Honor our free press on Independence Day
From Colonial patriots to Capital Gazette’s fallen
Daniel Fowle had just sat down for his midday meal when he heard an unexpected knock at the door. On that day, Oct. 24, 1754, on orders from the Massachusetts-Bay House of Representatives, police summarily arrested the Boston printer and hauled him before the hastily assembled tribunal.
The Colonial government accused Fowle of printing “The Monster of Monsters,” a scandalous satire critical of members of the House. When he refused to either admit he did or name the true printer (it was his brother), the British overseers threw him in jail. For five days, Fowle remained imprisoned with a thief and a murderer. The guard allowed Fowle no visitors and no pen to write his wife.
There was no free press in Colonial America. In “The Pamphleteers: The Birth of Journalism, Emergence of the Press & the Fourth Estate,” James A. Oliver put it this way: “There was freedom of speech in this era, so long as you were prepared to pay for it at the end of a rope.”
Even so, the press had a significant impact on inspiring patriots during our country’s founding. Oddly, there were few newspapers — three dozen at the start of the Revolutionary War. By 1783, primarily due to lack of revenue and logistical problems caused by the Revolutionary War, the Colonies would be down to only 20 newspapers.
While the war took its toll on newspapers, pamphlets proliferated. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” Bernard Bailyn cataloged more than 400 pamphlets through 1776. By war’s end in 1783, that number had grown nearly fourfold. At that time, Moses Coit Tyler wrote in “The Literary History of the American Revolution,” “the subordinate place (was) then occupied by the newspaper, the supreme place then occupied by the pamphlet.”
Pamphlets represented the guerrilla tactic of Revolutionary War communication (on both sides of the Atlantic). They helped frame the logic of our rebellion. They provoked the third of the population who remained independent to take the side of the Patriots rather than the Tories. They form the basis of our unique American origin story.
“It was in this form — as pamphlets — that much of the most important and characteristic writing of the American Revolution appeared,” Bailyn writes.
Many pamphleteers wrote under pseudonyms, and justly so. British authorities imprisoned Fowle merely for being suspected of printing a pamphlet critical of the government.
The History Channel calls Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, arguing for independence from Britain, “one of the most influential pamphlets in American history,” but it was first published anonymously. “His writings put his life at risk in every country he lived in,” Jon Katz wrote in Wired in 1995.
No doubt the Founding Fathers recalled these horrors when they adopted the First Amendment and the concept of a free press. Journalism in the new America thrived in the realm of the pamphleteer — the op-ed columnist of the day, something we at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists are quite proud of. We can thank them for the free press we casually count on now.
As we celebrate and honor those most responsible for giving us Independence Day, let us not forget those scribes who risked all for the cause of patriotism.
And, in light of the tragedy at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, let us not forget that the willingness to sign your name to an article, a column, a masthead continues to require an uncommon bravery we often take for granted.
Christopher Carosa is president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.