The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

Foreword by David Waldstreicher
Roger Mellen’s book addresses an enduring paradox of our past. How did
the gentry-dominated society of the largest colony become the seed ground not
only for political leadership but also of a lively political culture characterized not by
consensus, as some historians emphasized, but by publicly expressed dissent?
Mellen finds the answer in a livelier and more important set of newspapers
that gave Virginians of various classes, and some women, a venue for their not
always polite opinions. He enables us to understand how a slave society could come
to embrace press freedom, setting the stage for Virginians’ important efforts to
make freedom of the press a national policy during the early republic.
His findings fit well with the emphasis on conflict during the revolutionary
era in Virginia, from Rhys Isaac’s classic treatment in The Transformation of
Virginia, 1740-1790 to the more recent studies by Woody Holton and Michael
McDonnell. He departs in making us aware that Virginia’s counties, even with their
all-important court days, were not solely isolated, rural, face-to-face societies, any
more than the colonial experience, or the Revolution, can be written from the
perspective of the streets of Boston, where it is easier to imagine incendiary
pamphlets being written and distributed. The argument for the press’s importance
is unyielding, in Mellen’s hands, but he is also very careful to set the complex and
gradual context for the rise in reading and the social consequences.
That context is easier to understand armed with the notion of “media
ecology,” in the parlance Mellen borrows, or the idea, associated with media scholar
Marshall McLuhan, that the form is as important as the content. Even in Virginia,
even before the American Revolution, newspapers invited colonists who could read
them into a broader world, and a “two-way dialogue” that had implications for their
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