The origins of the political newspaper business were in the colonial printing trade. It is only from the vantage point of the colonial- and Revolutionary-period printers that we can appreciate the magnitude of the changes involved in the rise of newspaper politics. On the eve of the Revolution, printers occupied a unique and contradictory niche in American society. While the service they provided was indispensable to the political and intellectual life of their communities, they were still relegated with other artisans and laborers to a marginal role in the conduct of public affairs.
On the one hand, printers were the intellectual elite of the early American working class.1 They needed to be literate, unlike most other artisans and laborers, and they often had the chance to edit and write their own publications. Many were brainy working-class boys such as Benjamin Franklin, who was made a printer rather than a soapmaker like his father for the greater intellectual opportunities printing seemed to afford. “From a Child I was fond of Reading, and all the little money that came into my Hands was ever laid out in Books,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography. “This Bookish Inclination at length determin’d my father to make me a Printer.” Printing provided many a young workingman with a substitute for the advanced education that only a tiny minority of early Americans could obtain. Printers also enjoyed a more prominent role in their communities than most artisans. In a new or growing small town, a printer’s very presence could lead to local acclaim, because the possession of a press (especially one that published a newspaper) was considered an essential prerequisite to a town becoming a significant place. At the same time, a printer’s daily business brought him into contact with the local ruling, thinking, and writing classes: the government officials, political leaders, lawyers, and clergymen who were most likely to produce and consume printed matter.2
On the other hand, greater visibility rarely translated into influence. The literary training that could be acquired in a print shop conferred neither the systematic classical learning nor the polished manners that were the mark of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Though printing had its cerebral and prestigious aspects, it was still a dirty, smelly, physically demanding job. One of the first chores that would be delegated to a young apprentice printer was preparing the sheepskin balls used to ink the type. The skins were soaked in urine, stamped on daily for added softness, and finally wrung out by hand. The work got harder from there, and only a little more pleasant. Supplies of ink were often scarce in America, so printers frequently had to make it on site, by boiling lampblack (soot) in varnish (linseed oil and rosin). If the printing-office staff survived the noxious fumes and fire hazards of making ink, their persons and equipment nevertheless spent much of the workday covered in the stuff.
Then there was the printing process itself. The production of a typical four-page early American newspaper began with as many as sixteen hours setting type, which meant standing at the “case” and reading copy while one hand selected tiny bits of metal and the other placed them with a “composing stick.” Next the finished lines of type were locked by the foreman into heavy metal forms that had to be muscled over to the press. Even if the shop used one of the improved Ramage models that became popular after 1800, the typical early American printing press was a human-powered, predominantly wooden contraption that had only been refined, not essentially changed, since Gutenberg’s converted winepress.
To print a newspaper, each side of each sheet of each copy had to be pressed by hand, a complex task that involved (among many other procedures) wetting the paper, “beating” the type with ink-soaked balls, and repeatedly pulling the heavy crank that lowered the platen and made the impression. Two experienced workers lifting, beating, and pulling in rhythm, like parts of the machine, could print 240 sheets, or one “token,” an hour at their best. Later, the job would have to be done over again for the other side of the sheets, and still later each sheet would have to be folded into newspaper form. Thus even a rural weekly, with a barely adequate circulation of only 500 or 600, required a day and most of a night of unremitting labor to produce. Publishing a more ambitious or successful journal was commensurately harder on the staff. An apprentice for the Boston Independent Chronicle remembered how arduous his work became when the paper went semiweekly, meaning that the boys in the shop slept little at least two nights a week.3
Regardless of their relatively high status vis-à-vis other artisans, colonial printers could not escape their identity as men who worked with their hands, in a society that regarded manual labor as the province of those too dull, weak, or lowly to escape it. Status was accorded as it had been throughout human history—in inverse proportion to the amount of manual labor a person had to do to survive.4 According to Stephen Botein, one of the printing trade’s most perceptive historians, “printers had to face the hard, discouraging fact that in the eyes of their neighbors they were by training mechanics, without full legitimacy as men of independent intellect and creed.” As an artisan, “a colonial printer was not generally expected to possess a mind of his own . . . this expectation was likely to undercut whatever efforts he made to influence his neighbors.”5
Class was as much a matter of appearance, demeanor, and personal habits as it was of education and occupation, but here printers tended to do even worse. Too many years of pulling on a hand press often created physical deformities: an elongated right arm, a limping, shambling gait, severe back injuries, or all of the above. Few longtime printers could expect to cut dashing figures on the hustings or in the drawing room, even if they had left ink and type years behind them. A yet more serious problem for printers was alcoholism. Though theoretically under the parental care of their masters, apprentice printers spent their boyhoods immersed in a work culture dominated by adult journeymen. While rich in tradition and craft pride, printing office culture was built around heavy, on-the-job drinking. New apprentices and journeymen were required to treat their coworkers, and the older journeymen had to treat everyone whenever signature “o” of a work was put in the press. At eleven each morning “and too frequently afterwards,” Thurlow Weed remembered, the journeymen in his office “jeffed” (that is, played a dice game with pieces of type) for beer.
While on one level printing office drinking games were a charming example of preindustrial work discipline, the toll on printers’ health, prosperity, and public image was severe. Treating and jeffing involved trips around the corner to retrieve the necessary beverages, where grocers were happy to extend credit that could absorb most of a printer’s meager earnings. Almost all early Americans drank to what later eras would define as excess, but printers gained an especially unsavory reputation in this regard. Successful printers’ memoirs are full of old masters, friends, and colleagues who died young or stayed poor because of chronic intemperance.6
For the most part, colonial printers were under no illusions about their status. James Parker, a successful master printer in mid-eighteenth-century New York, felt that the printing trade was in “wretched Disrepute.” Printers were “obliged to work like Negroes, and in general are esteemed but little better.” To the stigma of manual labor was added the trade’s low profitability. It was obvious to Parker that no family “of Substance would ever put their Sons to such an Art.” It was only because of his own undistinguished origins that he ever became a printer. Masters were “obliged to take of the lowest People” for apprentices. Printers with aspirations to gentry status or political power needed to give up their trade first. Thus that apostle of hard work Benjamin Franklin retired from the trade in his forties, established himself as a gentleman of leisure and refinement, and only then began his illustrious career as a politician, diplomat, and scientist.7
If they successfully made their way through the artisanal life cycle from apprentice to journeyman to master (as fewer and fewer could over time), printers also became businessmen, operating in a market that was dispersed, agrarian, and woefully inadequate. In colonial America even more than in later times, there were many more people willing to produce printed matter than readers able or willing to pay for it. A village printer had to please as many people as possible and could not afford to alienate potential customers in any segment of his community. Politically, this dictated strict nonpartisanship and a self-consciously workmanlike approach to the business. Typically, colonial printers focused on the physical products and mechanical processes of printing rather than the content of what they printed. William Bradford, the first printer in Pennsylvania, called printing “a manufacture of the nation,” and most colonial printers tried hard to operate as if their product had no more political import than the shoes, barrels, and candles that other artisans made.8
Benjamin Franklin outlined his trade’s habitual approach to political controversy in 1731: “Printers are educated in the Belief that when Men differ in opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick.” In the language of the printing trade, liberty of the press meant something close to the modern phrase “equal access”: theoretically, newspapers should be open to all political opinions. In practice, many printers opted to leave local political contention out of their papers entirely if they could, preferring to fill their columns with European news copied from distant newspapers and merchants’ letters or heard from sea captains. Presented without comment or literary styling, such material was both attractive and safe: it was relevant to colonial readers as residents of the greater Atlantic world, but distant and impersonal enough not to bring any local trouble on the printer. Of course, Franklin and at least some other colonial printers did take an interest in the content of what they printed and sometimes provided it themselves, but they tried to conceal their own authorship and when challenged assumed the “mechanical” stance outlined by Franklin and Bradford.9
Colonial political leaders also held printer-effacing notions of how newspapers should operate, which was as a kind of mechanical amplifier for political and social leaders, delivering the small spectrum of thoughts and information that local elites deemed fit for broader consumption. Indeed, it can be argued that American newspapers were allowed to develop only when and if colonial oligarchs found them useful for their own purposes. In the small-scale, hierarchical society of the seventeenth-century colonies, there was little perceived or actual need for “mass communication.” Information flowed down the social hierarchy through face-to-face exchanges, on a need-to-know basis, with a very tiny fraction of the population seen as needing to know or have opinions about governmental affairs. What we might call “publicity”—full knowledge and the expectation of direct participation in political affairs—was reserved for the few who were directly involved in leadership, and those few were to speak in public only in unified and authoritative terms. Thus colonial leaders rarely required printed announcements to communicate with each other, conducting their most sensitive business in letters, closed meetings, or exclusive social gatherings.
Occasionally, however, they needed to reach outside their personal networks and deliver authoritative information to large numbers of their fellow inhabitants. Print was the most obvious means of doing this, but for many decades, all that seemed necessary was the occasional pamphlet or proclamation. Significantly, the first “newspaper” in British America did not appear until what might be considered the first intercolonial political event, the multiple rebellions against the Dominion of New England that broke out in response to the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, and even this journal was created to deliver an official announcement. Trying to calm an aroused populace, the reestablished government of Massachusetts Bay issued The Present State of New-English Affairs, a broadside that looked exactly like the front page of a London newspaper. It contained news of the Rev. Increase Mather’s mission to London to lobby for the return of the charter that James II had confiscated in 1685. The subheading of the broadside expressed the Puritan leadership’s suddenly felt need to broadcast some political information: “This is Published to Prevent False Reports.”10
The Present State of New-English Affairs proved to be a model for colonial journalism, in the sense that only newspapers firmly under the influence of the local elites could survive. The first newspaper intended for continuous publication quickly ran afoul of the colonial authorities’ jealous guardianship over political information. The publisher was Benjamin Harris, a high-minded Puritan radical who had been a journalist in England and fled James II’s crackdown on the press. On 25 September 1690, Harris issued a three-page journal called Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, promising to report on “The Remarkable Occurrences of Divine Providence” and “the Circumstances of Public Affairs” in both Europe and America. Harris put more information and commentary in his publication than American newspapers would again for years, including even some American news, a rarity during the colonial period. Publick Occurrences was to be a monthly publication, but four days after the first issue appeared, the governor and council met and declared their “high Resentment and Disallowance of said Pamphlet and order[ed] that the same be Suppressed and called in: strictly forbidding any person or persons for the future to Set forth anything in Print without License first obtained.” The problem was that Harris had dared to print opinions (or more properly, interpretations of fact) without the advice or imprimatur of Massachusetts leaders, issuing the paper “without the least Privity or Countenance of Authority.”11
Colonial publishers would rarely make that mistake again. It would be fourteen years before the newspaper format would be tried a second time, and it would survive over the long term only by taking a much more cautious approach. The first American newspaper to survive its infancy, the Boston News-Letter, carried the legend “Published by Authority” on its banner, and this was both a seal of approval and a general truth. The publisher of the News-Letter, Boston postmaster John Campbell, obtained government permission before proceeding with his project and allowed officials to vet each issue before publication. Rather than Harris’s comprehensive portrait of public affairs, Campbell contented himself with English and foreign news copied from London newspapers. His goal was the much more palatable one (to the colonial elite) of connecting that elite to the metropolitan core upon which they were still culturally and politically dependent.
Campbell’s intended market, in fact, appears to have been the handful of politically active colonists for whom it was useful to have such information as the names of the members of Parliament and who English nobles had recently married. After the European news, Campbell slipped in a few very brief notices of local ship arrivals, deaths, storms, and finally an advertisement or two. Subsequent publications, such as Boston’s second continuous newspaper, the Boston Gazette (founded 1719), corrected Campbell’s most egregious errors (such as printing all the foreign news clippings in strict chronological order and thus allowing them to fall years behind), but retained his basic formula.12
The commercialism and political subservience of colonial printers can be seen in the most famous case of newspaper partisanship before 1765, John Peter Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal. Zenger himself was only a bit player in the famous court case that bears his name. “Finding himself unable to subsist by other printing-work,” he had no choice but to hire on with the only available customers, who happened to be a coterie of local politicians at odds with New York’s crown-appointed governor, William Cosby. Zenger was paid to print—and only print, not edit or write—the New-York Journal, a newspaper containing sarcastic, Swiftian criticism of the Cosby regime and reprints from British republican tracts such as Cato’s Letters.
The paper’s chief contributor and real editor was the ambitious attorney James Alexander. Zenger himself was a mere front, but he proved a highly useful one. When the authorities cracked down on the Journal, it was Zenger they imprisoned, because his was the only name on the paper. Alexander defended Zenger, but he subordinated his client’s interests to his own desire to make political hay. In court, he continued the attack on Cosby, until finally disbarred by Chief Justice James DeLancey. Zenger languished nine months in jail, until his case came to trial and the colonies’ leading attorney, Andrew Hamilton, got him acquitted. Hamilton made a grandstand play for colonial rights that really had little relation to Zenger or printers, arguing that local juries rather than judges appointed by the royal governor could decide matters of law (in this case, the legal definition of libel) as well as the simple facts of the case. Zenger’s pawn status was underlined by the fact that the victory celebration was held before he was even released from jail.13
Zenger and other controversial colonial printers, such as Benjamin Franklin’s brother James, were drawn into political conflict not out of any desire for power and notoriety, but because they were underemployed tradesmen who needed any work they could get. Having endured their prosecutions, they settled down to quiet lives of merely “mechanical” and studiously noncontroversial printing. The significance of colonial newspaper controversies such as the one that victimized Zenger lies in the precedents they set for the development of newspaper politics: they were the earliest instances in which the American gentry resorted to newspapers when they had political differences with the powers that were, and the first cases in which American printers became surrogates for gentleman politicians, suffering persecutions and punishments for the words of their anonymous contributors.14
By midcentury there were newspapers in all the more populous colonies and multiple journals in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Almost all eventually adopted a format that would remain essentially unchanged until the technological improvements of the Jacksonian period. Typically, newspapers contained four pages, occasionally fewer during a week when no London newspapers or letters from “correspondents” arrived.15 Very occasionally, an extra sheet with some late-arriving items might be attached. In a financially successful newspaper, at least one and as many as three of the four pages would be devoted to advertising (including paid government notices), with ads running without change for weeks or months at a time. An important speech, proclamation, or essay might lead off the nonadvertising columns, but many papers (especially urban dailies later in the century) put the advertising on the front page. The news items were arranged under dated geographic headings that denoted the location, not of the events described, but of the newspaper from which the item was taken. The “London” head might include British parliamentary debates or rumors about the king of Prussia.
The items themselves usually carried no headlines, titles, or other differentiation between subjects and items. In the middle or at the end of the nonadvertising pages, there would be a heading for the town where the paper was published; here would be inserted a few brief local news items and commercial information such as ship arrivals and “prices current.” Here might also be found the publisher’s own comments, if any.
Format changes from the 1740s to 1820s were incremental only: type sizes shrank, the amount of certain categories of matter increased, some minor improvements in differentiating content were made (such as a literary page on the back of a paper, dividing lines or occasional short titles for individual items). The use of illustrations and decorative typefaces actually decreased a bit after the colonial period. The basic scheme, including the arrangement by uninformative geographic headings, remained in force. The lack of change is illustrated by the criticisms that a Connecticut political writer could still lodge against the newspapers he read in 1811: “I have . . . often been surprized that the most valuable communications in our papers should be in illegibly small type, while news from Leghorn, accounts of rare reptiles and thunderstorms are in long pica.” It was as difficult as ever for the reader to “form some idea, when he has closed one subject & begun on another.”16
Colonial leaders softened their attitudes toward the press considerably in the decades after Benjamin Harris’s short-lived experiment. Over the eighteenth century, they increasingly bid for popular support in their struggles with royal government, gravitating to the universalist rhetoric of natural rights and liberties while claiming to speak not as members of a frustrated native-born elite but instead in the name of an outraged “public” or “people.” In this context, a relatively free press came to seem more helpful than threatening to colonial politicians, who became much more likely to defend the printers who served them. Conversely, printers who departed from the political line set by local leading men were quickly disciplined. A pattern of selective press freedom emerged. Colonial printers who criticized royal government were generally safe—local juries would rarely indict or convict them—but those who crossed colonial assemblies, the repositories of local elite power, received swift punishment. Hence the leading characteristic of the colonial press was its close and subordinate relationship with local (as opposed to imperial) political elites.17
Newspapers came into their own as a political weapon during the controversies preceding the American Revolution. It was a matter of consensus, then as now, that Patriot newspapers were one of the most important factors in turning American public opinion against Great Britain.18 The years between 1760 and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War saw the number of newspapers in the colonies more than double. This was more than a demographic coincidence. Over the period, the newspaper press was expanding nearly twice as fast as the population. Moreover, as shown in appendix 1, chart 1, the number of newspapers shot up during each individual crisis: from twenty-two to twenty-seven during 1763–65 (the Stamp and Sugar Acts), from twenty-eight to thirty-two during 1767–69 (the Townshend Acts), and from thirty-five to forty-two during the final crisis of 1773–75.
This was only the first of many historical moments over the next half century when the American press quickly expanded in response to political turmoil. A chart of the press’s growth (see appendix 1, chart 2) shows massive upward spikes during the tumultuous Confederation period of the 1780s and the party conflict of the 1790s. A calculation and comparison of the growth rates of the press and the population (chart 4) shows newspapers reproducing four times faster than human beings during those decades. The beginnings of newspaper politics, the integration of the press and political activism that would dominate the nineteenth century, can thus be traced to the resistance movement of the 1760s.
The impetus toward sustained partisanship came not from printers but from rebellious gentlemen eager to use the press for their own political purposes. Among other things, the Revolution was the seizure of power by a native-born elite crowded out of the colonies’ top leadership positions. This “natural,” local, untitled aristocracy made the press the most reliable and powerful weapon in its arsenal. As Richard Buel has argued, Patriot leaders “saw [the press] primarily as an instrument by which the mass of the people”—or their self-appointed spokesmen—“might seek to compensate for some of the disadvantages they labored under” in the eternal struggle between aggressive executive power and the rights of the people as embodied in a legislative assembly.19 More specifically, they saw the press as the means by which political leaders could enlist their constituents’ support for resistance to Great Britain. It was assumed that there would be no conflict between the views of the mass of the people and those of their representatives, once the people were properly informed and proselytized in print. It was in these terms in which the Continental Congress recommended liberty of the press to the “inhabitants of Quebec” in 1774: “The last right we shall mention, regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists ... in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated, into more honorable and just modes of conducting affairs.” This statement reflected a naive Enlightenment faith in the power of “correct” information to change minds and shape events in the direction of progress, but embedded within the idea of “promoting union” was a harder-edged political lesson: that printing (and newspapers especially) could help organize, standardize, and spread a political movement’s ideas across large numbers of people and places.20
Such a weapon was too powerful to be allowed to fall into enemy hands. Despite their libertarian rhetoric, American resistance leaders proved unwilling to tolerate opposition from the press. Since press freedom existed for the purpose of protecting liberty, they reasoned, there should be no freedom for a press that opposed liberty. Some of the most skilled and articulate printers and publishers refused to join the resistance, and a few even became active opponents. Such insubordination was dealt with harshly, as in the case of the Boston publisher John Mein. A feistier-than-normal publication, Mein’s Boston Chronicle exposed secret violations of the nonimportation agreement by leading Patriot merchants such as John Hancock, even publishing cargo manifests as proof of the charges. Mob violence eventually forced Mein to flee to the British, but Hancock managed to exact long-distance revenge by purchasing a £2,000 debt of Mein’s and having the printer thrown into debtor’s prison in England. During the war, the Loyalist press was mobbed, prosecuted, or confiscated out of existence when the British army was not around to protect it. Loyalist publishers fled for their lives when they were not banished outright.21
If Patriot gentlemen used the press as their political instrument, they also used it in some measure to conceal their own agency in the pre-Revo-lutionary upheavals. Almost all partisan essays were written anonymously; many were signed with the names of classical heroes or invented characters such as the “Farmer in Pennsylvania” portrayed by the wealthy, sophisticated lawyer John Dickinson. Anonymous and pseudonymous writing were traditional practices in the press by this time, but they served the resistance movement in more directly political ways. Unidentified writing helped preserve the impression that newspaper essays and pamphlets were spontaneous expressions of American public opinion, and it camouflaged the sheer extent of the efforts of such prolific writers as Samuel Adams.
Though Revolutionary political culture sanctioned zealous industry in the common cause, disclosing the real identities of newspaper writers might have made the Revolutionary agitation appear to be the illegitimate machinations of a handful of conspirators. Anonymity also helped work around basic tensions in American Revolutionary ideology. As Michael Warner has argued, the central premises of the new nation’s emerging constitutional republicanism—that politics and government could be separated from personal social relations, and that their operations could be supervised by a rational, critical “public” and controlled by rules that were neutral regarding the status of individual persons (“a government of laws, not men”)—demanded and depended for their legitimacy on a political arena in which specific persons were absent. Printed political debate in newspapers and pamphlets provided such a depersonalized arena, what political theorists and historians have called a “public sphere.”
Partly through the typical anonymity and pseudonymity of contributions to it, the eighteenth-century public sphere allowed a handful of white, male, genteel political activists to speak in the guise of the supervising “public,” or to put it more prosaically, to assume the role of the “people” without calling attention to the great social and cultural distance between most political writers and the plebeian majority of the population.22
Anonymity also shielded from reprisal those gentleman Revolutionaries who had social or professional position to lose if they appeared too active against the British or performed badly on the public stage. A gentleman had a carefully built “character” that could be damaged by a poor performance, while an artisan was a much humbler man with no such standing to lose. Thus a printer could be a convenient surrogate for a gentleman, keeping the onus of criticism away from the actual author. Such considerations had motivated the colonial leaders who had spoken through the medium of John Peter Zenger, and they definitely entered the minds of many American resistance leaders in the 1760s and 1770s.
A good example of this desire for political camouflage occurred between Dr. Benjamin Rush and the former staymaker and tax collector Thomas Paine, when the latter was still an obscure recent immigrant. In 1775 Rush was “preparing an address to the inhabitants of the colonies” on the necessity of independence and of bringing “the war to a speedy and successful issue.” Yet the Philadelphia society doctor “hesitated” and “shuddered at . . . the consequence of its not being well received.” Rush had become acquainted with Paine from frequenting Robert Aitken’s political bookstore, where the new arrival was working. Rush made Paine a proposal, asking him “what he thought of writing a pamphlet upon [Rush’s subject]. I suggested to him that he had nothing to fear from the popular odium to which such a publication might expose him, for he could live anywhere, but that my profession and connections, which tied me to Philadelphia, where a great majority of the citizens and some of my friends were hostile to a separation of our country from Great Britain, forbad me to come forward as a pioneer in that important controversy.” Paine agreed and immediately began work on the pamphlet, for which the doctor eventually suggested the title Common Sense.23 Such partisan indirection—a respectable gentleman recruiting a mouthpiece from the ranks of the less respectable—would be a perennial theme in subsequent American political history.
Though several made names for themselves as heroes of the Revolution, printers as a group remained stubbornly traditional throughout the Revolutionary era, rarely straying far or willingly from their deferential habits and basically commercial orientation. Many printers were initially spurred to resistance by the Stamp Act, a direct threat to their business interests. Yet even that provocation was insufficient for others, and most went back to relative impartiality once the crisis was over. In the end, market forces were more effective in creating Revolutionary printers than Revolutionary politics was.
For instance, in 1771 the Boston printer Isaiah Thomas opened his Massachusetts Spy to both parties in the ongoing controversy even though he personally supported the resistance. Thomas switched the paper over to active “support of the whig interest” only after it became clear that impartiality was hurting his business. Loyalists had canceled their subscriptions to protest his printing pro-resistance articles along with those supporting their own views. At some point, most other American printers came to similar realizations that conversion to zealous patriotism was the most prudent and profitable course. It was impossible to please both Whigs and Loyalists, and those publishers who followed the old policy of neutrality for too long risked not only losing customers, but being ostracized from their communities and harassed by mobs and local authorities.24
In addition, printers were sometimes given positive incentives to publish for the Whig cause. William Rind founded the second Virginia Gazette at the behest, and with the pecuniary encouragement, of Thomas Jefferson and other opponents of the royal government. “Until the beginning of our revolutionary disputes, we had but one press, and that having the whole business of the government, . . . nothing disagreeable to the governor could ever be got into it,” Jefferson remembered. Therefore, he and his fellow Whigs in the House of Burgesses promised Rind the legislative printing contracts and thus “procured” him to move from Maryland and publish a “free paper” in Virginia. Here press freedom was defined only as free access for a particular group of politicians. Rind’s was a common experience. Government printing contracts had always been one of the most reliable and sought-after sources of profit in the trade, and Revolutionary printers were quick to secure the printing concessions of the new Revolutionary governments.25
Once they did become partisan, few Revolutionary printers wrote much political material for their papers. They served the cause by “editing” in the literal sense: publishing the writings of local gentlemen and selecting public documents and items from other papers that made the Whig case. (In some cases, even the editing was done by someone other than the printer.) Their papers were more conduits for Revolutionary rhetoric than initiators of it. As one scholar of the Revolutionary press has written, perhaps unwittingly taking an eighteenth-century gentleman’s view of printers’ mental capacities, “Although editorials were nonexistent, their place was more than taken by the contributions of others far more intelligent than the editors.”26
Perhaps the only consistently partisan printers in the pre-Revolutionary press corps were Benjamin Edes and John Gill of the Boston Gazette. They were also the printers most directly involved in the anti-British agitations. Their careers illustrate the new possibilities, as well as the ultimate limits, of the printers’ role in the Revolution. Longtime printers for the local and provincial governments, Edes and Gill had grown as wealthy and respected as was usually possible for working printers. Edes held several petty local offices such as constable, scavenger, and clerk of the market in the early 1760s and was a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. Though evidently a man of some political fervor, Edes practiced the colonial printer’s habitual deference toward the local authorities who provided so much of his business. Reprimanded by the Boston selectmen for publishing some too-speculative theological pamphlets in 1757, Edes apologized for offending and promised “to take more care for the future, & publish nothing that should give any uneasiness to any Persons whatever.”27
During the political crises over the Sugar and Stamp Acts, the Boston Gazette followed its customer base into active opposition. The Boston campaign against the British ministry was financed and fomented by merchants with interests at stake. Several of them, including John Hancock and Benjamin Church, also happened to be longtime Gazette advertisers. Edes is reputed to have been a member of the “Loyall Nine” who controlled the Sons of Liberty. It seems doubtful that he was truly such a ringleader, but at the very least, the printer was a junior partner of Samuel Adams in the ground-level management of the movement. Certainly, Edes was present at meetings of the group’s brain trust and involved in many of its activities.
The fiery political matter that filled the Boston Gazette came from a constellation of Boston Revolutionary leaders, including Samuel Adams, John Adams, James Otis, Josiah Quincy Jr., and Joseph Warren. These same men and their allies provided Edes and Gill with all the protection they needed from the vengeance of the royal government. When an article of Warren’s finally goaded Governor Frances Bernard into prosecuting the editors for seditious libel, the Gazette’s writers, in their capacities as attorneys, local officials, and politicians, saw to it that both the General Court and a grand jury refused to cooperate. In an arrangement that presaged the later integration of newspapers and political groups, the Gazette office provided a headquarters of sorts for the Patriot leadership; for a time, Edes and Gill published the paper from rooms above Josiah Quincy’s law office. John Adams remembered a Sunday night in 1769 spent with Otis, Sam Adams, and others, “preparing for the next day’s newspaper . . . cooking up paragraphs, articles, occurrences, &c., working the political engine.” According to one legend, the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party gathered at Edes’s house before setting off on their mission.28
It was widely agreed after the Revolution that, in the words of Edes’s competitor Thomas, “no publisher of a newspaper felt a greater interest in the establishment of . . . independence . . . than Benjamin Edes; and no newspaper was more instrumental in bringing forward this important event than The Boston Gazette.” Yet it seems clear that Edes conceived of himself as the Patriot leaders’ loyal auxiliary rather than as a leader himself. In 1797, hearkening back to his glory days, Edes praised himself primarily for maintaining Adams’s “political engine” rather than driving it: “Did you, my fellow-citizens, ever find the Boston Gazette deficient . . . ? Did an OTIS at that time seek in vain to declare his principles through this channel? . . . No, fellow-citizens, the Gazette of Edes & Gill, was always subservient to the cause of Freedom.”29
Benjamin Edes’s career after the 1760s is instructive. The editor’s illustrious Boston cohorts became generals and statesmen, but no such high stations were proffered to Edes. Even so, the printer was unwilling to give up his new vocation as a Revolutionary politician. When war broke out, Edes fled to Watertown, a wanted man, but continued to publish a makeshift Gazette. Later, back in Boston, he kept the paper going during a long decline, as old contributors died, retired, or deserted the Gazette for larger political arenas. Edes took over much of the writing himself, and his newspaper more frequently gave voice to the divergent views and interests of his own artisan class. To the horror of old political friends following the conservative trend of postwar Massachusetts politics, Edes opposed the Federal Constitution and, later, the administrations of George Washington and former Gazette writer John Adams.30
Edes’s newfound independence arose from the bitterness of his experience during and after the Revolution. Like many other artisans and farmers, Edes had nearly been ruined by the economic fluctuations arising from the war. He had amassed a small fortune in increasingly worthless paper money and Continental debt certificates paid to him by Patriot customers, and like many others, he apparently sold off his securities to speculators, at a fraction of their value, to meet immediate needs. The destruction of his wealth in this manner made Edes a bitter critic of the Hamiltonian financial system: “conscious . . . that I have served my country with faithfulness, and the most disinterested zeal, I cannot but observe with regret, that thousands have become enriched by a base speculation on those services which have impoverished me and many others.” Edes’s subscription list dwindled from a high of 2,000 before the Revolution to a few hundred in the mid-1790s, as (at least in the minds of political opponents) the Gazette abandoned “that soberness and dignity, that might have rendered its old age useful and respectable.” The Gazette and the Edes family alike moved into progressively shabbier quarters until by 1801 Edes was reduced to printing shop bills with worn-out type in a room above a tinsmith’s shop. A younger printer, Joseph Buckingham, found the old man setting type himself, while an elderly daughter worked the press. “The singular sight of a woman, beating and pulling at the press, together with the aspect of destitution, that pervaded the whole apartment, presented a scene” that remained horribly vivid in Buckingham’s memory fifty years later.31
Edes was unusual among the Revolutionary printers in maintaining his political activity for so long after the war. Once the war ended, the pressure to display zealous patriotism was relieved, and most Revolutionary printers who had not died or retired sank back into their old commercialism and relative neutrality. Isaiah Thomas changed the motto of his Massachusetts Spy (now published in Worcester) from the warlike “The noble efforts of a Virtuous, Free, and United People shall extirpate Tyranny” to the impartial “Knowledge of the World is essentially necessary for every Man” and shifted focus to the commercial publishing ventures that eventually made him a wealthy man.32
The younger printers who came into the business during and after the war showed the partisanizing effects of the conflict upon the trade, yet they still hewed as close to traditional policies as they could. Printers such as George Goodwin, who took over the Hartford Connecticut Courant in 1778, or Benjamin Russell, an apprentice of Thomas’s who founded the Boston Columbian Centinel in 1784, were more forthright in their opinions than their colonial predecessors had been, but they settled into the role of reliable auxiliaries to the victorious Whig establishment, which was growing steadily more disenchanted with the democratic, localistic political fervor the Revolution had unleashed.33
In places where the Revolutionaries were more divided than Massachusetts, a somewhat more freewheeling press appeared. When the Bostonian Ebenezer Hazard visited Philadelphia in 1782, opponents and defenders of the state’s radical Constitution of 1776 were locked in a savage struggle that often involved personal defamation of the leaders on both sides. Hazard wrote back home in disgust: “The papers of this place have become the most indecent publications of the kind I have ever met with. They are now the receptacles of obscenity and filth, the vehicles of scandal, and the instruments of the most infamous abuse.”34 This was true only by contrast with the Boston press. There were only two really partisan papers in Philadelphia, Francis Bailey’s Freeman’s Journal, favored by the Constitutionalists, and Colonel Eleazer Oswald’s Independent Gazetteer, backed by the anti-Constitution forces. Most editors of this period kept the traditional low profile, allowing their politician-sponsors to slug it out under pen names.35
On the whole, then, both printers and politicians tried to continue their long relationship after the Revolution. Now that the people had replaced the British king as the source of sovereignty, the press became even more vital. American political leaders expected that newspapers that had once been instruments of resistance would now be tools of governance. The press was seen as the most important means available of managing or manufacturing public opinion, the legitimating force behind the new governments. Thomas Jefferson explained this principle in 1787, giving his advice on how Shays’ Rebellion might have been prevented:
The people are the only censors of their governors; and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the first object should be to keep that right.36
Jefferson failed to acknowledge the tension, or saw none, between his plan of keeping the people fully informed and the underlying goal of keeping public opinion “right.” As long as “right” information was transmitted, Jefferson believed, public opinion would always reach the desired conclusion.
Leaders of other nations felt less sanguine and took aggressive measures to actively guide or check public opinion. The British government had for decades, even in peacetime, used prosecution, restrictive licensing, bribery, public subsidies, and other forms of “influence” to control the flow of information on government affairs and to assure the authorities a public voice that would constantly support, explain, and apologize for their actions. In the mid-seventeenth century, it became standard practice for whoever happened to hold power in London to contract for one or more official government organs. With the Printing Act of 1662, the restored Stuart monarchy sharply limited the supply of printed matter and closely regulated its content, establishing a government monopoly on domestic political news. As mouthpieces, the Stuarts initially employed newsbooks and later the first official government publications in the larger newspaper format, the Oxford Gazette and its successor, the London Gazette.37
The government monopoly ended when the Printing Act lapsed in 1695, but succeeding governments devised more complex (but only slightly more subtle) methods of maintaining their influence over the press, beginning with the stamp tax imposed in 1712. The system of press management most familiar to eighteenth-century Americans was developed by the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s. Following the lead of opposition noblemen who had established such newspapers as The Craftsman and the London Evening Post to pillory his ministry, Walpole began an aggressive campaign of enlisting newspapers in the government’s defense. Newspapers were subsidized through direct payments, government purchase of copies, and free postage, while the services of individual journalists were purchased with appointments, sinecures, and noble titles. In some cases, opposition writers were paid to keep silent. There was even a special fund for the purpose of influencing the press, from which £50,000 was disbursed between 1731 and 1741. By these methods, Walpole kept at least four London newspapers under almost direct government control and exerted a lesser degree of influence over many others. The ministry could not completely suppress the dissemination of news and opposition political comment, but many important opposition voices were neutralized. No less a figure than Thomas Gordon, coauthor of Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig, switched from violent opposition to support of the Walpole ministry after he was appointed a commissioner of wine licenses.38
Regarding Walpolean corruption as a great threat to liberty and being avid followers of the British opposition press, the American Revolutionaries had little desire to re-create the mother country’s “hireling” press. As it turned out, there was no need to bother. The leaders of the campaign for a stronger central government in the late 1780s found the press almost as reliable without the need of a purchase price. The American press monolithically supported the Federal Convention of 1787. Few newspapers protested the conclave’s secrecy, and most heaped sycophantic praise on the great “characters” who made up the body. Many newspapers carried advance recommendations that whatever document was produced should be accepted. Though scattered articles critical of the convention were written, they were seldom reprinted in other papers. Numerous pro-convention articles, on the other hand, received nationwide exposure.39
In the ratification campaign that followed the convention, the federalists overwhelmingly dominated the press, with only twelve of the ninety-two periodicals published during the ratification debate admitting any significant number of antifederalist articles. The pro-Constitution forces loaded the other eighty publications with an immense mass of verbiage. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton’s “Federalist” essays, written as part of this newspaper campaign, made up only a tiny fraction of the output. Newspaper editors themselves were mostly the passive recipients of these writings.40
In some states, such as Connecticut and New Hampshire, there was virtually no ratification “debate” at all, so one-sided was the material that filled the newspapers. The editors of both Hartford papers, the Connecticut Courant and the American Mercury, eventually found themselves at pains to deny that they were “under the direction of certain men, who exclude everything written against the new Constitution.” Claiming that they had maintained the “liberty of the press” to all, George Goodwin and Elisha Babcock issued a joint statement contending that no antifederal pieces had been submitted to them and invited writers on that side to come forward. In the next few weeks, a few token opposing viewpoints were heard, but they were usually couched in highly deferential terms.41
The federalists showed themselves to be remarkably intolerant of contradiction in the press despite the opposition’s journalistic weakness. The ill temper with which antifederalist writings were received showed the Revolutionary gentry’s profound discomfort with airing its political differences in front of the people.42 While proponents of the new system of government could not silence its critics outright, they made it clear that they regarded newspaper criticism as unwelcome, badly intended, and probably illegitimate. Many federalists saw the Constitution as a cause in which all right-thinking and well-meaning people ought to be united and suspected the motives of any who refused to join. One Pennsylvania federalist condemned those who had opposed the “noble struggle which the brave and virtuous have been . . . making to establish a new frame of government.” The writer accused the antifederalists of failing to publicly avow their writings and reasoned from this premise that they were “conscious of the wickedness of their proceedings—that their cause is that of the devil—and of it they are truly ashamed.” This reasoning was fallacious, of course, because virtually all political essays in the period were published anonymously, though real identities were often widely known in local elite circles.43
The same feelings prompted a widespread attempt to flush out antifederalists by inducing printers to break with tradition and identify the authors of anonymous political essays. A Massachusetts paper had announced such a policy, and “Galba” in Philadelphia suggested a modification under which only antifederalists would be required to leave their names. The “patriotic gentleman” who wrote in favor of the Constitution should not “be exposed to the malevolence of those wretches who pretend to find fault with it,” while the latter ought to “be justly exposed to the contempt and indignation of their fellow citizens, as enemies and traitors to their country.”
In Georgia, an elaborate “literary register” was proposed, where writers would leave their names so that readers could find out who the “designing, specious demagogues” writing the antifederal articles were. Belying the supposed openness and egalitarianism of the “public sphere” of printed debate, the proposer of the register showed a strong interest in discovering the social status of political writers, intending to judge arguments not by their own merits but according to the stature of the person who made them. He suspected that a recent article against the Constitution had been written either by a foreigner or by some uneducated person whose mind had been “only cultivated in a drilling squad or behind the counter of a dram shop” and “ought rather to be employed in the manufactures than in the politics of his country.”
None of the proposals were carried out, probably because they seemed to confirm antifederalist warnings about the Constitution’s counterrevolutionary tendencies. Yet the fact that they were made at all suggests the un-happiness of at least some former leaders of the Revolution with the idea that the press might now sometimes be used against them. The antifederalists correctly compared the proposals to expose and shame antifederal writers to the “tar and feathers” applied to Tory journalists in previous years.44
The pro-Constitution forces never escalated to the measures that Whigs had taken against Loyalists during the Revolution, but steps were taken to silence the Constitution’s critics. The one act of violence was an attack on Thomas Greenleaf’s New-York Journal, which seems to have been spurred as much by an inadvertent insult to the pottery trade as by politics. Yet Greenleaf believed he was being pressured by federalists for giving their opponents an outlet, and he promptly lowered his paper’s tone, with apologies, after the incident. More commonly, the federalists employed quieter measures, such as having subscriptions and advertisements withdrawn from papers that published antifederalist writings or even those that merely seemed doubtful in their political complexion. In Philadelphia, for instance, a young lawyer-editor from Jamaica named Alexander Dallas was fired from his position at the Pennsylvania Herald, following federalist complaints and boycotts, not for criticizing the Constitution, but for too accurately reporting the speeches on both sides in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention.45
A long record of subservience did not stop the Revolutionary printers from carrying an exalted self-image out of their experience.46 The years after 1788 made their true place in the scheme of things much clearer. Instead of the power and honors that accrued to the lawyers, clergymen, and military officers who participated in the Revolution, most of the Revolutionary printers became forgotten men. There were no printers among the pantheon of Revolutionary heroes and statesmen who filled the First Congress. Successful forays into nonpolitical publishing allowed some of the veteran printers to avoid the penury of Benjamin Edes, but none retained their old political influence. Though they were proud to have served in the Revolution, it is doubtful that prosperous veterans such as Isaiah Thomas wanted or expected any very different aftermath. They were printers, not politicians, after all, and planned to remain so.
What did come as a shock to men like Thomas was the steady decline in the reputation and social position of their trade after the Revolution. This occurred partly because of a trend toward functional specialization in the commercial publishing industry, in which the entrepreneurial act of selecting and editing material became increasingly separate from the physical process of printing. Journeyman printers found it more and more difficult to meet their traditional goal of owning their own printing office. The trade became identified ever more firmly with its manual labor aspects, as the intellectual activities associated with publishing were taken over by educated editors and entrepreneurs who soon gained exclusive use of the title “publisher.”
Some of the first successful commercial publishers were former printers, but by the 1830s or so, this possibility had been largely foreclosed. The vast majority of apprentices and journeymen could expect to spend their lives as wage laborers. The most striking evidence of these trends was the appearance of a rudimentary labor movement among journeyman printers as early as 1778 in New York and 1786 in Philadelphia. Formal “Typographical Societies” were formed in New York in 1795 and Philadelphia in 1802, and from there spread to many other cities. In the 1830s one organization of printers tried to convince its brethren to refuse to work for editors, publishers, and other nonprinters, who were held to be merely “speculating on the labor of printers.”47
In the face of these economic changes in the commercial printing trade, the more eminent of the traditional printers turned to scholarship and a kind of nostalgia later in life. Isaiah Thomas published his History of Printing in 1810 and founded the American Antiquarian Society in 1812, in large part to preserve and memorialize the legacy of the colonial and Revolutionary printers. He and Joseph T. Buckingham, who wrote a kind of sequel to Thomas’s history, were clearly commemorating what they saw as the good old days of the American printing trade.48
Yet, despite the melancholia of the aging Revolutionary printers, the printers’ period of greatest political and cultural influence still lay ahead. During the 1790s, newspapermen would fight on the front lines, doing as much as any group to secure the right of American citizens to peacefully change their government and to implement the democratic promise of the early days of the American Revolution. Why would the traditional printers not claim this honor as well?
The answer is that both the printing trade and journalism began to split and specialize during the 1790s. Probably most printers retained their commercial and mechanical orientation, but some began to focus on publishing books and others on newspapers. The newspaper business in turn came to be divided between the profit-seeking traditionalists, serving up foreign news and commercial information to merchants, and others who specialized (or came to specialize) in political journals.49
Younger men, and new kinds of men, took up the newspaper business during the Federalist-Republican struggle, especially on the Republican side. These new journalists lacked or lost the trade-oriented attitude and life goals of the colonial and Revolutionary printers. They did not (or came not to) conceive of themselves as mere tradesmen whose primary goal was to earn a respectable economic “competency” to pass on to their children.50 Not only did they fail to shy away from political controversies, they came to find their trade’s chief attraction in politics. In short, many printers became professional politicians, or more precisely, political communicators by trade, working in a new sector of the publishing industry devoted to and subsisting on partisan politics.
Political publishing offered an escape route from the industrializing tendencies at work in the commercial sector of the trade. Especially in the smaller cities and towns, political newspapers would be published mostly out of traditional small-scale printing offices until well after the Civil War. In the world of political publishing, many poor boys with “bookish inclinations” could begin as apprentices and find their way not only to learning, but also to political influence, without the necessity of retiring into gentility like Franklin.
The emergence of this political publishing sector was directly linked to the creation of the new government and the new political structures and forces that it called into being. The political arena was now a national one, with results and requirements for which few Americans were prepared. Chief among these were the partisan divisions that quickly appeared in the First Congress, divisions that would soon develop into nascent national political parties. The needs and effects of those parties would eventually transform many American editors and their papers into actual working parts of the political system. The editors would in turn transform the system itself. As their brother printers slipped back into the category of “mechanics” or hewed to the trade’s traditional ideal of impartiality and commercialism, the Republican journalists of the 1790s would become the mechanics of the American party system, the forerunners of the political spokesmen, manipulators, and operatives who would dominate American politics evermore.
This tortuous process began with the emergence of the first national partisan editors, whose Philadelphia newspapers became associated with the party divisions that coalesced in Congress over the competing blueprints of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson for the national future.