26 
INTRODUCTION. 
carded from the Journal the cut of the king’s arms, and substituted in its stead 
the device of a snake severed into parts, with the motto “ unite or die.”* If 
ill vi noton su ft’ ere d at die hands of the exasperated colonists, Holt was visited 
with the royal vengeance in forms scarcely less destructive. On the approach 
of the British army in 1776, he was obliged to quit the city and leave his pro¬ 
perty to be destroyed by the enemy. After a short interval, the Journal reap¬ 
peared in Kingston. Driven thence by the capture and destruction of that place 
in the same year, Holt continued the paper at Poughkeepsie until the termination 
of the war, when he returned to New-York. He died in 1784. His paper, 
continued by his widow and descendants several years, at length passed into the 
hands of Thomas Greenleaf. 
Early in the present century, the well known “American Citizen,” edited 
with distinguished ability by James Cheetham, appeared. The New-York 
Packet, by Samuel Loudon, a native of Ireland, was a spirited auxiliary of the 
popular cause. That Journal was published at Fishkill while the city of New- 
York was in possession of the enemy. 
During the same period, Robertson & Co. of the Royal American Gazette, 
and Lewis of the New-York Mercury and General Advertiser, made such an 
arrangement with the publishers of the other papers as to form a daily publica¬ 
tion. But these newspapers were all discontinued at the peace of 1783. There 
were, therefore, at the close of the revolutionary war, nearly one hundred and 
fifty years after the introduction of printing in Massachusetts, and nearly a cen¬ 
tury after its establishment in Pennsylvania, only three newspaper publications 
in the state of New-York. These were Holt’s and Loudon’s, then respectively 
published at Poughkeepsie and Fishkill, and the New-York Gazetteer, which 
was commenced in Albany in May, 1782, by Valentine & Webster, and was 
succeeded two years afterwards by the Albany Gazette, published by Charles 
R. Webster, and has been continued by him and Websters & Skinners until the 
* Thomas’ History of Printing. 
