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

191
“Printers are educated in the Belief that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides
ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick.” The Stamp
Act directly threatened the printers’ business by raising the prices of their
products, encouraging many of them to abandon impartiality. In addition,
political writing became a hot seller, making it financially worthwhile to take a
more radical stand with their printed products. Most printers, Botein suggested,
abandoned neutrality and chose sides, the majority opting for the more popular
patriots’ position. However, Botein suggested that printers for the most part did
not become partisan until the decade after the Stamp Act, until the Revolutionary
controversy was well-developed. In Virginia and Maryland, the printers became
clearly supportive of the patriot position by 1766. Along with other historians,
Botein viewed colonial American newspapers as being driven by the marketplace.
Commercial concerns, not political ideas, drove Franklin’s concept of press
liberty: “printers were attracted to the principle because it suited their business
interests to serve all customers.” In Virginia as in other colonies, the idea of a
press open to all who would pay to express their ideas in the commercial
marketplace helped to both expand the reading world and create the foundation
for a new concept of liberty of the press. 81
…
By 1765, civic discourse in Virginia—driven by the print media of the
newspaper and pamphlets—had increased and moved beyond the elites. The
expanding consumer marketplace helped to fuel this expansion. A new public
discourse critical of government began to flower in the eighteenth century. It began
81 Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’,” 150-21. Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution” in
The Press and the American Revolution, ed. Bailyn, Bernard and John B. Hench (Worcester:
American Antiquarian Society, 1980), 12-42. Franklin, from “Apology for Printers,” first printed
in the Pennsylvania Gazette of June 10, 1731, quoted in Botein, “Printers and the American
Revolution,” 16-23. Last quotation from Botein, 19, also quoting from The Autobiography of
Benjamin Franklin, eds. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven: 1964), 195-196.