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

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revenues, but it also served to restrict newspaper circulation. 3 Even the colonies had
used stamp taxes: Massachusetts passed its own stamp tax in 1755, New York in
1757. The 1765 act was different, however. It was both an internal tax, rather than
a tax on trade (which colonists had learned to accept), and it was viewed as taxation
without representation. It was enacted by a Parliament lacking any delegates from
the colonies. Of greater importance for publicity and propaganda, it also hit
American printers hard and in the process radicalized them. This virtually assured
that all the colonists would be well-informed about why this tax should never be
paid. 4
Contemporaries saw the tax as intentionally aimed at sources of dissidence,
and some historians agree. John Adams wrote in the Boston Gazette that the
ministry was intentionally trying “to strip us in a great measure of the means of
knowledge, by loading the press, the colleges, and even an almanack and a
newspaper, with restraints and duties.” 5 With the price going up, printed material
would not be distributed as widely, nor as far down the economic ladder. If
newspapers were more expensive, the poorest members of society could not afford
them. Michael Warner theorized that “it was an attempt by authority to curtail civil
liberty” by restricting press freedom. 6 Historians, British records, and Grenville’s
papers do not, however, give evidence to support this claim. Whatever the intent,
by challenging the printers’ viability, the tax had the effect of strengthening the ties
3 Newspapers in England were taxed up until 1855, from Barker, Newspapers, Politics and
English Society, 1 and 65-68.
4 Schlesinger, Prelude, 68. Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 307.
5 Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Boston Gazette, Aug. 26, 1765,
from The Works of John Adams, edited by Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1851-1865) 3:464, also found in Schlesinger, Prelude, 70.
6 Warner, Letters of the Republic, 69.