Over the summer and autumn of 1739 Philadelphia’s two newspapers published
competing versions of a hearing in the Pennsylvania assembly that was described as the ‘Affair
of the Tanners’. What began as a minor property dispute in the colonial assembly became,
with the aid of the local press, a citywide paper war for the support of the urban populace. This
article argues the affair provides unique evidence for competing conceptions of the common
good in the eighteenth-century colonial city, and was an expression of conflict with deep roots in
Philadelphia’s history. The affair also shows how the medium of print could reflect both
transatlantic cultural processes as well as distinctly local grievances, as a group of prosperous city artisans and their opponents utilized the city’s newspapers to articulate competing
commonwealth ideologies.
