"The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic.

By Jeffrey L. Pasley. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. [xx], 517. $37.50, ISBN 0-8139-2030-2.)

Newspaper editors of the early republic received a bad press from many of their contemporaries, and they have not fared much better at the hands of historians. Divisive, vituperative, and unabashedly partisan in their political allegiances, they have been largely neglected by historians of American journalism and the early republic or dismissed as political ciphers and party hacks. Jeffrey L. Pasley's meticulously researched and lively history, which traces the partisan press from its origins in the early 1790s through the creation of what he calls a "system of newspaper-based politics" in the Jacksonian period (p. 4), rescues these journalists from the continued condescension of posterity.

In Pasley's narrative the editors of the early republic are the self-made democratic heroes of their own lives and indispensable figures in the development of a more democratic system of party politics in the nineteenth century. Creating a common partisan discourse that linked like-minded readers and citizens together, editors were also the linchpins of early party organizations and their newspaper offices the campaign headquarters of the early nineteenth century. According to Pasley, the key moment in this story was the passage of the Sedition Act in 1798, when Federalists inadvertently sparked a rapid expansion in the Republican newspaper network they sought to destroy; and the key figure was the Republican William Duane, who, as editor of the Philadelphia-based Aurora, not only ran the most influential newspaper in the nation but also the most efficient campaign organization. After Jefferson's election in 1800, Duane became a power broker in national and local politics, and editors as a group emerged as the first professional politicians of the early republic, men from modest backgrounds who scraped a living from politics and had little time for the exclusionary gentility and antiparty sentiments of the political elite. By keeping partisan traditions and the infrastructure of party conflict alive during the "Era of Good Feelings," editors played a critical role in the revival of party politics during the 1820s and, by assuming public offices in unprecedented numbers after Andrew Jackson's election in 1828, in the democratization of American politics during the Jacksonian period.

Pasley's argument, which incorporates journalists into a familiar story of party development and political democratization, is not all that surprising, but he solidly establishes and skillfully evokes the centrality of newspapers to the political life of the early republic. I have only a few quibbles. One is his overemphasis on Republican editors. One of the most important Federalist editors of the 1790s, Noah Webster, doesn't even make the index, and the chapter on Federalist editors rehearses tired cliches about the reactionary character of Federalist culture. This is partly because Pasley is more interested in party organization than ideology. Consequently, he focuses on the organizational continuities that link Jeffersonian to Jacksonian democracy, at the expense of other forms of political journalism and of discontinuities within the Jeffersonian tradition. A significant gulf separates William Duane's plebeian radicalism from the views of an upwardly striving Jacksonian journalist like John Norvell. As Pasley writes at the end of the book, maybe it was not a good idea to have built "newspaper politics" (or other forms of privately controlled publicity) "into the heart of the government" (p. 398). Something was lost in doing so, and Pasley's conclusion that "real corruption may have been the price of real democratization" (p. 399) seems far too glib and easy.

MARCUS DANIEL
University of Hawaii-Manoa