Susanna Dillwyn was a curious woman in a busy world. She was born seven years before American independence, so the background noise of her childhood was the roar and whir of political tumult. In an era when men often claimed current events for themselves, Susanna was fascinated by every hint of news about the revolutions rippling across the globe. Her wealthy Quaker family gave her the time and the resources to look beyond her dull New Jersey life to other colonies, other empires and other continents.
Since local news was available on the street before the press could catch up, America’s earliest newspapers focused on faraway events, especially in Europe and its colonies. The Age of Revolutions produced so much information that only a newspaper could organize it all. In a piece of self-promoting prose, Philadelphia newspaper printer and poet Philip Freneau wrote, “This age is so fertile of mighty events / That people complain, with some reason, no doubt; / Besides the time lost, and besides the expence, / With reading the papers they’re fairly worn out.”
Looking back on recent events, Freneau concluded that readers had been “launch’d...on the ocean of news,” and they would need a newspaper to navigate it.
Susanna was eager to swim in this ocean of faraway news. Perhaps her fragmented family stirred this interest. Her mother, Sarah, had died a month after she was born, and her father, William, had remarried and relocated to London, leaving Susanna with relatives for most of her childhood.
An ocean apart, William and Susanna wrote each other often to share news, gossip and anecdotes about “public and private trouble.” As the sagas of the American, French and Haitian revolutions unfolded around them, they exchanged the latest news — some of which Susanna considered “too dreadful to be read,” but which she read anyway.
Susanna sometimes faltered, suggesting that she had nothing worthwhile to write. But William always insisted that “nothing thou can communicate is uninteresting in my Eyes.” He wanted family news, local news and regional news, but he also wanted her to think of herself as more than a passive observer of this news.
“Thou can never, in thy communications with me,” he insisted, “be too much the Heroine of thy own Tale.”
Fact or Rumor
Before newspapers, news was impossible to separate from rumor. One heard about the death of a monarch thousands of miles away the same way one heard about the death of a neighbor a hundred yards away — through conversation. Talk about the latest news flowed in all directions. Enslaved people, women and even children could receive, overhear and repeat news on equal terms.
The leaders of colonial society feared the democratic nature of rumor. In 1685, Virginia’s royal governor, Francis Howard, groused that the peoples’ “vain imaginations and conceit” were “esteemed as news.” Once it was “on foot,” false rumors “infused into the giddy headed multitude, which afterwards becomes the rule and square of their actions.” All the disorder in the colony, Howard explained, could be traced back to the unchecked flow of rumors. At first, Virginia and several other colonies dealt with this threat by passing laws to punish the spread of false news.
The growth of newspapers in 18th-century America did not end the wild flow of rumors, but it allowed leaders like Howard to influence the flow of news. Early newspapers usually did everything they could to win the colonial government’s favor. As Thomas Jefferson later recalled of the Williamsburg Virginia Gazette of his youth, “nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it.” Printers who ran afoul of colonial authority could be prosecuted. Some took the safe route of running their content by the governor’s office before it was published.
Cost of Information
The spread of newspapers introduced new inequalities into information consumption. Most people could not afford the luxury of a newspaper subscription. Not long before he moved to London, William Dillwyn paid 10 shillings to subscribe to the Pennsylvania Journal. Another family could have used those 10 shillings to purchase around 30 pounds of meat, three bushels of corn or a month’s rent. On the subscription list for the Pennsylvania Journal, the only such surviving list, William’s name appears alongside numerous doctors, attorneys and merchants, but almost no farmers or laborers, let alone women, people of color or Indigenous people. In the early stages of the American Revolution, only about one in every hundred Philadelphians subscribed to the Journal. Most people likely did not read newspapers on a regular basis.
Among merchant families like the Dillwyns, though, newspapers were inescapable. Just as almanacs helped farmers predict weather, newspapers helped merchants and other businessmen predict market needs. Susanna once described visiting an uncle whose bedroom “looked like the apartment of a Batchelor, for we were sometimes obliged to sit upon the bed every chair being loaded with newspapers, books and pamphlets, which are on no account to be displaced.” Like a web browser with a hundred open tabs, this uncle’s bedroom burst with an excess of interesting news and ideas.
The Dillwyns might have hoped that their newspaper subscriptions would make them more well-informed about global events. But newspapers did not always enlighten readers. If anything, they often made readers more anxious and uncertain about the world. William and Susanna’s correspondence is full of concerns about “groundless Rumours” and false news.
News of questionable veracity arrived constantly in early North America. Despite a lack of verification, few observers could bear the anxious uncertainty of awaiting a consensus. Some trusted their own judgment, perhaps for reasons they only dimly understood. Others trusted the judgment of the well-informed and the overconfident. In the 1790s, Susanna frequently heard unreliable rumors about the French navy’s seizure of American merchant ships, which threatened the family business. In one letter, she described how her attitude toward such a report evolved with time. When “unwelcome news” about a French attack on an American ship arrived yesterday, no one had doubted it. Today, this report was “mention’d in the papers,” but “nobody seems to have heard anything new, so that I think it may possibly be a false rumor.”
News and Politics
During the American Revolution, this process of evaluating news became political. Whereas colonial newspaper printers usually left it to “our Readers to Judge” what was true, patriot printers began to take it upon themselves to decide what was true, which was usually news that supported patriot mobilization. Likewise, the first political parties in the early United States came to opposite conclusions about American policy and politics largely because they disagreed about the nature of events in France, Saint-Domingue and elsewhere.
The political schisms of the late 18th century were arguments not just about the future but also about the very recent past. As newspapers became organs of political factions in the last three decades of the century, they assembled a political reality that aligned with and explained their party’s political actions. Newspapers existed not just to inform their readers but also to organize and reflect back readers’ own ideas about the world.
As news became more political, a rising tide of contradiction created problems. Some false accounts were potentially disruptive to the social order. In 1792, Virginia’s General Assembly revived a long-dormant colonial law that levied a hefty $40 fine on those “busy-headed people,” including newspaper printers, who “forge and divulge false rumours and reports.” While it is difficult to tell exactly how this law was applied, its timing indicates that it was probably meant to discourage white Virginians from sharing rumors about the Haitian Revolution that would inflame the commonwealth’s enslaved population.
A few years later, members of the Federalist Party in the U.S. Congress passed the Sedition Act, which aimed to punish newspaper printers sharing “false, scandalous, and malicious writing.” Though the Virginia government had seen fit to regulate news in 1792, its Democratic-Republican leaders rejected the Federalists’ Sedition Act that was billed as an attempt to deter the spread of falsehoods.
Like many others navigating this sea of contradiction, William confidently followed his own instincts for truth. In 1792, for example, he reported to Susanna, “Good accounts from Sierra Leone arrived this Day, giving an agreeable Contradiction to some wicked reports lately spread to discredit the settlement.” Hopeful about the colony of Sierra Leone, where thousands of Black Loyalists had recently resettled, William described positive news about the colony as “Good accounts” and negative news, which would harm global abolitionist efforts, as “wicked reports.” Lacking the means to verify news directly, William and Susanna relied on their own judgments and feelings. Likewise, when he heard that yellow fever was near his daughter’s family, William wrote, “I knew not how wholly to credit, or disbelieve this imperfect Report — but I feel the probability of its Truth.” When it was not known, the truth could be felt.
A News Deficiency
In rural America, where most people lived, information was scarce. Seldom encountering newspapers or letters from afar, Americans often relied on the word of those neighbors who seemed most well-informed. If only a few families in a farming community subscribed to a newspaper, printed accounts could nevertheless spread quickly if those subscribers were postmasters, tavernkeepers or preachers who were at the center of conversation and exchange. Accessing an abundance of uncertain information did not necessarily make such Americans more well-informed, but it could not help but make subscribers appear to be knowledgeable about public affairs.
The first American newspapers placed a high price on being informed. But this cost was borne largely by those excluded by newspapers. After she married a man named Samuel Emlen, Susanna’s letters to her father (which Samuel began to write and sign along with her) spoke less of politics and global news. In one letter composed while her husband was “too much engaged to write,” Susanna explained to her father that she did still care about the world beyond her household. “We talk sometimes,” she wrote, “or at least they do, of politics.”
Often viewed as a democratic medium and tool of populism, America’s first newspapers probably did more to concentrate power in the hands of the few rather than to diffuse it among the many. In an age of screens, it is easy to become nostalgic about the newspaper: the quiet thrill of collecting it from the door, the peaceful routine of perusing it with breakfast.
It is also easy to romanticize the newspaper’s role in the American Revolution. Many narratives of the American Revolution imagine a broad public using the newspaper to learn about and debate the great issues of the day. In the PBS animated children’s series Liberty’s Kids, for example, viewers follow several children who travel around the colonies as reporters for Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. “The people count on us for their news!” they urge each other. As if to underline the newspaper’s legitimacy, Walter Cronkite voices Franklin — one of the most admired newsmen in American history speaking for another.
The reality behind the first American newspapers little resembles the legend of Walter Cronkite. At their birth, American newspapers reached only a select few. The Dillwyns and other wealthy Americans who had the means to pay for newspaper subscriptions received a stream of unverified, contentious news.
But still they read on. Preferring certainty to doubt, they found news they could believe in, narratives that did not challenge them too much. They had to choose, so they did. Cast away in an “ocean of news,” they rowed on toward a hazy horizon.
Jordan E. Taylor is a historian of the American Revolution and author of Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America.