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

demonstrated by these advertisements is one important driver of that growth, and
the growing consumer use of these public prints was an essential preface to the
growing concept of press freedom. The printing process—the first form of mass
production—was an integral part of and intrinsic to the beginnings of an important
consumer revolution that helped bring competition and new press freedom to
Virginia.
The Chesapeake colonies’ printers themselves were part of a growing
middling class of tradesmen, a group with increasing influence. While Parks and his
successors were educated and knowledgeable in literary matters, they were not part
of the ruling elite. Printing was a hands-on craft that did not always pay well.
Literacy was essential, and knowledge of literature beneficial, but printing was most
often considered a trade. As Botein noted, the colonial printer was often a public
person, but also considered a “meer mechanic.” 55 The printing process was hard
labor, and it could also be dirty. Pulling the press to make the impression on the
page sometimes left printers with one arm longer and stronger than the other, a
bent over back, a shuffling gait, and hands stained with ink. 56 Most printers
employed several apprentices and several journeymen to do the most difficult
manual labor. William Parks died with an estate worth more than six thousand
pounds, William Hunter more than eight thousand pounds, a substantial fortune
for the eighteenth century. 57 Printers were comparably well-educated for craftsmen.
They had a great deal of contact with the educated elite, who were their main
customers. As Jeffrey Pasley suggested, middling printers did have influence,
55 Botein, “ ‘Mere Mechanics’,” 162-163.
56 Wroth, Colonial Printer, 115-119. Jeffrey Pasley, The Tyranny of the Printers: Newspaper
Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 24-27.
57 “Old Virginia Editors,” William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 7, no. 1
(July 1898): 9-17.
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