Saint Paul's Church: Where Freedom of the Press Was Born

Standing just off the interstate is a stone church that looks modest from the road, but it sits on ground where two foundational American principles were forged: freedom of the press and freedom of election. Saint Paul's Church in the old community of Eastchester has been a parish since sixteen sixty-five, and the present stone building dates to the colonial era.

But the event that made this place historically significant happened decades before the first stone was laid. On October twenty-ninth, seventeen thirty-three, a contested election for a seat in the New York Provincial Assembly was held on the village green right here. Hundreds of men gathered on the green to cast their votes in a charged political battle between Lewis Morris, the colony's former Chief Justice, and the candidate backed by the royal governor William Cosby. Morris won. And the drama of what happened on this green was reported in full by a fledgling printer in New York City named John Peter Zenger.

Zenger published the account in the inaugural issue of his New-York Weekly Journal, and he kept covering the governor's abuses. In seventeen thirty-five, Cosby had Zenger arrested and tried for seditious libel. Zenger's defense: that what he had published was simply true. The jury agreed and acquitted him. In a world where criticizing the crown was treated as a crime regardless of accuracy, Zenger's acquittal drew a new line. Truth, the jury declared, was a complete defense. That principle became a cornerstone of American press freedom and eventually shaped the First Amendment.

The church served as a field hospital after the nearby Battle of Pell's Point in October seventeen seventy-six. Today it is a National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service, its cemetery containing graves from the colonial period through the Civil War era.