“ address, & all the amendments made or proposed. [ while mentioning newspapers it is doing a good office to as distant places as yours & mine to observe that Bache has begun to publish his Aurora for his country customers on 3. sheets a week instead of six. you observe that the 1 ^st. & 4 ^th. pages are only of advertisements. the 2 ^d. & 3 ^d. contain all the essays & laws. he prints therefore his 2 ^d. & 3 ^d. pages of Monday’s & Tuesday’s papers on opposite sides of the same sheet, omitting the 1 ^st. & 4 ^th. so that we have the news pages of 2. papers on one. this costs but 5. instead of 8. dollars & saves half the postage . . . ”

On June 5, 1805, in a letter dated from Washington to Thomas Paine, Jefferson wrote: “ . . . Doct ^r. Eustis’s observation to you that ‘certain paragraphs in the National Intelligencer’ respecting my letter to you, ‘supposed to be under m ( ^~r ) Jefferson’s direction, had embarrassed m( ^~r ) Jefferson’s friends in Massachusets: that they appeared like a half denial of the letter, or as if there was something in it not proper to be owned, or that needed an apology’ is one of those mysterious half-confidences difficult to be understood. that tory-printers should think it advantageous to identify me with that paper, the Aurora &c in order to obtain ground for abusing me, is perhaps fair warfare. but that any one who knows me personally should listen one moment to such an insinuation is what I did not expect. I neither have nor ever had any more connection with those papers than our antipodes have, nor know what is to be in them until I see it in them, except proclamations & other documents sent for publication. the friends in Massachusets who could be embarrassed by so weak a weapon as this, must be feeble friends indeed . . . ”

In 1800 articles published in the Aurora against the Administration caused the indictment of Duane under the Alien and Sedition Act. The trial was postponed, and on March 25, 1801, Jefferson prepared an address on the matter to the Senate. The draft in the Jefferson Papers in the Library of Congress reads: By a resolñ of the Senate of the 14 ^th. of Mar. 1800. the President was requested to instruct the proper law officer to prosecute William Duane editor of the Newspaper called the Aurora for certain publications in that newspaper of the 19 ^th. of Feb. 1800. learning on my accession to the administration that the prosecution had been so instituted as to rest principally, if not solely, on the act called the Sedition act, I caused it to be discontinued, and another to be instituted under whatsoever [ other] laws might be in existence against the offence alledged . . .

On March 30, 1811, referring to Duane’s financial difficulties, Jefferson wrote to William Wirt: “ M( ^~r ) Dabney Carr has written to you on the situation of the Editor of the Aurora, and our desire to support him. that paper has unquestionably rendered incalculable services to republicanism thro’ all it’s struggles with the federalists, and has been the rallying point for the orthodox of the whole Union. it was our comfort in the gloomiest days, and is still performing the office of a watchful centinel. we should be ungrateful to desert him, and unfaithful to our own interests to lose him. still I am sensible, and I hope others are so too, that one of his late attacks is as unfounded as it is injurious to the republican cause . . . ”

The Aurora is frequently mentioned in Jefferson’s correspondence.

Benjamin Franklin Bache, 1769-1798, journalist, was the grandson of Benjamin Franklin. After the suspension of Freneau’s National Gazette (due to the yellow fever) the Aurora succeeded to its influence.

William Duane, 1760-1835, a loyal supporter of Jefferson, edited the Aurora during the lifetime of Bache, and after his death became the publisher of the paper. Duane married Bache’s widow.