What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“A SERMON preached … after the Report arrived that People at Boston had destroyed a large Quantity of TEA.”
The September 12, 1774, edition of the Connecticut Courant carried relatively few advertisements. News and editorials, especially concerning the imperial crisis that increasingly consumed public discourse, crowded out most of the notices that appeared the previous week. Ebenezer Watson, the printer, however, did find space to include an advertisement for “A SERMON preached” by Israel Holly “at Suffield, Dec. 27, 1773, the next Sabbath after the Report arrived that the People at Boston had destroyed a large Quantity of TEA belonging to the East-India Company, rather than submit to Parliament Acts which they looked upon unconstitutional, tyrannical, and tending to enslave America.” Watson proclaimed that he had “Just Published” the sermon and offered it for sale.
Even though Holly delivered the sermon eight months earlier, it was especially timely in September 1774 as colonizers received word of the Quebec Act. Watson initially advertised the sermon in the September 6 edition, immediately below the notice for Considerations on the Measures Carrying On with Respect to the British Colonies in North-America. He devoted most of the second and a portion of the third page to “an authentic Copy OF the ACT OF PARLIAMENT, For making more effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of QUEBEC, in NORTH-AMERICA.” Colonizers found several aspects of that legislation troubling, including the free practice of Catholicism by the residents of the territory won from the French in the Seven Years War. As relayed in the Connecticut Courant, the Quebec Act provided that “His Majesty’s Subject’s professing the Religion of the Church of Rome, of an in the said Province of Quebec, may have, hold and enjoy the free Exercise of the Religion of the Church of Rome … and that the Clergy of the said Church may hold, receive, and enjoy their accustomed Dues and Rights,” such as collecting tithes, “with respect to such Persons only as shall, profess the said Religion.” Protestants in New England and elsewhere in the colonies did not appreciate those provisions.
How was the Quebec Act connected to a minister preaching in support of the Boston Tea Party? In a review of James P. Byrd’s Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution, Mark A. Noll explains that Holly’s “word of warning to New England reflected the deeply engrained anti-Catholic biblicism that had become standard in the British Empire over the course of previous decades.” According to the minister’s line of reasoning, “[i]f New England did not repent of its own tyrannies … the expansion of British despotism could soon lead to more ‘arbitrary government’ and even ‘popery.’”[1] The Quebec Act seemed to fulfill the prediction that Holly made in December 1773, helping to explain why the minister and the printer took the sermon to press when they did.
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[1] Mark A. Noll, “The Holy Book in a Holy War,” Reviews in American History 42, no. 2 (December 2014): 612.