Reviews of Books

All his life Thomas Jefferson bragged that he had never written a single sentence for any newspaper and accused Alexander Hamilton of compromising the dignity of the government for doing so. But during George Washington's administration he inspired and supported the creation of America's first opposition newspaper in the nation's "first concrete act of party building" (p. 78). Jefferson's supporter Benjamin Franklin Bache grieved many of his grandfather's old friends, lost social status, and forfeited perhaps $20,000 in income when he descended into partisan politics as editor of the Aurora. He also "quite literally construct[ed] the Republican party during the mid-1790s" (p. 96).	1
In this astute, compelling, and exhaustively researched study, Jeffrey Pasley explores the central role of newspaper editors, "the most truly professional politicians in the party system" (p. 15), in shaping the development of party and politics in the early republic. It is an exploration long overdue of a role long overlooked by historians in general, who often see newspapers simply as data-in-amber rather than as cultural and social artifacts, and by journalism historians in particular, many of whom tend implicitly or explicitly to dismiss press practices of the past that challenge journalistic values of the present.	2
The title of Pasley's book underscores the tension between politicians and editors in the development of the first party system. Federalists had intended the 1798 Sedition Act as a curb on the power of upstart tradesmen of questionable virtue to criticize the men best fitted to run the federal government, but their high-handed tactics ended up only strengthening and solidifying the opposition press, and "the longer the persecution campaign lasted, the more Republican newspapers appeared" (p. 126). Soon, however, it was Republicans eager to gentrify their party who began to turn against the principles and tactics of such men as their own William Duane, Bache's powerful and independent successor. Decrying the "tyranny of printers" (p. 311) who exercised "editorial dictation," elite Pennsylvania Republicans (it was the Aurora that first called them "Quids") launched a bitter battle over the right to define and claim the party label, founded their own opposition newspaper, and in 1805 managed to elect their moderate candidate as governor even though they "lost the Republican party in the process" (p. 312).	3
Between an introductory chapter summarizing the colonial and Revolutionary press and a final chapter galloping a bit breathlessly through the newspaper's role in transforming the Era of Good Feelings into the Age of Jackson, Pasley traces the increasing importance of the party newspaper from the 1790s to the War of 1812, often focusing on the experiences of some of its more influential editors. We follow the careers of the usual suspects--Bache, Duane, John Fenno, Philip Freneau, Matthew Lyon, Charles Holt--as well as those of such lesser-known practitioners as James J. Wilson, the Republican editor of the Trenton True American who in 1814 became the first printer elected to the United States Senate.	. . .