Defining the Right Side of Virtue: Crowd Narratives, the Newspaper, and the Lee-Mercer Dispute in Rhetorical Perspective

This essay uses a minor controversy that played out in the pages of the Virginia Gazettes in 1766 and 1767 to explore the way in which the newspaper complicated an age-old question in Anglo-American monarchical-republican politics: Which was more important in attesting to (even determining) the virtue of gentleman politicians, the approbation of fellow gentlemen or that of the people at large? At this early moment in the newspaper's history, the question could remain testily unresolved. But the very fact that the newspaper helped open up the question made this medium a distinctly complicated arena for competing politicians.