The Tyranny of Printers

Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic

Jeffrey L. Pasley

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780813921778
• eBook ISBN: 9780813921891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Although frequently attacked for their partisanship and undue political influence, the American media of today are objective and relatively ineffectual compared to their counterparts of two hundred years ago. From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, newspapers were the republic's central political institutions, working components of the party system rather than commentators on it.

The Tyranny of Printers narrates the rise of this newspaper-based politics, in which editors became the chief party spokesmen and newspaper offices often served as local party headquarters. Beginning when Thomas Jefferson enlisted a Philadelphia editor to carry out his battle with Alexander Hamilton for the soul of the new republic (and got caught trying to cover it up), the centrality of newspapers in political life gained momentum after Jefferson's victory in 1800, which was widely credited to a superior network of papers. Jeffrey L. Pasley tells the rich story of this political culture and its culmination in Jacksonian democracy, enlivening his narrative with accounts of the colorful but often tragic careers of individual editors.

1

The Newspaper-Based Political System of the Nineteenth-Century United States

Here at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is common to observe that journalists have become more famous and powerful than the politicians they cover.¹ It is much less well known (outside a small circle of historical specialists) that journalists once were politicians, some of them among the most prominent candidates, officeholders, and party operatives in the nation. This was last true in the early twentieth century, appearing most starkly in the presidential election of 1920, in which the two major parties each nominated a longtime Ohio newspaper editor—Warren G. Harding for the Republicans, James M. Cox for the Democrats.² While an unusual circumstance, the nomination of two newspapermen was no fluke. Instead, it reflected the central role the press had been playing in American party politics since the end of the eighteenth century. The 1920 campaign was a kind of last hurrah for the old political press. The editor-candidates were not well received by reporters and columnists proud of their industry’s increasing professionalism. H. L. Mencken sneered that Cox and Harding were esteemed only “by the surviving hacks of the party press.”³ President Harding’s disgrace probably destroyed what little national prestige the party press had left. The news media and the parties parted ways permanently after the 1920s, ending a partnership, perhaps even a merger, that had profoundly shaped American political development. The subject of this book is how and by whom this merger was accomplished.

THE PARTISAN PRESS RECONSIDERED

Taking the old partisan press seriously requires a fairly radical shift in the typical late twentieth-century perspective on the subject of the press and politics. It requires abandoning the teleological notion that there can be only one model of a political press, namely, the modern United States—one in which journalists themselves take no role as active political partisans except on editorial pages and talk shows, and, even then, typically shun formal affiliation with political parties or candidates. It requires an openness to the possibility that newspapers might have useful functions besides gathering, writing, and disseminating news stories.⁴

Though few historians or commentators in the United States have shown this openness, the need for it in understanding the history of the American press can be seen in the fact that one of the primary missions of the modern media, the active gathering of news, emerged very slowly and very late in that history. Through most of the nineteenth century, only the largest urban dailies maintained reporting staffs. The rest delivered the “news” in a desultory, haphazard fashion, printing letters written or lent to the editor, material from other newspapers, and raw government documents. Local news, in particular, was largely absent from most smaller newspapers until well after the Civil War.⁵

Newspapers have long occupied a paradoxical place in histories of early and antebellum America. They were one of the most striking aspects of the nineteenth-century American scene to foreign commentators such as Alexis de Tocqueville. He noted in his travels that there seemed to be “hardly a hamlet in America without its newspaper” and that this ubiquitous political press made “political life circulate in every corner of that vast land.”⁶ Yet the partisan press is perhaps the one major institution in American society that goes virtually unmentioned in survey narratives, textbooks, and other syntheses, except for a few stereotyped, largely mythical instances of journalistic excess or heroism such as the Spanish-American War, Vietnam, and Watergate.⁷

Political and cultural historians have often used newspapers as sources, but they have rarely done justice to the press as a historical phenomenon in itself.⁸ This is especially true of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century partisan newspapers, which have generally been dismissed or lamented as denizens of the “dark ages” of journalism history, a time when the press was under the thumb of political parties and maintained by pathetic “kept editors.”⁹

Journalism school textbooks rehearse a standard version of newspaper history that amounts to an origin myth for the modern, commercial, “objective” news media, a myth designed (according to one critic) “to reinforce journalists’ and future journalists’ belief in the merit of their profession.” This origin myth centers around the struggle of modern journalism to emerge from the dark ages and assume its presumably foreordained characteristics: a fundamentally commercial orientation, a primary mission of delivering information to the public as quickly as possible, an ideal of objectivity regarding all political or social controversies, a value system prizing aggressive news gathering over all else, and an adversarial relationship with political parties and the state.¹⁰ The end of this story is the present era, in which the news media (though not necessarily the newspapers) enjoy unprecedented prosperity and penetration, wielding power that is often said to outstrip that of more overtly political institutions such as the political parties and the government.¹¹

This study is not the place for a full critique of this mythology, which some recent journalism historians have begun to dispel.¹² However, as a way of putting the era of the partisan press in its proper historical perspective, it may be useful to observe that arguments for the power of the modern media rest on an oxymoronic notion of political power. Typically, political power involves the ability to exercise control, implying some direction or purpose. Yet this is not what the modern news media have, committed as they are to a policy of political valuelessness and lacking as they do the direct link that a successful political party forges between public attitudes, partisan elections, and government policies. Rather, the modern political news media is powerful more as the weather is—an awesome force that moves or destroys without purpose, motive, intention, or plan, a power that cannot direct itself toward any particular object. Hence, though surveys have always revealed national-level journalists to be heavily Democratic in their personal beliefs, the news media over the years of the late twentieth century have raised up presidencies and candidates, then smote them down again, seemingly without much regard to substantive issues or ideological affinities.¹³

In nineteenth-century America, by contrast, the newspaper press was the political system’s central institution, not simply a forum or atmosphere in which politics took place. Instead, newspapers and their editors were purposeful actors in the political process, linking parties, voters, and the government together, and pursuing specific political goals. Newspapers were the “linchpin” of nineteenth-century party politics, one historian has written, though historical narratives and interpretations have rarely reflected that fact.¹⁴ This state of affairs held with particular force nationally from the 1790s to 1860s, but it remained strong long after the Civil War, as attested by the prominence of Gilded Age journalist-politicians such as Horace Greeley, James G. Blaine, Henry Watterson, and many others. In many localities, especially outside the major eastern cities where large commercial dailies came to overwhelm the party press, the system of newspaper-based politics remained fully operational until the early twentieth century.¹⁵

How and why was the press so central to the nineteenth-century political system?¹⁶ One possible argument might stress technological necessity: print was the only means of mass communication available in the age before film, radio, and television. In reality, cultural factors outweighed this technological gap, which was opened by a culturally created need. Tocqueville explained the problem in terms of the decline or absence of traditional social bonds: “When no firm and lasting ties any longer unite men, it is impossible to obtain the cooperation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help is required that he serves his private interests by voluntarily uniting his efforts to those of all the others. That cannot be done habitually and conveniently without the help of a newspaper. Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers.”¹⁷

More specific cultural factors were also at work. During much of the nineteenth century, prevailing political mores forbade candidates—especially presidential candidates—from campaigning for themselves. There were usually no lengthy speaking tours and few if any other public events directly involving the candidates. In this situation, newspapers conducted many if not most of the opinion-shaping activities we now call campaigning: communicating a party’s message, promoting its candidates, attacking their opponents, and encouraging voters to turn out at the polls.¹⁸

Of course, a limited number of live-audience events and personal contacts (both often conducted by surrogates for the candidate) had been part of election seasons and political controversies since colonial times, especially in the South and the Middle Atlantic region. A candidate’s “friends” (usually his personal and political clients and allies) cajoled voters at the polls and sometimes even brought them there. Southern planter-candidates treated the voters to court-day barbecues that often involved speeches, but in colonial times these were more social rituals through which local elites and their clients reaffirmed their hierarchical relationship with each other, rather than real campaign events in which candidates solicited votes. During the pre-Revolutionary crisis, countless towns and villages held meetings and issued resolutions or declarations protesting a British policy or asserting American rights. (Later the town meeting evolved into a major means of nominating candidates.)

Live campaign events became even more common after the Revolution. During the 1790s, voluntary associations and militia companies in Philadelphia held politicized celebrations on the Fourth of July and other major holidays. Often beginning with a parade, these celebrations typically ended with a serious-minded yet sodden banquet. A promising or ascendant politician would give a speech, followed by a dangerously long set of toasts (both prewritten and “volunteered” from the floor) expressing pointed political sentiments. During the nineteenth century, other, more familiar, types of campaign events would come into fashion, such as conventions, rallies, debates, speaking tours, and torchlight parades. The southern political barbecue evolved from an occasional display of noblesse oblige on the part of a local bigwig into a commercialized “barbecue circuit,” staged by tavernkeepers and pork purveyors and open to all candidates willing to pay the organizers.¹⁹

Yet, in the nineteenth century, even live events depended on newspapers (along with other forms of print) to have any significant political impact. Newspapers helped generate an audience before an event and broadcast news of it afterwards. Southern political barbecues were heavily advertised in the newspapers, and in Maryland, where political speeches and debates became popular earlier than elsewhere, newspapers featured extensive postmortem coverage of the events. In one case, the Baltimore Whig carried almost daily accounts of U.S. Attorney General William Pinkney’s speaking tour of rural Maryland on the eve of the 1813 state elections. This became a series of debates when local Federalist congressional candidate John Hanson Thomas decided to tag along. Under the heading of “ELECTIONEERING CAMPAIGN,” the Whig hyperbolized extensively on the eloquence of Pinkney’s rhetoric, the cogency of his arguments, and the enthusiasm of the crowds. At Frederick, it was explained, the Federalists “never received a more severe and a more genteel political drubbing in their lives. They withered under it.” But if that performance was great, “At Middletown, Mr. Pinkney . . . transcended himself.” He spoke for three hours, but “the audience stood as if they were riveted to the ground,” tears in many eyes, as they witnessed “such a display of powers as are unparalleled in the annals of oratory.” The most significant aspect of Pinkney’s tour for our purposes was that it seems to have been most effective in Baltimore, where people only read about it in the newspapers. The Republicans lost the 1813 elections in the rural county where the speeches took place, but won Baltimore by a landslide.²⁰

Since public events like the Pinkney-Thomas debates could be attended only by a minority of the population of one small region at any given time, even an extremely well-attended event could have few wide-reaching or lasting political effects—it could not engender wide concert of opinion or action—unless an account was printed in a newspaper. Moreover, debates and rallies and parades could only be held at intervals, and campaigns themselves were intermittent. Add the vast extent of the nation and even of some individual states and congressional districts, and we can see that party activists and voters needed “some means of talking every day without seeing one another and of acting together without meeting,” especially in the critical periods between campaigns, when key policy decisions were made and party ideologies and strategies were shaped and calibrated.²¹

In early America, many live political events seem to have been held almost entirely so they could be reported in the newspapers. During the pre-Revolutionary crisis, town-meeting resolutions meant little unless they were disseminated broadly, and in any case, the intended audience was not the local community but colonists and British officials in other towns. (The same applies to many of the colonial-era legislative resolutions.) Leaders everywhere scanned the papers to learn the state of public opinion elsewhere.

During the early national period, many physical political events (such as party meetings and banquets) were held mostly to provide an occasion for printing a statement that some local politician had written in advance. Like town-meeting resolutions, banquet toasts were carefully crafted to express the particular political views of the gathering, including their opinions on current political controversies and candidates. Lists of toasts often included such detail and shadings that they functioned almost as platforms, long before official party platforms were invented. Toasts were intended for public consumption in the newspapers. Individual neighborhoods, towns, and party factions held and drew up reports of their separate banquets, and as these appeared in the newspapers, sometimes for day...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Conventions and Methods
• 1. The Newspaper-Based Political System of the Nineteenth-Century United States
• 2. The Printing Trade in Early American Politics
• 3. The Two National Gazettes and the Beginnings of Newspaper Politics
• 4. Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Price of Partisanship
• 5. The Background and Failure of the Sedition Act
• 6. Charles Holt’s Generation: From Commercial Printers to Political Professionals
• 7. The Expansion of the Republican Newspaper Network,1789–1800
• 8. A Presence in the Public Sphere: William Duane and the Triumph of Newspaper Politics
• 9. The New Conventional Wisdom: Consolidating and Expanding a Newspaper-Based Political System
• 10. The Federalists Strike Back
• 11. Improving on the Sedition Act: Press Freedom and Political Culture After 1800
• 12. The “Tyranny of Printers” in Jeffersonian Philadelphia
• 13. Ordinary Editors and Everyday Politics: How the System Worked
• 14. Newspaper Editors and the Reconstruction of Party Politics
• Appendix 1: Charts on the Growth of the American Press
• Appendix 2: The Sedition Act and the Expansion of the Republican Press
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index