GUEST CURATOR: Adam Ide
What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“Will be Sold by PUBLIC VENDUE, at the Auction-Room in Queen-Street.”
In this advertisement, the auctioneer Joseph Russell was advertising an auction that he was running in which the property of “a Gentleman lately deceased” would be sold off. The practice of auctioning made its way into the colonies through its popularity in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This advertisement originally caught my eye because they were selling off the property of a dead man. I wondered it that could be seen as disrespectful to the family and the memory of whoever’s items were being auctioned off. However, upon further research, I learned that “for most residents [of the British colonies], it was at local auctions—estate auctions, sheriffs’ sales, and discount vendues—that bidders, sellers, and observers created a body of knowledge that established a link between price and value.”[1]
Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor writes about the ways in which colonists interacted with each other and took part in consumer culture by participating in public auctions. Hartigan-O’Connor claims that “[w]ith each exchange, people reflected on what goods were worth” since there was no easy-to-come-by comparative price information.[2] Many were left “to wonder how much they should pay for tools, teapots, or thread if the prices fluctuated with market availability.”[3]
Thankfully for colonists, auctions or “vendues” or “public sales” offered a solution. Unlike regular retail, which relied on the fluctuation of the markets and the importation of new goods, auctions allowed the price that someone was willing to pay to determine the value. Through this method, “it was only at the end, when the hammer strike closed the bidding at a final price, that the assembled community learned what they really considered to be the value of an object.”[4] So despite my initial hesitance toward an estate sale, having one’s items sold at “PUBLIC VENDUE” after one died not only gave people an opportunity to purchase goods outside of the fluctuating markets of the time, but it also allowed the community to determine for themselves the value of the items being sold.
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ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY: Carl Robert Keyes
Adam chose one of many auction notices that appeared in Boston’s newspapers during the week in March 1774 that he examined for his duties as guest curator of the Adverts 250 Project and the Slavery Adverts 250 Project. As he notes in his examination of Joseph Russell’s advertisement for an upcoming “PUBLIC VENDUE,” auctions were a popular means of buying and selling goods in eighteenth-century America. Russell’s notice in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter appeared immediately below another one about a sale the following day “At GOULD’S Auction-Office.”
The compositor for that newspaper often placed auction notices, with sales that took place at a particular time on a particular date, first among advertisements, following the shipping news from the custom house. Sales in shops, stores, and warehouses did not operate on such regimented schedules, so the printing office, readers, and, especially, auctioneers likely considered it less important to have a dedicated place to find other advertisements. In contrast, Gould’s auction would happen “TO-MORROW” and at no other time and Russell’s auction was scheduled for “Wednesday next.”
Not every compositor in every printing office took that approach, demonstrating that early American printers did not devise universal methods of classifying and organizing the contents of their newspapers. When Russell’s advertisement ran in the Boston-Gazette later in the week, it appeared among notices placed for a variety of purposes. It did not have a privileged place on the page, nor did Benjamin Church’s advertisement, one column over, for a “PUBLICK AUCTION … On THURSDAY NEXT.” M. Deshon, “AUCTIONEER,” placed his own notice that appeared further down the column.
The Boston Evening-Post and the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy each carried advertisements about auctions that week. Among the newspapers published in Boston, only the Massachusetts Spy did not disseminate notices about public vendues, though several appeared in its pages the following week. Merchants and shopkeepers certainly competed with auctioneers when it came to finding buyers in Boston on the eve of the American Revolution.
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[1] Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, “Public Sales and Public Values in Eighteenth-Century North America,” Early American Studies 13, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 749.
[2] Hartigan-O’Connor, “Public Sales and Public Values,” 751.
[3] Hartigan-O’Connor, “Public Sales and Public Values,” 751.
[4] Hartigan-O’Connor, “Public Sales and Public Values,” 752.