NEWSPAPERS

The local newspapers of the early American Republic are extremely unimpressive specimens to modern eyes. They are even less impressive than their equally simple but rather elegantly presented colonial forebears, such as Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette. Physically they were usually only four pages long; if the paper was successful, half or more of those pages were advertisements. There were no maps, no cartoons, usually no illustrations of any kind besides a few stereotyped woodcuts in the advertisements featuring crude drawings of ships, runaway slaves, or stud horses. (Political cartoons did exist, but only as separately published prints.) Sometimes a printer of unusual visual ambition procured a custom woodcut for his masthead, perhaps illustrating the name of the journal. The Pittsburgh Tree of Liberty featured a tree with some little faces at bottom, barely discernible to the naked eye, that were meant to represent the people but looked more a like a pile of severed heads. More typical was a clichéd American eagle, or nothing at all.

NOT NECESSARILY THE NEWS: THE LIMITATIONS OF THE EARLY AMERICAN NEWSPAPER

There was not much in early American newspapers that a modern reader would recognize as news. Because a typical newspaper's entire staff consisted only of the printer in whose shop it was published along with his journeymen and apprentices—all of whom were too busy with ink and type and paper to do much but print—no active reporting or systematic news gathering was done. Particularly successful printers in the major towns might hire an editor or pay a writer, but it was much more common for a printer to publish whatever he was handed by the local amateur literati (especially lawyers and other politicians), even if someone stuck it under his door, unsigned, in the middle of the night. Indeed, some political material was purposely delivered this way so that the printers could avoid prosecutions for seditious libel by asserting that they did not know the author and had not actually even read the libelous material, which they printed only to fill up space in the paper.

News was printed as it happened to come to the printer, ideally but by no means universally in the form of a letter that he or one of his neighbors received from a friend or traveling local who had seen or heard something. (This was the original, literal meaning of the term "correspondent" as applied to news reporting.) Sometimes the printer simplyjotted down and printed bits of hearsay he picked up in the street or tavern. Thus the Northampton Farmer of Easton, Pennsylvania, "covered" a possible change in British foreign policy by clipping a paragraph from a Philadelphia newspaper reporting the opinions of one Mr. Lyman, a passenger on a ship that had just arrived from Boston. The great Lyman expected "a speedy restoration of good understanding" between Great Britain and the United States and was "incredulous as to the report of an approaching peace between Great Britain and France."

Most news and other editorial material in most early American newspapers was simply copied from other newspapers, especially from the "exchange papers" that printers could mail each other for free. The resulting content was the raw material of news as we know it today: not "stories" written by reporters, but speeches, government documents, political essays, and programs of recent community celebrations. Only occasionally, in the case of foreign events (on which the typical early American newspaper was far more informative than local or domestic happenings) would there be any effort to provide a summary or narrative of the news.

Printers' arrangements of their papers compounded the difficulty of reading them. Headlines in the modern sense were nonexistent, and the reports and documents were usually classed not according to their subject or importance, but according to where the material was found. Thus, if you were perusing a copy of the Northampton Farmer, you might look under the heading "Philadelphia" and find news of a naval battle in the Caribbean. Someone in New York had gotten a letter saying that the French and the British navies had fought a battle near the port of Santo Domingo in the Caribbean; but because the Easton printer clipped the item out of a Philadelphia newspaper, there it was listed. In terms of placement, only two elements of newspaper design in the early Republic were generally consistent: general interest material (poetry, songs, stories, agricultural advice) went on the back page, and locally produced material, if any, appeared on the second or third page under a heading listing the town of publication. Otherwise items were placed at random or wherever convenient.

These shortcomings were noticed at the time. "I have . . . often been surprized that the most valuable communications in our papers should be in illegibly small type, while news from Leghorn, accounts of rare reptiles and thunderstorms are in long pica," wrote Connecticut politician and newspaper writer Abraham Bishop, noting that it was usually difficult for the reader "to form some idea, when he has closed one subject and begun on another." Even Thomas Jefferson, a tremendous supporter of the press who once opined that he would rather have newspapers without government than the reverse, was exasperated by the low quality of the information he found in the newspapers of his time. "I look with real commiseration on my fellow citizens," the president wrote, "who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world." The dissemination of commercial information, through price lists, ship notices, and advertisements, was about the only thing the press did to general satisfaction. The rise of "penny press" newspapers, with large staffs of reporters gathering the racy news of the nineteenth-century city, did not even begin until the 1830s.

Before the 1830s, small-town weeklies outnumbered urban dailies 10 to 1 throughout the period. Almost all were sold chiefly by subscription, at a price of a few dollars per year. Circulations ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand. Newspaper bibliographer Clarence S. Brigham estimated that the average circulation was six hundred to seven hundred. The absolute peak was four thousand or so, claimed by the Boston Columbian Centinel and the Albany Argus, among very few others. Limitations on printing, papermaking, and transportation technology made higher figures nearly impossible to achieve. Someone still had to press every page of every copy.

“IMMENSE MORAL AND POLITICAL ENGINES"

Yet the physical and organizational limitations of early American newspapers are only part of the story, and not the most important part. Collectively, seemingly pathetic little sheets like the Northampton Farmer, Tree of Liberty, and their ilk were considered an unstoppable force, especially in politics. "The newspapers are an overmatch for any government," growled one conservative Federalist after his candidate, John Adams, lost the election of 1800. The paradox was symbolized by the Troy (N.Y.) Northern Budget's masthead illustration: a crudely rendered Benjamin Franklin holding a tiny newspaper labeled with the words, "This is the basis of liberty."

What did the Northern Budget’s woodcut artist mean? As the early Republic's main form of wide publicity, newspapers filled a tremendous gap in the constitutional scheme of republican government. The whole system failed if voters could not hold elected officials accountable for their performance at a later election. The need for some lines of communication between the people and the rulers led the framers of state constitutions and the federal Bill of Rights to give special constitutional protections to the press. Later legislation and court decisions gave newspapers additional special privileges, including discounted postage rates. Simply put, the media were granted a special place at the political table because their publicity allows democracy to function. The particular means by which this was accomplished was left open. In the early Republic, with the "objective," news-gathering commercial media far in the future, newspapers performed their democratic functions by acting as working parts of the emerging party system—a convergence that might be called "newspaper politics."

The Reverend Samuel Miller's Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), a respected compendium of the century's achievements, observed that "political journals," as he headed his chapter on newspapers, had revolutionized their place in American society. Once "considered of small moment," Miller wrote, newspapers had become "immense moral and political engines" in which "the principles of government, the interests of nations, the spirit and tendency of public measures are all arraigned, tried, and decided." (Like many later press critics, Miller went on to bitterly attack the incompetence and immorality of the people who ran these all-powerful institutions.) As Miller saw it, newspapers had revolutionized the arts of political persuasion and organization. Formerly, "to sow the seeds of political discord, or to produce a spirit of union and co-operation through an extensive community, required time, patience, and a constant series of exertions." The advent of "the general circulation of Gazettes" had ushered in a new political era, in which "impressions could be made on the public mind . . . with a celerity, and to an extent of which our ancestors had no conception." The effect of this had been to inculcate the habits and values of democratic citizenship in the populace: "to keep the public mind awake and active . . . confirm and extend the love of freedom . . . promote union of spirit and of action among the most distant members of an extended community."

What was the evidence for the powerfully democratizing and politicizing effects of newspapers? That the basic practices, institutions, and values of the world's first democracy came together during this period of the political newspaper. At the time Miller wrote, it was generally accepted that the press had been instrumental in fomenting the break between America and Great Britain, especially by persuading the public that the British ministry and army were out to persecute and enslave America. The Federalist and hundreds of other newspaper essay series had sold the public a new Constitution that few initially wanted. Newspapers had helped create an opposition political party, the Democratic Republicans (ancestors of today's Democrats), which brought down the Federalist supporters of George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton in the world's first peaceful transfer of power. Across the ocean, the press had been a powerful player in the revolution that toppled the French monarchy, by many measures Europe's strongest. All those who wanted to build support for an idea or group concluded that newspapers were absolutely indispensable to their cause. Any serious political party, or faction within a party, or presidential candidate, wanted newspaper representation in as many places as possible, and had to be willing to spend money to get it. Following an old colonial practice that took on an increasingly partisan dimension in the early Republic, one method of financing new newspapers was steering profitable government printing contracts toward friendly printers willing to publish newspapers.

Under this sort of pressure for growth, the newspaper press became one of the most expansive institutions in American society. U.S. population growth was one of the wonders of the world in this time because of heavy immigration and high birth rates, but the growth of the press far outstripped it (see Figure 1).

Political crises and transformations coincided frequently with the establishment of large numbers of new newspapers, with the pace of newspaper creation spiking in such periods as the Revolution, the election of 1800, and the political crisis leading up to the War of 1812, when the defeated Federalists enjoyed a comeback across the northern states (see Figure 2). Similarly the rates of expansion shown in Figure 1 were greatest in decades of political upheaval, especially the 1780s, 1790s, and 1830s.

FIGURE 1

Newspaper Growth Outstrips Population Growth

Obviously multiple factors were involved in the expansion of the American press. Population movements carried the press west over the Appalachians during this period and spread it across the interior. At the same time, the newspaper press of the early Republic was highly diversified, with many purely commercial newspapers and around one hundred religious journals by the 1830s. There were also a significant number of newspapers that served particular ethnic communities, such as the extensive German-language press, and beginning in the late 1820s, newspapers published by and for African Americans (Freedom's Journal, 1827) and the Cherokee nation (Cherokee Phoenix, 1828). Yet it was clearly politics in its broadest sense—public, associational life—that drove much of the press's expansion in this period. Even the religious and ethnic publications often had clear political orientations, like the Readinger Adler of Reading, Pennsylvania, whose editor was whipped by Federalist soldiers for his fiery Democratic Republicanism.

CIRCULATION IN THE EXTREMITIES

Echoing the judgment of most other foreign and domestic observers, Samuel Miller concluded that the ubiquity of newspapers was one of the most distinctive features of the American scene. Never before, anywhere, was the number of newspapers "so great in proportion to the population of a country as at present in ours." This was true in 1802, and the trend grew more pronounced afterward. As shown in Figure 3, in 1800 there were almost 4.5 newspapers per 100,000 citizens, and by 1840, more than 8. In other words, the equivalent of a city of 100,000 people, roughly the size of present-day Topeka, Kansas, would have had 4 to 8 newspapers in this period. These would have represented not the "general public" or the local business community, as do twenty-first century monopoly newspapers, but multiple points in the local political and social spectrum. The situation on the ground was actually a bit more polarized. New York City had thirteen newspapers in 1810, when its population was just under 100,000. Reading, Pennsylvania, and Trenton, New Jersey, with populations around 3,000 each, both had two papers, one Republican and one Federalist. So did even smaller places such as Augusta, Georgia, Annapolis, Maryland, and Worcester, Massachusetts.

The wide distribution of newspapers greatly enlarged the number of people, including many who had never been part of the political class in any previous society, who could be informed about and participate intelligently in the political life of the community. The United States, Miller wrote, "has exhibited a spectacle . . . without parallel on the earth . . . not of the learned and the wealthy only, but of the great body of the people; even a large portion . . . of that class of the community which is destined to daily labour, having free and constant access to public prints, receiving regular information of every occurrence, attending to the course of political affairs, discussing public measures." Massive voter turnouts and foreign travelers' accounts of America testify to the accuracy of Miller's conclusions. Passing through the backwoods of Ohio, the Transylvanian bureaucrat and reformer Alexander Boloni Farkas marveled as the stagecoach driver hurled out settlers' newspapers right and left as they passed remote cabins along the road. "No matter how poor a settler may be, nor how far in the wilderness he may be from the civilized world," Farkas wrote, "he will read a newspaper."

FIGURE 2

Newspaper Creation

In hindsight, one may want to take such claims with a grain of salt. Newspapers could reach only literate citizens, who were most likely to be white and male, and only a tiny educated elite would have been able to fully grasp everything they read. Many working families probably could not afford a yearly subscription to a newspaper in any case.

Yet there were many channels through which the press could breach these limits and reach a percentage of the population that was almost certainly higher than the overall levels of newspaper readership in the twenty-first century. Newspapers were kept on hand in many public gathering places, especially taverns, coffeehouses, and hotels, where they were often read aloud or in groups. Neighbors often shared newspapers with each other, or even subscribed jointly. Information and ideas contained in newspapers moved by word of mouth, and passed hand to hand in clippings and letters. In a time when most people still conducted most of their daily affairs through face-to-face exchanges, even a few newspaper subscribers were enough to spread the word to entire neighborhoods. Even if one assumes that most early Americans would have been unable or unwilling to read the lengthy political essays and documents that dominated the political journals of this period, there were multiple paths that political arguments could take, many of them following what communication scholars call the two-step flow of political communication.

FIGURE 3

Although the leading "penny press" dailies that appeared after 1830 far outstripped the newspapers of the early Republic in terms of individual circulations, this may reflect as much a concentration of readership as an expansion. Decentralization was one of the hallmarks and great strengths of the early Republic's press system. Whether serving a political party, religious denomination, a social movement, or simply sharing commercial information, early American newspapers operated as networks of small, independent outlets tailored to the locality, beliefs, and interests of their readers. As a collectivity, early American newspapers outstripped their individual limitations and produced a vast amount of original material. Moreover, the networks showed an impressive ability to move information and arguments around the country.

During the election of 1800, Federalists and other observers were amazed at how quickly and effectively themes, arguments, information, and particular articles moved back and forth across the Democratic Republican press network. The Irish radical refugee William Duane's Philadelphia Aurora was the clear ideological leader and chief source of information for the others on politics at the seat of government. It seems to have taken from two weeks to a month for Aurora material to get over the mountains to the network's extremities in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania, but only a few days to a week to get as far away from Philadelphia as Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and Raleigh, North Carolina. This was blinding speed by eighteenth-century standards. Duane's newspaper was "the heart, the seat of life" of the Democratic Republican Party, argued the Federalist Connecticut Courant. "From thence the blood has flowed to the extremities by a sure and rapid circulation. . . . It is astonishing to remark, with how much punctuality and rapidity, the same opinion has been circulated and repeated by these people from high to low."

The Courant's metaphor was a little misleading. To borrow a computer term, the newspaper networks were "peer-to-peer" networks in which all the individual units supplied each other with material rather than taking it from a single, central source. Lateral or upstream exchanges (between hinterland newspapers, or from the hinterlands to the major cities) were just as common as items flowing down from the centers of government and culture. One of the most damaging scandals of the 1800 campaign was the saga of Republican congressman Matthew Lyon's imprisonment (because of the Sedition Act) in a "loathsome dungeon," a story that emanated from the press in Vermont. The Aurora and other big-city journals like the Boston Independent Chronicle and the New York American Citizen were the most heavily copied in the Republican press, but these journals copied just as much from each other and from smaller journals in the countryside.

Although social scientists tend to regard centralized command and control as indicators of a strong political organization, partisan newspaper networks thrived and drew some of their effectiveness from their very decentralization. The party's general message could be filtered or adjusted to suit local predilections. Southern Democratic Republican newspapers tried to justify and refine the states' rights principles of the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, for instance, while northern Republican journals largely avoided the topic. Perhaps responding to Federalist rhetoric about being ruled by Virginia slave lords, northern Republican editors openly expressed their antipathy to slavery despite their leader Thomas Jefferson's undeniable Virginia slave-lord status.

The major exception to this decentralization was the rise of so-called presidential "organs" in the new national capital of Washington, D.C. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson's National Intelligencer in 1800, there was always a newspaper in the capital that was regarded as the voice of the administration, essentially performing the functions of the modern White House press secretary and a major national newspaper at the same time. The practice began simply, with Jefferson inviting young Philadelphia printer Samuel Harrison Smith to start a newspaper in Washington, as a counterbalance to the cantankerous Aurora. From there, the presidential organ mushroomed into a prominent but much-resented national institution. While these spokespapers were not public entities or officially connected to the presidency, they originated most official statements and documents the president wished to release. In exchange, the publishers received the lion's share of the major government printing contracts. Thanks to the efforts of longtime National Intelligencer proprietors Joseph Gales Jr. and William Seaton, the presidential organ also usually had the franchise for compiling and publishing the records of proceedings in Congress. The Intelligencer held its position until 1829, when newly elected president Andrew Jackson, who had been criticized in the paper for years, anointed Duff Green's United States Telegraph as his favorite. From there the presidential organ became a political football that changed hands if a new faction or administration came to power. In a White House version of the sort of factional struggle over newspapers that went on everywhere in the political culture of the early Republic, the rivalry between Jackson and his vice president, John C. Calhoun, took out the Calhoun-friendly Telegraph as well. Francis Preston Blair was brought in from Kentucky to start the Washington Globe and quickly became one of the leaders of Jackson's "Kitchen Cabinet" of advisors. The presidential organ system lasted until scandals forced the creation of the Government Printing Office in 1860. "Newspaper politics" more generally lasted for the rest of the century, albeit with increasing rivalry from other models of publishing and politics.