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

omitted to publish them; others not so timid, but doubtful of the
consequences of publishing newspapers without stamps, omitted the
titles, or altered them as an evasion. 17
167
Thomas suggested that opposition to the tax was not universal, but rather ranged
from opposition to neutrality, with no American printers actually supporting the
act, but some rather weak in their opposition. In New Hampshire, Thomas reports,
some patriots thought the one press there was under the influence of crown officials
and brought in a second printer just before the Stamp Act. 18
Other historians have posited that the Stamp Act’s impact on printed
material generated a universal opposition to it from colonial printers. Historians
have also seen a greater influence on the colonial population from the printed
opposition thus generated and disseminated. Using Thomas as a major source,
Arthur Schlesinger wrote a groundbreaking study regarding the importance of
printers during the American Revolution and how the Stamp Act actually unified
their support for the patriot cause. His analysis suggested not only the importance
of American newspapers in rallying opposition to new British taxes, but argued that
the Stamp Act changed the actual role of printers in colonial American. This
transformed them, he argued, from merely transmitters of ideas to actual makers of
opinion. The Stamp Act was an unprecedented internal tax and “as though
deliberately to provoke resistance, it saddled them [the taxes] largely on the printers,
lawyers and merchants who, along with the clergy, formed the most literate and
vocal elements of the population.” He claimed that newspaper opposition was
unanimous, “throughout the colonies the printers in one manner or another defied
the Stamp Act.” Schlesinger quotes David Ramsay’s 1789 work, The History of the
American Revolution, in saying that printers generally favored liberty but were more
interested in profits. He claimed they universally opposed this tax: “A stamp duty,
17 Thomas, History of Printing in America, 16-17.
18 Ibid., 332.