Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic

By Brad A. Jones

In Resisting Independence, Brad A. Jones maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities—New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland—Jones argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. This compelling account reimagines Loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies.

Jones reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task—to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire.

Resisting Independence describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of Loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501754036

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

A Body Politic

Newspapers, Networks, and the Making of a Nation

In October 1756, the printer Daniel Fowle devoted almost half of the second issue of his newspaper, the New Hampshire Gazette, to an essay on the advantages of printing and the press.¹ Fowle described "the Art of Printing … [as] one of the most useful Inventions the World has ever seen, for it had enlightened individuals and freed them from the tyranny of governments. If absent, he warned, the common People [are] deprived of all the Means of Knowledge, and taught nothing but what qualifies them to acquiesce under the most abject Slavery. Absolutist monarchs, Fowle continued, knew full well that a free and open press was an admirable Instrument of promoting Knowledge, and … would prove the Bane of that absolute Authority, that inhuman Tyranny practiced by them."

Fowle contended that Weekly Mercuries, or newspapers, offered the most immediate and accessible check to those in power. He compared newspapers to the human body’s circulatory system, arguing that they keep the Body Politic (if not alive, at least) in sound Health, through the speedy Communication of the State of Affairs, from one part of the World to another, that easy Intercourse maintain’d between the different Parts of a Kingdom. This observation was true of Britain’s far-flung empire, he believed, where this circulation of news and information allowed subjects to stay abreast of events occurring far beyond their own towns and villages.

According to Fowle, newspapers were also capable of enlightening readers of all rank in society, regardless of wealth, status, or proximity to the nation’s capital. By this Means Knowledge is spread even among the Common People, he insisted, a useful Curiosity is rais’d in their Minds, their attention is rous’d, their Minds are enlarged, their Views extended. Through the regular reading of newspapers, a diverse British Atlantic public was drawn into an imperial political culture that encouraged subjects to see themselves, not in that contracted View they did … but in a more useful Light, as Members of a large Society … whose particular Welfare is in many Respects blended with the whole.²

Newspapers, more than anything else, helped to integrate the vast British Atlantic.³ Reports and editorials appearing in the dozens of Weekly Mercuries carried by ships crisscrossing the ocean gave meaning to an emerging, shared understanding of loyalty and Loyalism among the ocean’s many and varied British inhabitants. Newspapers were especially useful in generating what one historian has called a currency of political exchange by giving textual existence to nonliterary events, such as riots, protests, and celebrations. Local political occurrences could now achieve supralocal significance and meaning, helping to shape a broader British Atlantic political culture.⁴ This point was not lost on Daniel Fowle. Later in his 1756 essay he argued that reading about events that took place beyond one’s local community brings Men by Degrees to consider themselves as Neighbours and Fellow citizens with all Mankind. The Transition in our thoughts from others to our selves, is natural and easy; and we can’t avoid imagining … that the Adversities which happen to others, may meet us too. The movement of information along developing local, regional, and imperial communication networks fostered an imagined community of subjects around a common national identity.⁵

Formed in the pages of the many Weekly Mercuries read, discussed, and debated by subjects throughout the North Atlantic, this shared understanding of Britishness drew on Protestant subjects’ deeply held fears of their nation’s long-standing Catholic enemies, France and Spain. Stories, both real and imagined, regularly described the alleged cruelty and despotism of these Catholic nations to encourage inhabitants of these four communities, and Britons elsewhere for that matter, to think of themselves as part of a progressively freer, wealthier, Protestant nation. This language of loyalty, of Britishness, enabled a distant population of subjects to see themselves as Members of a large Society … whose particular Welfare is in many Respects blended with the whole.

Britons living in these four North Atlantic port cities were especially receptive to this narrative, not least because they lived in such close proximity to their nation’s many enemies. Haligonians were surrounded on three sides by Indian societies previously allied with France and a smaller Acadian population that still haunted many of the town’s residents. New Yorkers worried, too, about the combined threat of Indian and French-Canadian enemies who might descend on the city via Lake Champlain and the North River.⁶ Kingstonians also lived among and around their nation’s greatest rivals, who regularly threatened invasion and were often thought to have instigated the many slave uprisings that occurred on the island.⁷ Even Glaswegians, though far more secure than Britons living in the other three communities, were near the center of the twice-failed Jacobite uprisings and living among an increasing number of Highlanders who relocated to their city in the 1750s.⁸ The city and towns along the Clyde River were also thought to be likely destination points for invading French armies in the first half of the eighteenth century. When they read in their local newspapers of the dangers of their Catholic foes, the inhabitants of these four communities would have certainly understood that the Adversities which happen to others, may meet us too.

The makings of Fowle’s Body Politic, however, depended on reliable Atlantic communication networks, a circulatory system capable of carrying news quickly and regularly to all corners of Britain’s vast empire. The establishment of a government-sponsored packet service during the Seven Years’ War strengthened communication between the colonies and the metropole, but information traveled best within a far more robust and complex system of local and regional networks. News of national importance was thus filtered through these more immediate webs of contact, which played a significant role in shaping distinctive local political cultures and identities in places like New York City, Glasgow, Halifax, and Kingston. During the many wars fought against France and Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century, anti-Catholic rhetoric was able to overshadow divisions within the empire, providing a language of national unity that was so intentionally broad as to appeal to the nation’s diverse inhabitants. But in the absence of these wars and these enemies, as was the case for much of the 1760s and 1770s, subjects in these communities struggled to understand what exactly united them as Britons.

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By the 1750s, the British Atlantic was awash in a sea of print. Newspapers and other forms of print flooded cities, towns, and villages throughout mainland Britain, the Caribbean, and North America. Londoners, of course, enjoyed the largest and most accessible newspaper industry, while provincial printers on both sides of the ocean often published verbatim articles taken from metropolitan newspapers.⁹ The provincial press, however, was more than a mere extension of London’s printing industry. Local publishers had a wide variety of sources to draw from, including local and regional newspapers, personal letters, and locally written essays and editorials. These publishers also had access to newspapers and printed matter brought by ships from more distant communities across the empire.¹⁰

A vibrant and growing provincial and colonial printing industry helped to level the playing field with subjects living in London.¹¹ By the late 1760s, provincial English newspapers numbered in the thirties, while there were nearly thirty newspapers published in British North America and more than a half dozen in both Scotland and the British Caribbean.¹² On the eve of the American Revolution, Britons living in the most remote corners of the empire read, discussed, and debated ideas and events published in their local gazettes just as readily and enthusiastically as their compatriots in the nation’s capital.

Several factors contributed to the significant growth of the printing industry in the first half of the eighteenth century. A dramatic surge in the British population led to port cities emerging as regional and national centers of importance, not just in terms of trade and commerce, but also as points of contact along a complex transatlantic information network.¹³ New York City and Glasgow, for example, were sparsely populated provincial port towns at the turn of the eighteenth century. Fewer than 5,000 inhabitants called New York City home, while roughly 18,000 Scots lived in Glasgow. Six decades later, however, New York’s population had quadrupled to over 20,000 people, while Glasgow’s had nearly doubled to roughly 30,000.¹⁴ Even smaller port cities like Halifax and Kingston experienced some growth during this period, especially in relation to their colony’s population. Nearly half of Jamaica’s 13,000 white inhabitants lived in Kingston by the start of the American war, while several thousand of Nova Scotia’s roughly 20,000 inhabitants called Halifax home in the early 1770s.¹⁵ These port cities served as crucial information gateways both to the surrounding communities and with other regions of Britain’s ever-expanding Atlantic empire.

Imperial wars with Britain’s longtime European rivals also helped to expand the printing industry in these communities. The War of the Spanish Succession and that of the Austrian Succession, followed by the Great War for Empire in the 1750s, threatened Britain’s valuable Atlantic trade routes and often forced Caribbean and North American colonists to take up arms in defense of the Crown. In doing so, colonial subjects acted as agents of the state, playing a critical role in the formal expansion of their empire.

These wars forced Britons to take up their pens, too. The very act of imperial expansion required explanation. If subjects across the North Atlantic were expected to participate in the nation-building process—to risk their lives and livelihoods in defense of the state—they needed a narrative, a shared cause, to rally around. Scholars have emphasized the power of print in shaping national identities. Acts of war, argues one scholar, generate acts of narration … [which] are often joined in a common purpose: defining the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples.¹⁶ For eighteenth-century Britons, wartime stories printed and reprinted in newspapers across the North Atlantic enabled a diverse and distant populace to find common ground, to imagine themselves as part of something greater, and to commit themselves to a vision of empire distinguished from that of their rivals in Europe.

These narratives, however, depended on reliable communication networks, which struggled to keep pace with Britain’s rapidly expanding empire in the first half of the eighteenth century. Until the Postal Act of 1711, there existed no imperial postal system by which Britons on both sides of the ocean could easily and regularly send letters or exchange newspapers. And even after the passage of that act, networks within Britain, and in the North American and Caribbean colonies, continued to suffer from poorly kept postal roads (made worse during inclement weather), exorbitant postage rates (and successive stamp tax increases in Britain), and a chronically underfunded system.¹⁷

Reformers attempted to expand the communication infrastructure within England and lowland Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century. Officials in London invested in improving and adding roads as provincial towns and cities grew both in size and importance. The process, though, was far from even. For instance, Glaswegians relied almost entirely on nearby Edinburgh for their news, despite their city’s increasing commercial importance to the empire.¹⁸ Scotland’s capital city profited from a three-day-a-week postal service with London, and the nearby port town of Leith connected Scotland with the latest news from continental Europe. After 1749, a daily postal service connected Edinburgh newspaper printers to Glasgow, but it was not until 1788 that Glaswegians enjoyed a direct postal route to London.¹⁹ The city’s dependence on Edinburgh not only inhibited the growth of the newspaper industry in Glasgow but also delayed communication with London at a crucial moment in the city’s commercial development.

Of greater concern to officials was the need to connect the metropole to the colonies, a project that required considerable resources and manpower. At the turn of the century, imperialists like Edmund Dummer and William Warner briefly established a system of packet boats to facilitate communication with political and military officials stationed in the Caribbean, in part by carrying metropolitan and provincial newspapers. The service lasted just nine years, but it offered a radical reimagining of transatlantic communication networks by establishing a fairly routine, considerably faster method of contact between the metropole and colonies. The service also represented another way in which the government in London sought greater administrative control over its fledgling empire. Like later taxes and trade regulations, the purpose of the imperial packet service was to make London the hub of several spokes on a wheel, with information spreading to all corners of the empire from the nation’s capital.²⁰

Officials revived the service in 1755 in response to the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. This time they focused their efforts on a regular route from Falmouth to New York City, the British military headquarters in North America.²¹ The first ship, the Earl of Halifax, arrived in New York City on February 3, 1756, after fifty-three days at sea. It carried copies of the addresses of both Houses of Parliament to the king in support of his decision to ready the navy and army for war with France.²² The following Tuesday those addresses appeared in The New York Mercury and copies were then sent along an imperfect network of postal roads dotted by inns, taverns, coffeehouses, and even people’s homes, which stretched north to Boston and Montreal and south toward Williamsburg.²³ For mail going to Halifax, officials agreed to send it by way of the postmaster in Boston (at least until 1775), who often added local correspondence and newspapers to the bag while he waited for the next merchant vessel destined for that port.²⁴ Near the end of the month, on February 26, the Earl of Halifax began its return journey to Falmouth (which took only twenty-six days) loaded with bags of personal letters, business correspondence, and newspapers gathered from colonists across the Eastern Seaboard.

A total of nine ships made that same journey in 1756, and during the 1760s and 1770s an average of nearly eleven ships, or almost one per month, traversed the North Atlantic.²⁵ The time it took to cross from Falmouth to New York City averaged between six to eight weeks, but the return voyages were often shorter. Delays were common, however, especially in the winter months when poor weather conditions might postpone departures or force ships off course.²⁶ Enemy navies and privateers also often targeted packet boats, knowing that they carried official civil and military correspondence.²⁷

After several unsuccessful attempts in the 1750s, officials succeeded in establishing another packet service for the Caribbean and southern colonies in 1764. The service was much smaller than its northern counterpart, likely because there was more commercial traffic between the Caribbean islands and Great Britain. Under this new plan, packet ships regularly stopped in Kingston before traveling north to places like Pensacola, Savannah, and Charleston.²⁸ The Suffolk packet, for instance, departed Falmouth on April 19 and docked in Kingston on June 4 after forty-seven days at sea.²⁹ The letters, business correspondence, and newspapers left at the post office in Kingston were then delivered by enslaved postal couriers across a network of poorly kept roads to inhabitants living in all corners of the island.³⁰ Just three days later, the Suffolk departed Kingston harbor laden with news from that island for Britain’s North American colonies, making stops at Pensacola, St. Augustine, Savannah, and Charleston before returning to Falmouth on November 10.

The lengthy return time—nearly a half year passed between the Suffolk’s departure from Kingston and arrival in Falmouth—suggests some of the communication problems that persisted between the capital city and the empire’s most valuable colony. Kingstonians were far more likely to know what was going on elsewhere in the empire than mainland Britons were to know what was happening on that island.³¹ Records are incomplete for the years 1765 to 1783, but it is safe to assume that an average of about six ships made the journey annually across the Atlantic to Kingston.

While the primary purpose of the Northern and Caribbean packet services was to share political and military intelligence, imperial officials also believed they could be useful in spreading news and shaping popular attitudes toward the nation and empire. The first ships to arrive in North America in early 1756, for example, carried advertisements for annual subscriptions to virtually every metropolitan newspaper and magazine sent regularly by every packet-boat, so as to contain the freshest advices to the very time that each of them sail from Falmouth.³² Though imperfect, in the context of eighteenth-century communication networks, these packet services represented the nation’s best attempt at formalizing contact between the metropole and colonies, which helped to transform the Atlantic into the British Atlantic.

British commercial expansion in the middle decades of the eighteenth century also improved communication among communities throughout the empire, though in far more informal ways. By the 1740s, at least 1,000 ships were involved annually in Britain’s Atlantic trade, double the number from just six decades earlier.³³ In 1762, 477 ships cleared New York City’s harbor for ports across the North Atlantic. By 1772, that number jumped to 709.³⁴ Several decades earlier, half of those ships went to the British Caribbean, mainly to Jamaica, supplying many of the sugar planters with food, clothing, and other necessities for their slaves.³⁵ Another quarter to a third of ships departing New York City’s port traveled to other North American port cities, from Charleston to Boston, dispelling popularly held myths that American colonists interacted very little with one another.³⁶

The explosion of Glasgow’s tobacco trade in the 1750s led to a substantial increase in the number of ships traveling from that city to the Chesapeake region. During the 1760s, an average of eighty-six ships each year left Port Glasgow for Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Glasgow’s tobacco merchants perfected the North Atlantic shipping routes, completing the round-trip journey at a faster rate than competing merchant vessels or official packet ships.³⁷ With Congress’s expansive boycott looming in the fall of 1775, John Glassford’s ship Cochran made the round-trip journey to the Chesapeake in just sixty-five days.³⁸ While the Cochran’s main purpose was to transport hogsheads of tobacco, it also carried British manufactured goods to the colonies and likely facilitated the exchange of mainland and colonial newspapers. During the American war, many of these ships were redirected to New York City, Halifax, and ports throughout the British Caribbean, linking Glaswegians to the remaining loyal regions of Britain’s Atlantic empire.³⁹

The expansion of trade led to the emergence of multiple webs of decentralized networks that threatened the official imperial modes of communication established by government-sponsored packet boats. More and more Britons were able to indulge in a local print culture that drew from a variety of presses across the British Atlantic, some distant and some very close. Absent, or even alongside, the arrival of a packet boat from England, Haligonians often read reports and editorials taken from New England newspapers (or actually perused copies of those gazettes), while New York City printers often relied on news taken from nearby Boston and Philadelphia prints. Glaswegians mostly turned to Edinburgh papers for their news, but as the city’s commercial interests increasingly looked west to the Chesapeake, local printers began to publish more news from that region.⁴⁰ Perhaps only in Kingston did residents continue to rely mostly on London newspapers, though the colony’s dependence on North American staple goods meant that ships regularly arrived from ports to the north.⁴¹ London remained the information center of the empire, but these new webs of contact—small networks competing and combining with larger ones—both encouraged the greater circulation of information across the North Atlantic and established new modes of communication between the nation’s diverse and distant communities.⁴²

Of course, these extensive if informal networks belie easy explanation. Ships traveled to and from ports across the ocean in irregular patterns dictated by trading interests, harvest schedules, weather conditions, and wars, among many other factors. When (or if) they arrived at their final destinations, then, they constituted a complex information hub—a floating transatlantic newspaper—with reports and rumors, some written, others spoken, whose provenance was not always clearly known. In some ways, this represented one of the great strengths of Britain’s transatlantic print network. News of all kind traveled relatively quickly to even the most remote corners of the empire, but the lack of organization made it difficult for officials in London to control the message, to define the narrative.

These irregular and informal communication networks also often raised questions of authenticity and accuracy in the minds of British subjects, most of whom trusted newspapers for their understanding of the world around them.⁴³ Printers were certainly aware of this trust and tried to convince their readers from the start that they intended to publish only the most reliable news.⁴⁴ Printers also went to great lengths to explain the often circuitous origins of the news they printed. Virtually every report, editorial, or essay included an origins story that described where it came from, who it was written by, and when the event took place.⁴⁵ Sometimes this was a simple task, as was the case with the addresses to the king that arrived by packet boat in New York City in early 1756, although those too were explained to readers in the article’s opening paragraph.

More often, however, printers faced the difficult task of mapping an information network that defied easy explanation. Less than a decade later, for instance, Bostonians learned of the repeal of the unpopular Stamp Act in a Letter from a Member of Parliament … to his Friend in Ireland. According to the opening paragraph—the origins story—the letter appeared first in a Dublin newspaper before being reprinted in a Cork newspaper, a copy of which found its way across the ocean to Oxford, Maryland. From there the letter moved northward, appearing in the Pennsylvania Gazette, news of which occasioned the spread [of] a general Joy all over the City. The letter, now accompanied by a description of the celebration in Philadelphia, was then exchanged in both New York City and Newport newspapers, before arriving in Boston in early April. By the following month the letter, along with the news from Philadelphia, had recrossed the Atlantic, appearing in a Dublin newspaper as well as in papers across England and Scotland.⁴⁶ If Daniel Fowle was right that newspapers functioned as a sort of circulatory system that kept the body politic in sound health, printers often acted the part of the doctor, explaining to readers how that system worked.

The story of how that report traveled across the Atlantic also demonstrates how an imperial political culture interacted with, evolved, and drew new meaning and importance as it passed through different localities. The report began as a story of national importance, originating from the very pen of an imperial official in London. But as it crossed the ocean and entered into new political cultures, ones that had violently resisted the despised tax over the preceding months, it acquired new significance. Philadelphians made news by celebrating the news of the repeal with bonfires, bells, and toasts, a report of which was added to the original story and sent northward to other North American cities. From New York City to Boston, colonists read of the repeal and the celebrations in Philadelphia, which they replicated in their own city streets. As the news moved east across the Atlantic, mainland Britons now read excerpts of the MP’s letter in the context of colonial celebrations. Thus what was originally a story of administrative action, of elite officials deciding the fate of imperial legislation, was turned into one that made clearer to readers how colonists understood the tax and their rights and liberties as British subjects. In doing so, the story not only blurred both imperial and local information networks but also demonstrated the gradual, if limited, expansion of the political sphere whereby the words and actions of the empire’s diverse subjects interacted with the decisions of imperial officials.⁴⁷

While most Britons on all sides of the ocean opposed the Stamp Act and celebrated its repeal, accounts of other, more contested events changed dramatically and divisively as they moved across the North Atlantic. That tension between an imperial and local political culture, between a broader narrative of British loyalty and patriotism and more parochial customs and attitudes shaped by local news and events, was especially evident during the 1770s when the nation found itself engaged in a civil war. The arteries that had sustained Britain’s vast transatlantic networks of communication—its complex, tangled circulatory system—collapsed in some places, replaced by new networks formed in opposition to the old ones.

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By the 1760s, the number of locally printed newspapers in each of these communities compared favorably with towns and cities of similar size and location within Britain’s Atlantic empire. Most of these newspapers tended to be weekly or biweekly publications, with printing schedules timed to the arrival of ships and postriders bringing news from the surrounding region and across the North Atlantic. The newspapers’ contents were diverse but tended to reflect the beliefs and interests of their many readers and played a crucial role in creating and defining a local political culture. Rumors and reports from near and far, essays and editorials, proclamations and addresses, and the many advertisements that filled the back pages shaped how residents understood their empire, and their place within it.

During the revolutionary era, one newspaper was published weekly in Halifax, the Halifax Gazette, which later became the Nova-Scotia Gazette.⁴⁸ Except for a brief period in the late 1760s, the printer was Anthony Henry, a German immigrant and veteran of the British army who settled in Halifax after the Seven Years’ War. Henry operated the newspaper within a printing network almost entirely dependent on New England for its news, which both reflected and strengthened his readers’ close cultural and political ties with that region. During the Stamp Act Crisis, Henry actually employed the editorial services of Boston native Isaiah Thomas, who brought with him the Boston notions of liberty, which he openly expressed in the pages of the gazette.⁴⁹ The city’s ruling elite feared the influence of Henry’s newspaper during this period and often forbade the publication of radical texts produced by the city’s southern neighbors. Yet even after Thomas’s forced departure in 1766, Halifax’s only newspaper continued to defend colonial rights, shared in a wider transatlantic radical political culture, and expressed support for a burgeoning Patriot cause. It was not until news of the Franco-American alliance in 1778 that Henry adopted a more loyal tone and began to draw from other British and Loyalist newspapers across the empire.⁵⁰

Kingston had a far more robust local printing industry than Halifax, despite having only a slightly larger population. Local officials, merchants, planters, and many others depended on the sea for their livelihood and thus recognized the need to solidify the island’s place within burgeoning Atlantic communication networks.⁵¹ During the 1760s and 1770s, the island produced four newspapers, two of which were published in Kingston (the Kingston Journal and Jamaica Gazette). Few copies of either newspaper remain, but both appear to have emphasized the city’s commercial ties to the empire. Whereas most provincial and colonial newspapers devoted a page to advertisements, as much as half or more of a typical issue of a Kingston newspaper listed manufactured goods for sale and ships departing for ports across the North Atlantic, evidence of the city’s close ties to a broader British imperial commerce and culture.⁵² Columns devoted to announcing upcoming slave auctions and offering rewards for the capture of those who had run away also spoke to a local economy defined by its dependence on enslaved labor.

Reports and essays printed in these newspapers (alongside the many runaway slave advertisements) reflected the community’s commitment to defending the rights of white colonial subjects. Kingston’s newspapers were largely supportive of North American colonists in their ongoing disputes with the government in London, at least until the war began in 1775.⁵³ By 1779, however, two Loyalist refugees, William Aikman and David Douglass, began publishing a third newspaper in Kingston, the Jamaica Mercury, and Kingston Weekly Advertiser, which later became the Royal Gazette.⁵⁴ They drew mostly from mainland and Loyalist publications to fill the columns of their gazette, reflecting a broader ideological shift that occurred in Kingston during the final years of the war. White residents, fearful of the war’s effect on their slave-driven economy, denounced the rebellious Americans and their European allies and reaffirmed their support for the British monarchy.

Like Kingston’s, Glasgow’s newspaper industry was closely tied to the city’s commercial importance within the empire.⁵⁵ Moderate in tone, and supportive of the Crown during the ’45 Rebellion, early newspapers like the Glasgow Courant and the Glasgow Journal were intended to draw residents of the city and surrounding communities into a prosperous and expanding Atlantic empire.⁵⁶ During the revolutionary era, just two newspapers (the Glasgow Journal and the Glasgow Chronicle, the latter replaced in 1778 by the Glasgow Mercury) served a city of nearly forty thousand inhabitants. Both covered events in the colonies in close detail. They were largely critical of the growing violence, which threatened the traditional political order of society and, worse yet, might ruin the city’s prosperous tobacco trade. Glaswegians also regularly read as many as eight newspapers published in nearby Edinburgh, which reflected a diversity of political views and opinions.⁵⁷ Additionally, the Scots Magazine, modeled after a popular London periodical, the Gentlemen’s Magazine, was also widely available in Glasgow and throughout all of Scotland.⁵⁸ Like the other communities in this study, both of the city’s newspapers and the Scots Magazine turned decidedly in favor of the British cause after 1778, when the war expanded to include their longtime enemies, the French. But these same newspapers were also critical of the government’s decision to repeal certain Catholic penal laws in 1778 and helped to inspire a popular and, at times, violent movement throughout Scotland to oppose the legislation.

New York City’s local newspaper industry was the largest of these four communities. Since the Zenger Crisis of the mid-1730s, the city’s residents had come to view their local press as indispensably tied to British ideas of liberty and freedom, which gained greater traction in a city so riven by political factions.⁵⁹ During the 1760s and early 1770s, there were at least two and sometimes as many four weekly publications, all of which were largely supportive of colonial grievances against Parliament. Printers like Hugh Gaine, James Parker, and William Weyman published widely read newspapers along with numerous pamphlets and broadsides that were instrumental in shaping how residents understood the contentious politics of the period.⁶⁰ In 1766, the radical Whig John Holt began publishing the New-York Journal, or General Advertiser. Holt filled his paper with content drawn from a growing network of similar-minded printers and writers in Boston and Philadelphia, which began to give shape and meaning to a nascent Patriot cause.⁶¹

Beginning in April 1773, New York City was also home to the most important Loyalist newspaper in the empire, James Rivington’s New York Gazetteer.⁶² Rivington’s biweekly gazette became the mouthpiece for the British cause in the American colonies, providing readers with reports and essays that ultimately came to define an emerging transatlantic Loyalist political culture. Though a Patriot crowd forced him out of the colonies in 1775, he returned in 1777 as the king’s printer and published his loyal gazette for the remainder of the war. Other printers also took advantage of the city’s growing print market, the consequence of an ever-expanding population of Loyalist refugees and British soldiers. Hugh Gaine returned shortly after the British occupation of the city in 1776 to publish his New-York Gazette in support of the Crown. By 1779, there were a total of four newspapers published in New York City, with a new issue printed every day but Tuesday and Sunday.⁶³ The city had a composite daily newspaper; nearly every day the inhabitants could read fresh columns of print that supported the Crown.

Of course, these locally printed newspapers enjoyed an audience wider than just those living within each city. Copies of the latest gazette traveled, formally and informally, across local and regional communications networks and even boarded ships destined for communities elsewhere in the North Atlantic. After 1758, colonial printers were also able to send copies of their gazette by post for free to other printers in their region and beyond. The practice, known as franking, had existed for most of the century in mainland Britain and enabled printers to clip popular reports and essays from one another’s newspapers for publication in their own gazettes.⁶⁴ This movement of newspapers beyond their own locale, and the method of printers exchanging news, helped to blur local and regional distinctions, drawing distant settlements into an ever-expanding British Atlantic information network.⁶⁵

To some extent, it is possible to map the movement of newspapers in each of these four communities, even in the absence of subscription records. Glasgow newspapers, for instance, blanketed much of west and southwest Scotland, traveling by way of a series of postal roads first constructed in the 1720s to connect wealthy Scottish lairds invested in the burgeoning Atlantic trade to their nation’s most important port city.⁶⁶ By 1780, Alexander Duncan and Robert Chapman, printers of the Glasgow Mercury, were asking for subscribers as far away as Argyllshire and [the] Western Islands to pay their accounts.⁶⁷ Some newspapers even made the long journey across the Atlantic, likely aboard one of the city’s many tobacco ships. In 1774, Alexander Thomson, a recent Scottish immigrant in Pennsylvania, reported to a friend back in Glasgow that when I was at Philadelphia, I saw some Scotch news-papers.⁶⁸

New York City newspapers traveled similar distances, carried by one of the many ships departing the busiest harbor in British North America or by horseback across a stretch of roads that connected the city to communities throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic. Hugh Gaine declared in 1762 that his Mercury could be found in every Town and Country Village in the Provinces of New-Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode-Island and New-York; to all the Capital Places on the Continent of America, from Georgia to Halifax; to every Island in the West-Indies, and to all the Sea Port Towns and Cities in England, Scotland, Ireland and Holland.⁶⁹ James Rivington made similar claims a decade later, telling readers that he had as many as 3,600 subscribers from across North America, the Caribbean, the British Isles, and even continental Europe.⁷⁰

We know less about the geographical reach of the Halifax Gazette. Isaiah Thomas alleged not more than seventy copies were issued weekly from Anthony Henry’s press, which, if true, would have made his printing business financially insolvent without the support of government contracts.⁷¹ Most copies of Henry’s paper were probably sold locally, while the few destined for settlements to the north would have had to travel by boat because of the colony’s poorly kept roads. Henry most likely also sent issues to printers in New England and perhaps further south. During the Stamp Act Crisis, a story circulated claiming that Philadelphians hung up in the Coffee-House … a stamped news-paper from Halifax, and in the evening, the paper was set on fire, accompanied with loud huzzas.⁷²

Kingston printers appear to have carried on a brisk newspaper business that stretched across the entire island. In 1779, Aikman and Douglass requested their Country Subscribers to pay their subscriptions for the Jamaica Mercury, because the above Five Hundred Papers sent weekly to the Country, amounts every Half Year to a very large Sum of Money.⁷³ Their newspapers also crossed enemy lines. When news arrived in Kingston in 1779 that Spain had joined the American war, Aikman and Douglass published a letter to Comte d’Arguout, governor of the nearby Spanish colony of Hispaniola. As he was a man of letters, they began, "we make no doubt but he will read the Jamaica Mercury; therefore, we take the liberty to remind him, that a little, thieving, predatory war, is a disgrace to a generous nation, and ought to be discountenanced."⁷⁴

As their own local newspapers left the city, many others arrived in these four communities having traveled along the same local, regional, and Atlantic communication networks. For example, a recent analysis of William Bradford’s 1774 and 1775 subscription books for his popular Pennsylvania Journal reveals a print network extending across the North Atlantic, with twenty-six subscribers in New York City, nine in Jamaica, and three in Halifax, while a single copy also found its way to a customer in Glasgow, likely a printer of one of the city’s two newspapers.⁷⁵ John Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet had a similar reach, with subscriptions for sale at Hugh Gaine’s print shop in New York City and by all of the Printers and Booksellers on the Continent and the West India Islands.⁷⁶ Anthony Henry certainly depended on the flow of British Atlantic newspapers into Halifax, where fresh intelligence was often hard to come by. In 1772, he complained to his readers that someone was stealing "News-Papers sent to him from England and from different parts of the Continent," which he relied on to fill the columns of his gazette.⁷⁷

Similar networks also emerged in the British Isles during the first decades of the eighteenth century as printers realized that the commercial success of their press depended on gaining more and more subscribers. Though London publishers continued to dominate the industry, the provincial press expanded both in number of titles and subscriptions in the years preceding the American Revolution.⁷⁸ By tracking provincial English printers’ use of newsmen and agents, one scholar discovered wide distribution networks that averaged between one thousand and three thousand subscribers and stretched to all corners of England, across to Ireland, and in some cases, north into parts of lowland Scotland. From as early as 1756, for example, Glaswegians were able to peruse the latest issues of Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser and the Cumberland Pacquet and Ware’s Whitehaven-Advertiser, in addition to various London titles and the several newspapers published in nearby Edinburgh.⁷⁹ Though their account books have long since disappeared, it is likely that Robert Urie’s Glasgow Journal and Duncan and Chapman’s Glasgow Mercury relied on these networks, and many more, to fill the pages of their own newspapers.⁸⁰

On the eve of American independence, there were dozens of these webs throughout the North Atlantic, creating communication networks that, as one historian notes, were overlapping, extensive, and thick.⁸¹ They connected Britons at multiple levels to a local, regional, and increasingly national political culture, helping to overcome the challenges of distance and time. From Kingston to Halifax, from New York City to Glasgow, and all places in between, mid-eighteenth century Britons took part in a print revolution, one that allowed more and more subjects to see themselves, as Daniel Fowle argued, not in that contracted View they did … but in a more useful Light, as Members of a large Society.⁸² Print facilitated this view, this idea of nation and empire.

Still, as much as this national political culture enveloped the British Atlantic, these communication networks functioned best in local and regional contexts. Imperial efforts to bridge these networks, to draw Britons into a London-centric transatlantic print culture, worked to some degree, especially in times of war when communication was especially critical. But these efforts ultimately depended on creating an efficient, fast-moving packet service, which improved steadily over the latter half of the century but never overcame the sheer distance of the empire. Broader national narratives, though persuasive and widespread, were thus filtered through more substantial local and regional print cultures that often played just as important a role in shaping popular attitudes and beliefs. Britons’ imagined communities were simultaneously wider and closer than ever before. But their real communities—the streets, wharves, public houses, and people—still shaped how they digested news.

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As countless numbers of newspapers circulated the North Atlantic, they entered into an expansive community of readers numbering far more than could be found on simple subscription lists. Britons of all rank engaged with the nation’s far-reaching transatlantic print culture, creating their own smaller information networks that connected to these larger ones. In their homes, at places of work, in coffeehouses and taverns, through traveling libraries and at universities, as members of clubs and societies, and even gathered on street corners, Britons avidly and regularly devoured the latest gazettes. They read, discussed, and debated news of events at home and abroad. They argued over the meaning and importance of what was happening around them, and out of all of this, they began to make sense of their world. Fowle’s Body Politic was a vast population of people who habitually turned to their nation’s newspapers, an act that began to draw them out of their own parochial settings and into larger regional and national political cultures.

British writers on both sides of the ocean certainly understood this. When describing the importance of a free press, they almost always portrayed it in broad, expansive terms, as benefiting all Britons. A writer in a 1762 issue of William Weyman’s New York Gazette, for instance, delighted in the ability of newspapers to spread "Knowledge of Geography, History, Mechanicks, and indeed the principles of every species of useful Science, through the whole mass of the nation."⁸³ Quidnunc, writing late in the American war, explained to both New Yorkers and Glaswegians that without newspapers, our coffee-houses, ale houses, and barbers shops, would undergo a change next to depopulation; and our country villagers, the curate, the excise-man, and the blacksmith, would lose the self satisfaction of being as wise as our first minister of state.⁸⁴ So ubiquitous was this idea of a widely accessible print culture, that eighteenth-century prints almost always depicted the reading of news as a public act involving both poor and wealthy Britons.⁸⁵

Newspapers proved popular, in part, because they were substantially cheaper than other forms of printed material, such as pamphlets or magazines. If a pamphlet might cost several shillings, a single issue of a newspaper typically cost only two or three pence, while an annual subscription cost somewhere between ten and fifteen shillings, depending on location, the size of the newspaper, and the method