Jefferson and the Press
Crucible of Liberty
Jerry W. Knudson
With the exception of Abraham Lincoln, no president prior to the twentieth century has
been more vilified by the U.S. news media than Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson and the
Press demonstrates the power of the press in the early years of the Republic. Four-fifths
of the young nation’s 235 newspapers were Federalist, but, as Jerry W. Knudson
explains, the minority Republican newspapers combated these odds through direct
invectives and vehemently candid reportage.
Knudson details the coverage of four Federalist and four Republican newspapers in
wide circulation to six major episodes of the Jeffersonian era: the election of
1800–1801, the return of Thomas Paine from revolutionary France, the Louisiana
Purchase, the Hamilton-Burr duel, the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel
Chase, and the economic embargo of 1807–1809. Rocked by domestic scandals, the
American nation read accounts in Federalist papers that demonized Jefferson and in
Republican papers that lauded the president’s achievements.
Knudson profiles the men projecting these radically different views—savvy editors
who embraced their ability to channel public opinion and who often became famous
personalities in their own right, including Samuel Harrison Smith of National
Intelligencer in Washington, D.C., and William Duane of Philadelphia’s Aurora. He
shows these editors to have been sophisticated political “scribblers” who fearlessly
printed what they thought with bluntness and ferocity that might shock even twentyfirst-century readers.
Concerned with how these charged verbal skirmishes in the press both molded and
reflected public opinion, Knudson reveals the power, abrasiveness, and polarizing
effects of a free but quite partisan press as the only source of public information during
the young nation’s first major shift in leadership. Diverging from accepted views, he
frames his argument to illustrate that newspapers reached their height of influence and
malevolence during Jefferson’s presidency rather than that of Andrew Jackson in the
1820s and 1830s.
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Jerry W. Knudson, professor emeritus of
journalism at Temple University, is a
former journalist who has specialized in the
history of the press in both North America
and Latin America. He earned a Ph.D. in
history at the University of Virginia, where
he was one of the first Jefferson Fellows,
and received a Freedom Forum Award from
the Gannett Foundation for his long-term
coverage of the Pinochet dictatorship in
Chile.
JEFFERSON AND THE PRESS
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