New York in the 1760s was a divided town, riven by local factions as well as imperial politics. Local elections were fiercely contested, as they had been for decades. The imperial crisis didn’t help. To be sure, New York was no hotbed of radical unrest like Boston — many among its merchant class remained broadly loyal to the British imperial government, or at the very least kept their qualms to themselves in order to smooth the flow of commerce. And the British had seated their American military headquarters at New York at the end of the Seven Years War, among other imperial offices that lined the streets of southern Manhattan Island.
In the maelstrom of the imperial crisis — or perhaps because of it — the city also germinated the stories that have become classic elements of New York life: the immigrant establishing himself; commercial success built on controversy; even a dispute with arrogant New Englanders crossing the colony’s border from Connecticut to meddle in a situation the city’s leaders thought they should control. In some cases these elements even converged in one person’s narrative.
The figure at the center of this particular tale was James Rivington. The scion of a prominent London bookselling family, Rivington arrived in New York in the early 1760s — possibly to escape gambling debts back in England. Using his connections in the book trade, Rivington established successful shops in New York as well as Boston and Philadelphia within the decade. As he did so, for the most part he remained outside of partisan politics even as they heated up in New York and more broadly in North America.
As he expanded his trade from bookselling to printing, Rivington joined a collegial but competitive group of printers already active in the city. They were not a particularly radical bunch. Hugh Gaine had been a printer in the city since the 1750s and took a cautious tone in his New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury. Samuel Inslee and Anthony Carr, printers of the New York Gazette and Post Boy, took on that paper from James Parker at his death in 1770. Only John Holt, the prodigal son-in-law of a prominent Virginia businessman and printer of the New-York Journal, hewed strongly to the position of the Sons of Liberty.
In the early 1770s, Rivington made his move into politics by starting his own newspaper, Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, the fourth in the city. With an expansive geographic view — he subtitled the paper the Connecticut, New-Jersey, Hudson’s-River, and Quebec Weekly Advertiser — Rivington aimed for a paper that would draw merchants as a major source of its customer base. To attract them, he printed prices current and information about customs clearances — information to which he had solid access because of his imperial connections. He likewise represented the Gazetteer as the most reliable source of fresh information from London, a claim his networks likewise helped him reinforce.