| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty. By Jerry W. Knudson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. xviii, 221 pp. $34.95, ISBN 1-57003-607-1.)
Journalism, says Jerry W. Knudson, was the "ultimate weapon" in the political warfare of the Republicans and Federalists (p. xiv). Party organizations, philosophical trends, and other factors receive little, if any, attention in Jefferson and the Press. The author therefore needs to explain how the third president was elected with only a fourth of the newspapers, typically the weakest ones, backing him. His answer is that "the Republican press wrote for the people, and the Federalists seemed to write for each other" (p. 178). The Federalists, Knudson says, tended to advance their own interests rather than develop messages that would resonate with the general public.	1
Federalist policies were evidently unpopular enough to doom the party, but, as Jefferson and the Press indicates, both sides made journalistic combat a priority and ended up battered in the process. Thomas Jefferson worked closely with the editors of the Philadelphia Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache and his successor, William Duane. Jefferson helped Bache stay afloat financially and kept up a steady correspondence with Duane, who was sued for libel as many as seventy times by 1806.	2
Unlike James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson avoided entering the journalistic fray himself. Attacks on his reputation made him bitter about the press, an institution he praised hyperbolically before his presidency and again at the end of his life when time had healed wounds.	. . .

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