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The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary Virginia: Creating

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The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary Virginia: Creating Dedication To my late father, Curtis Gordon Mellen, who taught me that who we are is not decided by the advantages or tragedies that are thrown our way, but rather by how we deal with them. Table of Contents Foreword by David Waldstreicher....................................................................................i Acknowledgements .........................................................................................................iii Chapter 1 Prologue: Culture of Deference ...................................................................................1 Chapter 2 Print Culture in the Early Chesapeake Region...........................................................13 A Limited Print Culture.........................................................................................14 Print Culture Broadens ...........................................................................................28 Chapter 3 Chesapeake Newspapers and Expanding Civic Discourse, 1728-1764.......................57 Early Newspaper Form...........................................................................................58 Changes: Discourse Increases and Broadens ..............................................................76 Chapter 4 The Colonial Chesapeake Almanac: Revolutionary “Agent of Change” ...................97 The “Almanacks”.....................................................................................................99 Chapter 5 Women, Print, and Discourse .................................................................................133 Women and Literacy .............................................................................................137 Books....................................................................................................................140 Ephemeral Press....................................................................................................143 Women and the Civic Public..................................................................................152 Chapter 6 The Stamp Act ........................................................................................................161 Parliament’s Act....................................................................................................161 Reactions in the Chesapeake Prints ........................................................................170 Changing Virginia Press & Discourse.....................................................................175 Print and Related Cultural Shifts..........................................................................180 Chapter 7 Thomas Jefferson and the Origins of Newspaper Competition...............................195 A Government Press.............................................................................................196 Print Competition Comes to Virginia.....................................................................204 Effects of Competition...........................................................................................209 Chapter 8 Liberty of the Press...................................................................................................225 Context ................................................................................................................226 Early Limits to Press Liberty ................................................................................230 Expanding Press Freedom.....................................................................................240 George Mason and Rights Declared .......................................................................254 Revolution and Press Freedom...............................................................................263 The Constitution and the Bill of Rights.................................................................265 Chapter 9 Epilogue ...................................................................................................................279 Appendix Virginia Printers’ Timeline..........................................................................................289 Bibliography .................................................................................................................291 Index .............................................................................................................................309 List of Illustrations 1. Old English Press ........................................................................................cover and 32 2. Lawes of Virginia.........................................................................................................39 3. Maryland Gazette #65, Dec. 10, 1728.........................................................................60 4. Virginia Gazette # 6, Sept. 10, 1736 ............................................................................63 5. The Virginia and Maryland Almanac…1732...............................................................100 6. Zodiac Man...............................................................................................................102 7. Almanac as Diary ......................................................................................................126 8. Sarah Carlyle Almanac..............................................................................................128 9. Compleat Housewife (Cookbook)............................................................................140 10. The Fatal Stamp......................................................................................................165 11. Beer Street (Hogarth) .............................................................................................181 12. Isaiah Thomas..........................................................................................................206 13. Rind’s Virginia Gazette #1........................................................................................213 14. George Mason.........................................................................................................255 i i Foreword by David Waldstreicher Roger Mellen’s book addresses an enduring paradox of our past. How did the gentry-dominated society of the largest colony become the seed ground not only for political leadership but also of a lively political culture characterized not by consensus, as some historians emphasized, but by publicly expressed dissent? Mellen finds the answer in a livelier and more important set of newspapers that gave Virginians of various classes, and some women, a venue for their not always polite opinions. He enables us to understand how a slave society could come to embrace press freedom, setting the stage for Virginians’ important efforts to make freedom of the press a national policy during the early republic. His findings fit well with the emphasis on conflict during the revolutionary era in Virginia, from Rhys Isaac’s classic treatment in The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 to the more recent studies by Woody Holton and Michael McDonnell. He departs in making us aware that Virginia’s counties, even with their all-important court days, were not solely isolated, rural, face-to-face societies, any more than the colonial experience, or the Revolution, can be written from the perspective of the streets of Boston, where it is easier to imagine incendiary pamphlets being written and distributed. The argument for the press’s importance is unyielding, in Mellen’s hands, but he is also very careful to set the complex and gradual context for the rise in reading and the social consequences. That context is easier to understand armed with the notion of “media ecology,” in the parlance Mellen borrows, or the idea, associated with media scholar Marshall McLuhan, that the form is as important as the content. Even in Virginia, even before the American Revolution, newspapers invited colonists who could read them into a broader world, and a “two-way dialogue” that had implications for their ii relations with each other. The chapter on the almanac of Virginia is a fine example of how historians can move beyond the all-or-nothing approach to the effects of media in society by attending to questions of form’s relation to content, for if the almanacs had little radical material within them, the implications of their nature and existence embodied a liberating message: what ordinary people thought and did mattered. They could take everyday life and the workings of the cosmos literally into their own hands. The American Revolution catalyzed these impulses, and, as elsewhere, encouraged the politicization and diversification of the press. But Mellen does not overly stress the role of politics in the expansion of the press. Print, he reminds us, was a market commodity, part of – and essential to – the consumer revolution that preceded the political controversies of the 1760s and 1770s. It may be that the relatively late and contested emergence of a competitive press in Virginia led it to be all the more prized by Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison and their constituents. We owe Roger Mellen a debt of thanks for telling the story, from the late colonial period to the Bill of Rights, of press freedom’s complex origins. David Waldstreicher David Waldstreicher, Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia, specializes in the history of politics, slavery, and print culture in early America. He is the author of Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009);
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