What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“Three Dollars Reward [for] one of the said books.”
A headline offering “Three Dollars Reward” usually opened an advertisement about a runaway apprentice, livestock that escaped, an indentured servant who departed without permission, or enslaved people who liberated themselves. On occasion, such a headline appeared in advertisements for lost items that the owners wished to recover. In this instance, however, Benjamin Trumbull, a minister and historian, sought a copy of a book that had been published more than a century earlier.
Trumbull explained that in 1656 “the colony of New Haven, printed a code of laws, introduced with an account of the settlement of New Haven, in New England, by Governor Eaton.” He asserted that “Five hundred of those books were distributed in the towns of New Haven, Milford, Guilford, Stanford, Branford, and Southold, on Long-Island.” Trumbull imagined that with “so large a number it is not improvable that some remain legible,” so he put out a call for copies to his fellow colonizers, hoping that the reward would encourage them to “convey one of the said books” to him within two months. The historian was “very desirous of obtaining” the book because “much light may probably be reflected on the history of New Haven.”
He was so eager to acquire a copy that he advertised in both the Connecticut Journal and New-Haven Post-Boy, starting on February 18, 1774, and the Connecticut Courant, published in Hartford, starting on February 22. Despite disseminating his notice throughout much of the colony in those newspapers, this apparently did not have the intended results as quickly as Trumbull wished. On March 11, three weeks after the notice first appeared, he inserted it in the Connecticut Gazette, published in New London, expanding the reach of his plea. He did not, however, advertise in the colony’s other newspaper, the Norwich Packet, during that “term of two months.” Perhaps he did not consider it worth the investment, that newspaper being less than six months old at the time and likely having less circulation than the others.
Whether or not Trumbull managed to acquire a copy of the book, he eventually published the first volume of A Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Ecclesiastical, from the Emigration of Its First Planters from England, in MDCXXX, to MDCCXXIII in 1797. According to the historical background in the American Antiquarian Society’s catalog, that book “took over twenty years to complete but remained the best work on Connecticut for a century.” One of the historians of the founding generation, he also published the first volume of A General History of the United States of America in 1810. It spanned the period “from the discovery of North America, to the year 1765.” Trumbull died before completing the intended second and third volumes.