Media and War

Colonial and Revolutionary Wars

The latter effect was apparent in the earliest English colo-nial wars against indigenous peoples, such as King Philip's War, “the most fatal war in all of American history,” meas-ured by casualties relative to the population (Lepore, xiii). No fewer than 21 contemporary published accounts of it appeared. Some, like Puritan minister Increase Mather's A Brief History of the War (1676), were labeled “histo-ries” or narratives although they described current news-worthy events. Others represented personal testimony of English participants, particularly former captives of war-ring tribes, as in Mary Rowlandson's Soveraignty and[Page 469]Goodness of God(1682), the foundational captivity tale, a still-vibrant genre.

Captivity tales and other Indian war narratives usually appeared in pamphlet form, as did many of the period's con-troversial religious and secular debates. Little wonder, then, as political tensions mounted between Britain and the colonies after 1763, that discontent among the colonists would also be expressed in this form. From 1763 until July 1776, for example, no fewer than 195 political pamphlets on declaring colonial independence were published, from the deferential protest of John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania(1768) to the full-throttle attack on monarchal tyranny in Thomas Paine's Common Sense(1776). With an unprecedented 150,000 copies circulating, Paine's diatribe helped sway public opinion toward inde-pendence. Such pamphlets, along with the 137 or so news-papers published before the Revolution's end, largely advanced the revolutionaries' cause.

Despite print media's centrality to and in the Revolution, printers themselves only gingerly moved toward partisanship, for fear of abandoning a long-standing market strategy of either publishing opposing positions or eschew-ing controversy (the chilling effect of potential charges of seditious libel cannot be discounted, either). As the imperial crisis worsened, however, Patriots increasingly sought ideo-logical solidarity, thus any middle ground that printers might have previously claimed quickly became untenable. Many hapless conservatives, wishing to maintain neutrality, along with outright Loyalists, were simply victimized by Patriots via censorship or mob action. Loyalists themselves were not above responding in kind, sending Patriot printers fleeing from occupied cities.

Although often printed irregularly on the run, newspa-pers provided essential wartime intelligence and supplanted pamphlets as the premier media venue for politics. The Continental Army even had its own printer traveling with the troops and serving them by providing accurate news under the direct oversight of none other than George Washington. Papers provided a convenient single-stop news outlet, where readers glimpsed the doings of the Continental Congress, while learning details of battles, albeit mostly well after the fact. More controversially, editors pioneered the practice of publishing accounts of recent troop movements. Such reportage would become a persist-ent bone of contention between military, with its responsibil-ity to protect its forces, and the press, with its desire to serve its public (and sell papers). Although reports might be based upon rumor and could even be damaging, the Continental Congress was timid about attempting to restrain the press because it could not effectively exercise authority over it.

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