Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

the royal continental monopoly when its former governor Alexander Spotswood
became deputy postmaster general in 1732. All in all, the Crown was
no more able than Hamilton to make the postal service self-sufficient, and it
continued to lose money.
The royal postmasters soon found a peculiarly unfortunate way to use their
posts to enrich their personal coffers. The law made no provision for admission
of newspapers to the mails, and so the various postmasters adopted the
custom of publishing their own newspapers, circulating them in the mails,
and prohibiting the post riders from delivering any competing papers. The
effect on freedom of the press may well be imagined. Not that the content of
the press was free anyway. Indeed, the first newspaper in America, the Boston
Public Occurrences, had been issued by Benjamin Harris in 1690 and was
suppressed by the governor and Council after the first issue for being critical
of the war being prosecuted against France. The excuse was that the paper
was unlicensed and therefore illegal.*
The first continuous newspaper in the colonies was the Boston News-Letter,
a weekly founded in 1704 by Boston postmaster John Campbell. Campbell's
paper, which kept carefully away from political criticism, was warmly
approved and assisted by the Massachusetts authorities, by whom it was
licensed despite the ending of press licensing in the mother country in 1695.
Campbell asked for and obtained several governmental subventions for his
News-Letter; his editorial policies were in keeping with this cozy relationship.
When the tyrannical and widely hated ex-governor Joseph Dudley died in
1720, the News-Letter wildly exalted the deceased as "the glory of [his
country]; early its darling, always its ornament, and in his age its crown." It
was not until 1758, upon orders of Benjamin Franklin, deputy postmaster
general for the colonies, that the repressive system of prohibiting the mails to
the postmasters' competitors was ended, and the post was ordered to accept all
newspapers at a uniform rate.
John Campbell's toadying weekly remained the sole newspaper in the colonies
until about 1720, around which year two new papers were opened in
Boston. One was the Boston Gazette, begun by Campbell's successor as postmaster
and continued in turn by each succeeding postal officer. Campbell's old
News-Letter, however, continued to be as fawning as the official organ of the
royal postmaster. On the other hand, the other new Boston newspaper, the
New England Courant, begun by Benjamin Franklin's older brother James,
was a hard-hitting, critical, and unlicensed publication. The Franklins soon
lined up the Courant with the lower house against tyrannical intrusions by the
governor and the Council. The Courant could remain unlicensed because in
the spring of 1721 Governor Shute had urged the legislature to pass a law for
*A licensing requirement for all publications had long been in effect in Massachusetts,
and had effectively prevented the publication of "seditious" literature for over
twenty years.
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