Abstract
Shortly into George Washington’s presidency, a fundamental debate over the proper role of the federal government divided political leaders of the day. One faction led by Thomas Jefferson was dubious about the need for a strong central authority, which smacked too much of the monarchy Americans had just bested in the Revolutionary War. The Jeffersonians were agrarians, who preferred a decentralized government based on grassroots authority, local banks, and state militas. They were suspicious of concentrated power in any form.
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Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (New York: Penguin Books, 1961).
Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
The Gazette of the United States, April 15, 1789. Also see George Henry Payne, History of Journalism in the United States (New York: D. Appleton, 1920), 154; and Robert W. Jones, Journalism in the United States (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 175.
James Melvin Lee, History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 163.
William Dill, “Growth of Newspapers in the United States,” University of Kansas Bulletin, 1928, 11.
Lee, History of American Journalism, 122; Culver H. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The American Government’s Use of Newspapers 1789–1875 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 13; and Timothy E. Cook, Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 25–26.
Henry Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888), 1: 560. Also see Payne, History of Journalism in the United States, 157; and Claude Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 17.
National Gazette, December 19, 1791. Also see Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 260 Years: 1690 to 1950, rev. ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1950), 124. For full-length treatments of Freneau, see Jacob Axelrad, Philip Freneau: Champion of Democracy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967); Samuel E. Forman, The Political Activities of Phil Freneau, vol. 20 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1902); and Lewis Leary, That Rascal Freneau (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1941).
Thomas Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Monticello edition), Andrew Lipscomb, ed., (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–4), 5: 181–182. Also see Payne, History of Journalism in the United States, 157; Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton, and James Pollard, The Presidents and the Press (New York: Macmillan, 1947).
John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts, The Press and the Presidency: From George Washington to Ronald Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 13.
Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, From 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), 181. Also see Worthington Ford, Jefferson and the Newspaper, 1785–1830 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936).
Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Putnam, 1892–1899), 1: 231. Also see Hudson, Journalism in the United States, From 1690 to 1872, 186; and Payne, History of Journalism in the United States, 166.
John C. Miller, Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 8.
Hudson, Journalism in the United States, From 1690 to 1872, 210ff. For material on Bache, see Benjamin Franklin Bache, Truth Will Out! The Foul Charges of the Tories against the Editor of the Aurora Repelled by Positive Proof and Plain Truth and his Base Culumniators Put to Shame (Philadelphia: Aurora, 1798); and James Tugg, Benjamin Franklin Bache and the “Philadelphia Aurora” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
The joke is cited in Saul K. Padover, ed., Thomas Jefferson on Democracy (New York: Mentor, 1960), 97. Also see Tebbel and Watts, The Press and the Presidency, and Mott, Jefferson and the Press.
Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 8th ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996), 77.
Ibid., 75.
Ibid. For an account of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, see Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).
Isaiah Thomas, History of Printing in America (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 1810).
Tebbel and Watts, The Press and the Presidency, 77. Also see Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 23.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6–7.
Gerald J. Baldasty, “The Press and Politics in the Age of Jackson,” Journalism Monographs LXXXIX (August 1984): 23.
William Stickney, ed., Autobiography of Amos Kendall (Boston, 1872). Also see Hudson, Journalism in the United States, From 1690 to 1872, 238–239; and Payne, History of Journalism in the United States, 235.
Timothy E. Cook, Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chapters 2 and 3.
Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America (London: John Murray, 1849), I: 60–61.
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West, D.M. (2001). The Partisan Media. In: The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07405-8_2
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