Publick Occurrences’ first and only issue covered a wide range of topics, from the suicide of a “pious man” whose wife had recently died to the ongoing war between Great Britain and France to a new day of Thanksgiving celebrated by “the Christianized Indians in some parts of Plymouth.” But it was a pair of more salacious accounts that caught authorities’ attention.
Harris wrote that during a recent expedition to French Acadia, Britain’s Mohawk allies had captured French prisoners, “whom they used in a manner too barbarous for any English to approve.” The publisher then accused Britain’s leaders of having “too much confided” in the Mohawk. Far from reserving his criticism for the British, Harris also turned his attention to France, accusing Louis XIV of having sexual relations with his son’s wife. This incestuous act, Harris wrote, had led the king’s son to resolve “to depose him of his life and kingdom.”
An order from the Massachusetts governor and council banning future issues of Publick Occurrences quickly followed, appearing just four days later, on September 29. It alluded to the Mohawk and Louis XIV stories in vague terms, referencing the newspaper’s “sundry doubtful and uncertain reports.” But the colonial authorities mainly called Harris out for publishing his paper without a license. In the future, they wrote, anyone hoping to publish news in the colony must first obtain explicit permission.
Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman who would soon play a prominent role in the Salem witch trials, defended Harris in a letter, writing that the publisher had said nothing of the Mohawk “but what we ought to say to them, or else we bring guilt upon ourselves. As for the French tyrant, nothing is mentioned of him” besides a rumor that had already circulated in print in the colonies.
Despite Mather’s disapproval, officials remained steadfast in their decision. “Some members [of the council] feared free publishing and its possible consequences,” write William D. Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams in The Early American Press, 1690-1783. Amid raids by neighboring Native American groups and a breakdown of “internal order,” the authors explain, many Massachusetts residents “rejected the authority of the government and the courts,” leading the council to be “especially sensitive to criticism, particularly any made in public print.”