ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
On Sept. 21, 1765, New Jersey's first newspaper made a brief and scandalous debut.
Christened the Constitutional Courant, it contained all of two articles and was topped by a masthead featuring a snake and the words, "JOIN OR DIE." The newspaper was printed in Burlington, in a print shop owned by a Woodbridge man named James Parker. For the first issue of the Courant, Parker lent his machinery to William Goddard, an eager young newspaperman who had written pieces "too daring to be printed in New York," according to Tracts of the American Revolution 1763-1776, edited by Merrill Jensen.
Bearing the motto "Containing Matters Interesting to Liberty, and Nowise Repugnant to Loyalty," hundreds of copies of the Courant quickly made their way to New York City, where they were sold by hawkers and peddlers instructed to lie about its origins, according to Specimens of Newspaper Literature by Joseph Tinker Buckingham.
The reason for the secrecy: The stories railed against the British Parliament and its tyrannical Stamp Act. While the Parliament should be "treated with all possible respect," wrote "Philoleutherus" in one of the paper's two stories, "we owe them no more jurisdiction, in this respect, than the Divan of Constantinople," according to Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763-1776, by Joseph S. Tiedemann.
Shocked authorities tried to punish those responsible, even calling a council in New York to try to hunt down the printers and authors. Despite the government's failure to find its creators, however, the Courant folded after its first issue.
Other papers soon stepped into the void - including the 1796 Centinel of Freedom, which is considered the first precursor to The Star-Ledger.
- The New Jersey Historical Commission contributed to this report.