What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“I will requit their kindness by making a bonfire of [the tea].”
The Boston Tea Party serves as the most memorable destruction of tea during the imperial crisis that eventually resulted in thirteen colonies declaring independence from Great Britain, but greater numbers of colonizers participated in bonfires of tea. Benjamin Booth suggested that he would hold one of those bonfires if anyone in England had the audacity to designate him as the consignee of tea shipped to New York.
He made that bold declaration in an advertisement in the April 21, 1774, edition of the Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, an advertisement that he felt compelled to place after becoming the subject of vicious rumors. “[S]ome evil minded persons, with a wicked design no doubt,” he declared, “have reported that I lately received TEA concealed in bales and other packages.” Booth considered such accusations “trouble enough already” before learning that he had been “appointed … consignee of the tea said to be daily expected, on board the ship London,” an appointment made without his knowledge or permission. Yet Booth wanted nothing to do with importing tea and all the trouble brewing with it. That prompted him to make a declaration “once for all” that he “never was, not ever will be knowingly concerned in any contraband goods.” Furthermore, if anyone had concerns about which commodities he imported and exported, he invited them to examine “the custom-house books, which are PUBLIC RECORDS” to confirm for themselves that Booth “religiously abid[ed] by this determination.” If that still was not enough to satisfy those who suspected him of operating against the public interest, he stated that “if any person England should treat me so ill, as to consign me any more tea, while the present obstacles remain,” referring to the duties that Parliament imposed, “I will requit their kindness by making a bonfire of it.” To emphasize the point, he proclaimed that he would do so “in the most public part of the city,” for all to witness, “and with my own hands set fire to the pile.”
Booth was not the first colonizer to resort to an advertisement to communicate his position on tea as the issue reached a boiling point. Jeremiah Cronin previously did so in the Massachusetts Spy, having a justice of the peace attest to the veracity of his assertions. Thomas Walley, Peter Boyer, and William Thompson did the same. Even an associate of John Hancock ran such an advertisement on behalf of the prominent merchant in the New-York Journal even before the Boston Tea Party. In each of these instances, advertisements provided updates and contributed to the discourse around tea. Those notices doubled as news items, helping to keep the public informed about developments that did not appear elsewhere in colonial newspapers.