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

“AN ORATION, Delivered … on the Re-Interment of the Remains of … JOSEPH WARREN.”

Joseph Warren was an American hero, not just a hero in Massachusetts.  That was part of the point of the proliferation of local editions of the oration that Perez Morton delivered “on the Re-Interment of the Remains of the late Most Worshipful GRAND MASTER, … President of the late CONGRESS of this Colony, AND MAJOR-GENERAL of the Massachusetts Forces; Who was slain in the battle of BUNKER’s HILL, [on] June 17, 1775.”  When the siege of Boston ended with the departure of British forces on March 17, 1776, Warren’s brothers searched for his body.  After identifying it by an artificial tooth, they arranged for a Masonic funeral and burial in the Granary Burial Ground.  A few weeks later, John Gill advertised Morton’s oration from the occasion.  It met with such demand that he issued a second edition.

Yet Gill was not the only printer to publish, advertise, and distribute the oration in memory of Warren.  John Dunlap, the printer of Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, produced an edition in Philadelphia.  Simultaneously, John Holt, the printer of the New-York Journal, published yet another edition.  Advertisements for the various local editions featured nearly identical copy drawn from the extensive title of the oration.  Not only did that relieve the printers of composing their own advertisements, but it also provided readers in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania with a succinct overview of Warren’s most significant achievements, his commitment as a Patriot, and the sacrifice he made for the American cause.  As the war entered its second year and more colonizers advocating for declaring independence rather than seeking redress of grievances within the imperial system, newspapers throughout the colonies regularly carried letters, resolutions, and other items that made John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress, and George Washington, the commander of the Continental Army, known far and wide.  Yet the movement benefited from having even more heroes for Patriots to venerate.  The local editions of Morton’s oration in memory of Warren and the advertisements for in newspapers that circulated far beyond Boston, New York, and Philadelphia played a part in constructing a pantheon of American heroes.