lap of another student, the grown-up student being twelve years old. It was Trumbull's ambition, as expressed in the series of essays that he contributed to the Journal, to reform the controversial manners of a time when, as he said later, "the press groaned with controversy," and when the writing was marked with "absurd pedantry, unrelenting partisanship and the extravagance of misrepresentation."[1] To be remembered, in connection with the future developments of journalism in America, is the fact that in one of these essays he attacked those Americans and Christians who were building up fortunes through their participation in the African slave trade.[2]
It was in the New London Gazette, beginning September 6, 1765, that Stephen Johnson published his five essays addressed to the Freemen of the colony of Connecticut. In them he not only protested against the right of the British Government to tax the colonies against their will, but, with a boldness unusual at that time, against conditions that, if continued, would result in a " bloody revolution." Like others of the men who used the pen to arouse the colonists, Johnson was a Congregational pastor. He afterwards showed on the battle field that he had the courage of his convictions.
In Virginia, "unaided by an active press they learned from nature what others learned from philosophy."[3] While it was not through journalism or the printing-press that Virginia was to make its principal contribution to the pre-Revolutionary contest, the importance of a paper that would set forth the Whig cause was seen by no less a person than Thomas Jefferson.
