Papers of John Adams, volume 19
ca. 2 January 1788
I had hopes given me that I should have had the pleasure of seeing you here & I did not despair till the Snow came now it will not be long before I shall wait on you in town when I hope to find you well & in good Spirits.
The late behaivour of the Judge in the case of Spotwood the attorney, by whose direction he was brought in guilty of perjury the merits of case know not but that he has moved for a new trial, has 249 awakened all my fears regarding the sacredness of Juries & renewed by the memory of the Dean of st Asaph’s trial which was conducted with most consummate art & management both in wales shorpshire & westminster & determined by the said Judge these & other numerous attacks to annull & set aside Juries should be sufficient caution to the Americans to preserve inviolate that sacred right, peculiar to the English & their descendants, & to extend it to civil causes also for I fear application for redress to a large body will always be attended with expence delay & difficulty.1
it is said by the new constitution Juries not to extend to civil causes!
I beg leave to mention to your excellency with the freedom of a republican another circumstance which I hear has given some uneasiness at Boston a tax on advertisements.2 in this country it is become a real Grievance. it is raised & levied by a low office who set as Judges on what they do not understand & for gain construe every article almost as an advertisement. thus it becomes a heavy tax upon literature prevents communication of sentiments doing justice to the dead damps information regarding arts & sciences & in short, with the preventing franking & the heavy tax on letters & on imported books prints marbles & Pictures which latter prevents improvement.
all this chain of taxes improperly laid & tending to power ignorance & folly discovers the Spirit of the present government as not acting upon free manly liberal principles but contracted mercenary & Isolated & provides only for the present day regardless of consequences But the Americans acting on other principles may avoid these inconveniences & restraints as their government is founded upon principles which will bare examination & dreads no enquiry & have excelled from that principle. crush it not therefore in the bud but let it spread & florish to show what the human mind is capable of— which I beleive has no limits. permit me therefore to desire your excellency would inform yourself of the nature extent & power of this miserable office who it is composed of & what real & just cause of complaint & from those to whom the publick are most indebted for their Labors.
I have only to add my sincere complts to all your family & hope mr Smith is perfectly recovered and desire the honor of your company & his to an Essex Turkey on wednesday 9th. at Four en famille and persuade mr Jennings to met you. I am Dr Sir your faithfull Friend
RC (Adams Papers).
William Davies Shipley (1745–1826), dean of St. Asaph, republished an anonymous 1783 edition of William Jones’ The Principles of Government, In a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant, in Wales, and he distributed it via the Society for Constitutional Information. For reprinting Jones’ work, which advocated an armed citizenry with greater parliamentary power, Shipley was prosecuted for seditious libel. The case of “Spotwood” has not been further identified, but throughout the 1770s and 1780s, English judges and juries tussled over who decided what constituted libel. Shipley’s case magnified the issue. Justice Francis Buller instructed the Wrexham jury to rule only on the fact of publication, and to leave the question of whether it was libelous to the court. When the jury found Shipley guilty, Buller intervened, ordering it to reconsider on the question of libel, which it could not resolve. Shipley’s lawyers pressed for a new trial on grounds of misdirection, but the dean was freed in late 1784 by the lord chief justice, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield. Shipley’s trial galvanized parliamentary support for what became Charles James Fox’s Libel Act of 1792, which empowered the jury, rather than the judge, to decide what is libelous (
DNB
; Anthony Page, “The Dean of St. Asaph’s Trial: Libel and Politics in the 1780s,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:2135 [March 2009]).
Desperate for revenue, the Mass. General Court passed a controversial stamp act on 18 March 1785, which levied duties on legal documents, commercial papers, newspapers, and almanacs. A year later, buckling under the fierce dissent of editors across New England, the General Court repealed the tax on newspapers and replaced it with one on advertisements, although the collection system failed to stabilize (Hall, Politics without Parties
, p. 117, 118).