What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“Transmit … the Names of such Persons … notoriously inimical to the rights of America.”
It was another instance of an advertisement delivering news to newspaper readers. In this instance, Joseph Henshaw placed an advertisement in the Massachusetts Spy with instructions for the “Committees of Safety … for the several Towns in the county of Worcester” in central Massachusetts. Those committees “are hereby requested to transmit forthwith to the standing Committee the Names of such Persons in their respective Towns, who are esteemed to be notoriously inimical to the rights of America.” Henshaw and his committee decided to make the request on July 14, 1776, the same day that residents of Worcester may have participated in the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Massachusetts.
The notice (and the Declaration of Independence) appeared in the July 17, 1776, edition of the Massachusetts Spy, the next one that came off the press in the only printing office in Worcester. It ran at the bottom of the final column on the second page, immediately below news from Boston, dated July 11, and could have been mistaken for another news item selected by William Stearns and Daniel Bigelow except for the thick lines that traditionally separated news from paid notices. Even if the compositor inserted those lines in error, the notice would have run just once if Stearns and Bigelow considered it a news item. Instead, it ran again on July 24, this time at the bottom of the first column on the first page. It followed two other advertisements. The news for that issue began at the top of the next column. This suggests that Stearns and Bigelow treated the call to submit the names of people “esteemed to be notoriously inimical to the rights of America” as a paid notice, an advertisement that generated revenue, rather than as a news items published as a public service. In so doing, they took the same approach as the printers of Dunlap’s Maryland Gazette and the Maryland Journal who simultaneously published an advertisement with instructions for voting for delegates from Baltimore to attend a convention “for the express purpose of forming a New Government” for the state of Maryland.