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

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which openly invaded the first [liberty], and threatened a great diminution of the
last [profits], provoked their united zealous opposition.” All continued to publish
without stamps, although some suspended printing briefly. “Never again in like
circumstances,” Schlesinger notes, “would the press present so united a front.” His
premise regarding the unanimity of printers’ opposition to the Stamp Act has since
been challenged. 19
Susan Macall Allen’s dissertation on colonial printers and the Stamp Act
concluded that while no American printers actually supported the tax, their
opposition was not as universal as Schlesinger claimed. She suggested that he erred
by treating printers as a monolithic group. Allen took a quantitative approach, and
suggested that printers in strong financial positions tended to oppose the tax, while
those on less solid financial ground were more often neutral. With no extensive
financial records or newspaper circulation numbers available, she based her financial
estimates only on the amount of paper used for books, broadsides, and pamphlets
printed in 1765. She categorizes Maryland’s Green as very strong financially, and
Virginia’s Royle as merely strong, but not as financially solid as was Green. This
would tend to support the idea that Green was in better position to oppose the
British government in this dispute than was Royle. 20 The research that follows here
suggests a refinement of her findings for the Chesapeake region printers. The
printer who was more financially dependent on—and thus more controlled by the
royal governor—was less firm in his opposition to the stamp tax.
In May 1765, firebrand Patrick Henry succeeded in getting support for
some strong declarations against the Stamp Act, but many in Virginia would not
19 David Ramsey, The History of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: R. Aitken & Son,
1789), 1:61-62, quoted in Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence, 61-79, and 82.
20 Susan Macall Allen, “The Impact of the Stamp Act of 1765 on Colonial American
Printers: Threat or Bonanza?” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1996), 1-6, 24,
and 67.