and repel the attack of the Tories when they finally saw the necessity for attack and defense—this was the work of a comparatively few men, who, when they were not journalists themselves, either became journalists, or else, like Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, induced others to take up the cause through the press.
Papers were now being published regularly in Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Williamsburg (Virginia,) and Charleston. But it was in Boston that this fight took place—Boston, the cradle of American liberty and the birthplace of American journalism. It was from Boston that the campaign of publicity and propaganda was directed, for it was vitally necessary that Boston should arouse the other colonies, in order that she might not find herself single-handed in the very unequal struggle in which she had engaged.
There was in Boston one man who recognized the power of journalism, the first man in America to use it for political purposes—Samuel Adams. It was to Adams and a group of his young friends that the first political newspaper in the colonies owed its existence. On January 4, 1748, the Independent Advertiser was issued in Boston by Gamaliel Rogers and John Fowle, the leading printers of the colony, who had already published the American Magazine, from 1743 to 1746. They were the first in America to successfully manufacture ink, and the first American impression of the New Testament in English had been printed by them.
The Advertiser was started as the result of the activity of a political club, formed by the man who was to be the "Father of the Revolution." The paper, it is said, was begun on the strength of the communications promised by the members[1] That the group of young
- ↑ Wells, Life of Samuel Adams, i, 15.
