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

“POLITICAL PAMPHLETS … on Both Sides of the Question.”

As the imperial crisis intensified in late 1774 and early 1775, most American newspapers became increasingly partisan, even those that claimed that they did not take a side in the contest between Patriots and Parliament.  Printers sometimes ran advertisements for pamphlets that did not align with the principles most often espoused in their publications, but few made a point of declaring that they did so.  James Rivington, printer of Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer and a noted Loyalist, took the most strident approach in a series of advertisements for “POLITICAL PUBLICATIONS … written on the Whig and the Tory Side of the Question.”  Sporting headlines like “The American Contest” and “The American Controversy,” those advertisements listed several pamphlets, many of them written in response to others also advertised.

Yet Rivington was not alone.  In the supplement that accompanied the third issue of the new Pennsylvania Ledger, James Humphreys, Jr., the printer, inserted a short notice that announced, “Most of the POLITICAL PAMPHLETS That have been published, on Both Sides of the Question, May be had of the Printer hereof.”  On the first page, he once again ran the proposals for the newspaper, stating that he established a “Free and Impartial News Paper, open to All, and Influenced by None.”  Despite that assertion, “[i]t was supposed that Humhreys’s paper would be in the British interest,” according to Isaiah Thomas in his History of Printing in America (1810).[1]  He further explained that “in times more tranquil than those in which it appeared, [Humphreys] might have succeeded in his plan” to “conduct his paper with political impartiality.”[2]

When it came to marketing strategies for political pamphlets, printers associated with supporting the Tory “Side” took the more evenhanded approach of drawing attention to their commitment to selling and disseminating work on “Both Sides of the Question.”  In Rivington’s case, doing so was a matter of generating revenue as much as operating an impartial press and bookstore.  For Humphreys, on the other hand, doing so seemed to fall in line with the commitment he made in his proposals for the Pennsylvania Ledger.  Even taking those motivations into account, both printers may have considered it necessary to profess that they sold pamphlets on “Both Sides” to justify how many titles they sold that argued from the Tory perspective.

**********

[1] Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers (1810; New York: Weathervane Books, 1970), 399.

[2] Thomas, History of Printing, 439.