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

“AN ORATION, IN MEMORY OF GENERAL MONTGOMERY.”

The March 12, 1776, edition of Dunlap’s Maryland Gazette carried an advertisement for “AN ORATION, IN MEMORY OF GENERAL MONGTOMERY: And of the OFFICERS and SOLDIERS who fell with him before QUEBEC.”  Readers knew well that Major General Richard Montgomery, the commander of the American invasion of Canada, had been killed in action in failed attack on Quebec City on December 31, 1775.  The deaths of Montgomery and Major General Joseph Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, had been the most significant losses during the first year of the Revolutionary War.  After the war, John Trumbull memorialized both patriots in paintings that depicted their sacrifice.

Shortly after Montgomery’s death, the Continental Congress invited William Smith, an Anglican minister and provost of the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania, to preach at a memorial service for Montgomery on February 19, 1776.  The message that he delivered surprised many members of the Continental Congress, angering them with the blatant loyalism he espoused.  As Christopher A. Hunter outlines, Smith “prais[ed] Montgomery’s ‘loyalty to his sovereign.’”  Furthermore, he proclaimed that “the delegated voice of the continent … supports me in praying for a restoration ‘of the former harmony between Great Britain and these Colonies.”[1]  Smith directly quoted the Olive Branch Petition, a final effort to broker peace and a redress of grievances.  When George III refused to even read that missive, it convinced many colonizers that reconciliation was not possible.

In a letter to Abigail Adams, John described the oration as “an insolent Performance” and described what happened after William Livingston, a delegate from New Jersey, suggested that the Continental Congress publish Smith’s memorial to Montgomery.  “A Motion was made to Thank the orator and ask a Copy—But opposed with great Spirit, and Vivacity from every Part of the Room, and at last withdrawn, lest it be should be rejected as it certainly would have been with Indignation.”  Yet an advertisement for the oration appeared in Dunlap’s Maryland Gazette and several other newspapers.  “The orator then printed it himself,” Adams continued, “after leaving out or altering some offensive Passages.”  Hunter notes that Smith doubled down on some parts that Adams and others found most troublesome, “adding a preface declaring, ‘whatever claim he may have to the appellation of a good Citizen or Friend to Liberty’ must rest on his efforts to prevent American independence.”[2]

John Dunlap, the printer of Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet and Dunlap’s Maryland Gazette, printed the “ORATION,” advertised it in his newspapers, and sold it at his printing offices in Philadelphia and Baltimore.  Despite the controversy, printers in New York, Newport, and Norwich published local editions, disseminating even more copies.  Each also published, marketed, and sold their own editions of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a pamphlet that strongly advocated for declaring independence.  Perhaps they thought that honoring Montgomery and the officers and soldiers killed during the Battle of Quebec outweighed the portions of Smith’s commentary that patriots found so “insolent.”  Perhaps they merely sought to generate revenue by publishing a pamphlet that commemorated Montgomery.  Maybe they simultaneously pursued both courses.  Whatever their inspiration, readers of Dunlap’s Maryland Gazette and other newspapers repeatedly saw Montgomery memorialized when they perused the advertisements.  Many likely did not associate that act of veneration with the problematic rhetoric Smith introduced in his “ORATION.”

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[1] Christopher A. Hunter, “William Smith’s Catonian Loyalism, Race, and the Politics of Language,” Early American Literature 52, no. 3 (2017): 531.

[2] Hunter, “William Smith’s Catonian Loyalism,” 531.