These letters are entirely imaginary—offered with wit, affection, and no partisan agenda. We hope they make you smile, make you think, and perhaps send you back to what the founders actually wrote.
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In our previous post, we learned what the Founding Fathers would think about Presidential Character. Today, Hamilton and Jefferson speculate about the Press.
Source: Hamilton-Jefferson Correspondence | Correspondents: Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson
Both men bore scars from a savage press. Jefferson, champion of press freedom, once declared he would prefer newspapers without government to the reverse. Hamilton, who loathed the licentious press, would nonetheless defend a printer’s right to publish truth—in the very courtroom where his enemies sought to silence dissent. Here they imagine a future where news travels faster than thought, and every citizen carries a printing press in his pocket.
* * *
Monticello, Virginia, September 12, 1803
Dear General Hamilton,
I write to you not as adversary but as fellow sufferer. We have both been flayed alive by that scribbling wretch Callender—you for your domestic arrangements, I for mine. The irony would be delicious were it not so bitter.
I confess that experience has complicated my view of the gazettes. In 1787, from Paris, I wrote that I should prefer newspapers without government to government without newspapers. I believe this still—in principle. Yet after six years enduring their daily calumnies, I have discovered that nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
Imagine, if you can, a future age in which news travels instantaneously—where every rumor, every slander, every half-formed thought flies from one end of the continent to the other before a man can draw breath to refute it. Would such speed illuminate democracy, or set it ablaze?
I remain, with complicated esteem,
Th. Jefferson
* * *
New York, September 28, 1803
Dear Mr. President,
Your letter finds me preparing to defend young Croswell against prosecution for libel—for printing accusations against you, no less. You will appreciate the irony. I shall argue that truth, published with good motives for justifiable ends, ought to be a complete defense. The pestilential doctrine of an unchecked press destroys liberty; but so too does the magistrate who punishes truth-telling.
Your hypothetical future disturbs me profoundly. I confess I argued in Federalist that press liberty cannot be defined with precision, that its security must depend upon public opinion and the general spirit of the people. But I assumed that printers would value their reputations—that shame and commercial interest would impose some discipline.
In this instant world you imagine, might not a printer discover that falsehood travels faster and sells better than truth? That the more outrageous the claim, the wider its circulation? And the more times the claim is made, the more it is likely to be believed? What then becomes of the marketplace of ideas when the merchants profit most from spoiled goods?
Your obedient servant,
Hamilton
* * *
Monticello, Virginia, October 14, 1803
Dear Hamilton,
You touch upon the central paradox. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe—but only if truth can eventually overtake falsehood. In our era, a lie printed in Philadelphia may take weeks to be refuted in Virginia. Time permits reflection, correction, the gradual sifting of fact from fiction.
But suppose every citizen possessed his own printing press, small enough to carry in his waistcoat, capable of publishing his every passing thought to thousands in an instant. Suppose further that ingenious men discovered how to profit by inflaming passions rather than informing judgment—that citizens sorted themselves into rival camps, each with its own gazettes, each convinced the other peddles nothing but lies.
Would men still govern themselves by reason, or would they be governed by whoever shouted loudest and most frequently?
Yours in philosophical disquiet,
Th. Jefferson
* * *
New York, October 30, 1803
Dear Jefferson,
Your vision of pocket printing presses is fantastical, yet I find I cannot dismiss it. Human nature remains constant; only the instruments change. The passions that divided Federalist from Republican would surely persist, amplified by whatever machinery the future invents.
I wonder whether such citizens might eventually lose the capacity to distinguish between news and entertainment, between the deliberations of statesmen and the performances of actors. Might the line between governing and spectacle dissolve entirely?
And yet—I return to my argument in the Croswell matter. The remedy for bad speech is more speech, for false news is true news. This I must believe, for the alternative—government as arbiter of truth—leads to tyranny more certain than any anarchy of opinion.
Your reluctant correspondent,
Hamilton
* * *
Monticello, Virginia, November 15, 1803
Dear Hamilton,
Then we are agreed, however improbably. The press must remain free precisely because the alternative is worse. I have lent myself willingly as subject of a great experiment—to prove that an administration conducting itself with integrity cannot be battered down, even by the falsehoods of a licentious press.
If our posterity inherits a world of instantaneous communication, they shall require something we possess in lesser measure than we suppose: the patience to wait for truth, the humility to question what confirms our prejudices, and the wisdom to distinguish between the liberty to speak and the obligation to listen.
May they prove worthier stewards than we have been critics.
Your fellow sufferer at the hands of printers,
Th. Jefferson
* * * * *
If they only knew… that their philosophical debate would unfold in a world where every citizen carries a printing press in his pocket, where news travels at the speed of light, where algorithms sort citizens into hostile camps, and where the line between information and entertainment has all but vanished—they might marvel that the republic survives at all, or wonder whether it truly does.
Reader Engagement Questions
- Jefferson said he would prefer newspapers without government to the contrary—yet later declared nothing in newspapers could be believed. Have you found your own views on media shifting with experience?
- Hamilton argued that truth, published with good motives, should be protected. In an age of viral misinformation, is that standard still workable?
- Both men were savaged by the same journalist—Callender. Does it matter that partisan attacks come from the same source when the targets are enemies? What does that tell us about the nature of the press?
Share your thoughts in the comments—and click ‘Like’ if this made you think about the press differently.