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[ 11 ] chapter 1 Foundations of the American Press, 1704–1763 Franklin and His Contemporaries Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter. —Benjamin Franklin, 1731 When young Ben Franklin was learning the printer’s trade in the early eighteenth century, the business of putting out a newspaper was still a new one in North America. As the early settlers along the Atlantic coast started establishing their farms and towns, they brought with them a cultural inheritance from Europe. Among English speakers, that legacy included newspapers such as those that were already flourishing in London by the late seventeenth century.1 During the first decades of settlement and well into the 1600s, the colonists found themselves much too busy with more pressing matters to bother publishing newspapers of their own. Even before they had newspapers, however, colonists had ways of acquiring information, points of view, and ideas. They could visit their neighbors or see them in their village. They could go to church and hear the weekly sermon, or they could read collections of sermons, which were among the earliest forms of printed matter in the colonies. They could read or hear an official proclamation. They might subscribe to a London newspaper. And thanks to the growing reach of the postal system, they could also receive letters from distant parts.2 By the late 1600s, one colonist was ready to try adding something else to the mix. On September 25, 1690, there appeared in Boston a new publication, bearing the rather comprehensive title PUBLICK OCCURRENCES Both FORREIGN and DOMESTICK. [ 12 ] CHAPTER 1 The publisher was Benjamin Harris, who clearly had in mind creating a newspaper of the sort that had existed for decades in European capitals and trading centers such as Amsterdam, Paris, and London. But Harris had made one critical mistake: he had failed to get permission from the royal authorities. For most of the years since 1538, English law had required that all printed matter be issued under license, or “by authority” of the Crown, and this obligation naturally extended to those English people who happened to be living abroad in the colonies.3 Harris was not only lacking in authority but also lacking in tact. His Publick Occurrences touched on a number of sensitive subjects, starting with his criticism of England’s allies, the Iroquois Indians, calling them “those miserable Salvages, in whom we have too much confided.” He went on to suggest, impertinently, that some of France’s troubles could be traced to the fact that Louis XIV was having sex with his own daughter-in-law, or as Harris put it, that the King “used to lie with the Sons Wife.”4 At the very start of the long relationship between journalism and the government, it was clear who had the upper hand. And so, after only a single edition of Publick Occurrences, Harris was shut down and his newspaper banned.5 His swift punishment shows that the royal governor of Massachusetts had plenty of power to suppress thought by censoring the press and would not hesitate to do so.6 Harris has thus always appeared in histories of American journalism with an asterisk next to his name, since historians dispute whether his one-time publication meets the definition of a newspaper.7 But without doubt, he was the first to give it a try. Fourteen years passed before anyone dared try again to publish a newspaper in America. During this period, around the end of the seventeenth century, the English colonists were gradually strengthening their ties to one another. From their beginnings the colonies had been oriented eastward toward London rather than north and south toward their neighbors. Until well into the eighteenth century it was much easier for a letter—or for that matter a person—to go from Boston to London than from Boston to, say, Philadelphia or Richmond or Charleston. By degrees, however, the colonists built roads and turnpikes, dug canals, and established a postal service. In a piecemeal way, they created and strengthened the ties running north and south that began to bind the colonies to one another. In the history of American journalism, one of the most significant of these ties was the development of a postal service. From the start, postal delivery allowed...

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