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

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government income and control were key influences. 2 The press in colonial Virginia
began as a royally sanctioned and controlled institution, paid for and licensed by the
government in power. While printing was limited to one government-sanctioned
press, there could be no real press freedom. As historian of the book Hugh Amory
noted, printing was reflective of the power structure of the colony within which it
existed. In Puritan New England, about which Amory was writing, printing was
initially licensed and sanctioned, serving rather than challenging the power
structure. As historian Jack Greene wrote in his exploration of the shifting of power
in the southern colonies, government support for a printer was crucial in such
colonies as Virginia before a strong, commercial economy developed. He suggested
that the royal governor had a great deal of control over what was printed prior to
1766. 3 By the 1760s, the pressures of trade and merchandising altered the function
of the press from merely duplicating official governmental and religious works to
providing a wider range of commercial output. Mass-produced printed products
were an important part of the growing consumer demand and rising marketplace
that constituted a consumer revolution, an important preface to political change.
Newspapers—as part of this increased consumption—helped expand civic
discourse. 4
With a second press and consumer pressure, the very character of printing
and the idea of a “free press” transformed. With a wider range of content, print was
freed to function as a medium for the “diffusion of useful knowledge.” 5 As Amory
2 Berkeley’s superiors were the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations in London. See
Chapter 2 for early history of the Virginia and Maryland presses. William Parks was invited by the
lower house to move his printing office from Annapolis to Williamsburg, and paid him a
government salary. Journals of the House of Burgesses (June 10, 1732), ed., John Pendleton Kennedy
(Richmond: The Colonial Press, E. Waddey Co, 1905-15), 6:141-2.
3 Greene, Quest for Power, 287-289.
4 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, xvi, 133, and 248.
5 Amory, “Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1683-1713,” in Amory and Hall
Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, 83-116.