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