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

“The Negro Caesar’s Cure for Poison.”

On January 10, 1775, Charles Crouch, the printer of the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, advertised “THE SOUTH-CAROLINA ALMANACK, or Lady’s and Gentleman’s DIARY for the Year of our Lord Christ 1775.”  Like many other printers who promoted almanacs, he attempted to incite interest by listing the contents, including the usual astronomical calculations, “High Water at Charles-Town,” “Days for holding Courts in South-Carolina and Georgia,” “Lists of Public Officers,” and a “Description of the Roads throughout the Continent.”  This almanac contained all sorts of useful information for readers to reference throughout the year.

In addition to the contents, Crouch printed a poem that resonated with current events.  That poem (or perhaps a longer version) presumably appeared in the almanac, a piece of inspiration to inculcate support for the American cause.  As the imperial crisis intensified in the wake of the Coercive Acts and the meeting of the First Continental Congress, the poem called on “AMERICANS! for Freedom firmly join, / Unite your Councils, and your Force combine, / Disarm Oppression — prune Ambition’s Wings, / And stifle Tories, e’er they dart their Stings.”  While the poem in Crouch’s advertisement lamented the loss of “Rights and Liberties” for colonizers, the printer simultaneously disseminated two dozen advertisements about enslaved people in that edition of the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal and the supplement that accompanied it.  Yet readers did not need to look beyond the advertisement for the almanac to find references to enslaved people.  The contents included “The Negro Caesar’s Cure for Poison, and the Bite of a Rattle-Snake,” appropriating African knowledge just as so many of the advertisements appropriated African labor.  The exploitation of enslaved people that contributed to the welfare and prosperity of colonizers occurred along multiple trajectories.  Although agricultural labor on plantations has been the most visible of those, newspaper advertisements and other primary sources demonstrate that enslaved Africans and African Americans provided all sorts of knowledge and skilled labor, ranging from remedies like Caesar’s cures for poison and rattlesnake bites to the work undertaken by enslaved coopers, carpenters, cooks, and seamstresses.