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

“TO be SOLD, a NEGRO BOY, about four or five years of age.”

Advertisements placed for a variety of purposes appeared in the May 28, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  Hyns Taylor, an upholsterer, and Ameia Taylor, a milliner and mantuamaker, once again offered their services.  Charles Eddy offered a reward for the return of a lost “RED MOROCCO LEATHER POCKET BOOK” and the papers it contained.  Andrew Robeson, the secretary of the Library Company of Philadelphia, called on members to attend a meeting later in the month.  Mary Jenkins advertised a vendue or auction of household goods and furniture.  An anonymous advertiser sought a buyer for “a NEGRO BOY, about four or five years of age, who had had the smallpox and measles,” instructing interested parties to “Inquire of the printer.”

That advertisement appeared immediately below one for a wet nurse and above one selling hay, undifferentiated from any of the paid notices in that issue of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  News items in that issue concerned the war and meetings of provincial congresses or conventions held in other colonies.  A unanimous resolution from North Carolina, for instance, stated, “That the Delegates for this colony in the Continental Congress be empowered to concur with the Delegates of the other colonies in declaring independency, and forming foreign alliances, reserving for this colony the sole and exclusive right of forming a constitution and laws for this colony.”  A unanimous resolution, this one from Virginia, declared, “That the Delegates appointed to represent this colony in General Congress be instructed to propose to that respectable body TO DECLARE THE UNITED COLONIES FREE AND INDEPENDANT STATES, absolved from all allegiance to, or dependance upon, the Crown or Parliament of Great-Britain.”  Readers were thinking about their own freedom as they perused the advertisement offering “a NEGRO BOY, about four or five years of age,” for sale.

That was one of countless juxtapositions of liberty and enslavement in American newspaper published during the era of the Revolution.  Jordan E. Taylor notes that “was not unusual.  Many newspaper notices for enslaved people appeared alongside high-minded essays about politics and news of revolutions at home or abroad.”[1]  That did not seem as jarring to eighteenth-century readers as modern readers, he explains, because newspapers “provided a model of the mental compartmentalization that Americans needed to embrace in order to avoid recognizing their own hypocrisy and complicity.  …  Vertical and horizontal lines divided these items, drawing distinctions and signaling difference.  In this mapping of the public consciousness, newspaper printers assured readers that the topics were unrelated.”[2]  The business of the slave trade and the business of advertising enslaved people for sale continued to thrive during the era of the American Revolution.  The same newspapers that were engines of liberty for Patriots simultaneously played a significant role in perpetuating slavery.

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[1] Jordan E. Taylor, “Enquire of the Printer: Newspaper Advertising and the Moral Economy of the North American Slave Trade, 1704, 1807,” Early American Studies 18, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 314-315.

[2] Taylor, “Enquire of the Printer,” 291.