In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[ 31 ] Chapter 2 Printers Take Sides, 1763–1832 What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of 13 legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers in all the colonies, ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed. —John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815 A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. —James Madison to W. T. Barry, 1822 The fate of North America and all its peoples—whether they spoke English, French, or Spanish; Mandinka or Yoruba; Navajo or Cherokee; Creole, German , or Russian—was decided on September 13, 1759, when General James Wolfe and his British troops sneaked up the cliffs of Quebec and defeated the French forces under the Marquis de Montcalm. There was no mention of the momentous event in the next day’s newspapers along the Atlantic seaboard, although the journalists of the day were hardly to blame, since there were no journalists present to see it. From the moment of Wolfe’s victory, a succession of British ministers embarked on a policy to squeeze the colonies financially to make them pay for the years of war that had brought those colonies security. To make the colonies pay, authorities in London imposed a series of harsh new laws; those economic and political measures in turn propelled some colonists to seek independence, with consequences for the entire world. The peace settlement between the French and the English, expressed in the Treaty of Paris of 1763, set the American colonies on a collision course with the full array of English power—the king, his ministers, and Parliament—making a war for independence almost inevitable. The conflict was fundamental: the Crown saw Wolfe’s military victory as a signal that the time had come to begin extracting wealth from those colonies, which for more than a century had been primarily an expense and a burden. Many English colonists saw Wolfe’s military victory in [ 32 ] CHAPTER 2 nearly the opposite terms: with the victory, they reasoned, it should be less costly in the future to maintain the American colonies, not more so. Without the French and their native allies harassing them in trans-Appalachia, many English settlers were hoping for an increase in freedom. What they got instead was less freedom, because the king and Parliament were now trying to make the colonies pay, which necessitated a policy of legal and political crackdowns that aggravated this conflict sharply and repeatedly. These repressive actions were the fuel that fed the repeated flare-ups through the 1760s and 1770s that American schoolchildren once memorized : the Stamp Act, the Townsend Act, the Intolerable Acts. If conflict between England and the colonies was inevitable after 1763, it was not at all obvious that a campaign for the independence of the colonies should also entail a second, even more ambitious goal: the establishment of a republic . The truly radical idea behind the American rebellion—the one for which it deserves the name “revolution”—was that the colonists were proposing to break away from the king and not replace him. Before this time, Europeans had seen plenty of separations and realignments of boundaries, but in every case some king or emperor, some pope or cardinal, some prince or duke eventually claimed the top spot in a society that remained hierarchical. That is, when change came to societies before 1776, it was widely assumed that the natural, vertical order of society itself would not change. In the American case, the colonists were proposing a world turned upside down, a world with a flatter and broader franchise than anyone had seen since classical antiquity, a world with no kings and no hereditary titles at all. That was the great radical idea behind the Revolution, and it was the 2.1 The death of newspapers ? The Stamp Tax, imposed on the colonies in 1765, hit hard at printers because all printed material had to bear a stamp certifying that a tax had been paid. Many of the printers who ran newspapers felt that the tax would prove fatal and printed farewell...

Share