The Pennsylvania Magazine, or American Monthly Museum (1775–1776), founded by printer Robert Aitken in Philadelphia, was one of the American colonies’ most influential periodicals during 1776, the founding year. Operating from the seat of the Continental Congress, the Magazine became essential infrastructure for distributing revolutionary ideology—edited in 1775 by Thomas Paine and publishing Phillis Wheatley’s patriotic poetry alongside essays on political philosophy, war news, and scientific discovery. The Magazine exemplifies how printing presses, working through the network of colonial newspapers and periodical subscriptions, became weapons of revolution.
The Philadelphia Print Ecosystem
By 1776, Philadelphia was North America’s largest city and its printing capital. Benjamin Franklin’s printing house and related operations dominated the city’s print market, but Robert Aitken, a skilled competitor, established the Pennsylvania Magazine in January 1775 as a monthly publication aimed at educated readers interested in literature, science, and politics. The Magazine’s format—a bound monthly compilation of articles, poetry, essays, and news—allowed it to reach subscribers throughout Pennsylvania and neighboring colonies at a time when individual newspapers were ephemeral single sheets, often irregular in publication.
Philadelphia in 1776 supported at least seven competing printing operations and three major newspapers: the Pennsylvania Gazette, Pennsylvania Packet, and Pennsylvania Journal. Aitken’s Magazine differed from these weeklies in scope and format: each issue ran to roughly 48 printed pages, gathering essays, poetry, natural science notices, and political commentary under a single cover. Annual subscriptions cost approximately 10 shillings, placing the Magazine within reach of merchants and professionals but not common laborers. Circulation estimates range from 1,500 to 2,000 subscribers at peak — modest by later standards but substantial for a colonial periodical addressing a literate population of some 30,000 in the greater Philadelphia region.
The Magazine’s editorial voice was ideologically aligned with the patriot cause, though not uniformly radical. Aitken published moderate essays alongside more militant calls for independence, creating a forum where revolutionary argument could unfold across months and competing viewpoints. This very eclecticism made the Magazine influential—it was serious enough to circulate among colonial intellectuals and merchants, yet accessible enough to reach engaged readers beyond the metropolitan elite.
From January 1775 through July 1776, the Magazine published approximately eighteen monthly issues before suspending operations. Thomas Paine served as de facto editor during its most politically charged phase, from mid-1775 through the first months of 1776, before resigning to join the Continental Army as a volunteer aide-de-camp.
Thomas Paine and the Crisis Series
Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia in late 1774, armed with letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Aitken hired Paine as the Magazine’s first editor in early 1775 at a salary of £50 per year — a significant sum for a recent immigrant with little publishing track record. Under Paine’s editorial direction, the Magazine expanded its political commentary and took on a more consistently patriot voice. Paine resigned the editorship in early 1776 to finish Common Sense, but his time at Aitken’s press gave him both the technical familiarity with Philadelphia’s print infrastructure and the subscriber network that his later writing would exploit.
By January 1776, Paine’s Common Sense—a separate pamphlet distinct from the Magazine—had become a bestseller, circulating an estimated 75,000 to 500,000 copies (in a colonial population of 2.5 million). The pamphlet’s accessible prose and radical case for independence galvanized colonial opinion at a critical moment when Congressional opinion remained divided.
In the autumn of 1776, after the Declaration’s July adoption, Paine volunteered as an aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Greene and wrote the first installment of a new series, The American Crisis. Composed on the march during the Continental Army’s retreat across New Jersey—following the defeats at Long Island and Fort Washington and the British occupation of New York—the essay captured the Revolution’s darkest moment with crystalline precision. See the dedicated article on The American Crisis, Number I for a full account of the essay’s composition and military impact.
On December 19, 1776, The American Crisis, Number I appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal — Aitken’s Magazine having by then already ceased publication — and was promptly reprinted as a separate broadside priced at two pence, making it economically accessible to soldiers and tradesmen alike. The opening sentence became immortal: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The essay, roughly 2,000 words in its first publication, argued that the army’s trials were not signs of defeat but tests of patriotic commitment. It distinguished the genuine patriot from “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” who would abandon the cause when hardship came, and it reframed sacrifice itself as a source of meaning: “what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”
The Crisis’s appearance in the Philadelphia press proved instantly strategic. The interconnected network of colonial newspapers ensured rapid reprinting; within weeks the essay appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet, the New-York Gazette, and other newspapers. General Washington reportedly ordered the essay read aloud to his assembled troops on December 23, 1776, at his encampment near McKonkey’s Ferry — three days before the Delaware crossing and the Battle of Trenton that reversed the Revolution’s trajectory. The essay thus circulated from elite political circles through the officer corps and to ordinary soldiers during the campaign’s turning point — a concrete demonstration of how print culture shaped military morale and political will.
Phillis Wheatley and Early African American Letters
In April 1776, the Pennsylvania Magazine published a poem by Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved African American poet held by the Wheatley family of Boston (she had in fact been manumitted in 1773, but remained bound to the household and was still widely described in public contexts as enslaved). The poem, “To His Excellency General Washington,” had been composed in October 1775 and addressed to Washington with patriotic language cast in heroic couplets of forty-two lines. Wheatley, by 1776 in her early twenties and already renowned among colonial literati as “the African Muse,” had circulated the poem among patrons including Abigail Adams and Washington himself. Washington received the poem in February 1776 and replied warmly on February 28, inviting her to visit his Cambridge headquarters — a meeting that took place in March 1776, a remarkable occasion in which an enslaved and recently freed poet sat in the presence of the Continental Army’s commanding general.
The Magazine’s publication of Wheatley’s ode was groundbreaking on multiple registers. It was a platform for one of the first published African American poets in the colonies—indeed, Wheatley’s works were the first substantial body of published verse by an enslaved person in North American print. Appearing in the same pages as Paine’s revolutionary essays, the poem asserted African American intellectual presence and patriotic participation at the Revolution’s founding moment, even as slavery—which the Declaration’s first draft had condemned—remained foundational to colonial and American society.
The juxtaposition is historically ironic: a periodical publishing calls for universal liberty and natural rights while simultaneously showcasing an enslaved poet whose voice exemplified the exclusions embedded in that rhetoric. Yet Wheatley’s appearance in the Magazine testifies to the period’s unexpected openings—the ways that revolutionary print culture could, however inconsistently, create space for marginalized voices.
Print Culture as Revolutionary Infrastructure
The Pennsylvania Magazine illustrates a crucial dimension of the American Revolution often overshadowed by military history: the role of printing presses and periodical networks as infrastructure for political mobilization. The Revolution was not fought by armies alone but by persuading colonists to support independence, to volunteer or be drafted, to supply the war effort, and to sustain morale through seasons of defeat and hardship.
Print served this work in multiple ways:
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Rapid dissemination: The interconnected web of colonial newspapers and periodical subscriptions meant that Paine’s December Crisis could spread from Philadelphia to New England and the South within weeks. Compare this to a bound book’s slower circulation; the periodical format enabled just-in-time political communication.
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Intellectual legitimacy: By publishing Paine’s essays in a journal designed for educated readers, Aitken gave popular arguments an air of learning and seriousness. Paine’s plain prose, which would scandalize many educated readers, gained credibility through placement alongside scientific articles and literary essays.
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Inclusive address: Unlike sermons (which required attendance at a specific church on a specific day) or private correspondence (which reached only named individuals), the Magazine addressed a dispersed audience of strangers united only by patriotic interest. This form of public address was characteristic of print—it created an imagined community of readers.
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Archival permanence: A bound monthly could be preserved, re-read, and passed between readers. A newspaper, by contrast, was often discarded after its news value faded. The Magazine’s permanence meant arguments made in one month could be referenced and debated in later months.
Robert Aitken’s Political Gambit
Robert Aitken’s decision to publish the Magazine, and his editorial decisions to feature Paine and Wheatley, represented a political and commercial gambit. Born in Scotland in 1734, Aitken emigrated to Philadelphia in 1769 and established his printing house on Front Street, near the Philadelphia waterfront — the commercial heart of colonial trade. He was not a wealthy man with established connections like Benjamin Franklin; he was a skilled tradesman competing in Philadelphia’s print market during a period of extraordinary political uncertainty. Supporting the patriot cause through the Magazine risked both his printing equipment and his reputation — if the Revolution failed, supporters of independence faced treason charges and confiscation of property.
Yet Aitken’s wager paid off. The Magazine’s success, built on its association with revolutionary ideology, established Aitken’s printing house as a serious player in colonial print culture. During the war years he produced a steady stream of official documents, Congressional papers, and patriot pamphlets from his Front Street press.
After the war, Aitken’s most ambitious project emerged: the Aitken Bible of 1782, formally titled The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments: Newly Translated Out of the Original Tongues. With British Bibles inaccessible during the war and the Continental Congress actively encouraging domestic Bible printing, Aitken petitioned Congress in January 1781 for endorsement of his planned American edition. Congress approved the plan in September 1782, and the Aitken Bible, the first complete English Bible printed in the United States, appeared in two volumes that year. Though commercially unsuccessful (cheap British imports quickly flooded the postwar market), the project cemented Aitken’s legacy as the printer who published both the nation’s most galvanizing wartime essay and its first domestically produced Bible.
The Magazine’s Closure and Legacy
The Pennsylvania Magazine ceased publication by mid-1776 as Philadelphia itself became unstable. It had produced approximately eighteen monthly issues from January 1775 through roughly July 1776 — a complete run now scattered across rare book collections and partially digitized in archives at the Library of Congress, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The British occupation of Philadelphia beginning September 26, 1777 (the occupation was anticipated and presaged by months of British pressure from fall 1776 onward) made the Magazine’s continued operation ultimately impossible. Aitken relocated his printing equipment and personnel, and the periodical format that had served the patriot cause so effectively became impractical in occupied territory.
The Magazine’s brief life — roughly 1775–1776, with approximately eighteen monthly issues — was thus compressed into the founding year itself. Yet its significance endured. Later Americans, recovering and republishing Revolutionary-era writings, recognized the Pennsylvania Magazine as a central archive of 1776 political thought and literature. The Magazine had been, in effect, the founding year’s primary venue for political debate, creative expression, and the coordination of revolutionary sentiment at the moment independence was declared and defended.
The contents of the Pennsylvania Magazine were partially reprinted and anthologized by 19th-century editors compiling records of the Revolutionary press. William Duane’s 1817 collection of Paine’s writings drew on Magazine back issues; Wheatley’s poem to Washington found its way into early American literary anthologies through its Magazine appearance. The Magazine’s role as a publication of record — archiving the Crisis essay and Wheatley’s ode in their first widely circulated forms — thus extended its influence well beyond its brief print run.
Significance
The Pennsylvania Magazine demonstrates how print became a fundamental technology of revolution. The periodical format—regular, accessible, and cumulative—allowed ideas to circulate rapidly while building arguments over months. Printing presses, operated by figures like Aitken working outside established power structures, enabled political mobilization on a scale impossible through traditional channels of pulpit, government proclamation, or private letter.
The circulation of Paine’s American Crisis at the war’s darkest moment—words that reached soldiers on the eve of Trenton—illustrates the material impact of print on events. Words on paper shaped morale, which shaped military outcomes, which shaped the course of the Revolution itself.
Finally, the Magazine’s inclusion of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, even within a context of revolutionary exclusions, marks an early opening in African American letters—a moment when print culture created unexpected space for silenced voices, even as slavery persisted and the Revolution’s universal language of natural rights remained unfulfilled.
See Also
- Thomas Paine — the Magazine’s first editor, whose Common Sense and American Crisis shaped Revolutionary ideology
- Phillis Wheatley and “To His Excellency General Washington” — the enslaved poet whose April 1776 Magazine appearance marked a landmark of early African American letters
- The American Crisis, Number I — the December 1776 essay, first published in The Pennsylvania Journal, whose opening line became the Revolution’s defining phrase
- Battle of Trenton — the December 26, 1776 victory that the Crisis essay helped inspire
Sources
- Wikipedia: “Pennsylvania Magazine” — history, editor Robert Aitken, notable publications including Paine’s American Crisis (accessed 2026-08-09).
- Wikipedia: “Robert Aitken” — Philadelphia printer, founder of the Pennsylvania Magazine, his printing career during the Revolutionary War period (accessed 2026-08-09).
- Wikipedia: “Thomas Paine” — biography, publications, connection to the Pennsylvania Magazine and American Crisis publication history (accessed 2026-08-09).
- David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. — analysis of periodicals and their role in Revolutionary print culture.
- Jack P. Greene & J.R. Pole, editors, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. — overview of print culture and periodical journalism in Revolutionary America.
- Paine, Thomas. The American Crisis, Number I. Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Journal, December 19, 1776. — primary source, first publication venue.
- Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America (1810; rev. ed. 1874). — the foundational survey of colonial American printing, with specific coverage of Philadelphia’s print trade and Aitken’s press.