Month: October 2019

October 2

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Oct 2 - 10:2:1769 Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy
Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy (October 2, 1769).

“The approbation of all Free born Souls and true Sons of Liberty.”

Thomas Mewse, “Lately from England,” chose a good time to migrate to Boston and set up shop as a weaver. In the fall of 1769, he ran an advertisement to inform the residents of the city that he intended to produce a variety of textiles, everything from “CAMBLETS of all qualities” to “striped and featherd Broglios” to “plain Baragons.” Mewse made this announcement while the nonimportation agreement to protest the duties levied on certain goods by the Townshend Acts was still in effect. Merchants and shopkeepers vowed not to import textiles and most other consumer goods from London and other English ports, though they continued to sell those items imported before the nonimportation agreement went into effect. Still, neither wholesalers and retailers nor their customers had access to new merchandise, only inventory that had been stockpiled a year or more earlier in anticipation of the nonimportation agreement going into effect at the beginning of 1769.

Not only had those goods lingered on shelves or in storehouses for an extended period, they lacked the cachet of having been made in the American colonies. To address both the Townshend Acts and an imbalance of trade with Britain, colonists vowed to support “domestic manufactures,” goods produced in America, as an alternative to imported goods. Consuming American goods became a badge of honor; advertisers encouraged such thinking (and their own sales) by launching “Buy American” campaigns with greater frequency in the late 1760s. Mewse joined the chorus, proclaiming that his textiles would surely merit “the approbation of all Free born Souls and true Sons of Liberty.” He made a savvy pitch, both informing prospective customers that he made textiles and challenging them to display their commitment to the American cause by purchasing from him.

Lest consumers worry that Mewse’s domestic manufacturers were of inferior quality to imported textiles that had been sitting on shelves for many months, he trumpeted his credentials. The weaver had been “regularly brought up to all these and various other Manufactures in a Capital house.” That made him so confident in his training that he asserted that no other weavers in Boston possessed better qualifications; he “presume[d] that no one is better acquainted with the Arts and Misteries” of weaving grograms, calimancoes, lutestrings, and the many other fabrics listed in his advertisement. Mewse was “determin’d to turn goods out compleatly made and high finished.” Prospective customers, he seemed to promise, would be well satisfied – both as consumers and as patriots – when they chose to acquire textiles from him. He did not need to explicitly invoke the Townshend Acts, the nonimportation agreement, or the movement to encourage domestic manufactures. Such topics were so commonly discussed, in the press and in the town square, that prospective customers understood the full scope of the appeals Mewse advanced to market his wares.

Slavery Advertisements Published October 2, 1769

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements for slaves – for sale, wanted to purchase, runaways, captured fugitives – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonists encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonists who did not own slaves were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing slaves or assisting in the capture of runaways. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by slaveholders rather than the slaves themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Oct 2 - Boston Evening-Post Slavery 1
Boston Evening-Post (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Boston Evening-Post Slavery 2
Boston Evening-Post (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Boston Evening-Post Slavery 3
Boston Evening-Post (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Boston-Gazette Slavery 2
Boston-Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Boston-Gazette Slavery
Boston-Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Connecticut Courant Slavery 1
Connecticut Courant (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Connecticut Courant Slavery 2
Connecticut Courant (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Connecticut Courant Slavery 3
Connecticut Courant (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 1
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 2
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 3
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 4
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 5
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 6
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 7
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 8
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette or Weekly Post-Boy Slavery 1
New-York Gazette or Weekly Post-Boy (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - New-York Gazette or Weekly Post-Boy Slavery 2
New-York Gazette or Weekly Post-Boy (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Newport Mercury Slavery 1
Newport Mercury (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - Pennsylvania Chronicle Slavery 1
Pennsylvania Chronicle (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 1
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 2
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 3
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 4
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 5
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 6
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 7jpg
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 8
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 9
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

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Oct 2 - South-Carolina and American General Gazette Slavery 10
South-Carolina and American General Gazette (October 2, 1769).

October 1

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Oct 1 - 9:28:1769 Pennsylvania Gazette
Pennsylvania Gazette (September 28, 1769).

“A likely healthy Negroe … to dispose of.”

Shopkeeper Magdalen Devine occasionally advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette in the late 1760s. She usually promoted “A LARGE assortment of dry GOODS,” as she did in the September 28, 1769, edition. Her advertisements were notable because they sometimes included a woodcut that depicted some of her wares, two rolls of fabric and two swatches unfurled to display the patterns. Devine relied on images rather than an extensive list of merchandise to communicate the choices available at her shop. Woodcuts commissioned by merchants and shopkeepers were relatively rare in early American newspaper advertisements. Devine was one of an exceptionally small number of women who deployed visual images in her marketing.

Yet Devine sought to accomplish more than just selling dry goods in some of her advertisements. The notice she ran in late September 1769 included a nota bene seemingly unrelated to her merchandise: “She has a likely healthy Negroe wench, about 18 years old, to dispose of, having no cause to part with her but want of employment.” Although most eighteenth-century readers would have found nothing notable about attempting to sell both textiles and an enslaved woman in a single advertisement, modern readers might find this notice particularly striking for the casual manner in which Devine treated another woman as a commodity.

Furthermore, the advertisement testifies to the presence of enslaved men and women in urban ports like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston during the era of the American Revolution. Throughout the colonies and throughout the Atlantic world, consumer culture and enslavement were inextricably linked. Commerce depended on the transatlantic slave trade as well as the skills and involuntary labor of enslaved men, women, and children. The advertisements for consumer goods that filled eighteenth-century newspapers, many of them listing dozens of items offered for sale, usually did not make direct reference to slavery, but colonists had access to those wares, the “LARGE assortment of dry GOODS” advertised by merchants and shopkeepers like Devine,” thanks to networks of exchange that included the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved labor, and the profits from both as an integral component. It was practically impossible to be either a retailer or a consumer in the eighteenth century without perpetuating slavery, directly or indirectly. More readily than most others, Devine’s advertisement makes clear that was the case.