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

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expand, grow in importance, and change over the course of the seventeenth-
century. While printed material traveled with the first English settlers to Virginia, it
was then primarily an elite phenomenon. The printed materials that were brought
to the new colony belonged to the few who were wealthy enough to afford them,
the same few who were also members of the ruling elite. Freedom of
communication was severely limited, and unseemly speech or written words could
be severely punished. Lesser sorts were limited to owning a few religious prints at
most, and could not take part in the larger discourse spawned by literature and
politics. That remained the exclusive province of the gentlemen, who were also
accorded proper deference from the lesser sort. Not until 1730 did the printing
press did gain a firm foothold in Virginia, and even then the output remained
restricted. However, print culture did change the way governing elites related to
each other as well as the way the government related to the people. Conflicts
ensued, fought out on the printed page. Printers sometimes found themselves
caught in the midst of these controversies. By the mid-eighteenth century, print
culture began to have a demonstrable impact on the nature and scope of political
debate in colonial Virginia.
A Limited Print Culture
Printing came much later to the south than it did to the northern British-
American colonies. The first press was set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in
1638. A press arrived there before one came to the older colony in the south for
two reasons: There was an urban center to help finance the expensive technology,
but more importantly, the written word was central to the faith of the Puritans who
first settled the New England colonies. Christianity was a text-based religion, rather
than one based on oral tradition, and the Protestant faith was even more dependent
on vernacular text than was the Roman Catholic Church. Puritan reformers saw
print as divinely ordained, and each individual was expected to read the Bible and
other religious texts to individually determine their meaning, to an extent not
typical of the Church of England that predominated in Virginia. Printed texts were