Throughout the 1790s Dennie contributed to various journals, including the
Federal Orrery and the
Massachusetts Magazine, often using pen names such as Academicus and Socialis. In 1795, his writing being enthusiastically received, Dennie was persuaded to begin a literary journal,
The Tablet. William Spotswood, a Boston printer and bookseller, agreed to oversee the entire enterprise, splitting the profits evenly with Dennie. Such a literary journal was a novel idea at the time, and it was well received among the city's elite. Despite the initial excitement surrounding the project and content from noted writers such as John Sylvester John Gardiner,
The Tablet lasted only a few months before folding, having published thirteen issues.
Dennie's disappointment over the failure of
The Tablet inspired him to begin work on
The Lay Preacher, the first of which appeared in
The Farmer's Weekly Museum, a New Hampshire newspaper which was the leading literary journal of the 1790s. After Dennie took over as editor of the paper in 1796, its circulation increased dramatically, stretching, as one commentator put it, "from Maine to Georgia." Under Dennie's leadership the paper had a decidedly Federalist slant, supporting both the Quasi-War and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Dennie collaborated often with his friend Royall Tyler; the two wrote a satirical column by the name of "The Shop of Messrs. Colon and Spondee" which appeared in the
Museum. In 1798 Dennie lost a considerable amount of money when the paper's printer went bankrupt. He remained as editor for a few months afterward at a reduced salary, but was soon replaced by the printer's brother. The paper's circulation dropped precipitously following Dennie's departure. Later in the year Dennie ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress; following this defeat, he turned down offers to edit several prominent journals, including a generous offer from Boston's
Independent Chronicle, as he refused to work for a Democratic paper. Instead, he accepted an appointment from Timothy Pickering (at the time United States Secretary of State) to a position as Pickering's personal secretary.
Once in Philadelphia, Dennie resumed his editorial career with the
Gazette of the United States, a Federalist-friendly newspaper. In 1800 Dennie, along with Philadelphia bookseller Asbury Dickens, began work on the
Port Folio. Under the pseudonym Oliver Oldschool, Esq., Dennie wrote, in 1803, a scathing attack on Jeffersonian democracy, for which he was brought up on charges of seditious libel. Dennie wrote, in part:
A democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history. Its omens are always sinister, and its powers are unpropitious. It is on its trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy. No wise man but discerns its imperfections, no good man but shudders at its miseries, no honest man but proclaims its fraud, and no brave man but draws his sword against its force. The institution of a scheme of policy so radically contemptible and vicious is a memorable example of what the villany of some men can devise, the folly of others receive, and both establish in spite of reason, reflection, and sensation.
This paragraph was reprinted in Federalist newspapers throughout the country. While Dennie was acquitted, the severity of the attacks leveled in
Port Folio would henceforth be lessened. However, when Dennie criticized democracy, it was not the republican democracy found in the United States today, but rather the "democracy" found in France under Robespierre and Napoleon. Dennie was invoking Aristotle's argument that "an absolute democracy is not to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government. It is the corruption and degeneracy, and not the sound constitution of a republic."