Though they may have been willing to lower their guard against
neighborhood gossips, the colonial elite kept their legal weapons primed and
ready for libelers who entered the public field. And during the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries most colonial officials did not lack for potential
targets. If the dominant idea remained one of order and harmony, the clash of
factional groups suggested a somewhat different reality. Shifting coalitions of
political "outs" formed and reformed in many communities and in most
provinces. This intermittent factionalism gave birth to bitter political debates
that authorities could not always terminate by the old system of controls.

Most areas of English North America endured severe, sometimes violent,
political troubles during the late seventeenth century, and colonial authorities
often invoked new controls over political expression. Responding to continued
unrest in the Old Dominion, for instance, Lord Effingham's Thanksgiving
Proclamation of 1685 warned Virginians that "the Rise and Growth of Sedi-
tion and Faction proceeds and encreases by the over lycentiousness of people
in their discourses," and his Lordship charged all governmental officials to act
resolutely against "seditious discourses" lest they upset "ye Giddy headed
Multitude." Disturbed by opposition in Pennsylvania's lower counties to Wil-
liam Penn's proprietary rule, the provincial legislature passed a comprehensive
sedition law in 1684. And in the wake of Leisler's Rebellion of 1689 in New
York, authorities stepped up prosecutions for "contempt of authority." ¹

By the early eighteenth century, many colonial officials faced a new politi-
cal threat--the printing press. In New England, for example, introduction of
the printing press gave the literate public access to a great deal of information
about politics and government; after the first decade of the eighteenth century,
pamphlets and then newspapers appeared regularly. Through these publica-
tions, citizens could learn about the actions of their political representatives
and could read English and colonial political essays, many of which offered
alternatives to the views presented by New England's political and religious
establishment. ²

Not everyone welcomed the printing press. Governor William Berkeley of
Virginia, for example, once thanked God that in his colony "there are no free
schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years;
for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world,

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