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Those who gained a seat in the courtroom had arrived hours early to navigate the mud and standing water deposited by the morning’s storm. Inside, the air was heavy, thick with the smell of damp wool and anxious bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder. Every bench was filled. Spectators lined the walls. Some had climbed onto window ledges for a better view. They had come to watch a man be broken by his government.
At the front of the room sat a printer, his wrists resting on the worn wood of the defendant’s dock. He had already spent months in a cell for the offense that brought him here. He had not committed any act of violence. Nor had he committed any fraud.
His crime was publishing words that had offended his government – and his government reserved the right to punish him if it was offended.
The prosecutor, Attorney General Richard Bradley, rose with the confidence of a man who knew the machinery of the state was humming in his favor. His voice carried easily across the room.
“The defendant,” Bradley declared, is guilty of “printing and publishing a false, scandalous, and seditious libel in which His Excellency, the Governor of this Province, who is the king’s immediate representative here, is greatly and unjustly scandalized.”
But Bradley never attempted to prove the words were false or entirely without basis – he didn’t need to. He didn’t need to show the government had been harmed. Under the law, he only needed to argue that the published words offended, and that offense was the crime.
The judge nodded along in agreement with Bradley, occasionally glancing at the defendant with the detached impatience of someone overseeing a foregone conclusion. When defense counsel attempted to speak, the judge cut him off sharply. Truth, he said, is no defense.
A murmur rippled through the crowd. The guards shifted their weight. The prosecutor folded his hands in satisfaction. The verdict, everyone assumed, was already written. As the trial ended and the decision was placed in the hands of the jury, the air grew heavier. The mood grew more somber. Everyone sensed, before they could find words to explain it, that a danger larger than the one man on trial was present.
Every free society faces these moments: a time when citizens must determine whether liberty is only for their friends or also for their opponents. For if those rights that protect liberty are solely defined by those in power, they are not rights at all, but merely allowances.
But if those rights are respected by the moral culture of a nation – of a people – they are inviolate. No nation that seeks to remain free can do so unless its people are willing to defend the rights of those with whom they disagree. It is easy to respect speech we admire. It is difficult to protect speech that irritates, embarrasses, or challenges. But if liberty is not protected at its edges, it will not survive at its center.
After deliberations, the jury returned. They acquitted the printer – unanimously, swiftly, and without hesitation. The courtroom erupted in cheers. The machinery of government had been confronted by the conscience of citizens, and in that moment, conscience prevailed.
This trial was not in Moscow. It was not in Beijing, nor even in modern Britain or Canada.
It was New York City in 1735. The man was John Peter Zenger, and the jury was composed of men who inspired the founders and helped shape their understanding of a free press.
The founders never forgot that verdict. They may have forgotten the names of the magistrates, governors, and court officials, but they remembered the twelve jurors who defied the law of their day to protect liberty – Thomas Hunt (Foreman), Harmanus Rutgers, Stanley Holmes, Edward Man, John Bell, Samuel Weaver, Andries Marschalk, Egbert van Borsom, Benjamin Hildreth, Abraham Keteltas, John Goelet and Hercules Wendover.
The defiance of these twelve men helped inspire the amendment that protects your speech to this day. Their exceptional courage is part of the reason why Americans have a constitutionally protected right to free speech while 12,000 British citizens have been arrested for posts on social media. The drafters of our Constitution codified this courage in the First Amendment, adopted by the nation in 1791: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the Preamble to the Constitution, called the Zenger verdict “the germ of American freedom, the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America.”
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution is exceptional. No other nation has its full contours. No other nation carries its history.
That said, the First Amendment has faced its share of threats, and it will continue to face them. It will not be lost in a single moment, but in a thousand small surrenders. Each time we forget the defiance of those twelve men, each time we allow the heavy hand of government to silence someone’s voice, even a voice we with disagree with, we chisel at the foundation of the First Amendment.
Freedom is one of the most insecure places in which one can exist. It requires self-responsibility; it limits your ability to foist your burdens on the backs of others. It does not contain a safe space away from uncomfortable or disagreeable ideas. Those who seek liberty understand that compelled speech is not free speech.
The First Amendment is our cultural inheritance. It lives wherever citizens choose courage over comfort, truth over power, and liberty over fear. The Defiant Twelve handed that inheritance to us.
Our task is simple: cherish that inheritance, preserve it, and pass it on to those who come after us.
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