Perhaps because history is so often told from the winning side, standard journalism history accounts have paid little attention to the picaresque career of Eleazer Oswald. His life span of forty years included episodes as printer, soldier, publisher, duelist, coffee shop proprietor, free press theorist, fighter in the French Revolution, and unsuccessful revolutionist in Ireland. Newspapers controlled or influenced by Oswald--Philadelphia's Independent Gazetteer, or, the Chronicle of Freedom and the New York Journal--were leading voices in opposition to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Oswald was born in 1755 in Falmouth, England, the son of a sea captain who traded with Jamaica and who disappeared when Oswald was in his early teens. At age fifteen Oswald left England for New York City, where he was apprenticed to the printer John Holt, proprietor of the New-York Journal, or General Advertiser. He won the affection...