Did you know that the first attempt at a free press in Virginia took place here, in Gloucester County, 342 years ago?
In 1682, John Buckner, a Gloucester County businessman with a store at Gloucester Point, brought a printer, William Nuthead, and a press, to Virginia.
According to information from the Library of Virginia, Nuthead proceeded to print the recent acts of the General Assembly. This project attempted to help local clerks and other officials understand what the Assembly had done. News of the assembly’s acts was slow to reach localities after a session ended.
The library said that John Buckner, as a member of the House of Burgesses and the Clerk of the Gloucester County Court, “became aware of the tardy distribution of the laws enacted by the General Assembly, then ‘published’ only in widely-varying manuscript form carried home by the individual Burgesses.”
When Buckner brought the press to Virginia, the royal governor was Thomas Culpeper, who was rarely in the colony. William Berkeley, who preceded him in office, “opposed and actively suppressed any efforts to bring printing to Virginia, seeing the technology as a destabilizing influence,” the library biography of Nuthead says.
With a void at the top and information needed, “The uncertainty led Buckner to take matters into his own hands. It appears that between the two sessions of the 1682 General Assembly (April and November), he invited Nuthead to bring his press to Virginia to produce printed copies of that Assembly’s laws. At the end of the November session, Nuthead printed proof copies of the laws enacted by that Assembly for Buckner at his Gloucester Point store,” said the library.
Buckner and Nuthead printed the laws without permission or a required license and were called before the governor when he finally came home. “In February 1683, they were ordered to immediately cease and desist in their endeavor until the King’s pleasure on the matter could be ascertained,” the library said.
Culpeper’s successor, Francis Howard, ended any doubt. He brought with him instructions from the king: “And whereas, We have taken notice of the Inconvenience that may arise by the Liberty of Printing in that Our Colony, you are to provide by all necessary orders and Directions that no person be permitted to use any press for printing upon any occasion whatsoever.”
This ended Buckner’s experiment with a free press, and probably created a festering boil for information that, a century later, was addressed in the Constitution’s first amendment guaranteeing a free press.
It started here.