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

as “an agent of change” that helped to bring about revolutionary new ideas in
science, religion, and politics in Western society. The publicity afforded by the
printing press to the discoveries of “new” lands in the Americas helped to spur
emigration. 15 Europeans came to the two American continents in search of gold,
new lands, and religious freedom. The Virginia Company sent new settlers
specifically in search of profits and land, not for religious freedom. 16 They found
the soil to be fertile for tobacco, but the frontier settlers struggling for survival had
little need for education or reading materials. Governor Berkeley was not alone in
believing that learning and books bring about heresy and disobedience to authority.
Although printing was not kept out for one hundred years as Berkeley had
wished, the colony of Virginia originally was not receptive to either printing or
freedom of the press. Despite the royal governor’s wishes, the first attempt at
printing did take place in Virginia in the seventeenth century, before Pennsylvania
had its own printer, and not long after the Massachusetts’ colonists had theirs.
Merchant and one-time Burgess John Buckner imported both a press and the
experienced printer, William Nuthead, to the capital of Jamestown. In 1682 he
printed several “papers,” the form and content of which is not known, and then set
to print the laws the Virginia Assembly had just passed. “At this stage a flurry of
alarm seems to have seized the Governor and Council.” 17 After reviewing two
15 Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent Of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. One
volume reprint, 1980). J. C. Carothers, “Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word,” Psychiatry
22, no. 4 (Nov. 1959): 308-312, Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(New York: Methuen, 1982), and Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1951). Without widespread publicity, the Norse discoveries of North America
went largely unknown outside of a small part of Scandinavia. In contrast, Christopher Columbus’s
findings were quickly known throughout Europe due to immediate publicity made possible only
through the printing press. See Taylor, American Colonies, 35-36.
16 Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, and Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 6-9.
17 Wroth, Colonial Printer, 16-17, and 38. Buckner is listed as a Burgess from Gloucester in
John Pendleton Kennedy, ed. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia (Richmond: The
Colonial Press, E. Waddey Co., 1905-15), 10:290. Thomas, History of Printing, 550-552.
(Thomas was unable to unearth Nuthead’s name or any details.)
19