American Intelligence: Small-Town News and Political Culture in Federalist New Hampshire by Ben P. Lafferty (review)

A welcome addition to a growing literature on the intersection of print and politics in the early republic is Ben P. Lafferty's American Intelligence: Small-Town News and Political Culture in Federalist New Hampshire, an ambitious and energetically written book that examines "how information, in the form of newspapers, traveled around the Federalist-era United States" (7). Building on the work of Allan Pred, Jeffrey L. Pasley, Rachel Hope Cleves, James Tagg, Richard Kielbowicz, Richard R. John, Simon Newman, Charles Clark, Thomas Leonard, and William J. Gilmore, Lafferty uses the state of New Hampshire from 1790 to 1800 as a case study "to explore key issues in late eighteenth-century political journalism" (11). Lafferty relies heavily on OCR searchable digitized newspaper archives, made available to us by Readex, to conduct a content analysis of New Hampshire newspapers using targeted keyword searches. "Content analysis," he writes, "becomes possible across vast, and easily defined, amounts of texts, spread across numerous sources" (10). Content analysis on such a massive scale allows Lafferty to ask big questions that address the relationship between small-town newspapers and large urban centers, where news originated and how it was disseminated to "far-flung communities," the degree to which "transportation, commerce, and federally subsidized mail delivery" impacted the circulation of information, and whether small towns were active or passive recipients of an "emerging national culture" (10). Ultimately, Lafferty's data reveals "that the growth of the press occurred alongside growth in both population and economy, and therefore to some extent reflects the development of early American society as a whole" (16).

Across eight chapters, Lafferty explores the role of the press in demographic, political, religious, and economic developments in New Hampshire. His chapters are thematic, ranging from the business of early national newspapers, the experiences of reading an early republic newspaper, how printers found news to print, the myriad ways that news was delivered, newspapermen as writers, and the content of political news. Printers in New Hampshire towns, he argues, often acted as "conduits for communication" and "stood alongside the minister, mayor, and tavern keeper as a locus of social and cultural life" (57).

Ultimately, Lafferty tells us, newspaper printers connected people to far-flung places, well beyond the limits of small-town life. "The most salient feature of these newspapers was their preoccupation with the human element," he writes," and that for those Americans who "lived in remote isolation," the "spores of otherness that landed on their porch were a window into a world of princes, presidents, and pirates" (86). Key to these connections, he insists, was the reprinting of stories published in newspapers elsewhere—whether abroad or domestically—and exchanges between American printers. In chapter 4, Lafferty examines how printers constructed their newspapers using reprinted stories. Not surprisingly, Lafferty finds that a considerable amount of "news" in early republic New Hampshire came from Europe, London in particular. "For a people who still largely faced out toward the Atlantic, a direct connection to Europe, and especially Britain, conferred a patina of cosmopolitanism on these coastal communities to which other Americans were, by turns, deferential and resentful," he writes (89). Lafferty here points to data compiled using OCR searches in Readex's Early American Newspapers database. He tells us that "there are more than 11,000 articles containing incidences of the word London published in New Hampshire from 1790 to 1800" (89). Important also were the relationships printers developed with seamen, "who could be an invaluable source of foreign news" (90). Once a story was published in a newspaper, Lafferty continues, fellow editors "were free to appropriate it for their own publication" (96). Newspapermen in New Hampshire did not rely solely on publications like the London Gazette, however. "In 1790 the three greatest external conduits of foreign news to New Hampshire were the presses...