Who was the subject of an advertisement in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“RAN away … a NEGRO MAN, named TOWER.”

Isaiah Thomas, the printer of the Massachusetts Spy, left Boston just before the battles at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.  He had previously advertised that he intended to establish a printing office in Worcester and install a junior partner there to print the town’s first newspaper.  When he decided to leave Boston to escape the ire of British officials he had angered with his advocacy for the Patriot cause, however, he revised his plans.  Instead of a junior partner printing a new newspaper, Thomas moved the Massachusetts Spy to Worcester and continued publishing it there, safely beyond the reach of Tories in Boston.  Although the numbering of the newspaper continued uninterrupted, it gained a new subtitle, American Oracle of Liberty, and a warning that ran across the top of the masthead, “Americans! — Liberty or Death! — Join or Die.”

When published in Boston, the Massachusetts Spy carried advertisements that offered enslaved people for sale and notices that described enslaved people who liberated themselves by running away from their enslavers and offered rewards for their capture and return.  Despite the new subtitle and the admonitions in the masthead, Thomas continued to earn revenue for his newspaper by printing those advertisements in the Massachusetts Spy after moving it to Worcester.  Away from the colony’s largest urban port, colonizers did not resort to such notices as often, but they did submit them to the printing office and Thomas did publish them. The June 14, 1775, edition of the Massachusetts Spy, the seventh issue printed in Worcester, carried an advertisement about a “NEGRO MAN, named TOWER” who “RAN away” from Nathaniel Read of the nearby town of Western.  Read stated that “Whoever will take up said Runaway shall be handsomely rewarded.”  That advertisement appeared immediately below a news update that confirmed that residents of Charleston, South Carolina, had received word of “a skirmish, or in fact rather an engagement, which happened between his Majesty’s troops and the Provincials” on April 19.  The extract of the letter, written by a British officer in Boston and sent to a correspondent in Charleston, acknowledged that “On the whole the Provincials behaved with unexpected bravery.”  Tower also acted with courage, though not necessarily “unexpected bravery,” as he enacted his own plan for “Liberty or Death!”  Neither Read nor most readers allowed for that possibility, though an item that appeared in the next issue of the Massachusetts Spyindicated that some colonizers in Massachusetts did grapple with the meaning of freedom for enslaved people and the applied the rhetoric of the Revolution to them as well.  The Adverts 250 Project will feature that item next week.