What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“Worth the Perusal of each TRUE SON OF LIBERTY.”
In the years after British soldiers fired into a crowd of protestors and killed several colonizers on March 5, 1770, the residents of Boston staged an annual commemoration of the “horrid MASSACRE.” They called on a prominent patriot to give an “ORATION” about what occurred and the dangers of having British soldiers quartered in urban ports during times of peace. Colonizers did not need to be present for the oration to experience it for themselves. Each year, printers published and marketed the oration, commodifying an event that played an important role in the imperial crisis becoming a revolution.
In the first several years, printers in Boston published the oration and newspapers in Massachusetts carried advertisements for it. In 1775, however, printers in other colonies produced their own editions of Joseph Warren’s oration commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Benjamin Edes and John Gill, the printers of the Boston-Gazette, and Joseph Greenleaf, the publisher of the Royal American Magazine, partnered in printing and advertising a Boston edition. Not long after, Solomon Southwick, the printer of the Newport Mercury, advertised his own edition, giving the notice a privileged place as the first item in the first column on the first page of the March 27 edition of his newspaper. On that same day, John Anderson inserted a notice in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury to alert readers of the imminent publication of a local edition undertaken “At the particular Desire of a Number of respectable GENTLEMEN.” Patriots expressed intertest in obtaining their own copies of Warren’s oration; in turn, printers believed they could generate even greater demand. To that end, Anderson declared, “The genuine Spirit of Freedom which breathes in every Line of this inimitable Performance, renders it worth the Perusal of each TRUE SON OF LIBERTY.”
The political climate had shifted since printers in Boston disseminated John Hancock’s oration commemorating the fourth anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Since then, colonizers experienced how Parliament reacted to the destruction of tea during what has become known as the Boston Tea Party. The Coercive Acts, including the Boston Port Act that closed the harbor until residents paid restitution, prompted delegates from throughout the colonies to gather in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress in the fall of 1774. They adopted a nonimportation agreement, the Continental Association, that remained in effect in the spring of 1775. Given the events that transpired in 1774 and early 1775, it made sense that the anniversary of the “BLOODY TRAGEDY of the 5th of MARCH, 1770” garnered greater attention beyond Massachusetts.