Spreading the News

Night had not yet descended over Philadelphia's State House when Printer Benjamin Towne's Pennsylvania Evening Post came streaming off the press with a terse announcement of the action: "This day the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS declared the UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES." Thus was the fact of independence first spread among colonial readers. By early this week the city's five other newspapers--a concentration that makes Philadelphia the publishing capital of the former colonies--had either reported the Declaration or were preparing stories on it. The Evening Post and Dunlap's Pennsylvania Packet have published the entire text, and Printer Henrich Miller has translated the "Erklaerung" into German for his Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote.*

Yet hardly a word of the Declaration could so far have appeared in the rest of the American press. Despite the development of post roads and fast packets between cities, news still takes weeks to travel from one end of the Colonies to the other. And because printing technology has advanced little since the Boston News-Letter became the first successful colonial newspaper in 1704, it still takes two men with a manual press ten hours to turn out a typical weekly run of 600 copies. Only three of the nation's 32 papers are printed more frequently than once a week. The most prolific: Benjamin Towne's Evening Post, which was able to insert that brief mention of the Declaration in the first of its thrice-weekly issues right at press time. As is the custom in colonial newspapers, however, the momentous late news was simply inserted on a back page of the Post; readers who paid their two coppers for the paper had to read through earlier dispatches from London, Halifax, Williamsburg and New York before learning of the Declaration.

A number of New York papers plan to print the full Declaration this week, and the news will probably appear in Williamsburg's two rival Virginia Gazettes and Boston's New England Chronicle next week. Readers in Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia and New Jersey--where there are at present no newspapers published--will have to rely on whatever journals eventually arrive from other states. In some places, publishers are making up in patriotic zeal what they lack in timeliness. New York's John Holt, for instance, plans to print the text of the Declaration on a special page of this week's Journal with an exhortation to readers "to separate it from the rest of the paper and fix it up, in open view, in their houses."

That kind of patriotism permeates the colonial press nowadays. Almost without exception, newspapers are either militantly pro-Patriot or studiously neutral on the issue of independence. One of the last openly Tory publications was the venerable Boston News-Letter, which died last February shortly before the British evacuated that city.

Of course, even ardently patriotic printers rarely ventilate their own opinions in print, a situation that says less about the state of patriotism than about the structure of the newspaper business today. Newspapers are typically published as a secondary occupation by printers who derive a large part of their income from turning out business forms, announcements, pamphlets and similar work for their clients. Unpaid correspondents write nearly all of the news that fills most papers, and their contributions generally appear unedited.

Printers do, however, make their points through selective publication of material. Thus the Philadelphia papers have been printing both attacks on and defenses of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, but defenders usually have the last word. Besides, the Boston Gazette and the Massachusetts Spy have been so filled with reports critical of Britain that readers can hardly mistake the publishers' views.

This zeal may be getting out of hand. Last November the Sons of Liberty destroyed the press and type of New York Gazetteer Publisher James Rivington, who had attempted to print articles on both sides of the independence issue. A few months later, Portsmouth Printer Daniel Fowle, self-professed champion of press freedom, was summoned before the New Hampshire House of Representatives to answer for an article in his Gazette attacking independence; his paper has not appeared since. New York Packet Publisher Samuel Loudon reports that he was warned recently by the local Committee of Safety not to distribute a pamphlet he had printed for a client who wanted to answer Paine's Common Sense "lest my personal safety be endangered." That night a group of men forced their way into his office, seized all 1,500 pamphlets and burned them on the Common. "The freedom of the press is now insulted and infringed," says Loudon. If similar incidents occur, he warns, "we are in danger of a more fatal despotism than that with which we are now threatened."

A Prophet Honored

Six months ago, perhaps nine out of ten Americans opposed independence and favored reconciliation with England. Now that independence is a proclaimed fact, the astounding change in public opinion may be attributed largely to an anonymous 47-page pamphlet entitled Common Sense. "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth," the author cried out in support of independence; nor indeed has the sun ever shined on a political pamphlet so widely read. Originally published in Philadelphia last January, it has been reprinted, pirated and repirated. Perhaps as many as 100,000 copies have been bought and passed from hand to hand.

"Sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning," says General George Washington. "By private letters which I have lately received from Virginia, I find Common Sense is working a wonderful change there in the minds of men." General Charles Lee is equally enthusiastic: "A masterly, irresistible performance. I own myself convinced, by the arguments, of the necessity of a separation." These praises are not quite accurate. Sound reasoning is not the main strength of Common Sense, but its fierce rhetoric has helped to shatter the unreasoning assumptions that upheld loyalty to the British Crown.

Do Americans owe allegiance to George III? The author calls him "the royal brute of Great Britain" and a "hardened, sullen-tempered Pharoah." Do any monarchs have a hereditary right to rule their subjects? The author argues that dynasties are founded by "nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang." Does America depend on Britain for safety or prosperity? Only in "the credulous weakness of our minds." Would it be better to delay? "Every thing that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'TIS TIME TO PART."

Who is the vehement author who modestly (or prudently) signed himself only "an Englishman"? TIME has learned that he is Thomas Paine, 39, a blunt, quick, florid immigrant, lately editor of the successful Pennsylvania Magazine. Just two years ago he resided in England and called himself "Pain." And pain has been his lot. He is a failed tax official, a failed tobacconist, a failed husband, and a frequent failure at the humble trade to which he was apprenticed--that of corsetmaker. His second wife paid him -L- 35 as part of the agreement by which he left her house (she is reported to have said that they never consummated the marriage, but his only comment is, "It is nobody's business but my own"). Thus cheered on his way, he begged a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, then in London, and boarded a packet for the New World.

Paine had never been a journalist, and he arrived in Philadelphia on Nov. 30, 1774, with no more formal schooling than one would expect of a corsetmaker. His ambition was to set up as master of an academy for young ladies. When his ship docked at Philadelphia, however, he was seriously ill with what doctors diagnosed as putrid fever, and he remained so for six weeks.

By chance, Paine (as he began to respell himself) encountered Robert Aitken, a printer then trying to start a magazine for genteel readers. Paine found it easy to fill the magazine with elevated essays on such topics as science, dueling and marriage. His patriotic poem on the death of General James Wolfe at Quebec helped build circulation to a record-breaking 1,500. As the god Mercury describes the scene:

With a darksome thick film I

encompass'd his eyes And bore him away in an urn...

Paine did write occasionally on political questions, but it was the news of last spring's skirmish at Lexington and Concord that turned him into the fiery prophet of the new America he saw taking form. Says he: "It was the cause of America that made me an author. I neither read books nor studied other people's opinions--I thought for myself." He adds that he has not earned a shilling from the huge popularity of his pamphlet (under his arrangement with Printer Robert Bell, Paine's half of the profits was to be donated to buy mittens for the American expedition against Quebec).

General Lee said after meeting Paine, "He has genius in his eyes." But that genius may be nothing more than the ability to speak plainly to plain citizens like himself, and thus to preach a sermon so powerful that the listener finds himself converted.

*"Wenn es im Lauf menschlicher Begebenheiten fuer ein Volk noethig wird... "and so on.

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