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

“This celebrated Performance … had a wonderful Operation on the Minds of that People.”

A popular political pamphlet originally printed in London and reprinted in four towns in the colonies made another appearance among the advertisements in the September 6, 1774, edition of the Connecticut Courant.  In this instance, Ebenezer Watson, the printer of that newspaper, promoted his own edition of Considerations on the Measures Carrying On with Respect to the British Colonies in North-America produced at his printing office in Hartford.  By that time, John Holt, printer of the New-York Journal, and Benjamin Edes and John Gill, printers of the Boston-Gazette, had already advertised their own editions of the tract.  In New Haven, David Atwater advertised and sold Holt’s New York edition.

Those advertisers replicated the copy from one notice to another.  For his part, however Watson devised his own copy, though he had likely seen at least some of the other advertisements as he scoured other newspapers for content to reprint in the Connecticut Courant.  Watson even offered a variant title in his advertisement, “CONSIDERATIONS On the Measures carrying on by GREAT-BRITAIN, Against the Colonies in NORTH-AMERICA,” though the title on the title page of the pamphlet itself was consistent with the original London edition and the others reprinted in the colonies.  Although Watson did not directly borrow copy from the other advertisements circulating at the time, he seems to have been inspired by them enough to paraphrase from them.  “This celebrated performance” (rather than a “most masterly performance”), he proclaimed, “was first published in England, and had a wonderful Operation on the Minds of that People, in eradicating their Prejudices against the Inhabitants of America.”  In comparison, the other advertisements declared that the tract “had a wonderful effect in removing the prejudices and convincing the people of England.”  Other advertisers commented on the price of American editions compared to the London edition.  Watson did so more elaborately, stating that a “Book so highly admired, and so wonderfully calculated to open blind Eyes, ought to be in the hands” of colonizers throughout America.  That convinced him “to sell it as cheap as he can possibly afford it” without losing money on it.

To disseminate the pamphlet widely, Watson enlisted the aid of local agents in several towns, including Canaan, Farmington, Great Barrington, Litchfield, Middletown, Norfolk, Sheffield, Simsbury, and Torringford.  In addition, readers could acquire copies from two post riders, Joseph Knight and Amos Alden.  As printers in New England marketed a variety of books and pamphlets related to the imperial crisis in the mid 1770s, some of them integrated post riders into their distribution networks in new ways.  They made a point of naming post riders as agents who sold these publications, entrusting them with responsibilities beyond delivering items that buyers ordered from a local dignitary or directly from the printer.  This made post riders’ role in keeping colonizers informed about arguments critiquing Parliament even more visible as they became active proponents rather than mere messengers.