His decision to come to the colonies was prompted by people seeking retribution for what was considered his public display of disrespect for a popular member of the English clergy.
Fleet produced works for various booksellers, printed pamphlets, ballads, children's stories and later established the Boston Evening Post.
In his earlier years fleet compiled his own version of Mother Goose from stories told by his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Vergoose, to his children.
When he published various controversial accounts about the colonial government and the clergy he was admonished, threatened with prosecution and subsequently became one of the first American printers to challenge royal authority and defend the idea of Freedom of the Press.
Through his newspaper Fleet played an active role in the Christian revivalist controversy that occurred in the colonies during the early eighteenth century.
While he was working in Bristol one day "the notorious" Henry Sacheverell, an English high church Anglican clergyman, was passing through on his way to his new home in Salatin.
The townspeople gathered along the route, waving flags and cheering him on for preaching his controversial sermons against the established Congregationalists of England, which he also had printed.
As the procession passed by the building where Fleet was working he accordingly concocted his own flag, hurriedly made from a halter-top fixed to a pole, and began waving it from a window.
Realizing he was no longer safe working at his former job and in his community he subsequently thought it was wise to distance himself from England altogether and made his way to Boston in the American colonies.
[2][3] Fleet arrived at Boston in 1712, and soon established his printing shop with T. Crump, on Pudding Lane, which later was renamed Devonshire Street.
[8][9] Fleet began his printing trade by producing works for booksellers, and also pamphlets, ballads and similar material for his own business purposes.
It was a spacious structure which afforded him a residence, printing shop and a store front, with a sign displaying his trade mark of the "Heart and Crown."
all gentlemen of leisure and capacity, inclined on either side, to write any thing of a political nature, that tends to enlighten and serve the public, to communicate their productions, provided they are not over long, and confined within modesty and good manners; for all possible care will be taken that nothing contrary to these shall ever be here published.
By April 2, 1733, he became the sole proprietor of the newspaper and changed its name to the Boston Evening-Post, which was "printed ... at the Heart & Crown in Cornhill".
Publication ended due to the accusations the Fleet brothers, as journalists, received from revolutionary proponents over the neutral position they took concerning the revolution.
Other works included, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God...(1720); The Redeemed Captive, by John Williams (1720); The History of the Wars of New- England with the Eastern Indians, by Samuel Penhallow (1726); The New England Primer Enlarged, (1737–38); A Brief Narrative of the Case and Tryal of John Peter Zenger, (1738); Cato by Joseph Addison (1750); and The Day of Doom, (1751), by Michael Wigglesworth.
The Christian History, played an important role in the Great Awakening by reporting on the religious revivals that were sweeping Europe and the American colonies in the early eighteenth century.