Communicating liberty: The newspapers of the British empire as a matrix for the American revolution

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 72, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 339-361

  Warner, William B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950032960     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2005.0022     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. Lieutenant-Governor of South Carolina William Bull to the Earl of Dartmouth, 31 July 1774, in Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-1783, ed. K. G. Davies, 21 vols. (Dublin: Irish Univ. Press, 1975), 8:154.
2. John Adams, Letter of 18 February 1818 to Hezekiah Niles, editor of the Weekly Register, in The Annals of America, 1797-1820 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968), 4:465.
3. The most important circular letters were the Massachusetts circular letter of 11 February 1768 and the Virginia House of Burgesses circular letter of 12 March 1773; congresses include the Stamp Act Congress (New York, 1765), the Convention of Towns of Massachusetts (Boston, September, 1768), and finally, the First Continental Congress.
4. The Votes and Proceedings of the Town of Boston (Boston: Edes & Gill), 33.
5. Thomas Hutchinson, Governors rejoinder to the Council and House's reply to the Governors speech of 6 January 1773, The Boston Gazette, 22 February 1773.
6. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), 41.
7. In his general critique of media determinism, Michael Warner is particularly valuable for demonstrating the futility of attempting to confer some identity or meaning upon print outside of the cultures and practices within which it emerges. So to say, as many do, that the 18th century had a "print culture" is not to say that they had a culture of print, in the sense that "print," as an abstract totality, becomes culture s informing nature. See Warner's valuable introductory chapter to The Letters of the Republic, "The Cultural Mediation of Print Media," especially 1-18, and his observation that "[t]he assumption that technology (i.e. print) is prior to culture results in a kind of retrodeterminism whereby the political history of a technology is converted into the unfolding nature of that technology" (9).
8. Arthur Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: the Newspaper War on Britain, 1764-1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 61.
9. In "Print and the Public Sphere in Early America," Robert Gross offers an historian's critique of Warner's deployment of the concept of the public sphere: Warner's "incisive account of an ideology has been taken as a social fact." To complicate social facts, Gross shows how anonymous publication can serve ends very different from the one Warner foregrounds, the republican ideal of disinterestedness. Gross, "Print and the Public Sphere" in The State of American History, ed. Melvyn Stokes (Oxford: Berg Press, 2002), 245-64.
10. Several factors made the prerevolutionary decades a time of expansion for newspapers: swift increases in the general population between 1750 and 1770 (from one million to more than two million, from 1/20th to 1/5th of the population of the British Empire (Gordon Wood, The American Revolution: A History [New York: Modern Library, 2002], 6);
11. an "oversupply" of printers' apprentices in the principal cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia) produces an outward migration to smaller towns to start new papers; and the newsworthy quality of the political crisis itself helps to encourage a doubling of the number of newspapers between 1763 and 1776, and a doubling again between 1776 and 1790 (see Charles E. Clark, "Part One: Early American Journalism," in A History of the Book in America: Volume One: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall [Cambridge: American Antiquarian Society and Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000], 361). Schlesinger reports forty-two newspapers on the eve of Revolution in the thirteen colonies.
12. See Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).
13. The Pennsylvania Gazette, 31 March 1773.
14. Richard Henry Lee, writing to Samuel Adams, The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, ed. James Curtis Ballagh (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 82.
15. The New York Gazette, edited by Hugh Gaine, 4 August 1783, articles signed by Quidnunc. Problems gaining accurate news were particularly acute in the aftermath of battle. In late May 1775, news reports were circulating in London about the battles of Lexington and Concord. The London Gazette, official publication of the British administration, reports on 30 May 1775 in large font: "A report having been spread, and an account having been printed and published, of a skirmish between some of the people of the province of Massachusetts Bay and a detachment of His Majesty's Troops; it is proper to inform the Publick, that no Advices have as yet been received in the American Department of any such Event." The measured, objective tone of this announcement has the effect of enabling the Gazette to discredit reports it is not yet in the position to dispute. Similarly, The London Gazette refuses to publish a report on the outcome of the battle of Saratoga, though other London papers are doing so. Instead, because government has not yet received the only account that can be credited as accurate, the official report from the commander in the field, in this instance General Johnny Burgoyne, the Gazette desists from covering the biggest story of the moment.
16. See Clark's account of John Campbell, the publisher of the Boston News-Letter, the first newspaper in America, which offers a valuable overview of the earliest techniques of news collection (Clark, The Public Prints, chap. 4).
17. This monthly service between England and the three colonial ports finally overcame the four- to five-month winter hiatus in mail delivery caused by the difficulty of travel on the northern route in the first century and a half of British settlement. This postal service required from four to five ships for each run. (Postmaster-General to Earl of Dartmouth, 4 December 1772, in Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-1783, ed. K. G. Davies [Dublin: Irish University Press, 1975], 5: 237-38.)
18. See David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), Appendix S, 324-25, for his valuable table on the "spread of the news of the first shots at Lexington." The commencement of military hostilities, which justified the use of express riders to spread the news at maximum speed, offers a profile of the upper limits of American communication in 1775: 19 April (Lexington, MA)-20 April (New London, CT)-21 April (New Haven, CT)-22 April (Fairfield, CT)-23 April (New York, NY)-24 April (Philadelphia, PA)-25 April (Head of Elk, MD)-26 April (Baltimore, MD)-28 April (Williamsburg, VA)-3 May (Smithfield, VA)-8 May (Wilmington, NC)-9 May (Charleston, SC).
19. The reliance of each paper upon numberless other papers encouraged papers to time their publication date to the flows of information. In the summer of 1776, John Dunlop, publisher of the Pennsylvania Packet, changed his publication date to gratify reader demand for timely news from the battlefront in New York. He notified his readers that he was moving his publication date from Monday (the traditional beginning-of-the-week publication date for many 18th-century papers) to Tuesday, since "the posts from New-York and Virginia arrive in this city every Monday, and the intelligence they bring will be a means of rendering the Pennsylvania Packet still more agreeable to our readers" (5 August 1776).
20. See James N. Green, "Part One. English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin," in The History of the Book in America, 248-98.
21. See Sue Carol Humphrey, "This Popular Engine": New England Newspapers during the American Revolution, 1775-1789 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1992), 79.
22. See Wallace B. Eberhard, "Press and Post Office in Eighteenth-Century America: Origins of a Public Policy," in Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth-Century Journalism, ed. Donovan H. Bond and W Reynolds McLeod (Morgantown, West Virginia: School of Journalism, West Virginia University, 1977), 148. In his order to postmasters on circulation of the newspapers in the mails, reprinted in an Appendix of Newsletters to Newspapers, Franklin promotes "the spreading of news-papers, which are on many occasions useful to government, and advantageous to commerce and the public" (Appendix, 153).
23. Joseph Addison, "The Royal Exchange," Spectator 69.
24. Skeptics of this ideology of empire - from the 18th century to the present - point to the periodic resort to force in forging an empire: in conquering native lands and peoples (from Ireland to Madras), in enforcing the Navigation Acts, and in competing with rival powers in a series of wars with Spain, the Netherlands, and France. See the introduction to Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994). However, our contemporary struggles around the effects of global trade also suggest that the idea of a global empire of trade is not simply wrong.
25. See Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies (1768), A Facsimile Reproduction, with introduction by Daniel A. Baugh and Alison Gilbert Olson (Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1993).
26. Pownall, 9-10.
27. Pownall, 34-35.
28. See Richard Brown, "Periodicals and Politics, Part 2: The Shifting Freedoms of the Press in the Eighteenth Century," in A History of the Book in America, 366-76.
29. Mucius Scaevola [pseud.] quoted by Cotton Mather [Samuel Adams] in the Boston Gazette, 25 November 1771.
30. Mucius Scaevola, quoted from the Massachusetts Spy of 14 November 1771, in Schlesinger, 140. Scaevola's essay was from the Massachusetts Spy and is quoted by Schlesinger. I have not been able to examine an original copy of this rare number of the Massachusetts Spy; because of the litigation it sparked, it is often cited.
31. Schlesinger, 141.
32. Joseph Greenleaf, Boston Gazette, 13 January 1772.
33. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on English Common Law, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1769), 4:152.
34. Greenleaf, Boston Gazette, 13 January 1772.
35. The difficulty that Governor Thomas Hutchinson had in punishing printers like Isaiah Thomas in Boston echoes the difficulties the British Parliament had in suppressing the speech acts of John Wilkes throughout the 1770s, as well as the problems the ministry had, during the summer of 1770, in prosecuting the newspapers that had reprinted the anonymous and notoriously critical essays of Junius. For an account of the Junius affair see Robert R. Rea, The English Press in Politics: 1760-1774 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1963), 159.
36. "Determinatus" [Samuel Adams], Boston Gazette, 8 August 1768, in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 1:240.
37. For "divan," see the entry for this word in the OED.
38. For the immense popularity of Clarissa in the American colonies before, during, and after the American Revolution, where it came to function as a kind of allegory of virtuous American resistance to a corrupt Britain, see Leonard Tennenhouse, "The Americanization of Clarissa," The Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (1998): 177-96.
39. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato's Letters, ed. Ronald Hamowy, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 1:111 (4 February 1720).
40. See Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), especially chap. 2, "The Communications Revolution."
41. For useful and cogent histories of the Internet and the Web, see Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000)
42. and Tim Berners Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (New York: Harpers Business, 2000).
43. On Internet "cyberlibertarians," see Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 8, "Cyber-Politics and Bad Attitude."