Benjamin Franklin's Printing Network: Disseminating Virtue in Early America

1. Poor Richard, 1739, in PBF, 2:220.

2. Samuel Davies to John Holt, January 23, 1761, Rush Papers, HSP.

3. BF to Noah Webster, December 26, 1789, in WrBF, 10:79–80.

4. Poor Richard, 1738, in PBF, 2:194.

1. Ralph Frasca, “Benjamin Franklin's Printing Network,” 145–58.

2. Reprinted in James Alexander, A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger, 81. See also Alison Olsen, “The Zenger Case Revisited: Satire, Sedition, and Political Debate in Eighteenth-Century America,” 223–45. On the press's function as a check on government, see Vincent Blasi, “The Checking Value in First Amendment Theory,” 521–649.

3. H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin; Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, 2.

4. Peter Coclanis, “The Lightning-Rod Man: Franklin of Philadelphia,” 616.

5. The Franklin network's existence has been acknowledged by early historians Elizabeth Christine Cook, Literary Influence in Colonial Newspapers, 1704–1750, 230; John Clyde Oswald, Benjamin Franklin, Printer, 138–50; Marion R. King, “One Link in the First Newspaper Chain: The South Carolina Gazette,” 257–68; and Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 115–23. It has also been noted by more recent histo- rians Stephen Botein, “'Meer Mechanics' and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial Printers,” 154–55; Charles W. Wetherell, “Brokers of the Word: An Essay in the Social History of the Early American Press, 1639–1783,”

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