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

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that of a press that should contain and encourage discussion of public issues, similar
to the ideas expressed in the Maryland tobacco pamphlet years earlier. 114 As
Warner wrote, the cultural meaning of writing and literature was transforming
during this period. The meaning of “letters” was evolving from one of privacy and
religious faith into “a technology of publicity” that was civic and emancipatory.
Print was a critical element of the public discourse that became the major feature of
republican political relations as they later emerged in the new nation. 115 The
publishing of such political debates marked the beginning, in Virginia, of
newspapers and other popular prints nudging politics out of the exclusive realm of
the elite, and into a larger arena, where a wider population could read and even take
part in such critical discussion. 116 It also demonstrates the beginning of a transition
for the Chesapeake area press, from one paid for and responsible to the
government, towards a free press that could inspire public discourse and political
involvement by a wider range of people.
* * *
Expansion of print was closely tied both to the rise of the market economy
and to an increasing public discourse. Because of this growth, there is evidence of
more civic involvement by more people representing wider distribution, beyond
simply the planter and ruler elite. Sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas
developed a theory that is extremely relevant here, that of an expanding civic public
engaging in civic discourse. Habermas focused on such discourse within physical
settings such as salons, coffeehouses, and reading societies, while noting specifically
113 Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’,” 172-173.
114 Letter from a Freeholder (1727), 4.
115 Warner, Republic of Letters, 5-9, 38-41.
116 Barker, Newspapers, 125-127. Referring to England, Barker saw this happening in the
early eighteenth century, as newspapers expanded in the wake of the lifting of license restrictions.
This happened some fifty years later in Virginia, where printing came later.