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

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tells much about both the way the larger society was changing and the role of the
public prints as part of that transition. A shift is apparent in the sources and
characteristics of the stories, as the links between colonies visibly strengthened, and
the close ties to England weakened. Civic discourse can be seen in the pages,
beginning with literature and then expanding, with a wider group of participants
both geographically and demographically. The deferential style that predominated
in early Virginia gave way as dissenting opinions became much more common—
first in religion, later in politics. By the early 1760s, frustration over a lack of press
freedom became evident, the key concept of liberty of the press had evolved and
developed to the extent that dissatisfaction with the single, government-controlled
press emerged. Careful analysis demonstrates how the public prints themselves
began to set the stage for such changes. However, understanding the significance of
these changes requires an understanding of the newspapers themselves.
Early Newspaper Form
Newspapers were critical to the colonial printers’ financial viability and were
considered a vital tool for political propagandists of the American Revolution. They
were an important means of spreading print culture and political discourse to a
wider range of people. Despite that, colonial newspapers are poorly understood. 2
Modern day assumptions about the newspapers often cloud views of early America
as seen through those pages. How a newspaper was laid out by the editor and read
by the reader has changed considerably since the eighteenth century. Many
historians read and interpret colonial newspapers as if they had the same structure as
2 Botein, “ ‘Meer Mechanics’,” 127-150. Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American
Revolution: 1763-1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941, 225-309. Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764-1776 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1957). Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).