Essay 16-C: Newspapers, an Informed Citizenry, and The Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

From the nation’s earliest days, Americans celebrated their free and prolific print culture. In establishing their new nation, British colonists and later citizens of the United States drew legitimacy and power from the thriving print industry. In the new nation, printers identified themselves at the center of a civilizing mission to keep the people informed. A Pittsburgh printer, Zadock Cramer, wrote with pride to Thomas Jefferson in 1808 that a gold-leaf Bible “is altogether a western manufactory…this shows what can be done in this our new country when the channel of industry is conducted to a proper point.”

Some leaders even identified the nation’s legitimacy and purpose in its ability to foster such a strong industry of media. For example, in the opening of Isaiah Thomas’s 1810The History of Printing in America, the printer and historian wrote the following:

“Among the first settlers of New England were not only pious but educated men. They emigrated from a country where the press had more license than in other parts of Europe, and they were acquainted with the usefulness of it. As soon as they had made those provisions that were necessary for their existence in this land, which was then a rude wilderness, their next objects were the establishment of schools and a printing press.”

With the official separation from the British Empire, one of the first orders of business for the uniting colonies was to establish a postal service to enable information—about war, trade, and items of interest—to spread across the nation. It ensured that the printed word could travel freely, inhibited by neither political nor physical obstruction, in the national Union.

Reflecting on this period in 1835, Charles Brewster, in a lecture on printing delivered before the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Lyceum, declared that without a free press, “the system of our government, over so vast an extent of territory, could not be maintained, and the name of State, in its present relation, would soon be heard no more among us. The chain which binds our Union together would be broken—for we are literally bound together by the press.” 

And as the eighteenth century progressed, this certainly seemed to ring true. The power of a self-governing people rested fully on citizens’ ability to make informed decisions. A freely operating news environment allowed the public to educate themselves and deliberate with each other on the news of the day, the priorities of their communities, and the high stakes of their continued civic engagement.

The centrality of the press was enshrined in the First Amendment, which declares: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” And the debate over the role of government in the spread of information was hotly contested during the first years of the early republic. As part of those debates, American leaders spoke extensively about the importance of the press to a free society.

When considering the limitation of the press under the 1798 Sedition Act, Thomas Jefferson asserted that “this is a game where principles are at stake,” and he hoped that the “reign of witches,” as he termed the Adams administration’s attempts to curtail the flow of information, would soon pass. With the expiration of the 1798 law at the start of Jefferson’s own presidency, the rights of free press were restored to the new nation.

Massive changes rocked the production of the news during the early nineteenth century, and the steadfast security of the principles protected by the First Amendment meant that the printed word remained ever powerful in informing the citizenry in the growing republic. By the mid-nineteenth century, both paper production and printing work were completed by steam-powered machines rather than by hand. Such a seismic change to the scope and scale of printed work made the already influential medium even more readily available throughout the American populace. 

The increased mechanization of production, speed, and reliability of travel with infrastructure improvements all came together to culturally shrink the growing country. At the eve of the Civil War, the 1860 census revealed over 4,000 news publications coming regularly off the presses across the United States. And the American people were reading more than one million copies of printed news (in its various forms across newspapers, magazines, and specialty publications) each year. The proliferation of information across the citizenry reflected both the enduring success of the founding principles and the energetic enterprise of the American people to engage in the project of self-governance, both equally key components of a healthy democratic society.

Dr. C.C. Borzilleri is a historian of women and print culture in early America. She is a Content Specialist at the Bill of Rights Institute and teaches university courses on American history and memory.

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