Three huzzas in the hall

What happened

On 4 August 1735, in the second-floor courtroom of City Hall on Wall Street, the jury withdrew and came back in about ten minutes. Asked whether John Peter Zenger was guilty of printing libels, the foreman answered Not Guilty, and, in the words of the printed narrative of the case, there were three huzzas in the hall, which was crowded with people. Zenger had sat in jail for nine months on Governor Cosby's order, and the court had disbarred his lawyers for objecting to Cosby's packing of the bench, so the Morris faction brought in Andrew Hamilton, the venerable lawyer from Philadelphia. He won by asking the jury to judge the law as well as the facts and by arguing that the articles were true. Zenger was freed the next day, and Hamilton was given a dinner and a salute of cannon when he left. Rothbard praises the two legal points, then cuts the legend down. The fight was between two factions of the landed oligarchy, truth as a defense is "a very shaky reed," and English law took neither point until 1792 and 1843 (CiL, p. 646). The real enemy of a free press in those years, he says, was the colonial Assembly.