The paper was founded by Benjamin Franklin Bache, and was continued as a tri-weekly, after his death from yellow fever in September 1798, as a leading organ of radical republicanism by the Irish-American journalist William Duane.
Bache had died while awaiting trial on charges of seditious libel against President John Adams and his Federalist administration as result of his attempt to justify the French position in the XYZ Affair.
[6] Duane was again charged, for seditious libel, in response to articles published in the Aurora intimating that Great Britain had used intrigue to exert its influence on the United States.
But able to produce a letter that John Adams himself had written a few years earlier implying the same in respect of the appointment of Thomas Pinckney as the United States' minister to London, Duane avoided prosecution.
It published details of the Ross Bill which would have established a closed-door Grand Committee, chaired by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, an Adams appointee, with powers to disqualify College electors.
As a result, in the gubernatorial election of 1805 it help split the Jeffersonian coalition in the state: previously defeated Federalists ("Quids") coalesced with "Constitutional Republicans" to secure the re-election of Thomas McKean, a lawyer who had rejected the Aurora's program.