Maria Lepak is a senior at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is pursuing a double major in History and Secondary Education and plans to be a middle school teacher. She is a member of the Phi Alpha Theta National History Honors Society and a recipient of the History Department’s Moggio Award for Outstanding Essay. She also participated in “We Protect Us: Early American Histories of Mutual Aid and Community Care,” the Fall 2022 American Studies Seminar at the American Antiquarian Society. Beyond her studies, Maria participates in an a cappella group on campus, is the president of a fashion sustainability club, and is a tutor for various history courses. Maria made her contributions to the Adverts 250 Project and the Slavery Adverts 250 Project while enrolled in HIS 401 Revolutionary America, 1763-1815, in Fall 2023.
The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.
The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.
These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.
These advertisements appeared in colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.
What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
Essex Journal (April 6, 1774).
“The business will be carried on as usual by his sons.”
In the spring of 1774, Patrick Tracy of Newburyport, Massachusetts, ran an advertisement in the Essex Journal to request those he owed money to call on him to settle accounts because he had “quitted the business he has been in of late years.” Only after that did the conscientious entrepreneur also instruct “all who are indebted to him … to make speedy payment, more especially those whose debts have been long standing.” Tracy made what he owed his priority, signaling how he did business and suggesting to current and prospective customers that they could expect similar treatment from his sons who carried on the business. Tracy considered that business well enough known that he did not indicate his occupation.
His sons, however, revealed that they “have taken the business lately carried on by their honoured father” and “carry on the distillery as usual” in an advertisement that conveniently appeared immediately below Tracy’s notice in the April 6 edition of the Essex Journal. Their father deployed more subtle means in attempting to pass along his clientele to his sons, while they instead emphasized their desire for “the continuance of his good customers and the custom of all others.” The elder Tracy established a reputation during his many years in business. His sons hoped to benefit from the customer loyalty their father had cultivated, asserting a “mutual advantage” for all involved.
To that end, they also made clear that they put the interests of their customers and associates first. In addition to operating the distillery “as usual,” they also stocked “an assortment of English Goods, which they will sell by wholesale upon reasonable terms, and so as to afford a profit to the purchaser.” Though they intended to make money on those transactions, the distillers associated “profit” with their customers who purchased imported goods from them, reversing the usual relationship between sellers and buyers. Shopkeepers and others who purchased those items to sell retail would acquire them at low enough prices that Jackson, Tracy, and Tracy practically guaranteed that they could in turn offer such bargains that retail customers would purchase their wares.
In their newspaper advertisements, Tracy and his sons carefully choreographed his departure from the family business and their role in continuing its operations. They sought to maintain and even expand the existing clientele by emphasizing certain principles, including paying what they owed to associates and selling merchandise at such “reasonable terms” that everyone involved benefited from the transactions.
The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.
The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.
These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.
These advertisements appeared in colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.
What advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
Essex Gazette (April 5, 1774).
“To be sold by the Printers hereof, Mr. Hancock’s ORATION, On the Fifth of March.”
Immediately above the record of ships “Entered-In,” “Outward-Bound,” and “Cleared-Out” from the customs house in Boston in the April 5, 1774, edition of the Essex Gazette, Samuel Hall and Ebenezer Hall, the printers, inserted a brief notice, just three lines, alerting readers that they sold “Mr. Hancock’s ORATION, On the Fifth of March.” The Halls did not need to provide further elaboration for readers to understand the announcement. For colonizers in New England in the 1770s, the phrase “Fifth of March” conjured images like the phrase “Boston Massacre” evokes today. They needed no explanation that the advertisement referred to John Hancock delivering the annual address to commemorate the event, to honor those killed when British soldiers from the 29th Regiment under the command of Captain Thomas Preston fired into a crowd of protesters, to condemn quartering troops in colonial cities during times of peace, and to advocate for American liberties.
As had become customary by the fourth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, the town voted to have the oration published and advertisements appeared in newspapers printed in Boston. Yet they did not appear solely in newspapers in that town. Other newspapers in New England sometimes carried them as well, none more often that the Essex Gazette, published in nearby Salem. Samuel Hall had a long history of publishing news and opinion that favored sentiments expressed by Patriots. On the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre, for instance, he included thick black mourning borders on the first page of his newspaper and published “a solemn and perpetual MEMORIAL Of the Tyranny of the British Administration of Government in the Years 1768, 1769, and 1770,” especially “THE FIFTH OF MARCH, … the Anniversary of Preston’s Massacre–in King-Street–Boston, N. England–1770.” When Benjamin Edes and John Gill, among the most ardent of Patriots among the printers in Boston, published Hancock’s oration in 1774, the Halls acquired copies to disseminate in Salem and beyond. In so doing, they participated in the commodification of the Boston Massacre while simultaneously commemorating it and encouraging others to side with the Patriots as relations with Parliament further deteriorated following the Boston Tea Party the previous December.
The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.
The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.
These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.
These advertisements appeared in colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.
Essex Gazette (April 5, 1773).
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South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (April 5, 1774).
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South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (April 5, 1774).
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South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (April 5, 1774).
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South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (April 5, 1774).
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South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (April 5, 1774).
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South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (April 5, 1774).
What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (April 4, 1774).
“West-India and New-York rum.”
Delia Lee, a student in my Revolutionary America class, selected advertisements placed by local distillers in the April 4, 1774, edition of the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury to feature today. Richard Deane frequently placed advertisements in the public prints. The Adverts 250 Project previously examined one of his advertisements that he ran in the New-York Journal in 1772. Philip Kissick, “DISTILLER and VINTNER,” on the other hand, is making his first appearance among on the Adverts 250 Project.
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (April 4, 1774).
Delia, who was enrolled in business courses at the same time she was studying Revolutionary America, was interested in the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol in early America. When she set about her research, she consulted W.J. Rorabaugh’s overview of “Alcohol in America” in the OAH Magazine of History.[1] According to Rorabaugh, “By 1770 Americans consumed alcohol, mostly in the form of rum and cider, routinely with every meal.” Deane and Kissick stood ready to meet that demand. Both included “West-India and New-York rum” among the lists of spirits that they sold. Rorabaugh also notes that each colonizer “consumed about three and a half gallons of alcohol per year.” Deane asserted that demand for his “Rasberry brandy,” “Cherry rum,” “Shrub of Jamaica spirits,” and other products “exceeded his expectations ten-fold,” suggesting a brisk market, especially for his wares.
Over the next couple of decades, the American Revolution and its aftermath “drastically changed drinking habits. When the British blockaded the seacoast and thereby cut off molasses and rum imports, Americans looked for a substitute.” Whiskey, distilled by Scot-Irish immigrants on the western frontier, replaced rum at the end of the eighteenth century “since the British refused to supply it and the new federal government began to tax it in the 1790s.” Neither Deane nor Kissick included whiskey among the many spirits they advertised on the eve of the American Revolution. Their advertisements provide a snapshot of the alcohol industry in the colonies at that time, an industry that politics and war would soon alter in significant ways.
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[1] W.J. Rorabaugh, “Alcohol in America,” OAH Magazine of History 6, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 17-19.
Delia Lee is a senior at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is majoring in History with minors in Education and Marketing. She is a member of the field hockey team and Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society. Delia made her contributions to the Adverts 250 Project and the Slavery Adverts 250 Project while enrolled in HIS 401 Revolutionary America, 1763-1815, in Fall 2023.
The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.
The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.
These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.
These advertisements appeared in colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.
Boston Evening-Post (April 4, 1774).
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Boston-Gazette (April 4, 1774).
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Boston-Gazette (April 4, 1774).
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Boston-Gazette (April 4, 1774).
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Newport Mercury (April 4, 1774).
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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (April 4, 1774).
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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (April 4, 1774).
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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (April 4, 1774).
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Supplement to the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (April 4, 1774).
What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago this week?
Massachusetts Spy (March 24, 1774).
“Numb. III. is now in the press.”
Isaiah Thomas continued marketing the new Royal American Magazine in March 1774. The Adverts 250 Project has traced his efforts to promote and launch the magazine in 1773 and 1774, starting with his initial announcement, published in May 1773, that he intended to circulate subscription proposals and his advertising campaign undertaken from New Hampshire to Maryland in throughout June, July, August, September, October, November, and December 1773 and January and February 1774 . Newspaper announcements beyond Massachusetts tapered off once Thomas took the first issue to press.
March 1774 opened with the third and final insertion of an advertisement that Thomas had “Lately PUBLISHED … NUMBER I” of the magazine in the Essex Journal, the newspaper that his partner, Henry-Walter Tinges, printed in Newburyport. On Thursday, March 3, Thomas placed a new notice in the newspaper he printed in Boston, the Massachusetts Spy, alerting the public that “Monday next will be published, NUMBER II. of THE ROYAL American Magazine … For FEBRUARY, 1774.” He remained behind schedule following the late arrival of new types for the magazine, but he did indeed release the second issue of the magazine the following Monday. An advertisement in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy on March 7 proclaimed, “THIS DAY PUBLISHED … NUMBER II. of THE ROYAL American Magazine.” It asserted that “the Printers and Booksellers in America” sold the magazine, though few advertised it in March 1774. The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy carried that advertisement for three consecutive weeks, the only newspaper printed in Boston (with the exception of Thomas’s own Massachusetts Spy) to run more than one notice about the Royal American Magazine in March 1774.
Beyond Boston and beyond Massachusetts, the Newport Mercury featured an advertisement about the first issue of the magazine on the same day that the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy ran Thomas’s notice that the second issue was published. “THE first number of the ROYAL AMERICAN MAGAZINE is come to hand,” it stated, also providing instructions that “all those persons who subscribed with the printer hereof for it, and have not had theirs, are desired to send for the same.” That advertisement ran for two weeks. A few days later, on March 11, the New-Hampshire Gazette circulated an advertisement about the magazine “FOR JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 1774,” informing subscribers in Portsmouth, York, Berwick, New Castle, Dover, Windham, and Kittery to apply to Isaac Williams in Portsmouth for their copies. That notice also ran for two weeks.
The remaining advertisements for the Royal American Magazine published in March 1774 all ran in newspapers printed in Boston. On March 10, Thomas inserted his own “This day published” notice in the Massachusetts Spy, supplementing the copy with a list of the contents and a note that the second edition was “Embellished with elegant engravings of Sir Wilbraham Wentworth; and a Night Scene.” He inserted the same advertisement once again on March 24 and may have done so on March 17 (a missing page in the digitized edition causing the confusion). The Boston Evening-Post carried the same advertisement on March 14, while the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter carried it on March 17. It appeared in both newspapers only once, compared to two insertions of a similar advertisement about the first issue of the magazine in each newspaper the previous month. The Boston-Gazette did not carry any notices about the Royal American Magazine in March 1774. Perhaps Thomas did not consider it imperative to advertise as aggressively once the magazine began circulating in Boston.
Thomas took to the pages of the Massachusetts Spy once again on March 17, that time with a brief notice that “Numb. III. is now in the press.” He called on “Those Gentlemen who have original pieces, useful extracts, &c. prepared for said number” to submit them for publication. That notice ran once again the following week. At the end of the month, on March 31, Thomas revised Moses Cleveland’s advertisement to indicate that the post rider carried the Royal American Magazine as well as newspapers printed in Boston on his route between that city and Norwich, Connecticut. It was a clever means of gaining more exposure for the magazine and encouraging more subscriptions, a return, however brief, to the more expansive advertising campaign and marketing strategies that Thomas had adopted in previous months.
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“NUMBER I” (“Lately PUBLISHED” variant)
March 2 – Essex Journal (third appearance)
“will be published, NUMBER II”
March 3 – Massachusetts Spy (first appearance)
“THIS DAY PUBLISHED … NUMBER II”
March 7 – Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy (first appearance)
March 14 – Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy (second appearance)
March 21 – Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy (third appearance)
“first number … come to hand”
March 7 – Newport Mercury (first appearance)
March 14 – Newport Mercury (first appearance)
“This day published … NUMBER II” with contents
March 10 – Massachusetts Spy (first appearance)
March 14 – Boston Evening-Post (first appearance)
March 17 – Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter (first appearance)
March 10 – Massachusetts Spy (possible second appearance)
March 10 – Massachusetts Spy (second known appearance; possible third appearance)
“FOR JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 1774”
March 11 – New-Hampshire Gazette (first appearance)
March 18 – New-Hampshire Gazette (second appearance)
