America, 1750-1820

6 America, – David Copeland Between  and  America underwent a series of extensive poli- tical upheavals in which the press played a pivotal role. Beginning as colonies of Grea t Britain, America declared its independence in  fol- lowing a tumultuous ten years of protest against British laws and taxes. After eight years of revolution, Britain agreed to a peace that allowed the newly formed United States to develop its unique governmental sys- tem. From the end of the Revolution through to the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans transformed their country from a loosely organised confederation of states into a nation with a strong cen- tral government and a powerful constitution. In all these developments, a fast-growing newspaper press acted both as witness to events and as an active participant in the political process. As America’s public sphere developed and the voice of public opinion became more dominant, the press played a crucial role in shaping this new political world. On  January , Judge Alexander Addison warned in Boston’s Columbian Centinel, ‘Give to any set of men the command of the press, and you give them the command of the country, for you give them the com- mand of public opinion, which commands everything.’ Addison wrote his letter to the Federalist newspaper at a time when America’s two main political ideologies – Federalism and Republicanism – vied for control of the United States, itself scarcely a decade old. Addison’s Federalist party, which favoured a strong, central government and controlled the presidency, was locked in battle with the Republicans, who wanted less centralisation and more power for individual states. Whilst politicians debated the issues, however, arguably the most important debate took place in America’s press, since, as one writer remarked, ‘[W]ithout polit- ical knowledge the people cannot secure their liberties, and this necessary information they receive by the medium of News-Papers.’  Six months before Addison wrote his letter to the Centinel, President John Adams sponsored a series of new laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. At the heart of this measure was an attempt to silence newspapers opposed to the Federalist Administration. Anyone  America –  who wrote, uttered, printed or published any false, scandalous or ma- licious comments against the government was to be punished by fine and imprisonment. The Alien and Sedition Acts appeared to be a direct violation of America’s First Amendment, which stated, ‘Congress shall make no law .abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’ That Adams and the Federalists felt this law was necessary tells us much about the importance of newspapers in influencing American society during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It also explains the comments of the Republican printer William Duane, who was as keen as many politicians to influence opinion. ‘The fact is’, Duane wrote, ‘that my pen and press are the only formidable weapons I have ever used.’  The prominence of newspapers and other forms of print reflected both the breadth of popular involvement in public debate and the widespread use of the press to facilitate and promote this process. But it was not just the backcountry farmer, middle-class merchant or elite, educated planters, lawyers and politicians who had access to, and used the public forum afforded by, the press.  High literacy rates in America, which ex- ceeded  per cent in some regions by , meant that even the poor were more often literate than not,  and ensured that access to the public sphere was restricted neither by gender nor race. Thus people of colour and women could also voice their opinions and shape the public sphere to some degree, as could those who were motivated solely by religious beliefs.  Although voting and other forms of formal political involvement was limited to white males, women were active in shaping society and had been for decades. America’s female population had always been lit- erate, and by the nineteenth century, literacy rates between the sexes were nearly identical.  When one also considers the subscription penetration of newspapers, and factors such as women’s role as educators of chil- dren in the home, there seems little doubt that they were avid readers of newspapers and would have discussed their contents.  Whilst newspapers had a wide audience, determining how many Americans actively contributed to press debate is difficult, particularly because of the use of pseudonyms and common absence of any form of signature on essays and letters. Especially in the colonial period and the era before the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts in , many writ- ers avoided using their real names. Anonymity protected them from libel charges and allowed them to be more vituperative in their assaults. But it served another purpose, too. Anonymity also reflected a commitment to a particular cause or argument, rather than an appeal to personal author- ity. Thus, John Dickinson’s ‘Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania’ of  and  represented the mass of hardworking colonials – farmers, merchants, shippers – not the elite of society from which he came. His  David Copeland arguments concerning a boycott of British goods in an effort to influence British tax policies were of more importance than the true identity of the writer, despite the fact that Dickinson, as a well-known and influential Philadelphia lawyer, had a certain amount of individual status. Similarly, in the pivotal years of  and , discussion of the direction which the new Republic should take captured significant space in the newspa- per press, as Federalists and Anti-Federalists debated the philosophical basis for the new nation. Some of America’s greatest and best-known thinkers – Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay – penned The Federalist Papers. Seventy-seven of the eighty-five essays appeared in newspapers throughout America under the pseudonyms ‘a Citizen of New York’ and ‘Publius’. Yet despite a lackof evidence concerning both the readers and writers of newspapers, it seems likely that the public sphere in America was broader than that of most European nations, and that the American press was par- ticularly powerful. As one Vermont writer stated, ‘All ranks and descrip- tions of men, read, study, and endeavour to comprehend the intelligence they [newspapers] convey .as if they were sanctioned by irrefragable authority.’  In common with European states, however, the American public sphere was not owned solely by a bourgeois class,  nor was it nar- rowly devoted to any form of ‘rational-critical debate’, since Americans cleverly mixed the emotion that surrounded the volatile issues of inde- pendence and nationhood with Enlightenment rationalism in the writings that appeared in the public prints.  According to Michael Schudson, America did not fit into Habermas’s model of a rational-critical sphere where public debate shaped political policy because there was little po- litical involvement by the press or by the populace at this time, whilst papers only reacted in times of political crisis.  He notes that few people with the franchise chose to vote during the first forty years of the United States’ existence, and cites the workof Stephen Botein, which claims that printers were reluctant to take sides during America’s formation, and only did so when forced.  Schudson believes that news was chosen to avoid controversy, and that printers sought to present material that was a safe alternative to political debate. For eighteenth-century printers, he argues, the more remote the news was and the less local connection there was, the better.  This approach, however, misses the intricacies of news dissemina- tion in eighteenth-century America. As Richard D. Brown has pointed out, America’s naturally pluralistic society produced a complicated sys- tem for sharing information. Brown notes that word of mouth, public ceremony and address, coupled with printing, all combined to shape society.  Newspapers throughout the eighteenth century, and even into America –  the nineteenth, sometimes found it less necessary to discuss local issues than those with more holistic implications because of alternative local oral networks and ceremonies. This did not mean, however, that print – and specifically newspapers – played a secondary role to the oral dissemi- nation of information throughout our period. Nor does it mean that local issues were not discussed in newspapers. Thus, the events of the s surrounding the French and Indian War (America’s name for its part in the Seven Years War) propelled newspapers to a position of prominence in terms of the spread of information because local, trans-colonial and inter- national events all had the potential for direct repercussions throughout America. Although the French and Indian War proved a signi ficant tur ning point for American newspapers, the written dissemination of news had begun to increase in prominence much earlier. Handwritten newsletters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which were circulated among the clergy, merchants and others set the stage for the introduction of public prints. Benjamin Harris stated that he was beginning Publick Occurrences in , in part, so ‘That people every where may better understand the Circumstances of Publique Affairs, both abroad and at home’ and to stop the ‘many false reports’ being spread by New England’s oral network.  Even though John Campbell’s Boston News-Letter, begun in , often published news up to a year old, it assumed a growing importance in the information-dispersal networkof New England. One letter-writer from Harvard in , for example, simply mentioned read- ing about the news rather than commenting on it because both he and his father subscribed to Boston’s newspaper and were ‘informed by this weeks Newsletter’ of the events.  As the number of newspapers grew in specific locales during the s and s, print culture began to do more than supplement oral tra- ditions. In towns with multiple newspapers, such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia, printers offered readers a wide range of topics and issues. Moreover, they began to provide a forum for debate, such as that surrounding the itinerant preacher George Whitefield in . Newspa- pers, rather than the oral communication network, stimulated discussion and sustained it, even though print did not supplant oral communica- tion altogether.  When newspapers were delivered to specific commu- nities, according to a New Jersey account, ‘one subscriber would read it [the newspaper] on the evening of its arrival and pass it over to his neighbor the next morning’.  Similarly, people would go to taverns to borrow newspapers once they arrived in a town or listen there as the paper was read aloud, as the growing ties between regions in colonial America heightened the population’s interest in both local and national affairs.   David Copeland Gradually, local news became an important part of shared information, both because its appearance in a paper gave the news legitimacy and pro- vided a way to disseminate it to other regions through the exchange of newspapers by printers and because the issues being discussed on local levels had national repercussions.  To say, as Schudson does, that the press was not involved in political dialogue unless dragged there is therefore unlikely. America ’s printers included controversial information in their newspapers, which is why Publick Occurrences lasted just one issue in  (falling victim to ad- ministrative censorship), and why printers and editors in the eighteenth century believed their publications needed to stimulate debate within the public sphere. As William Cobbett said in his Porcupine’s Gazette and Daily Advertiser in , ‘Professions of impartiality I shall make none,’ adding that any editor that did not actively involve his newspaper in the politi- cal issues of the day was ‘a poor passive fool, and not an editor’.  Philip Freneau declared in the same decade that ‘public opinion sets the bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign of every free one.’  And a host of printers from  until the Revolution agreed with Benjamin Franklin’s famous woodcut, ‘JOIN, or DIE’, and promoted the unity of the colonies and colonials in the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act cr isis, and the prelude to the Revolution itself. It has been argued that because eighteenth-century assemblies con- ducted much of their business in secret – only occasionally publishing their proceedings in an official journal – America’s public sphere was limited and its openness questionable.  Yet there is little to indicate that such attempts at secrecy had much impact on the press’s discussion of political proceedings. Although delegates to the Constitutional Congress in Philadelphia in  voted ‘That nothing spoken in the House be printed, or otherwise published or communicated without leave’,  news- papers discussed the delegates attending the convention, the significance of what was taking place, the election of George Washington as President, the form the new government might take, and the weaknesses of the old government under the Articles of Confederation during the convention.  In the same year, Congress authorised the Secretary of State to select newspapers to publish the laws and resolutions it passed. Congress sub- sequently expanded the number of papers that published its proceedings and even added a German-language edition to the authorised list. By , it mandated that at least one newspaper in each state – more if needed – would be selected to publish legislature.  Newspapers were therefore able to both report and comment on proceedings with relative freedom. They thus allowed individuals at all levels to become part of the public sphere and ‘join in debate of issues bearing on state authority’.  America –  The fact that voting numbers were low, therefore, is of less importance to the existence of a public sphere than the degree and nature of public debate that tookplace in other arenas. In this respect, America can be seen as sharing many similarities with several of the European countries examined in this volume, and England in particular. Indeed, it was because America developed as a group of British colonies that its newspapers followed the pattern and practice of newspapers there in other respects too. The first American effort at producing a newspaper, Boston’s Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, came eighty- three years after initial British colonisation in . Benjamin Harris’s paper officially fell victim to licensing, as the Governor’s Council of Massachusetts Bay invoked the instructions given to it by parliament in . ‘Forasmuch as great inconvenience may arise by liberty of printing within our said ter ritory under your government, ’ the directive issued to all colonial governors until  stated, ‘you are to provide by all neces- sary orders that no person keep any printing-press for printing, nor that any book, pamphlet or other matter whatsoever be printed without your especial leave and license first obtained.’  Parliament allowed licensing to lapse in England in , but American newspapers operated under the official shackles of licensing for the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Until that time, the phrase ‘Printed by Authority’ in the paper’s nameplate indicated that its licence to print news had the approval of the colonial government. While licensing affected newspaper publication when there was only one newspaper in America, the practice never truly stopped printers from printing what they wanted once competition for readers began in the s. Printers quickly followed English practices of layout and emulated the essays of Trenchard, Gordon, and others. The subject matter of opinion pieces in newspapers varied, but be- fore the middle of the eighteenth century, most dealt with education, medicine, religion, and issues concerning correct social behaviour, in- cluding marriage. As America grew more populous and economically independent, political issues became the central focus of opinion in news- papers, especially in the twenty-five years before the Revolution. But politics also played a role in many of the issues surrounding education, medicine and religion. As early as , for example, a smallpox epidemic spurred a medical debate with political and religious overtones in Boston. Competing factions used letters and essays to discuss the validity of in- oculation, and their debates also included the control of the colony’s government and religious establishments.  War was a more pressing topic of debate from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. From , newspapers printed nearly every obtainable piece of information about the fighting in America, and did the same with news concerning battles  David Copeland between Britain and France in any part of the world during the Seven Years War. American newspapers presented a comprehensive national and international picture of events for all who read the papers or heard their contents discussed in public places.  Moreover, the press sought to influence the country’s managing of its international affairs. Printers in  and , for example, pushed for acceptance of the Albany Plan of Union. Newspapers published speeches from colonial assemblies and essays from anonymous writers detailing the horrors of what would hap- pen to America if the French and Indians were not stopped. Creating a universal voice that opposed French aggression in America was not dif- ficult, but printers were doing more than this, even if they did not realise it. They were making the press indispensable to public debate through practices such as verifying sources of news, supporting causes and urging adoption of political action. Events in the s thus paved the way for the press’s growing role in shaping public debate and popular politics in America for years to come.  By , Patriot leaders realised that the national agenda could be shaped by what appeared in the press, which is why John Adams described the workof the printers of the Boston Gazette as ‘a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles, occurrences, &c., working the political engine’.  By this point, printers were also more conscious of their influ- ence. The New-York Journal printer, John Holt, wrote to Samuel Adams in the early days of  that ‘It was by means of News papers that we receiv’d and spread the Notice of the tyrannical designs formed against America and kindled a spirit that has been sufficient to repel them.’  The press, therefore, was widely acknowledged as a shaper of political culture and an agenda-setter for public debate. As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in : What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revo- lution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people .The records of the thirteen legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers in all the colonies, ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of Parliament over the colonies.  One sees some proof of Adams’ observation by examining coverage of the Boston Massacre of . Coloured woodcuts by Paul Revere de- picting Red Coats firing into an innocent crowd of Bostonians printed in a handbill, coupled with inflammatory descriptions of the massacre in the Boston Gazette, transformed an event provoked by Bostonians into an act of aggression by British troops. As time passed, the Boston Massacre tookon a meaning of its own thanks to the press. Isaiah Thomas of the America –  Massachusetts Spy, for example, published remembrances of the massacre yearly.  The entire event was slowly transformed into part of America’s cultural fabric, taking on new meaning as issues changed. In , for example, Crispus Attucks, an African American and one of those killed in the King Street confrontation, became a symbol for civil rights.  Not surprisingly, participation in the public sphere increased as America made the transition from colony to nation. In political battles between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, for example, Saul Cornell has noted that Anti-Federalists from all social and economic strata partici- pated in the printed debate over the form of government the United States should adopt.  While this is true, it did not necessarily mean active in- volvement by all Americans as correspondents, letter-writers or essayists – rather, that the press was at least presumed to be open to all. Benjamin Franklin, along with most other American printers, realised this early on. Franklin acknowledged that printers were the sole proprietors of their presses, but he said, ‘they willingly allow, that any one is entitled to the Use of it, who thinks it necessary to offer his Sentiments on disputable Point to the Publick’.  He also believed that when issues of public im- portance were at stake, ‘both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick’. Franklin believed if that happened, then truth – by which he meant the general good – would always win out.  In , the anonymous B reiterated Franklin’s ideas when he wrote in a New Yorkessay, ‘Public grievances can never be redressed but by public complaints; and they cannot well be made without the P.’  The relationship between the press and the public sphere was clearly a symbiotic one. Discussion of the issues of the day tookplace in coffee houses, taverns and even on public streets. But the catalyst for debate was almost always the printed word in newspapers, which according to James Carey was key to the formation of the public sphere in America.  Increas- ingly, after the French and Indian War, the press assumed a major role in shaping public debate. As a French diplomat pointed out in , ‘They [Amer icans] have printed news at once; they [newspapers] are read avidly in the Circles, the taverns and public places. They dispute the articles; they examine from all sides, since all the individuals without exception take part in public affairs and are naturally talkers and questioners.’  Whilst other forms of printed material such as pamphlets and broadsides remained important, much of what appeared in them ended up shared throughout America in the newspaper press. This was especially true in the case of pamphlets. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, for example, was enormously successful in this form, but it still found its way into newspa- pers as a way to disseminate the pamphlet’s main points quickly.  Paine’s other influential writing of the Revolution, The Crisis, appeared first in the  David Copeland Pennsylvania Journal in three instalments before becoming a pamphlet. The same is true of The Federalist Papers, which were expanded slightly into pamphlet form in , but were introduced to Americans via New Yorknewspapers and reprints of the essays in the papers of other states. As the number of daily newspapers in America increased, it became more easy and efficient to use newspapers to shape opinion rather than other printed matter. The use of pamphlets and broadsides did not end, but they – like their readers – were increasingly dependent on newspapers. Thus, when Federalists in Albany, New York, wanted to promote their candidates for election in , they produced a broadside listing their candidates that referred its readers backto the Albany Gazette for more in-depth information.  As part of the colonial inheritance, ownership of newspapers followed British tradition from their emergence in the late seventeenth century: they were run by printers, postmasters or influential individuals who contracted the paper’s production to a printer. Most vied for the royal printing contracts of their respective colonies. The competition for this business often produced odd results. In Virginia, for example, the assem- bly decreed all printing would go to the Virginia Gazette. As a result, every paper published in the colony before the Revolution was named Virginia Gazette, with several versions sometimes in direct competition and dis- tinguished only by the name of the printer. By , increases in sales meant that printers did not necessarily need a government contract to produce a profitable newspaper. Printers generally expected a weekly cir- culation of between  and  papers, and larger cities produced more than one newspaper. Boston, for example, had four newspapers in , with a combined circulation of ,. This means that the population- to-newspaper-issue ratio was seven to one.  Newspaper penetration into society may have been even greater in the s and later, however, as Americans shared their newspapers and read and discussed them at public houses. One New Yorkwriter explained that newspapers were ‘borrowed one to another to the distance perhaps of twenty miles’, while another said America had become ‘a nation of newspaper readers’.  As has been noted, the growth of newspapers from the middle of the eighteenth century coincided with increased public interest in political issues, first prompted by the French and Indian War. By the time France surrendered Canada in , the colonies’ English-language papers had grown from eleven to nineteen, an increase of  per cent and a growth rate twice that of the population from  to .  Following the war, the number of newspapers grew steadily to the beginning of the Revolu- tion in , when forty papers were published in America. That num- ber fell to thirty-five by . Newspaper production quickly rebounded, America –  however, with a daily newspaper appearing for the first time in .In colonial America, most papers appeared weekly, although printers at- tempted more frequent publication as early as . For the most part, these attempts failed, probably for a number of reasons including scarcity of paper and news, coupled with a lackof financial resources. However, printers did issue multiple weekly issues on occasion, when they felt the news of the day warranted additional production (such as during the French and Indian War and again in the s). The political debate surrounding the adoption of the Constitution and Bill of Rights between  and  helped spur the growth of newspapers further, with ninety-one being regularly published in . That number included eight dailies and produced a total circulation of about ,. Following the Revolution, Americans moved westward, filling the territor y between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River. This migrant population was accompanied by newspaper printers who set up presses when new communities were founded. By , the number of newspapers increased to  with twenty-four dailies and a total circulation of ,. Before the Revolution, American newspa- pers were located along the Atlantic seaboard in towns with water access to the Atlantic Ocean. Water access remained important to the spread of news after the war, but twenty-one newspapers were published west of the mountains in .By, newspaper production crossed the Mississippi River,  and in ,  papers were printed in America, increasing to  in  with some printing , copies per issue: a number that would jump to more than , in less than six years.  ‘In no other country on earth,’ wrote the editor Noah Webster in , ‘not even in Great-Britain, are newspapers so generally circulated among the body of people, as in America.’  As the number of newspapers grew during the early nineteenth century, so, too, did the level of political affiliation shown by the press. In , for example, all but fifty-six of the  newspapers in the United States were openly aligned with a political party. The politicisation of the press and its role in shaping policy changed radically during our period because of po- litical upheaval, war and the developing gover nment of the United States. In the early eighteenth century, newspaper printers usually advocated impartiality and were generally united in their outlookon the American situation. By , however, printers began to develop fierce loyalties and commonly became openly partisan. Following the Revolution, and as the party system grew, both politicians and newspaper printers started new papers to support specific political agenda and to sway public opinion. In the decade following the constitution’s ratification, the country witnessed a battle of competing political ideologies. The principal formulators of [...]... Returns (New York, ), p  America –   See Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, – (Chapel Hill, NC, ), pp , –  Richard D Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, – (New York and London, ), p   See, for example, Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power... de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,  vols (New York, ), vol , pp –  Jefferson to Madison,  February , in Paul L Ford, The Works of Thomas Jefferson,  vols (New York, –), vol , p   Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage, pp –  American Watchman and Delaware Republican,  October , quoted in Sloan and Startt (eds.), The Media in America, p   Village Record... compared to those in Europe may have been due in part to an ideological  David Copeland reluctance to stifle public opinion At the same time that Patriots were bullying the Tory printers of revolutionary America, they espoused freedom for America’s presses in their official documents As early as , the Continental Congress, in an attempt to gain Canadian support for its efforts to establish a new North... section are based on personal research; Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (New York, ); Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic; and Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America, th edn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, ), p   American Minerva (New York),  December   Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage, pp –  Jeffery A Smith, Printers and Press Freedom:... powerful role that the press had assumed in American society This was evident to Isaiah Thomas, variously an apprentice, printer and editor from  until , who published The History of Printing in America, the nation’s first media history, in  Thomas observed that newspapers  David Copeland have become the vehicles of discussion, in which the principles of government, the interest of nations, . Tradition in America, – (Chapel Hill, NC, ), pp. , –.  Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America,. and used the public forum afforded by, the press.  High literacy rates in America, which ex- ceeded  per cent in some regions by , meant that even