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

mid-to-later eighteenth century. 73 The increase in printing, literacy, and available
reading materials indicates a cultural shift, which may also be seen as blurring the
social hierarchy. Due to education, our extremely deferential young boy had now
become a minister and part of the elite himself. The spread of printed materials did
sometimes lead to unforeseen consequences.
The primary purpose of bringing printer Parks to the colony was to print
laws and other legal documents. He mostly produced government publications,
religious works, and an occasional pamphlet. The official output of the press
included the Journal of the House of Burgesses and compilations of Virginia Laws,
supplemented by occasional pamphlets on court cases, and miscellany such as the
William and Mary College Charter. Government officials used printing to
legitimize their political authority. “Publishing” once meant reading aloud or
writing down by hand. In England, royal proclamations that predated parliamentary
laws were written by hand and merely fixed to walls and other public places. By the
1480s, laws were compiled, indexed, and printed. These are important changes with
broad implications. Civic order was best maintained when the laws and legal
precedents were widely publicized, and while scribal documents were helpful,
printing could spread them more widely, and with fewer discrepancies. One could
see, for the first time, the history and evolution of laws, with numbered pages and
indexing making the laws much more accessible. A printed document was less easy
to alter or forge than was a hand-written one. Governors, legislatures, and the
governed found security and legitimacy in printed documents that they could not
find in a legal system based on oral or manuscript laws. 74
73 For example, William J. Gilmore, “Literacy, the Rise Of An Age Of Reading, and The
Cultural Grammar Of Print Communications In America, 1735-1850,” Communication 11 no.1
(1988): 23-28, sees increased reading between 1730 and 1785. Cathy Davidson, in Revolution and
the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), preface,
page vii, sees a “reading revolution” beginning later in the eighteenth century.
74 Hall, Cultures of Print, 100-105, 124-5. Eisenstein, in Printing Revolution, 79-84. This use
of print was not strictly limited to rulers; as shown earlier, the rebels in Maryland had Nuthead
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