aurora’s attacks. It contrived as well to oust Adams after only one term, and it did usher in Jeffersonian democracy, whose commitment toward states’ rights and limited federal authority, Benjamin Franklin, the true father of the country, could only dream of. It was the Aurora that, in Jefferson’s opinion, halted “the rapid march of our government toward monarchy.” After serving only a few weeks as editor, Duane wrote on Nov. 26, 1799, “The Aurora, and other republican papers in this State and the United States--May they never be awed by the threats of power from freely and decently investigating the conduct of men in office.” He remained editor until 1822 and died in 1835. His son, William John, became secretary of the treasury under President Andrew Jackson.

Rosenfeld’s “American Aurora” is revisionist history, fresh from its thorough grounding in the sources, brilliantly conceived and written. It is a remarkable retelling of the early years of the United States and prints many juicy extracts not only from the Aurora but from its rivals, John Fenno’s the Gazette of the United States and William Cobbett’s Porcupine’s Gazette, each of which in its own distinct fashion took a pro-government line. Fenno’s Gazette, founded in 1789, sought “to endear the General Government to the people.” It extolled Hamilton’s policies. Cobbett, who was British and Canadian by background, took a similar pro-government line. To counter the stinging rhetoric of these publications--political parties were just taking shape and each needed its journal--Jefferson enticed the poet and journalist Philip Freneau to Philadelphia, gave him a job as a translator and founded the National Gazette in 1791, with Freneau as editor.

The Aurora was remarkable for its time: Its scope was catholic. It included extensive comments on European affairs, of which Bache felt particularly interested and involved, and it published the proceedings of Congress and executive orders. Thanks to receiving the text from Sen. Stevens T. Mason of Virginia, it printed, in full, the terms of the Jay Treaty with Britain in 1795, which was later reprinted as a pamphlet. But it also indulged in virulent personal abuse. When Washington announced his retirement in March 1797, the Aurora marked the occasion with an abusive “valedictory”: “If ever there was a period for rejoicing, this is the moment every heart in unison with the freedom and happiness of the people ought to beat high with exultation.”

When I was a post-graduate student long ago at the University of Virginia, my mentor, the late Thomas Perkins Abernethy, used to say to us: “You must people the past.” Richard Rosenfeld does a brilliant job of peopling the past with live, WASPish, bitter people and, as a result, we know better how and why they acted as they did. This is an original work of history and told by a master storyteller. It is not, however, just a tale for the chimney-corner. It is the story of a newspaper that tried to report the nation’s origins, and it has a message for our own times. Rosenfeld rewrites the country’s history but concludes that “those who view the past as prologue may recognize monarchy and aristocracy (enemies to the “American Aurora”) in the America of today, entrenched in our Constitution . . . and revealed in such contemporary issues as ‘the imperial presidency,’ ‘legislative deadlock,’ ‘vested interests,’ ‘term limits,’ ‘campaign financing,’ ‘lobbying,’ ‘the military-industrial complex’ and ‘civil liberties.’ They will see ‘Democratic-Republicans’ still championing the will of the majority against the wiles of the ‘establishment’ and the freedoms of our Bill of Rights against them both.”