SOURCE: Smith. Jeffery A. “The Revolutionary Journalist: The Court of the Press.” In Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism, pp. 142-61. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

In the following excerpt, Smith discusses Bache as a journalist and printer, describing Benjamin Franklin's role in setting him up in the business as well as in his political activities.

The main target of Federalist wrath in 1798 was Benjamin Franklin Bache, a man who had been introduced into the printing trade by his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin. A Jeffersonian editor in Philadelphia, Bache was educated under Franklin's supervision. He became a doctrinaire proponent of Enlightenment and revolutionary principles—particularly those of Benjamin Franklin's protégé, Thomas Paine. Unlike his grandfather, who had talents and ambitions in many fields, Bache made newspaper writing an almost exclusive occupation, as it was possible to do in the United States by the 1790s...