Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies

introduction

Over the past several decades, an explosion of historical writing on the early republic has examined popular politics’ connection with the average citizen’s personal and social activities. Scholars have placed particular emphasis on participation in parades, crowds, and various national holiday celebrations that reflected the growth of political parties during the 1790s. Elaborating on [End Page 297] the maxim that the “personal is political,” writers have also investigated the role of local party meetings and leaders, newspapers, and social gatherings in nurturing popular interest in government activities. Political, cultural, social, and journalistic historians have analyzed the early partisan press and the filtration of political ideology to the masses.¹

Two main formats of print media existed for political disputants during the 1790s: newspapers and pamphlets. Newspapers have gained the most scholarly attention, perhaps because they appeared frequently, often as dailies. Therefore, they furnish an abundance of readily accessible information, not only on political matters but on everyday life. In general, historians assume that newspapers, because of their wider circulation and ostensibly cheaper price, rather than pamphlets, were the most important media by which the masses acquired political information and analysis. Most scholars take for granted that readership of partisan pamphlets was restricted to a better-educated, wealthier, politically prominent minority.²

What follows compares the role of political pamphlets and newspapers in the early US republic’s political culture. Were pamphlets intended to appeal to a closed circle of political insiders while the target audience of newspapers was average citizens? This is a topic seldom discussed by historians of the first American party system, from the late 1790s to the War of 1812. Questioning previous analyses, this author argues that pamphlets, lower priced than newspapers (whose publishers generally required a year’s subscription paid in advance), were more within the income range of average citizens.³ Implicit in this finding is the conclusion that the average citizen was more involved in political matters than we have appreciated, in that he or she was as likely as political insiders and members of a minority elite to purchase and read political pamphlets that conveyed information and ideologies between their covers.

This essay centers on the Philadelphia area during the 1790s and discusses the pamphleteering activities of diverse individuals in various contexts. Among those examined are philosopher-planter John Taylor of Caroline, who occasionally resided in Philadelphia as US senator from Virginia; noted Philadelphia publisher and newspaper editor Benjamin Franklin Bache; the great Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine; South Carolina Federalist congressman William L. Smith; British expatriate William Cobbett of Philadelphia and Bostonian Benjamin Russell, both very successful Federalist newspaper editors; and others involved in the period’s print culture. Pamphlet and book prices are compared with the cost of a year’s subscription [End Page 298] to a newspaper during the 1790s. The essay concludes that political writers considered pamphlets a means to reach a wide audience, not only the wealthy or those in positions of political power.

This article attempts to determine by various methods, including price, a pamphlet’s intended audience and the extent of its circulation. It also concentrates, albeit to a lesser extent, on newspapers, which scholars have more thoroughly analyzed. It is impossible to quantify the exact number of people who read newspapers that were passed around in taverns, hotels, post offices, and subscription libraries, as several memoirs of the period recall. It is probable that such public readings and transfers between individuals and families took place with the most popular pamphlets, such as Common Sense, as well. Speculation with regard to both media must remain impressionistic rather than precise. Also examined more closely than previous research is the provenance of political pamphlets and other literature during the early decades of the United States. Findings suggest that, rather than being intended for a closed circle of upper-class political insiders, pamphlets were widely distributed among the public. Often consisting of essays originally published in newspapers, pamphlets efficiently conveyed partisan ideologies and attitudes on issues. They were written by, and for, followers as well as leaders.⁴

newspapers versus pamphlets in the early republic

As noted, a good part of scholarly discussion of the readership and circulation of pamphlets and newspapers during the 1790s is based on assumption more than research. In Affairs of Honor (2001), a study of American political culture during the 1790s, historian Joanne B. Freeman concludes that political pamphlets were party notables’ tools of communication. (She calls them “defense pamphlets” because authors wrote them to defend their political positions and private character.) They preferred pamphlets to cheaper and more widely available newspapers because by this means they excluded the masses. This assertion comprises part of Freeman’s thesis that, during the republic’s youth, a “culture of honor” and aristocratic “friendship” prevailed among Democratic-Republican and Federalist leaders. In terms of their influence and circulation, Freeman asserts, pamphlets were intermediate between politically oriented, “public-minded personal letters” and the more widely circulated broadsides and newspapers. Freeman observes that “political pamphlets aimed at wider circles of elite readers” than personal letters. [End Page 299] They were intended for a well-educated minority, “dignified in tone and lengthy” and “ideal platforms for presenting a detailed argument.” By definition, they contained a great deal of information and were not designed for the average person.⁵ Stressing the significance of which instrument political writers chose to employ, newspaper or pamphlet, Freemen asserts, “is an idea worth repeating: When politicians chose a medium for their writings, they declared their intended purpose and audience—a useful fact for scholars trying to interpret those writings today.”⁶

In the 1960s Donald H. Stewart, an expert on Democratic-Republican journalism during the 1790s, observed, “Since newspapers then were read in taverns as a sort of library service or loaned much more than at present, circulation figures give only a rough estimate of the number of people who read them.”⁷ After the anti-tax Fries Rebellion broke out among middle-class German farmers and entrepreneurs in eastern Pennsylvania, a Federalist newspaper lamented that one of its causes was that too many people were reading free newspapers in neighborhood taverns.⁸ Without making much effort to confirm his assumptions, John L. Brooke, a leading scholar of New York’s political culture during this period, observes, “Newspapers must have been in short supply, constantly borrowed or read in the shared quarters of taverns or reading rooms.”⁹ In New York, by 1800 the third most populous state, most local papers were expected to attract from 200 to 400 subscribers. In 1806 the Troy (NY) Gazette suggested that 700 was the average circulation of area newspapers. According to a careful study of early nineteenth-century upstate New York newspapers, there were fifty-four newspapers in the entire state: seven were dailies published in New York City; three were semiweeklies; and three came out three times a week. The rest were weeklies. Its peers admired the success of an upstate New York paper with 400 subscribers, the Geneva Palladium.¹⁰ It is likely that only a handful of newspapers had a circulation of more than a few hundred, even those that boasted of being organs of expression for the Federalist and Republican parties and aspired to national prestige.

Detailed information about the extent of newspaper circulation in the late 1790s emerges from an interesting source: New York City Democratic-Republican Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller in his book A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803). Miller’s account of annual newspaper production concluded that 200 different newspapers circulated throughout the United States, which he estimated at 13 million copies annually. He counted 17 dailies, 7 papers that appeared three times a week, [End Page 300] 30 that appeared twice a week, and 146 weeklies. Miller proudly observed that although the population of the United States was less than half of Britain’s, its number of newspaper copies in circulation was over two-thirds that of Britain.¹¹

In big cities some newspapers were produced in large numbers before the 1790s. In 1774 James Rivington, publisher of the Loyalist New-York Gazetteer, claimed that his weekly had a circulation of 3,600. At the same time his competitor, Whig pamphleteer Isaiah Thomas, declared that his Massachusetts Spy sold over 3,500 copies in Boston alone.¹² It was already common for coffee houses and taverns to keep files of newspapers from all over the country. John Adams, as a member of the First Continental Congress convening in Philadelphia in 1774, recorded in his diary for August 23: “Went to the Coffee House and saw the Virginia paper.” In his standard textbook on journalism history, Frank Luther Mott wrote, “Reading Rooms advertised ‘every paper of note, either in Europe or America.’”¹³ Another scholar has written specifically about newspapers in New York’s Columbia County: “Circulation statistics do not tell the whole story, since every copy of a paper was likely to be read by several persons. Those who could not pay or would not subscribe, were not averse to borrowing.”¹⁴ None of these works provide convincing evidence other than one or two anecdotes to back up their assertions.

Although most historians assume that a large number of browsers in taverns, hotels, and even post offices perused newspapers, quantitative evidence of this (which would be extremely difficult to obtain in any case) is lacking. The sources of most of the examples in contemporary memoirs or correspondence describing such crowd-like behavior are somewhat snobbish Europeans, principally English travelers and novelists. Intent on describing Americans’ boorish, “uncivilized” conduct, they observed (often-inebriated) men reading newspapers in taverns and hotels with their feet on tables, yelling threats and obscenities at those who disagreed with their political opinions, and acting in a generally offensive manner. The examples usually come from the period during the great expansion of post offices, transportation, and communication networks following the War of 1812, roughly from 1815 to 1860, rather than the 1790s, which constitutes the time period of this article. Tourists’ narratives describe Americans (mostly male) reading and sharing newspapers in diverse places of public accommodation. The authors of these accounts more often emphasized the slovenliness, abrasiveness, and drunken condition of newspaper readers than their articulateness and conversancy with public affairs. These travelers were often members of [End Page 301] the British aristocracy or would-be aristocrats hostile to American ideals of liberty, equality, and uncivil behavior.

According to Richard R. John’s seminal work, post-1818 post office archives reveal that people gathered at post offices to rifle through newspapers that belonged to subscribers who had not yet picked them up. In small towns, isolated corners of taverns and grocery stores often served as post offices where customers skimmed newspapers that arrived in the mail for other people. Indeed, some enterprising postal employees set up reading rooms, in which they charged a monthly fee for browsers (ironically called “subscribers”) to read selected newspapers. However, John estimated that only about 3 percent of families actually subscribed to newspapers ca. 1820.¹⁵

During the period of partisan conflict between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, the semi-weekly Boston Columbian Centinel probably had the greatest circulation. It claimed over 4,000 subscribers. Another pro-Federalist newspaper, William Cobbett’s Philadelphia daily, Porcupine’s Gazette, boasted over 2,000 early in 1799. This number was as large as that of any London daily. The leading Democratic-Republican newspaper, Benjamin Franklin Bache’s daily, the Philadelphia General Advertiser: Aurora, at its height reputedly had about 1,700 subscribers. Of the weekly papers, the Walpole, New Hampshire Farmer’s Weekly Museum, which claimed about 2,000 subscribers, was probably the most successful.¹⁶

Just as there was great variety in newspaper circulation, there apparently existed a great disparity in the cost of producing newspapers. The printers of three Boston semiweekly newspapers, the Columbian Centinel, the Massachusetts Mercury, and the Commercial Gazette, which all cost three dollars per year, sustained diverse production costs. In an effort to standardize their expenses, the three journals publicly stated their weekly disbursements in their issues of October 3, 1798. The Columbian Centinel was published at a weekly cost of $120, while the Mercury expended only $80 and the Commercial Gazette as little as $50.¹⁷

pamphlets and newspapers in the 1790s: similarities and differences

In light of the vicissitudes experienced by newspaper publishers and subscribers, it is possible that pamphlets were more likely than newspapers to reach [End Page 302] a large, carefully defined audience. Amanda Porterfield implied this in her recent synthesis of the religious history of the Early Republic, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. Emphasizing the importance of Thomas Paine’s deist work, The Age of Reason (1794–95), she writes that it owed its great influence in the United States at least partly to its production as a cheap, affordable pamphlet, which “circulated widely,” appearing in eighteen editions. The second American edition cost only twenty cents; she observes that this was about the price of a pound of pork, a pound of raisins, or a pound of tallow. Lyman Beecher, the foremost New England Presbyterian revivalist of the early nineteenth century, recalled that even poor young boys “read Tom Paine and believed him.” And Porterfield relates that as far west as Kentucky, Baptists, after reading Paine’s Age of Reason became religious skeptics, eventually converting to Unitarianism. According to Porterfield, the book’s great impact resulted from the lower classes’ ability to purchase it because of its price as a cheap, though lengthy pamphlet.¹⁸

Most pamphlets began life as series of newspaper articles. Shortly after they appeared in newspapers, the essays were stitched together and sold as pamphlets. A good example of this is William L. Smith’s diatribe against Thomas Jefferson’s presidential candidacy in 1796, The Pretensions of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency Examined, published first as a series of newspaper articles, then a few days later as a pamphlet. This pamphlet, in which Smith, with Alexander Hamilton his anonymous coauthor, employed the pseudonym “Phocion,” originally appeared in John Fenno’s Federalist Gazette of the United States in October and November 1796 as an untitled series of articles. The essays merely carried the heading, “For the Gazette of the United States.” By the end of November, it was available as a pamphlet, with the prolix title, The Pretensions of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency Examined and the charges against John Adams Refuted; addressed to the Citizens of America in general, and particularly to the Electors of the President. An example of the cheapness of pamphlets compared to newspapers, “Phocion” was printed as a pamphlet in two parts: part one appeared as early as November 5, 1796, and was sold for the relatively low price of 37½ cents. By comparison, in 1796 a year’s subscription to Thomas Greenleaf’s Democratic-Republican New York Daily Argus cost seven dollars, about twenty times as much. It is likely that average-income New Yorkers would find the pamphlet more within their income than the newspaper.¹⁹

George Washington’s more famous Farewell Address first appeared as a full-page newspaper essay in two Philadelphia papers, the politically impartial [End Page 303] American Daily Advertiser and the Federalist Gazette of the United States.²⁰ In some cases, as with Jefferson’s only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, a work might first appear as a bound volume (especially if, like Notes, it was initially printed abroad). Afterwards, various chapters and sections would intermittently show up in newspapers and the burgeoning magazines of the post-Revolutionary period.²¹

Numerous instances occurred in which essays were published solely as cheap pamphlets. Their authors intended them to reach a wide audience, targeting mainly less-wealthy citizens. This was often the case with radical writers like Thomas Paine, who requested Benjamin Franklin Bache, the leading Republican printer in Philadelphia, to sell his open, derogatory Letter to George Washington in 1796 for only twenty-five cents. Paine subsidized its publication so that average-income readers could afford it. Before Bache advertised Paine’s Letter for sale in December 1796, no extracts from it appeared in the Aurora other than a minor instance on October 17, 1796—a single paragraph in which Paine claimed that reliable sources long ago informed him that John Adams favored a hereditary presidency in Washington’s male line, starting with his cousin Lund Washington. Paine wrote, “Two persons to whom John Adams said this told me of it. The secretary of Mr. [John] Jay was present when it was told me.” Perhaps Bache, in a display of business acumen, thought that by printing a brief extract of the letter, he would titillate potential readers into purchasing the pamphlet when it came out several weeks later. Under the heading “Important,” Bache accompanied the brief extract from Paine’s Letter with a note asserting, “The Editor of the Aurora knows T. Paine’s hand writing and has seen the original of which the following is a faithful extract.”²²

The one-paragraph extract of the Letter from the Philadelphia Aurora appeared in many newspapers. It was carried the same day under the byline, “October 17. Extract of a letter from thomas paine dated Paris, July 30, 1796,” in the Federalist Philadelphia Gazette of the United States. Two days later, on October 19, 1796, it appeared in the Elizabethtown New-Jersey Journal. It was reprinted in the Democratic-Republican New Jersey Centinel of Freedom on October 26, 1796. The Aurora frequently printed the following advertisement in December 1796: “this day is published, at the Office of the Aurora, Price 25 Cents. A Letter from Thomas Paine to George Washington, President of the United States, on affairs public and private.”²³ Despite being aimed primarily at the masses, Paine’s publication was printed only as a pamphlet, not in the newspapers. [End Page 304]

Similarly, when Irish American radical William Duane composed his attack on Washington’s Farewell Address under the pseudonym “Jasper Dwight of Vermont,” it came out only as a cheap pamphlet, never in the newspapers. On December 16, 1796, the Philadelphia Aurora advertised, at the price of twenty-five cents (the same cost as Paine’s Letter) Jasper Dwight’s “letter to george washington, president of the united states: containing strictures on his Address of the 17th of September 1796, notifying the relinquishment of the Presidential office.”²⁴

Occasionally, official documents in pamphlet form merely conveyed information, rather than attempting to convince readers to follow the editor’s political stance. For example, in 1794 Bache printed the radical democratic, never-implemented 1793 French Constitution. The advertisement in Bache’s paper read: “french constitution. A few copies of the French Constitution, carefully translated into English, from an authentic original, to be had at the Office of the General Advertiser. Price 6 Cents.” Dated December 7, 1793, the advertisement was printed into January of the following year, probably because the text of the French Constitution was not in great demand among Philadelphians despite its low price.²⁵

Although some pamphlets cost more than the average citizen could afford, in some cases, as during the presidential campaigns in 1796 and 1800, clever Democratic-Republican Party strategists like Philadelphia tactician John Beckley ensured that thousands of copies of cheap or free pro-Jefferson pamphlets were distributed to the people. Beckley disseminated at least 1,200 copies of pamphlets in 1796 and 5,000 in 1800 in the Philadelphia area alone.²⁶

In many cases, political parties used daily newspapers to appeal to the lower classes. However, if publishers enforced the typical contract with subscribers, which stipulated that a yearly subscription to the newspaper must be paid for a year in advance, this would strain the average citizen’s financial means. It is helpful to compare the prices of newspapers and pamphlets to help ascertain which forms of print media might be more within the capacity of an average-income worker to purchase.

john taylor of caroline: a case study of aristocrat as democratic pamphleteer (1793)

The unlikely author of a 1794 cheap political pamphlet, which he was eager for average citizens to purchase, was US Senator (Virginia) John Taylor of [End Page 305] Caroline. As a slaveholder, Taylor believed in blacks’ racial inferiority and supported slavery, views he elaborated in his newspaper series Arator in 1810. He published the essays as a pamphlet in 1813, regretting that they had originally appeared “in the ephemeral columns of a newspaper.” Nonetheless, Taylor favored a broad suffrage for white men. He considered himself the spokesman for small farmers, the silent majority in the republic, whose interests he felt were ignored by the Federalists and the Washington administration.²⁷ In the forefront of the intellectual leadership of the Democratic-Republican Party, Taylor wrote numerous newspaper articles and pamphlets attacking Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s financial policies. He claimed the Federalist economic program was designed to harm the small farmer and secure political and economic power in the hands of a wealthy urban oligarchy of financiers, speculators, and merchants, who would eventually transform the US government from a republic into a monarchy.²⁸

Taylor had already written newspaper essays. In February and March 1793 he composed a series of articles for Freneau’s National Gazette under the pseudonym “Franklin.” These essays anticipated much of what he wrote later. In these articles Taylor charged that Hamilton and his Federalist supporters set up institutions like the Bank of the United States and manipulated the public debt so that rich city-dwellers and venal congressmen held most of it. Their ultimate intention was to overthrow the US Constitution and the republican form of government and replace them with a British-type monarchy.²⁹

Despite his prestigious post in the Senate, Taylor wrote using a pseudonym because it was considered ungentlemanly and self-aggrandizing to engage in public political controversy. Still, he may have expected readers to see through his “Franklin” cognomen.³⁰ With regard to his lengthier, upcoming project, he wanted his attack on the Washington administration’s domestic policy, especially the Bank of the United States, to have extraordinary impact. “The news papers are improper channels through which to make a considerable impression on the public mind,” he opined in a letter to James Madison, the Democratic- Republican Party chief, “because they are a species of ephemerae, and because the printers are not orthodox in general as to politicks. Hence a pamphlet appeared most advisable, and I have written, in length sufficient for a pamphlet.”³¹ Taylor decided that he wanted to influence the “public mind,” not a restricted elite.

After completing his latest pamphlet in June 1793, An Enquiry into the Principles and Tendency of Certain Public Measures (Philadelphia, 1794), which he considered his magnum opus, Taylor submitted it to Jefferson and [End Page 306] Madison for their comments. Explaining to Madison that his only objective was “the publick good,” he wanted his essay to receive the most extensive circulation possible, and believed that a cheap pamphlet would be the best format for this purpose. Taylor considered a pamphlet the most suitable means to impress the people with his fears, “and alarm the publick mind into a discussion of principles.” In Taylor’s assessment, newspapers, even the most important ones, such as Freneau’s National Gazette, generally did not circulate much beyond their local vicinity. Moreover, he did not want his work buried among the mass of essays, news reports, notices, and advertisements that appeared within the small print of a newspaper’s format. Debating whether to publish his essay as a pamphlet or “in the newspapers,” he reiterated that “the latter are meer ephemere [mere ephemera], and tho’ containing merit, read & forgotten.” He considered another drawback to publishing in the newspapers: “the sphere of their circulation is circumscribed.”³²

Observing that “the best political essays” were “often supposed to proceed from the printers in a course of trade” in pamphlet form, this aristocrat-as-democrat styled himself a Pied Piper of the masses. “If the performance is adjudged worthy of being printed in a pamp[h]let, I submit it to you,” he humbly suggested to Madison, “whether it ought not to be done in the cheapest stile, for the sake of circulation, for it will hardly have merit enough to circulate itself.” He told Madison that he was willing to subsidize publication of the pamphlet himself to enable it to reach the voters.³³ He assumed that Philadelphia, the biggest central city and the nation’s capital, would be the best venue to publish it, from which it could be disseminated throughout the country. Taylor hoped voters would appreciate the essay and impress its anti-Hamiltonian recommendations, such as repeal of the Bank of the United States’ charter, on their state and congressional representatives. As he explained to Madison, he proposed to “print it in phila., to be distributed either among the state assemblies at their fall meeting, or at the opening of the next Congress. In the latter case, to make a direct impression on the members of Congress; in the first, to subjoin the influence of their constituents,” who he hoped would purchase the cheap pamphlet before their state legislatures met and petition them to advocate his ideas.³⁴

Three months later, Taylor was displeased to find that portions of his pamphlet had appeared without his permission in Philip Freneau’s Democratic-Republican newspaper, the National Gazette.³⁵ Taylor knew that it was common practice for the text of a political pamphlet to appear first in newspaper installments. Although his writing style was often convoluted [End Page 307] and bombastic, Taylor never said that publication in a newspaper degraded his arguments or made them less intellectual. (One need only mention that the ponderous Federalist Papers, the greatest classic of American political thought, were initially published in newspapers.). Moreover, Taylor’s letters indicated that he wanted a large audience for his work.

It is doubtful that Taylor considered his work somehow degraded by a small portion’s previous appearance in the National Gazette, an organ of mass opinion allegedly read by less wealthy citizens. Indeed, most people could not afford to purchase Freneau’s high-priced paper. The democratic editor Freneau was not the publisher of this paper; Philadelphia entrepreneurs Childs and Swaine were, and they needed to make a profit. The National Gazette was published twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, for three dollars a year, “one dollar and a half payable in advance, and future payments at the commencement of every half year.” In addition, the “expences of postage, or other conveyance, [were] to be paid by the person subscribing,” an unusual stipulation for a newspaper, amounting to an additional dollar or more per year for the subscriber.³⁶ As already mentioned, newspapers were comparatively more expensive than pamphlets, because an annual subscription, payable in advance, was generally required. The National Gazette, at a cost to subscribers of three dollars a year plus postage, was more expensive than most other semiweekly newspapers, possibly because it carried fewer advertisements.³⁷

Taylor probably thought that he would gain a greater number of readers if he published his work as a pamphlet than in the high-priced National Gazette. The worth of his essay would be devalued and would probably attract fewer purchasers if scraps of it first appeared in a newspaper. As historian Robert E. Shalhope put it, “Freneau’s printing of extracts miffed Taylor because he felt that this would weaken the impact of the pamphlet when it finally appeared.”³⁸

Perhaps another reason for Taylor’s annoyance was that, like several of his fellow egotistical republican aristocrats thirsty for fame and the applause of posterity, he preferred that his essay stand alone, apart from the newspaper’s microscopic print.³⁹ At the same time, he wanted to spread his ideas to as great a portion of the literate public as possible, and probably nearly 90 percent of the adult white males could read.⁴⁰ His goal was to “make a considerable impression on the public mind.”⁴¹ If he succeeded in motivating the people, he might put the brakes on the Hamiltonian fiscal system and help gain passage of amendments to the Constitution restricting the national government’s powers.⁴² [End Page 308]

More interested in propagating his ideas among the literate public as a single cohesive piece than in making money or publishing an essay for the wealthy, Taylor desired to present his work “in the cheapest stile, for the sake of circulation,” so that the greatest number of average citizens would purchase and read it. He naturally sought to engage a wider audience than an elite few, and considered a cheap pamphlet the best means to secure the most readers. Determined to produce the Enquiry as a stand-alone pamphlet, he pledged at least fifty dollars toward the cost of publication and expected his friends Madison, Jefferson, and James Monroe to “share” the burden.⁴³ He thus anticipated the mode by which Jefferson financed pamphlet production and dissemination in the late 1790s, including the notorious writings of the radical James Thomson Callender during the crisis produced by the Alien and Sedition Acts and the undeclared “quasi-war” with France.⁴⁴

As Jefferson wrote a former Virginia political leader, current Maryland congressman John Francis Mercer, in December 1792, he was in accord with Taylor in believing that Federalist policies presented “very threatening features to landed & farming men.” Extracts from the Enquiry appeared anonymously on September 11 and 14, 1793, in the National Gazette under the title, “Reflections on Several Subjects.” Justifying Taylor’s apprehensions, Freneau printed portions of the essay in random order.⁴⁵

Taylor was angry at the prior appearance of portions of the essay in any newspaper, even the firmly Republican National Gazette, whose reputation for excessive pro-French Revolutionary radicalism may have embarrassed him.⁴⁶ His self-esteem was injured by seeing his essay “ludicrously” implanted, as he put it, in a comparatively nondescript manner, among a sea of other essays, news items, and advertisements. As he wrote Madison, “I observe that Freneau is publishing extracts from it. This is both unwise and indelicate. Unwise, as mutilated anticipations, will weaken its effect, if it should appear as a pamphlet. Indelicate, as in that event, the performance will exhibit the ludicrous aspect, of a compilation from his news papers.”⁴⁷

In early 1794 Taylor’s work finally appeared in pamphlet form as he desired. On January 27, an advertisement in the Philadelphia General Advertiser notified its readers that Thomas Dobson (who had earlier published the first American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica) was printing it: “just published and to be sold by thomas dobson, Price three eighths of a dollar, An Enquiry into the principles and tendency of certain public measures.”⁴⁸ The price was relatively cheap, considering that the pamphlet was [End Page 309] ninety-five pages. It was printed by a reputable printer with no discernible party ties. Taylor must have expected it to have many purchasers.

Although unfortunately we lack precise figures for sales of Taylor’s work, pamphlets, as Paine’s Common Sense demonstrated (although Paine may have exaggerated the number sold), generally sold more copies than much more expensive newspapers. One of the few pamphlets of whose sales a contemporary estimate exists, Anglo-Federalist William Cobbett’s best-selling, six-cent diatribe against the French Revolution, “Cannibal’s Progress,” published in Philadelphia in 1798, sold 6,000 copies according to entries in Cobbett’s Account Book: ten times more than the average newspaper.⁴⁹

Taylor’s point of view, which we have analyzed at length as a case study, makes it apparent that late eighteenth-century pamphleteers and political activists did not consider pamphlets a way to exclude the common people from their deliberations. Even the aristocratic democrat Taylor understood that if a pamphlet were priced cheaply enough it would be more within reach of the average literate citizen than a far more expensive year-long subscription to a newspaper. In this respect the slaveholder John Taylor was akin to nonslaveholding pamphleteers like Benjamin Franklin Bache, Thomas Paine, and others. He also appreciated that, unlike a newspaper with its distracting array of other articles, essays, news reports, and advertisements, a pamphlet would be more likely to occupy the reader’s sole attention during the time it was being read.⁵⁰ Taylor’s choice to have his work appear in a pamphlet instead of a newspaper suggests that, perhaps because such a large percentage of Americans were literate, they were inclined to purchase pamphlets they found interesting, at least in part because their price was low compared to a newspaper subscription. In seeking the additional information about politics that pamphlets provided, late eighteenth-century American readers and writers endorsed the Baconian dictum that “knowledge is power.”⁵¹

from newspapers to pamphlets: philadelphia printer benjamin franklin bache and thomas paine

During the 1790s most newspapers, the commercially oriented and the vehemently partisan alike, shared similar characteristics. They were generally only four pages long and advertisements usually filled their front and back pages. News, editorials, and “correspondent” (contributor) commentary were reserved for the second and third pages. For their economic survival, early [End Page 310] party newspapers relied to a great extent on patronage from the state and national governments, such as the printing of laws, other documents, and notices; and on public employment for their editors, such as the position of state printer.⁵² With regard to the cost of newspapers to subscribers, one scholar, corroborating part of this article’s thesis, explains, newspapers were

expensive. A paper ordinarily cost the reader six cents an issue at a time when the average daily wage for nonfarm labor was less than eighty-five cents. But a person could not buy one issue at a time except at the printer’s office. Newspapers were generally sold only by subscription, and annual subscriptions ranged from eight to ten dollars. Not surprisingly, circulation of newspapers was low, usually just one or two thousand for even the most prominent metropolitan papers.⁵³

Newspapers remained beyond the financial reach of most citizens, since in many cases a reader was required to subscribe for a full year in advance, a sum of money difficult for a small farmer or artisan who made less than a dollar a day to pay (and farmers made something more like forty cents a day).⁵⁴ With the average daily newspaper in 1798 selling for eight dollars a year, even the most devout Jeffersonian Republican would be hard pressed to subscribe to Benjamin Franklin Bache’s flagship Democratic-Republican paper, the daily Philadelphia General Advertiser: Aurora.⁵⁵ At a cost of eight dollars a year in 1798, an inflationary increase of two dollars (33.33%) from six dollars, its January 1795 price, the Aurora was definitely out of reach.⁵⁶

At the outset, Bache probably hoped to sell his newspaper cheaply but profitably, so that it would reach Philadelphia’s lower classes and immigrants. Bearing the motto “truth, decency, utility” on its masthead, the General Advertiser’s first issue, appearing on October 6, 1790, cost three pence. It was a daily paper, for which subscriptions would cost five dollars annually, as Bache informed his readers in small print at the bottom of the last (fourth) page in the first number. Subscriptions for a year of Tuesday papers would cost ten shillings (around $70 today). All subscriptions were entered “at the Printing-Office; where Advertisements and Articles of Intelligence, in French as well as English, are gratefully received and carefully attended to.” Bidding for additional sources of revenue, Bache’s notice continued, “Advertisements of one square are One Quarter of a Dollar for the first, and Eleven Pence for every subsequent insertion” in the paper.⁵⁷ [End Page 311]

Like many newspaper publishers, Bache found it hard to make his journal a money-making enterprise. An increase of such magnitude in price is possibly justified by Bache’s desire to increase his income. He had recently become a father. His wife Margaret gave birth to three sons in three years, Franklin (1792), Richard Jr. (1794), and Benjamin (1796). He needed to gain more money from a paper that was losing it, at least partly because of overdue subscription payments.⁵⁸

Bache was undoubtedly aware of the high price of newspapers and knew from personal experience that many subscribers were unable or unwilling to pay up their yearly subscriptions. Beginning in January 1794 a daily Philadelphia General Advertiser subscription cost “six dollars per annum, to be paid at the end of the year by City Subscribers, but in advance by those in the Country.” In July 1795 he undertook a junket from Philadelphia to Boston selling copies of his pamphlet edition of Jay’s Treaty. In this first newspaper “scoop” in US history, he obtained the treaty’s text from a Virginia senator before the government made it public. The good-natured Bache, who had granted some subscribers a reprieve in payment, wrote his wife Margaret asking her to mail him a list of delinquent city customers who had not paid their bills, so that he could attempt to collect these debts en route.⁵⁹

Books and pamphlets were advertised in great numbers in the small rectangular boxes on the first and fourth pages of newspapers, often in very small print. An examination of newspaper advertisements for political pamphlets in the late 1790s suggests that an average-income person would find the purchase of a pamphlet more within their reach than buying a year-long subscription to a newspaper. In light of the usually accepted assumption that hundreds of thousands of copies of Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, were sold, such a conclusion seems plausible.⁶⁰

By briefly examining advertisements in Bache’s daily newspaper, and its longer-lived Federalist competitor, Benjamin Russell’s semiweekly Boston Columbian Centinel, we may ascertain the prices of various pamphlets. It is also possible that we will gain some insight into what it meant to issue a political work in pamphlet form. Bache’s radical Democratic-Republican newspaper printed far more advertisements for political pamphlets than did Russell’s conservative Federalist newspaper. Both newspapers tended to print advertisements for pamphlets that supported their political persuasion. Therefore, it seems likely that, although Democratic-Republicans controlled fewer newspapers (some historians estimate that the numbers favored the [End Page 312] Federalists in 1800 by a 2-to-1 ratio), their party held the advantage in terms of the number of pamphlets that espoused their cause.⁶¹

Although Republicans purportedly represented the lower and “middling” classes, Federalist and Republican newspapers usually sold for the same price. In other words, in selling their newspapers, Bache and his Democratic-Republican colleagues did not make a sustained effort to disseminate their journals cheaply in order to gain more subscribers among lower-income groups and propagate their ideology. Sadly, shortly before his death Bache complained that his newspaper had impoverished him, especially after Federalist jingoistic propaganda and the impact of the Sedition Act caused him to lose subscribers. Subscribers also tended to be remiss in paying for their subscriptions, taking advantage of lax credit provisions to avoid paying their full debt.⁶²

As a printer and bookseller, Bache, seeking to recoup his newspaper losses, attempted to sell pamphlets and other works by radicals and Democratic-Republicans at a cheap price to facilitate their circulation among the “middling and lower sort.” By confining examination of the General Advertiser to two different dates, January 2, 1795, and January 2, 1798, the author has restricted research within manageable limits and, because of the numerous advertisements, reached meaningful conclusions.

Several intriguing titles, often concerning the French Revolution, were advertised in the Aurora on January 2, 1795. Slaves in Algiers, a play by the feminist writer Susannah Rowson, cost only “one quarter of a dollar.” Bache’s advertisement observed that “all the booksellers in Philadelphia” carried it, attesting to Rowson’s great popularity. Other books and pamphlets on sale that day included French revolutionary Jean Bon St. André’s Journal of the Grand Course of the French Fleet, at eighteen cents; John Omrod’s Life of John Howard, the British prison reformer, for seventy-five cents; and the French Revolutionary Calendar for the Third Year of the French Republic, at a price of six cents.⁶³

Bache advertised numerous pamphlets on specific aspects of the French Revolution grouped together: Morality of the Sans Culottes for twenty-cents; Joel Barlow’s famous Advice to the Privileged Orders: Part II, for the same price; An Oration from the French, on Public Worship, for six cents; and even a translation of Maximilien Robespierre’s twenty-six-page Report to the National Convention on Political Morality, dated February 6, 1794 (two days after the National Convention abolished slavery in the French colonies), for twelve cents. The Political Progress of Britain, Or an Impartial history of [End Page 313] the Abuses in the Government of the British Empire, from 1688 to the Present, James T. Callender’s influential pamphlet predicting the British monarchy’s downfall in a republican revolution, was sold at the Aurora’s Office for half a dollar.⁶⁴ It is revealing that, as a radical Republican, Bache advertised pamphlets of such inflammatory content, while his conservative Federalist competitors, such as John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, did not.

Bache often reprinted radical political tracts that had appeared first in England, ostensibly selling his pirated editions at a far cheaper price. On January 2, 1798, the Aurora advertised the anarchist-socialist William Godwin’s Political Justice (full title: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Morals and Happiness) for the price of two dollars, “neatly bound,” claiming that the last English edition sold at the exorbitant price of seven and a half dollars.⁶⁵

Attacks on George Washington, despite his great popularity, constituted a stock in trade for Bache, a choice he may have eventually regretted.⁶⁶ One of the pamphlets that denounced Washington as a slaveholder, the now-forgotten Expostulatory Letter to Geo. Washington, Late President of the United States, On the Subject of his Continuing a Proprietor of Slaves, by Edward Rushton, “A Citizen of Liverpool,” is an example. The pamphlet, only eight pages long, cost one-eighth of a dollar. The Aurora advertised it over a long period. The letter was dated July 21, 1797, and the advertisement for it continued from that date through at least January 7, 1798.

This was at the same time as the ongoing sale of Paine’s more famous letter to Washington, which appeared as a pamphlet in December 1796 and was never printed in newspapers. Bache printed identically worded advertisements for Paine’s Letter from December 8, 1796, through January 1798. The advertisement stated, “T. Paine to G. Washington. This day is published, at the office of the Aurora, Price 25 Cents. A Letter from Thomas Paine to George Washington President of the United States, on Affairs Public and Private (Copyright Secured).” Indicating that Bache may have expected trouble selling a pamphlet from the “atheist” Paine that attacked the revered president, the ad continued, “The usual allowances will be made to booksellers, and Political works of approved merit taken in exchange.”⁶⁷

In this angry epistle, Paine charged Washington with betraying their “friendship” and republican principles by failing to secure his liberation from a Paris jail for two years, until James Monroe independently demanded his release as a US citizen. The letter consisted of seventy-six large-print pages, at a relatively modest price of twenty-five cents.⁶⁸ Convinced by 1796 that [End Page 314] Washington, who had crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, signed the Jay Treaty, and adopted Hamiltonian fiscal policies, had deserted republicanism, Bache probably printed Paine’s vituperative Letter more from principle than in expectation of monetary gain.⁶⁹

bache, monroe, paine, jefferson, and others: newspapers and pamphlets in the 1790s

Samuel Johnson’s 1785 Dictionary of the English Language defines “pamphlet” simply as “a small book, properly a book sold unbound, and only stitched.”⁷⁰ But if we follow Freeman we may consider a pamphlet any politically motivated contemporary work, irrespective of size, meant to “defend” the reputation of the author or his comrades against the aspersions of the opposition. By this standard, James Monroe’s voluminous collection of diplomatic correspondence, mainly between him and secretaries of state Edmund Randolph and Timothy Pickering during his controversial tenure as US minister to France from 1794 to 1796, may fall into the category of a “defense pamphlet.” Monroe’s objective in publishing his official correspondence, prefaced by a fifty-page introduction that consisted largely of quotations from it, was to refute Federalist charges that he had been inept and even disloyal to the United States and preferred France’s interests to those of his own country.

Loyal to his Jeffersonian friends, Bache agreed to publish the book, taking the copyright for it even though he knew it was unlikely to be remunerative. Ironically, Monroe and Bache dithered over the expense of publishing the book. Monroe agreed not to take any royalties, and consented to subsidize the book’s publication as Bache requested, provided he was promptly reimbursed. Monroe’s View of the Conduct of the Executive, as it was called, went on sale in December 1797. Despite the book’s great length of 450 pages, Bache, hoping to assist the vindication of a leading Republican, charged only $1.50, with “a very liberal allowance to those who buy to sell again.”⁷¹ In any case, the price of this very long “pamphlet” was less than a third of the cost of a year’s subscription to a daily newspaper. By encouraging booksellers to purchase the title, Bache hoped to spread Monroe’s message among the masses as well as attempt to earn a profit for the undertaking.⁷²

In this connection, it is likely that Bache welcomed Connecticut Federalist senator Uriah Tracy’s vociferous attack on Monroe as a Jacobin and a traitor, titled Scipio’s Reflections on Monroe’s View of the Conduct of the Executive [End Page 315] on the Foreign Affairs of the United States, Connected with a Mission to the French Republic in the Years 1794, ’95, ’96. Published serially in the Gazette of the United States during January 1798, it appeared almost simultaneously in pamphlet form.⁷³ Scipio’s tirade might attract attention and purchasers to Monroe’s tedious work and make Bache some money.

Unfortunately, Monroe’s book never made Bache any money, and he died in debt. Monroe tried unsuccessfully to collect the funds due him from Bache’s widow, Margaret Markoe, who married her husband’s associate, the Irish radical William Duane, over a year after his death. Bache had borrowed $600 from Monroe, and paid him back only $400 of his “claim.” Discouraged by the poor sales of his book, Monroe stopped requesting full reimbursement for his subsidy. He was eventually paid in books published by Bache. Monroe’s friend, Virginia congressman John Dawson, noted, “On the subject of Mr. Monroe’s accounts when in Richmond, in consequence of a conversation with Mrs. Duane, I advised him to take books to the amount of his claim, and rejoice that he has assented.” Dawson was a subscriber to the Philadelphia Aurora. He wrote Duane, Bache’s successor as editor, “Will you be pleased to direct my newspaper to be forwarded to the city of Washington?”⁷⁴

In 1795 Thomas Jefferson, a wealthy Virginia slaveholder residing at his home in Monticello, was among those “country” customers financially capable of paying in advance for a year’s subscription to a daily newspaper like Bache’s. His letters implied that he understood that this was something of a burden for the average citizen, which he advised Bache to attempt to overcome by printing a cheap triweekly paper in addition to the daily Aurora. Jefferson seemed more impressed by Bache’s pamphlet crusade against Jay’s Treaty than he was with the Aurora’s contents. Having obtained copies of the treaty from Virginia senator Stevens T. Mason and Pierre Adet, French minister to the United States, Bache printed its text, virtually complete, in the Aurora on June 29, 1795. He sold the treaty in pamphlet form beginning July 1, before the State Department released its contents. Then he went on a tour of the northern states, selling copies of the allegedly ignominious treaty for propaganda purposes.⁷⁵

Around this time, Jefferson made friendly overtures to Bache, promising to deliver him a “Chinese gong” that Bache’s grandfather Benjamin Franklin had left with him for safekeeping at the time of his death. He requested Bache to mail him a set of the General Advertiser for the entire year 1794, indicating that he had not been a regular subscriber before this time. He also [End Page 316] inquired when Franklin’s Works would be published, because he wanted to buy a copy.⁷⁶

Intending to renew his subscription to the Aurora, Jefferson wrote Bache at the end of 1795. Using State Department clerk Sampson Crosby as liaison, he desired to purchase the edition of Bache’s newspaper for 1795, seemingly not having subscribed in advance for that year either. (Perhaps he considered the Aurora of such significant historical value that he wanted two copies.) “Independent of this I shall be glad to become your subscriber from the 1st day of this month [December] for another set to be forwarded to me by post,” he wrote. Apparently, he had decided to become a regular purchaser of Bache’s paper. Anticipating postal mishaps, the methodical Jefferson wanted to make sure he had a full run of the paper. “As some of these will miscarry, I shall hope that on forwarding to you at the end of the next year a list of the papers wanting [i.e., missing] you will be so good as to furnish them at the pro ratâ price that I may have the whole year bound up here.” Perhaps desiring to assist Bache financially, he sent him payment for a second copy of that year’s subscription through his agent John Barnes.⁷⁷

Although Jefferson was aware that Bache, as Franklin’s grandson, was committed to republicanism, he had several objections to the fledgling General Advertiser in the early 1790s. He believed that as a daily it was too expensive and that its numerous advertisements impaired its value in disseminating the republican point of view. By mid-1791 he perceived that John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States (to which he had earlier, as secretary of state, granted some State Department patronage) was controlled by his foe Hamilton and had become a “paper of pure Toryism.” Although it was too expensive for mass circulation, “Bache’s is better [than Fenno’s],” he advised his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. “In the mean time Bache’s paper, the principles of which were always republican, improves in it’s matter,” his lukewarm endorsement continued. “If we can persuade him to throw all his advertisements on one leaf, by tearing that off the leaf containing intelligence may be sent without over-charging the post and be generally taken instead of Fenno’s. I will continue to send it [the General Advertiser] to you, as it may not only amuse yourself, but enable you to oblige your neighbors with the perusal.”⁷⁸ Thus, Jefferson was aware that Randolph could help the republican cause by lending Bache’s paper to his less-wealthy farmer-neighbors. It is likely that only the wealthy and near-wealthy had sufficient funds available to pay the cost of a newspaper subscription to a daily like the Aurora a year in advance. [End Page 317]

Among these was the rich New York Republican leader Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of Clermont Manor. At the beginning of 1799, a few months after Bache died of yellow fever, Livingston made sure that he paid Bache’s widow, who now owned the paper, a year’s advance subscription. He wrote his brother, New York City’s Congressman Edward Livingston, who resided in Philadelphia, “I enclose you Mrs. Bache’s account & money to pay it. I wish you would call upon her to discharge it & requisition to direct her papers to Clermont which they seldom do very irregularly reach being detained as I imagine at the post office at New York,” probably by Federalist postmasters trying to impede the paper’s distribution. “I hope you will not neglect this little commission as you know the consequence we attach to newspapers here.”⁷⁹

Livingston also purchased James Monroe’s View of the Conduct of the Executive, the overlong “defense pamphlet” whose purpose was to defend Monroe’s reputation as US minister to France. Livingston considered Monroe’s work worthy of a wide readership. Praising View as helpful in “opening the eyes of the people” to Federalist perfidy, he feared that sly Federalists might buy up the few copies available in New York to prevent its being read. He recommended printing it in a cheaper edition “so as to give it an extensive circulation.”⁸⁰

The Aurora advertised numerous radical pamphlets that were more ideologically oriented than Monroe’s narrative of his foreign service. Their authors were often British immigrants like the Scotsman James T. Callender, whose Sketches of the History of America, with its revelations about the sexual affair between Alexander Hamilton and Maria Reynolds that occurred six years earlier, cost only one dollar. Although the production of some literary works, like Joel Barlow’s epic poem The Columbiad, was delayed by a scarcity of subscribers, the Aurora advertised them anyway. Mathew Carey, the most prominent publisher and bookseller in Philadelphia, sold for only one dollar a 300-page volume of President Washington’s messages, A Collection of the Speeches of the President of the United States, to Both Houses of Congress. The book, printed by a Boston firm, included the replies of each house of Congress to Washington’s speeches, and contained an appendix with General George Washington’s Revolutionary War Circular Letter to the Governors of the States and his farewell orders to the Army in 1783.⁸¹ Individual books like these were certainly cheaper than a year’s subscription to any newspaper.

Bache’s own composition, a tract titled Remarks Occasioned by the Late Conduct of Mr. Washington as President of the United States, 1796, published [End Page 318] in July 1797, cost only thirty-one cents despite its eighty-five pages.⁸² That Bache intended lower-income groups to purchase Remarks is suggested by the comparatively higher price he charged for the brief pamphlet edition of Jay’s Treaty. He probably took for granted that only political activists, interested merchants, and the wealthy elite would desire to purchase it; he priced at twenty-five or fifty cents depending on the paper’s quality.⁸³

Although Bache perhaps hoped to attain solvency by the sale of pamphlets containing his exclusive “scoop” of the text of Jay Treaty, which he personally peddled from New York City to Philadelphia in the summer of 1795, he printed the pamphlet in two differently priced editions, hoping for its purchase by the middle class as well as the rich. John E. Harwood, a famous Baltimore actor who later married Bache’s sister, apparently expected his expedition to garner financial rewards. “You are doubtless returned from your excursion to the North [Boston],” he wrote, “I hope with plenty of that purifier—pecuniary profit.”⁸⁴ Unfortunately, Bache failed to sell all of his copies of Jay’s Treaty (perhaps a dull document to read).

Thomas Paine, in so many things a representative of radical aspects of the early republic’s political culture, may help us more accurately discern the role of pamphlets as compared with newspapers. In 1796 he resided in Paris. Freed from the Bastille on the initiative of Minister Monroe, he continued to serve in the French legislature. Despite his travails and political activities, Paine was still amazingly productive as an inflammatory writer. His American publisher, Bache, received from him 5,000 copies of “a small tract,” the pamphlet Dissertation on First Principles of Government. Unconcerned with profit, he instructed Bache to sell it at the cheap price of twenty cents. “Please to advertise them at not more than 20 Cents each, and by the dozen according to whatever custom is with you,” he wrote Bache. “I will settle the account with you hereafter.”⁸⁵

Bache printed most of Paine’s writings, including part 2 of The Age of Reason (1795–96), Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance (1796), and Agrarian Justice (1797). In 1796 Bache published Paine’s Letter to George Washington, even though a London publisher reportedly offered Paine £300 for the manuscript. Paine was interested in procuring the greatest number of readers. He did not care about the money. In addition to the 5,000 copies of his Dissertation on First Principles, he sent Bache 12,000 copies of Age of Reason: Part Two, instructing him to sell them for thirty-three cents a copy with 25 percent discount on wholesale purchases. He also allowed Bache a 25 percent profit on sales. However, Paine wanted Bache to seek copyright [End Page 319] protection from Congress for his work, because pirates were reprinting his books inaccurately and charging high prices for them.⁸⁶ Paine assumed that Bache would be able to sell these cheaply produced pamphlets to the general public. He apparently believed that the market for his pamphlets was inexhaustible. “The quantity is intended as a supply for the several States as far as it will answer that purpose,” he explained to Bache, “and I shall send you 10,000 more by the next vessel, for the whole of the work is kept standing at the printers.”⁸⁷

Paine’s primary objective was not only to disseminate his works as widely as possible, but also with his original text intact. Referring to The Age of Reason, he wrote Bache, “I request and commission you to enter the work at the proper office, conformably to the Act of Congress, as my property, for I intend to keep the right of publication in my own hands of which I wish you to give notice when you advertise the work.” Charging that new editions of the first part of Age of Reason were unfaithful to the original, he wrote Bache:

I see that by frequently reprinting the former part of the Age of Reason in the several States I am made to say what I never wrote, as you will see by a note in this work, and besides this it has been sold higher [priced] than I expected or intended, which is partly owing to the number of small Editions that have been made.⁸⁸

For Paine, the political pamphlet stood for freedom and enlightenment for all, not a rarefied, esoteric work designed to be accessible to a few.

Unlike the price of the pamphlets Bache advertised, his newspaper’s cost steadily increased. Taking into consideration the proximity of Philadelphia subscribers and the consequently lower postage costs, he offered them comparatively lenient payment terms. As noted earlier, after January 1794, Bache’s daily’s six-dollar annual price would “be paid at the end of the year by City Subscribers, but in advance by those in the Country.” He also noted that he would “gratefully receive” subscriptions, advertisements, and other sources of income “at the Office of the General Advertiser, No. 112, Market-street.”⁸⁹ Apparently many of his subscribers personally came to his office. They resided in Philadelphia. Many of them failed to pay for their papers at year’s end, precipitating Bache’s impending bankruptcy at the time of his premature death. However, when he raised the Aurora’s price to eight dollars per year in 1798, it was still “payable in advance” only for “country readers.” [End Page 320]

One of the Aurora’s foremost Democratic successor papers, Thomas Ritchie’s long-lived Richmond Enquirer (1804–51), was published only three times a week. According to the masthead of its first issue dated May 9, 1804, it cost “four dollars per annum, payable in advance.” Over time Ritchie pursued several simultaneous courses to safeguard his enterprise’s fiscal well-being. By January 1806 he raised the newspaper’s price to five dollars annually, “payable in advance.” During the 1820s, after two decades of experience, Ritchie curtailed the number of times per week he printed his paper. He published it “twice a week generally” and “three times a week during the sessions of the legislature.” The paper’s cost remained “five dollars per annum, payable in advance.” In addition, “notes (only) of chartered, specie-paying banks will be received in payment.” Further evoking the financial risks of newspaper publishing, Ritchie and his partner, Claiborne W. Gooch, asserted the prerogative of canceling the subscriptions of derelict customers. Employing carrot-and-stick tactics, they stated that “Whoever will guarantee the payment of nine papers shall have the tenth gratis.”⁹⁰

The trend toward payment in advance was evident among both Federalist and Republican newspapers. In 1804 Alexander Hamilton’s New-York Herald, the title of the semiweekly edition of the daily New-York Evening Post, charged four dollars per year, “payable in advance, with the option of paying at the end of the first six months.” This was quite expensive for a paper that appeared only twice a week.⁹¹ Thus, newspapers, whether run by Republican “friends of the people” or Federalist “aristocrats,” maintained a price that was too high for most citizens.

the boston columbian centinel’s pamphlet advertisements

As in the case of Bache’s Aurora, a random examination of the prices listed for pamphlets in advertisements within a leading Federalist newspaper, such as the Boston Columbian Centinel during 1797–99, indicates that pamphlets were intended for a larger audience than a restricted elite. Indeed, it seems likely that pamphlets, with their more modest price and specific content (for those interested in the topic under discussion) found a wider readership than most newspapers. Although the Columbian Centinel claimed a circulation of 8,000, more than any other newspaper, it appeared only twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Despite its infrequent publication, it cost three dollars a year. Assuming that 100 issues/numbers were printed per year, [End Page 321] each thin, four-page paper (two pages of them advertisements), cost about three cents, or .8 cents per page. This was more expensive per page than most pamphlets, and much of the material was irrelevant to most readers.

Perhaps because it was a prominent Federalist paper, the titles and subject matter of the pamphlets advertised for sale in the Columbian Centinel differed somewhat from those advertised in Bache’s Republican Aurora. For example, on Saturday, May 27, 1797, the Centinel advertised as a pamphlet what was an official government document in disguise. Considering the uniquely staggered scale of the item’s cost, graduated according to a purchaser’s alleged income, it was in effect a propaganda document. By encouraging people to buy and read this partisan work, Russell may have also hoped to attract additional subscribers to his journal and new advocates for Federalist policies within the city’s middle classes, reputedly Democratic-Republican sympathizers. The advertisement’s full text follows:

america and france. a full display of the present misunderstanding between the United States of America and france for sale at the Centinel office, price from 6 & ¼ cents to 50 cents, as the pecuniary ability of the purchaser may be. The list price is not its value: for it contains 86 close pages, and is written by the Hon. timothy pickering, Secretary of State of the United States, on the one part: and Citizen peter anthony adet, late Minister of the French Nation, near the United States, on the other. Every American ought to possess this book.⁹²

Seeking to attract a greater number of readers, the advertisement obscured the character of what was actually an official diplomatic exchange. Russell purported to sell, in the guise of an original work, a series of angry diplomatic notes between Pickering and Adet dating from November 1796 to January 1797, a period during which France recalled Adet to protest the Jay Treaty and began attacking Anglo-American commerce. The booklet’s enterprising publisher, apparently Benjamin Russell himself (since no specific publisher was mentioned and the advertisement is the first one on the first page), thus attempted economic distributive justice in a unique manner, allowing each purchaser to contribute what they thought they could afford. Priced at only six cents, this pamphlet was far more affordable to the average person than a year’s subscription to a newspaper for eight dollars a year.

Even fine novels in fine bindings were inexpensive compared to newspapers. The Centinel advertised British author Fanny Burney’s novel Camilla, [End Page 322] encompassing three large volumes, at only three dollars. The advertisement read: “Camilla—A new Novel. This day published, in 3 vols. duodecimo, price 3 dollars neatly bound and lettered CAMILLA; or a Picture of Youth . . . Sold by S. Hall, W. Spotswood, J. White, Thomas and Andrews, at their respective Bookstores.”⁹³ The romance totaled 1,000 pages, while a year’s worth of the Centinel at the same price, and unbound, consisted of merely 400 pages, of which half were advertisements.

Perhaps the most remarkable partisan pamphlet during the early national period was “A Native of Virginia’s” calumny of the long-retired ex-president Jefferson in 1821. This was the only instance in which a diatribe against the third president provoked him to a public, signed newspaper reply.⁹⁴ This incident, overlooked by scholars, was precipitated by a series of newspaper articles that appeared first in a Baltimore paper, the Federal Republican, and were reprinted in several others before being published as a pamphlet in Baltimore, New York City and elsewhere in 1822. The Baltimore Federal Republican succeeded the Georgetown Daily Federal Republican, and cost ten dollars a year in 1816, a time when the average daily pay for a city worker was a dollar. The newspaper’s annual subscription was out of reach for many.⁹⁵

The pamphlet containing the articles appeared under two titles: Public Defaulters Brought to Light, in a Series of Letters addressed to the People of the United States. By a Native of Virginia (New York: Bliss and White, 1822), and the less-abrasive moniker Letters Addressed to the People of the United States on the Subject of Illegal & Improper Disbursements (Baltimore: F. G. Schaeffer, 1822).⁹⁶ It is likely that the publishers regarded pamphlets as the cheapest, most effective means to reach a greater number of readers than its previous publication in a newspaper had done. Along with many others, this example reveals that a political essay’s appearance in the newspapers did not preclude its later publication in pamphlet form for purchase by those with incomes too small for a year-long subscription to a newspaper.

final thoughts on the role of pamphlets versus newspapers in the early republic

At first glance, late eighteenth-century pamphlets appear to be an upper-class, elitist mode of communication. However, as this article has suggested, they could potentially expand popular access to a more substantial body of political information and extend the media of political controversy to wider sections of [End Page 323] the early republic’s electorate than newspapers. Both Democratic-Republicans and Federalists utilized pamphlets to spread their ideas, often (as in the case of William Cobbett’s essays) in their most vituperative form. Pamphlets were not only employed by aristocratic political opinion-makers intent on defending their character and actions before a limited audience of select political allies and peers. They conveyed political activists’ views on timely issues and ideologies to a larger number of literate and politically articulate citizens than could be accomplished by resorting to locally circulating newspapers. Moreover, in Philadelphia and elsewhere throughout the country, rank-and-file party members, not only office-holders and -seekers, wrote pamphlets, and hoped that they would have a wide readership.

Political conservatives ostensibly perceived pamphlets as more widely available to the people than newspapers. Consequently, by unduly facilitating public access to events and ideas that would more appropriately be controlled by the few, pamphlets conveyed potential danger. This may have been the purport of ex-president John Adams’s complaint that his works were tarnished when converted from newspaper articles to pamphlet format. Concerning the famous series of articles he wrote about his presidency in the Boston Patriot newspaper in 1809, Adams later reminisced to a friend, “On April 10, 1809, I commenced in the Boston Patriot a series of letters in vindication of my mission to France. These letters were imprudently published as pamphlets.”⁹⁷ Adams apparently thought that pamphlets indiscriminately disseminated his work to the masses. His articles exposed his disagreements with his High Federalist Cabinet members during the 1799–1800 undeclared war with France. He may have found their publication in pamphlet form objectionable and personally embarrassing, as well as politically injurious to the declining Federalist Party. Evidently, Adams did not perceive pamphlets as a medium that confined his writings to a select, reliable political elite.

Furthermore, the diverse, rather desperate expedients by which nonsubscribers sought the opportunity to read newspapers in the antebellum period suggest that most people could not afford to purchase them, a factor also prevalent in the 1790s, when daily wages were even lower. Historians examining early US press tend to exaggerate the extent to which browsing in taverns, hotels, and other public places increased newspaper readership and supposedly made them more efficient vehicles for communicating political opinion than were pamphlets. More fundamentally, since the essays that comprised pamphlets frequently appeared first in newspapers, the alleged dichotomy that modern scholars posit between pamphlets and newspapers—asserting [End Page 324] that contending elites employed pamphlets as tools in their “paper wars” while newspapers served the masses—lacks force.

The proliferation of pamphlets indicates that Americans during the period of the first party system were more capable of reading dense works and more interested in facilitating their understanding of events than scholars recognize. It suggests that voters were less politically apathetic than their temporary support for measures of political repression during the “XYZ scare” and the undeclared war with France might imply.⁹⁸ The comparative role of pamphlets and newspapers in conveying information and ideas to enlighten the American reading public in the late eighteenth century is a topic virtually ignored by historians and deserves more study. Further investigation of this question will expand our knowledge of politics, society, and culture during the era.