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

also critical to the important spreading of the word of God. As Alan Taylor
summarized, “Puritans cherished direct access to holy and printed texts as
fundamental to their liberty and identity as English and Protestant folk. They
insisted every individual should read the Bible …” Michael Warner described the
Puritan press as “a technology of privacy underwritten by divine authority.” The
religious texts and their meanings were very private, in contrast to the later public
prints. Printing in Massachusetts became less religious, more commercial, and
more “civic and emancipatory” over time. 3 One issue of the first newspaper, Publick
Occurences both Forreign and Domestick, was printed without license in 1690, but the
governor and council suppressed it before a second issue was released. The Boston
News-Letter was published with permission of the authorities in 1704, and it is
considered the first successful American newspaper. James Franklin, Benjamin
Franklin’s older brother, printed a competitive newspaper, the New England
Courant, unusual in that it was in opposition to the Puritan leaders who shut it
down in 1722. Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland all had
working presses before printing was successfully established in Virginia. 4
When the new settlers first arrived in Jamestown in 1607, books and other
printed materials were not high on the list of needs. Simple survival was much more
important for the transplanted Europeans. Half the colonists died each year, and
they lost approximately six out of every seven people in the first two decades,
primarily due to starvation. The ocean voyage to Virginia lasted six to eight weeks
3 Wroth, Colonial Printer, 16-17. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early
Modern Europe, 2 nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 148-186. Taylor,
American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Viking, 2001), 179. Warner, The
Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1-14.
4 Wroth, Colonial Printer, 18-20, Sidney Kobre, The Development of the Colonial Newspaper
(Pittsburgh: Colonial Press, 1944; reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1960), 16-19, David
Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers,
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 50-53, Ned Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials:
American Thought and Culture 1680-1760 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 35-37.
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