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

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in overcrowded conditions. Once on land, the early settlers did not have enough
food and the marshy, unsanitary Jamestown settlement bred disease. 5 The colonists
were primarily beggars and underemployed English, led by gentlemen adventurers.
Neither group was accustomed to the hard labor needed for survival in the new
land. 6 One list of what early colonists were told to take to Virginia did not include
any books, not even Bibles. 7 A few families were likely to have had some religious
books, and in 1623, the Virginia Company sent three Bibles, two Common Prayer
books, and an Ursinaes Catechisme to the colony. 8 The settlers were influenced by
the world of print through their European roots, in contrast to the Native
Americans who were here before them and lived within a completely oral culture.
With few imported books, out-of-date European newspapers, and expensive paper
and writing materials, the new Virginians lived within their own largely oral culture
with some writing and limited printed materials.
There was no compulsory education in early Virginia. Opportunities for
formal education were rare, so learning had to take place in the home. 9 All printed
5 George Percy, “Observations gathered out of a discourse of the plantation of the southern
colony in Virginia,” written 1606, Edward Wright Hale, ed., Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness
Accounts of the Virginia Colony (Champlain, VA: RoundHouse, 1998), 99. Carl Bridenbaugh,
Jamestown, 1544-1699 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 45. See also Greene, Pursuits
of Happiness.
6 Taylor, American Colonies, 130-148. Greene in Pursuits of Happiness, 6-9, notes that the
early Virginia settlers came as military and commercial conquerors looking for instant riches,
rather than as farmers. John Smith is quoted from several of his writings as suggesting that
between one third to one half of the initial settlers were “gentlemen,” and most of the laborers
were unskilled, from James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America
(New York: Basic Books, 2005), 40-41.
7 Samuel Purchas, list compiled for prospective colonists, in Hakluytus Posthumus, Or Purchas
His Pilgrimes… (Glasgow, 1905-1907), XIX 164-167, quoted in Warren Billings, ed., The Old
Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (Chapel Hill:
Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia by
the University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 4, 15-20.
8 Nicholas Fferrar, and Ed Collingwood, Virginia Company, “A Letter to the Governor and
Council in Virginia,” August 6, 1623, from Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia
Company of London (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1935), IV, 262-271.