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

“MILITARY INSTRUCTIONS FOR OFFICERS DETACHED IN THE FIELD.”

It was a timely volume for the summer of 1775.  The June 24 edition of the Pennsylvania Ledger carried an advertisement for Military Instructions for Officers Detached in the Field: With Plans of the Manoeuvres Necessary in Carrying on the Petite Guerre.  Robert Aitken, a printer and bookseller in Philadelphia, published and sold an American edition of a book that had been successful enough in England to go to a second edition the previous year.

Aitken marketed it at a time that readers of the Pennsylvania Ledger already knew about the battles at Concord and Lexington and the siege of Boston.  They were just learning about the Battle of Bunker Hill a week earlier.  In the column to the left of the advertisement for Military Instructions, the Pennsylvania Ledger reprinted a portion of a letter that reported “our people attempting to take possession of Bunker’s Hill and Dorchester Point … were attacked by the regulars.”  The correspondent did not have all the details, but did know that “three Colonels in our service were wounded, Col. Gardner, mortally; how many are slain on either side, is uncertain.”  The letter did not mention the death of Joseph Warren, a noted Patriot and the president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, nor did it reveal the outcome of the battle.  “When the post came away,” the letter stated, “our people kept their ground and made a stand; how they have fared at Dorchester, we do not hear.”  Incomplete, it was the most recent update available in Philadelphia at the time the June 24 edition of the Pennsylvania Ledger went to press.

Still, it likely primed some readers to take greater interest in Military Instructions written “BY AN OFFICER.”  To help in stimulating demand, Aitken inserted an excerpt of a review that appeared in the Monthly Review, a magazine published in London.  “OF the instructions which this useful treatise contains,” the reviewer asserted, “it may, with great truth and propriety, be declared, that they are the dictates of military genius, and the evident result of extensive experience.”  That made the book required reading for colonizers serving as officers.  “Those gentlemen, for whose service they are intended,” the reviewer pronounced, “will peruse them with pleasure and advantage.”  Yet that was not the only prospective audience for Military Instructions.  The reviewer insisted that “they are illustrated by observations and facts which must interest the attention and gratify the taste of the most indifferent reader.”  With battles being fought in New England and George Washington “appointed commander in chief of all the North-American forces by the Honourable Continental CONGRESS” (according to an update that appeared just below the initial report from Bunker Hill), could any prospective reader have been “indifferent” when they saw Aitken’s advertisement?