James Rivington

James Rivington (1724 – July 1802) was an English-born American journalist who published a loyalist newspaper in the American colonies called Rivington's Gazette. Some scholars in the 1950s determined that despite all outward appearances, Rivington was a member of the American Culper Spy Ring.

Rivington was one of the sons of the bookseller and publisher Charles Rivington and inherited a share of his father's business, which he lost at the Newmarket races. In 1760 he sailed to North America and resumed his occupation in Philadelphia and in the next year opened a print-shop at the foot of Wall Street, New York.

In 1773 he began to publish a newspaper "at his ever open and uninfluenced press, Hanover Square". The first number of a newspaper, The New York Gazetteer or the Connecticut, New Jersey, Hudson's River, and Quebec Weekly Advertiser was issued in April 1773.

His initially impartial stance shifted as a revolution loomed and public opinion polarized, until by late 1774 he was advocating the restrictive measures of the British government with such great zeal and attacking the patriots so severely, that in 1775 the Whigs of Newport, Rhode Island, resolved to hold no further communication with him. The Sons of Liberty hanged Rivington in effigy, and the patriot poet Philip Freneau published a mock speech of Rivington's supposed contrition at his execution, which Rivington reprinted. He infuriated Captain Isaac Sears, the prominent patriot and Son of Liberty.

"He would appear as a leading man amongst us, without perceiving that he is enlisted under a party as a tool of the lowest order; a political cracker, sent abroad to alarm and terrify, sure to do mischief to the cause he means to support, and generally finishing his career in an explosion that often bespatters his friends

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