Fenno family

John Fenno (1751-1798) was born in Boston in 1751, the son of Ephraim and Mary Chapman Fenno. Little is known about his early life, but between April and September, 1775, he served as secretary to Gen. Artemus Ward. Fenno incurred heavy debts at the close of the Revolution, when importing goods "largely and unwisely," and eventually sought to build his fortune in the printing trade. His elegant prose while writing for the Massachusetts Centinel impressed Federalist politicians, and he had little difficulty in securing approval for a newspaper "for the purpose of disseminating favorable sentiments of the federal Constitution and the Administration."

On April 11, 1789, in the same month that George Washington became President, Fenno founded the Gazette of the United States in New York City. The following year, the paper was moved to the capitol in Philadelphia, and soon became a focal point of contestation between Jeffersonians and Federalists. In the long and often bitter debates that ensued, the Gazette became recognized more and more as the mouthpiece for Federalism, and Fenno became an important printer of political works. Alexander Hamilton was a frequent, if pseudonymous, contributor, and in 1793 he personally rescued the paper from its creditors. Fenno's Gazette matched the Jeffersonian Aurora of Benjamin F. Bache and the National Gazette of Philip Freneau, piece for piece and controversy for controversy during the 1790s. At one point, the temperature of the debate grew so high that Bache is reported to have attacked Fenno with a cane, packing a punch that his newspaper apparently could not.

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