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

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that additional indictments for 37 people should be issued immediately, “so that
they may suffer for their presumption.” If not, he threatened to sell his estate and
move to another part of the world where his dignity might be better supported. 57
Several important points are apparent here. Satire had become an effective tool for
“reducing ‘great men’ to disposable size,” 58 something certainly inconsistent with the
traditional deference to such men. The public reading the newspapers valued press
freedom: they saw the Virginia papers as being free because now there were two
papers that were free from control by the governor. Libel suits by powerful
government figures such as Byrd were seen as a threat to press liberty. These
developments support the notion that Virginians did have an expansive view of press
freedom that goes well beyond merely a lack of prior censorship.
Wilkes and Press Freedom
Domestic dissent in England against the government there became visible
in the Virginia and Maryland Gazettes as the Stamp Act crisis hit colonial shores in
the mid-1760s. As Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and others have written, British
opposition thought—the “real whigs,” or “country party”—influenced early
American leaders, perhaps even more than the ideas from Locke or classical
republican writings. Historians reached a newer understanding of the transatlantic
nature of political thinking and the media that transmit such ideas. In this view,
corrupt ministers conspired against traditional English freedoms, threatening not
only the liberty of British radicals such as John Wilkes, but also the liberty of the
colonists. 59 Americans saw the Stamp Act as directly threatening colonial liberty by
57 Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon, Nov. 6, 1766), 1.
58 Olson, “Zenger Case Revisited,” 227. Satire not only bonded its readers, but she suggested
such mockery of the elites also helped to “shrink” them in status.
59 Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968), Bailyn, Ideological
Origins Of The American Revolution, Wood, The Creation Of The American Republic, 1776-1787
(Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg,
Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1969), and Wood, The Radicalism of the American
Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991).