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

“I feared the Vengeance of the British Ministry; and verily believed that Governor Hutchinson had Influence to avert it.”

Benjamin Clarke, “late of Boston” and now from Nantucket, joined the chorus of colonizers who recanted after signing an address to Governor Thomas Hutchinson when he departed Massachusetts.  Like others who did so, Clarke ran a newspaper advertisement to make it widely known that he did not support the governor.  His explanation, however, differed from what others had written in their notices.  Many had claimed that they signed their names without carefully reading the address first or that they only thought through the larger implications after they signed.

Clarke, on the other hand, gave a very different account of the circumstances around his signing of the “obnoxious Address to Governor Hutchinson.”  He asserted that he lived in fear of “the Vengeance of the British Ministry; and verily believed that Governor Hutchinson had Influence to avert it.”  According to scholars at the Winterthur Library, the repository that holds Clarke’s account book spanning 1769 to 1812, Clarke was a merchant who “specialized in brasses.”  He joined other merchants in signing a nonimportation agreement in 1768 and “the next year he signed the petition protesting the sending of the Regulars to Boston.”  Historian J.L. Bell notes that Clarke appeared on lists of colonizers involved in the Boston Tea Party compiled in the early nineteenth century.  Whether or not he participated, his history likely made him a suspect and, as he claimed in his advertisement, prompted him to sign the address to Hutchinson in hopes of finding favor and avoiding consequences under the governor’s protection.

In hindsight, Clarke claimed, he understood that was not the strategy he should have adopted.  Hutchinson, it turned out, supported Parliament more than Clarke realized when he signed the address, though some readers may have found that a convenient justification rather than an accurate account of the reputation the governor had earned.  “I have now the fullest Conviction of [Hutchinson’s] Enmity to this Country,” Clarke declared, “and am sensible of the Wrong and Injury which I have done my Countrymen.”  The same issue of the Boston-Gazette that carried his advertisement included a “Further Account of Tom. Hutchinson’s Assiduity in rooting up our ONCE happy Constitution, and of his Endeavours to disunite the AMERICAN COLONIES.”  With that as a backdrop, Clarke requested the “Forgiveness” of “my Countrymen” and “a Restoration to their Favour.”  Rehabilitating his own reputation may not have happened immediately, but Clarke became a justice of the peace when he returned to Boston after the Revolutionary War.