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And yet that was at the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities had four. I notice that your explanation isn't accurately predicting the historical results.
I don't think what you said connects. The following two statements can both be true:
Put another way, do you think that when Elijah Lovejoy's printing press was destroyed multiple times and he was eventually murdered over his abolitionist position, that this was good for free speech culture or bad for free speech culture? Do you think, on the margins, that people were more likely to want to speak out in support of abolition or less likely? Of course, there's no accounting for the martyr effect, but I assume the goals of Elijah's killers should be obvious and repudiated.
I think "free speech culture" in the context of the 1850's - a far more legitimately democratic (in the sense that actual political and physical power was exercised directly by the demos upon and against itself rather than via an elected/appointed expert/governing class) is something of a category error. The people who mailed Preston Brooks canes in encouragement of his beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor were exercising speech just as much as Lovejoy was. So was Cassius Clay in his antislavery advocacy. So was Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the other Secret Six fundraising for John Brown. People clearly were not deterred from expressing their political views.
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