Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789
Reviewed by Jonathan W. Wilson
Have pity for John Holt. He lived in perilous times. As the publisher of the New-York Journal, and as a centrally located postmaster, Holt was poised to play an important role in the American Revolution. His evident sympathies were with the patriots. But he had to be careful.
In the 1760s and 1770s, printers like John Holt could easily find themselves caught between the British empire and its protesters. Just as importantly, they were often caught in economic binds. That was particularly true in New York, where neither patriots nor loyalists could completely dominate the city. During the Stamp Act protests of late 1765, Holt’s supposed allies in the Sons of Liberty resorted to dire threats against his “House, Person and Effects” to make sure he continued to print on unstamped paper.[1] Just a few months later, on the other hand, a Lieutenant Hallam, stationed in New York harbor on his majesty’s ship Garland, threatened to personally hang Holt as a rebel. A few years later, the poor printer had to flee the city entirely.
Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789
By Joseph M. Adelman
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019
John Holt’s pickle may have been worse because he was in New York, but his colleagues faced similar dilemmas in towns across the colonies. Joseph M. Adelman argues in Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789, that the delicacy of their situation was actually one of the key reasons that printers like Holt took leading roles in the American Revolution. As artisans who had to think like merchants and officeholders, printers were accustomed to being caught in the middle of things. It was in order to survive, as much as to sway public opinion, that they adopted business strategies that shaped the ideas of the American founding.
Scholars have already assigned newspaper editors a central place in early American public life. They argue that printers and editors (these were generally the same people) opened the pages of newspapers and magazines to help create a discussion space—a “public sphere,” in the term popularized by Jürgen Habermas sixty years ago. Through print culture, readers could imagine the early United States as an entity, and citizens outside of government could debate public issues in a relatively democratic way.[2]
Entering this discussion, Adelman proposes that revolutionary-era newspaper printers’ behavior owed as much to local working conditions as it did to any larger political ideas. In other words, to understand printers as political actors—whether they sided with the patriots or the loyalists—we first need to understand them as people who earned a living by printing, in New York or elsewhere.
This argument hinges on the importance of business networks. Printers in eighteenth-century America, Adelman shows, relied on connections with people across the British empire—including other printers, family members, merchants, and government officials—just to stay afloat. “Printing was a constant struggle to survive,” Adelman writes, and printers needed well-placed friends not only to secure capital and job contracts but also to obtain “the most current information—their most precious commodity.”[3]
Most towns in British North America could support, at best, a single print shop. It would typically be run by a master printer and his wife (or widow) on a household model, with a few apprentices and journeymen, and sometimes with hired unmarried women and enslaved workers as well. Since a journeyman was unlikely to establish a firm of his own in the same community, this model kept printers moving, forced them to collaborate across long distances, and encouraged them to form family alliances. Adelman bases his study partly on an impressive database he assembled of 756 master printers active between 1756 and 1796, which documents many of these relationships and movements.[4]
Adelman’s inferences about their working conditions are some of the most fascinating material in the book. He explains, for example, how the printing process influences the way a colonial newspaper should be read. The first and last pages had to be inked first and then set aside to dry, so a newspaper usually opened with the news that was on hand early in the week, especially texts from Europe; the rest of the edition was laid out in descending order of distance, relaying news received from other colonial printers and postmasters and leaving little room for local stories (which, of course, most customers had already heard). What readers did need to see from their own town were advertisements, which could occupy as much as half the newspaper, and which were critical to the print shop’s survival.
But what made struggling printers into revolutionary activists? According to Adelman, it was the Stamp Act of 1765, which directly threatened printers’ living. It raised the up-front cost of everything they printed and sold. Because they had to print on either stamped or unstamped paper, it also forced them to take sides. Direct defiance of the act happened mostly in Boston. But elsewhere, printers could form associations behind the scenes with the Sons of Liberty, as John Holt did in New York City. They could print and sell anonymous denunciations of the act, as Holt’s associate William Goddard did, sneaking across the river to print a special newspaper in New Jersey. And they could creatively edit stories of the street protests to shape the way readers in distant communities experienced the whole crisis. In the short run, they won; the Stamp Act was soon repealed. In the long run, their turn to political activism contributed to a crisis that would threaten the survival of many of their firms.
This first half of Revolutionary Networks may be stronger than what follows. The first three chapters draw on several kinds of evidence, direct and circumstantial, to put together a vivid picture of the late colonial printer, and to explain why he or she is crucial for understanding colonial thought at the time of the Stamp Act. The rest of the book, though still persuasive, draws sensible inferences from a more fragmentary field of information—fragmentary both because the imperial crisis would disrupt the business of printing firms and because North American printers would take different sides in the conflict.
By 1773, as the political ground shifted again, younger printers took the Stamp Act crisis for granted as a precedent for political activism. Yet newspaper printers in the age of the Tea Act and the Coercive Acts still worked in a complex environment. They made room for some cooperation across partisan lines because of their shared need for news, for example. Old commitments to impartiality could mean patriot propaganda found its way even into the pages of loyalist newspapers, like James Rivington’s in New York. (Loyalist printers, Adelman notes, were more likely than patriots to separate politics from business—a habit that would help Rivington stay open after the war.)
The political crisis also created practical emergencies, as when Holt enlisted the help of a Sons of Liberty leader in Connecticut to procure paper as it became scarce in late 1774. Conversely, printers’ understanding of the political moment was shaped by their commercial interests. For example, William Goddard’s campaign to create a “Constitutional Post” to replace the imperial postal system grew partly out of his commercial rivalry with William Bradford, the Philadelphia postmaster.
Once the Revolutionary War was fully underway, economic conditions for printers became grim. The war made it difficult to obtain supplies, printing contracts were interrupted, and printers had to flee from opposing armies. In Norfolk, Virginia, Holt’s son John Hunter Holt had his press confiscated by British troops, while in Baltimore, ironically, William Goddard came under attack by patriots. The total number of working master printers, which had been steadily growing, fell slightly by 1777, and fewer than half of the printers working at the start of the war would be active eight years later.
Where did this leave newspapers after the Revolution? Adelman concludes that printers in the new nation chose between two different expansion strategies. After the war, some headed inland, setting up shop in new settlements much as their forebears had—but extending American information networks deeper into the continental interior. Others survived on the coasts through entrepreneurialism and becoming more open and vocal about political topics. Both of these strategies put printers in the vanguard of early American nationalism. In the following decades, as other historians tell us, more and more of their trade would come to be concentrated in New York.
Alas, neither strategy was available for John Holt. Having fled upriver to Kingston during the war, he returned at the end of 1783 to Manhattan. There he began trying to rebuild his subscriber base, calling on prospective readers to reward his wartime service. Within just weeks, exhausted, he died.
With Revolutionary Networks, Joseph Adelman has delivered an elegant and satisfying explanation of several major changes in early American print culture. This will be useful to anyone trying to do original research in the period, since Adelman demystifies many of the eccentricities of revolutionary-era newspapers. (The introduction and first chapter will be especially useful to students.) All historians studying the Stamp Act crisis should take this book into account. And Revolutionary Networks will be indispensable to anyone studying the early history of American news media. That includes readers with a special interest in New York, although Adelman never singles it out. The primary audience in all these cases is academic, but Adelman’s prose is clear enough to make Revolutionary Networks valuable to almost any reader interested in how Americans in the age of Holt and Rivington spread the news.
Jonathan W. Wilson holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Syracuse University. His research focuses on articulations of American national identity in early 19th-century New York literary culture. He teaches history and American studies at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
[1] Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 65.
[2] Jeffrey Pasley, for example, has shown that newspapers were critical political institutions in the decades after the Revolution; their editors, far from being neutral observers, were among the most powerful political actors in the early republic. Robert Parkinson, more recently, has argued that newspaper printers were already crucial “publicists” for the patriot cause during the Revolution. Printers strategically circulated and reprinted stories to create the sense that colonists across the continent shared a common identity, and that they were separate from both Great Britain and other North American peoples. This argument sits a bit uneasily with the work of Trish Loughran, who has questioned whether early America had a unified print culture at all. Until the mid-nineteenth century, she points out, printed texts spread mostly to smaller, local reading publics, who used them to imagine each other’s communities. All three of these arguments are important background for Joseph Adelman’s work now. See Jeffrey L. Pasley, ‘The Tyranny of Printers’: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation-Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
[3] Adelman, Revolutionary Networks, 38.
[4] Ibid., 210n15 and 245.