As I have noted previously in my 1735 Project, freedom of expression didn't spring full-blown from the brow of George Mason, James Madison, and the other authors of the U.S. Constitution. It's more properly understood to be the other way around: The American Experiment was made possible by freedom of the press, which enlightened men on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean began agitating for almost as soon as it became technologically viable to mass publish treatises on civics and politics.
Is it jarring today to read the words of brilliant Virginians who waxed eloquent on the virtues of liberty while enslaving other human beings? Yes, it is. The hypocrisy is stunning, even 250 years later (and struck some people that way at the time). Does it mean everything these men did and wrote should be discarded as though it can teach us nothing? No, of course not.
As president, Thomas Jefferson chafed under the withering criticism of a partisan press, writing on June 11, 1808, to a friend that "nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."
But that complaint was and always will be a rationale for better news coverage, not government censorship. Jefferson understood this perfectly. In an earlier letter to a friend, written on March 24, 1789, the Sage of Monticello wrote, "it [liberty] is the great parent of science & of virtue: and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free."
Three years earlier, Jefferson wrote a letter to a Scotsman physician named James Currie, who he'd known while Dr. Currie lived in Virginia. "Our liberty," Jefferson wrote, "depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
