On Monday morning Cobbett took down his shutters and opened the shop. Although a large crowd collected, nothing happened. The only threat of violence came in the form of an anonymous letter to his landlord John Oldden, a Quaker merchant of Chesnut (sic) Street:
Sir, a certain William Cobbett alias Peter Porcupine, I am informed is your tenant. This daring scoundrell [sic] not satisfied with having repeatedly traduced the people of this country; in his detestable productions, he has now the astonishing effrontery to expose those very publications at his window for sale … When the time of retribution arrives it may not be convenient to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. Your property may suffer. As a friend therefore I advise you to save your property by either compelling Mr Porcupine to leave your house or at all events oblige him to cease exposing his abominable proclivities or any of his courtley [sic] prints at his window for sale. In this way only you may avoid danger to your house and perhaps save the rotten carcase of your tenant for the present.
Cobbett used the letter as the pretext for another fiery pamphlet, ‘The Scarecrow’ (1796). But although he affected great indignation he actually enjoyed engaging in controversy with his opponents. There was to be more than enough of this now that he had come out into the open and revealed the true identity of Peter Porcupine. Several pamphlets resulted: Cobbett was accused of being a deserter, a British government spy and a criminal who had fled to America to escape the gallows. They said he had been whipped when he was in Paris – hence his hatred of the French.
Cobbett was astute enough to realise that all such attacks were not just good for business but a tribute to the success of his campaign. He also knew that he was a better writer than any of his critics. In reply to them he quoted a letter to his father: ‘“Dear Father, when you used to get me off to work in the morning, dressed in my blue smock-frock and woollen spatterdashes, with my bag of bread and cheese and bottle of small beer slung over my shoulder on the little crook that my old god-father Boxall gave me, little did you imagine that I should one day become so great a man as to have my picture stuck in the windows and have four whole books published about me in the course of one week” – Thus begins a letter which I wrote to my father yesterday morning and which, if it reaches him, will make the old man drink an extraordinary pot of ale to my health. Heaven bless him. I think I see him now by his old-fashioned fire-side reading the letter to his neighbours’ – an unlikely scenario, in view of the fact that George Cobbett had been dead for four years. It would have been most unlike Cobbett to deceive his readers about this, and the assumption must be that, having been out of the country since early 1792 he had not been in touch with his family. This in turn suggests that, contrary to the impression he liked to give, Cobbett had never been close to either his father or his three brothers.
In 1796, as part of his continuing campaign to answer his critics, Cobbett published his short autobiography The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, in which he gave the Americans a vivid and appealing account of his boyhood in Farnham, his escape from home and his army career. It is one of his best pieces of writing, and served its purpose in showing that he was not just a hack pamphleteer but a writer with a genuinely independent spirit. The following year, 1797, he launched a daily newspaper, Porcupine’s Gazette, and closed down his monthly periodical the Political Censor. The paper was an immediate success, Cobbett claming in the first issue that he already had a thousand subscribers. By November three thousand copies were being printed. The paper flourished for the simple reason that, as the sales figures suggest, the American public, even though they might disagree with Cobbett’s views, enjoyed his writing – the robust straightforward style, the knockabout, the jokes and the nicknames.
As a journalist Cobbett was at his best when he could focus his animosity on a particular individual rather than a set of principles or ideas. This is not to say that he was uninterested in ideas, only that he needed someone, like Dr Priestley, to personify the particular variety of political hypocrisy he was attacking at any time. Labelled with appropriate nicknames, these favoured targets (mentioned at every opportunity) lent a powerful spice to his political journalism, making it compulsive reading even for his enemies. Many of the victims of his most savage attacks were not necessarily his political opponents, but had aroused his indignation by being humourless, puritanical in their attitude to morality or, above all, vain. Priestley was one such. William Wilberforce would later be another. A third was Noah Webster (1758–1843) of Webster’s Dictionary fame, a lexicographer, a grammarian, the author of a spelling book for American schools and the man responsible for the differences between American and English spelling (‘color’ for ‘colour’, etc.). Webster came from a family of strict Puritans and was highly industrious in any number of fields – though Jefferson called him ‘a mere pedagogue of very limited understanding’. Cobbett was even ruder, despite the fact that Webster supported the federalists, and missed no opportunity to call him names:
despicable creature … viper … mean shuffling fellow … were this man indeed distinguished as being descended from a famous race, for great learning and talents, for important public services, for possessing much weight in the opinions of the people, even his vanity would be inexcusable but the fellow is distinguished, amongst the few who know him, for the very contrary of all this. He comes of obscure parents, he has just learning enough to make him a fool, his public services have all been confined to silly, idle projects, every one of which has completely failed, and as to his weight as a politician, it is that of a feather, which is overbalanced by a straw, and puffed away by the gentlest breath. All his measures are exploded, his predictions have proved false, not a single sentiment of his has become fashionable, nor has the Federal Government ever adopted a single measure which he has been in the habit of recommending.6
Webster later saw a chance of revenge following the passing of a Sedition Act by Washington in 1798 which made it illegal ‘to write, print, utter or publish any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States’. Although the Act was intended to be used against French writers – by this time the USA had broken off relations with France and was preparing for war – Webster decided it could equally well be used against people like Cobbett. Affecting, like many of his type, not to have personally seen the attacks, he wrote to the Secretary of State Timothy Pickering: ‘The violence and resentment of the English knows no bounds. They are intolerably insolent and strive, by all possible means to lessen the circulation of my papers.’ (He need not have bothered, as by that stage proceedings were already under way.)
A more formidable opponent than Webster was Thomas McKean (1734–1817), a lawyer of Scottish descent who involved himself in politics, became one of the most ardent advocates of separation prior to the war with Britain, and was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The following year McKean became the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania (a post he occupied for twenty years), and he was elected President of Congress in 1781. Though a keen Democrat and francophile, McKean was deeply conservative in matters of law, besides being, in the words of his contemporary Thomas Rodney, a man ‘of great vanity, extremely fond of power and entirely governed by passions, ever pursuing the object present with warm, enthusiastic zeal without much reflection or forecast’.7 A recent biographer describes him as ‘almost pathological in his insistence upon deference in his political and judicial capacities’. Among other insults, Cobbett called him ‘a little upstart tyrant’, or ‘Mrs McKean’s husband’ (the suggestion being that he was under the thumb of his dominating wife).
Already needled by these jibes, McKean was only too happy to act when his prospective son-in-law Don Carlos Martinez de Yrujo, the Spanish Ambassador, complained of certain disobliging comments which Cobbett made about himself