The American Revolution and the Press: The Promise of Independence

Foreword

ix ] When discussion turns to America’s move toward independence from Great Britain and the role the press played in the process, quotations from those who were firsthand observers are truly powerful. “What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution,”John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1815. Instead, Adams said, one needed to consult newspapers and pamphlets in all the colonies to uncover the true Revolution . Historian David Ramsay’s well-known statement from his 1789 history of the Revolution serves notice, too, that “the pen and the press had merit equal to that of the sword” in bringing about the separation of colonies from their colonial rulers. And New York printer John Holt wrote to master newspaper essayist Samuel Adams on January 26, 1776, with this observation: “It was by means of News papers that we receiv’d & spread the Notice of the tyrannical Designs formed against America and kindled a Spirit that has been sufficient to repel them.”Bernard Bailyn probably best summed up the relationship between the Revolution and the press at the beginning of his 1967 Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: “Every medium of written expression was put to use” to ensure that all Americans received the message that the time had come to separate from Great Britain. But the question that this insightful volume by Carol Sue Humphrey so ably asks and answers is: How was it possible for a relatively minuscule number of printing establishments, estimated at around forty, to provide thirteen colonies and a population of FOREWORD David A. Copeland x FOREWORD approximately 2.5 million with so much material for discussion and debate that those colonists were willing not only to defy British law and taxes but also to create a declaration for their independence and to fight to obtain self-rule? From a perspective in the twenty-first century—when information about almost any subject is passed on in seconds and it is nearly impossible to see anyone walking who is not looking down at some portable device to stay informed—it is hard to imagine that the speed of sharing information in the age of the Revolution was measured in days and weeks. It also becomes nearly impossible to believe that plodding paragraphs and pages of type—not photographs, nor images, nor voice transmissions,but paragraphs that required readers to sift through thousands of words sans headlines or story leads—could bring people to the point of declaring their independence from the most powerful nation in the world. But that is exactly what happened in what would become the United States in the second half of the eighteenth century. Simply saying this is so and offering quotations from those involved in the Revolutionary era as support may be enough because the end results are observable. But in eighteenth-century America, a melding of ideas and events had to occur to make it possible for the press to become such a powerful tool. First, there was the expansion of free speech and the press that, by the time of the Stamp Act in 1765, practically ensured that whatever someone wanted to say in a newspaper could be said. The trial of John Peter Zenger had not provided colonists with any laws to protect them, but, as a writer in the Pennsylvania Gazette noted three years after the trial, the results were better than law because they were written upon the hearts of the people. Truth as a defense against libel, a trial with a jury of peers of the accused, and the possibility of finding the defendant not guilty FOREWORD xi were seldom heard of prior to 1735. But by 1765 no other libel trials had occurred in America,and irate printers and citizens alike reacted to the Stamp Act with great fervor. In New York, Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden said that colonial papers had violated every law of sedition and libel in their reaction to the Stamp Act with assorted lies aimed at arousing the populace. But, he noted, any attempt to seek prosecution would be worthless . In Massachusetts, Governor Thomas Hutchinson could not get a single grand jury to return a charge of libel in the colony even though the most virulent charges against the British government came out of the papers and essayists there.Writers,however, believed they had the right to attack the government, and...