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

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many as four or five coffeehouses in Williamsburg, although not necessarily all at
once, according to a research report based on archeological and documentary
evidence. 73 The coffeehouses did sometimes serve liquor, they were often the site of
gambling, and commonly the main entertainment was the political discussions.
Both coffeehouses and taverns were places to read and discuss the news. “Yet
taverns were far more than places to imbibe,” as David Waldstreicher wrote, “Men
repaired there to read the newspapers and discuss politics: they were ideal sites for
these public acts of affiliation,” such as toasts against importation or for Revolution.
These taverns and coffeehouses were important locations for the development of a
critical political culture. 74
Coffee and tea were not luxuries that Devereux Jarratt and his poor family
enjoyed in his youth. He wrote that such extravagant living such as that was only
for the “gentle folk.” Jarratt may not have been debating politics in the
coffeehouses by the time of the Stamp Act, but he was involved in one dissenting
movement. Jarratt returned from England in 1763 as a priest of the Church of
England, but he was one of the few who supported the “New Light” Methodist
reform movement. Jarratt read the sermons of George Whitefield and actively
supported evangelical conversions, although he remained in the established
church. The movement of religious dissidence is the fourth cultural shift observed
in the Virginia prints. These new evangelical beliefs practiced by Baptists and
Methodists in colonial Virginia were a form of dissent against the established
church and faith, empowering the poor and uneducated and questioning the
73 Goodwin, “Coffee-House,” 30.
74 David Waldstreicher, In The Midst Of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism,
1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at
Williamsburg, VA, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 26.