What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“PROCEEDINGS OF THE PROVINCIAL CONFERENCE of COMMITTEES, Of the PROVINCE of PENNSYLVANIA.”
The Pennsylvania Provincial Congress met at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia in June 1776. Delegates from the city of Philadelphia and each of the ten counties in the colony convened on June 18 and adjourned on June 25. Over the course of a week, the Pennsylvania Provincial Congress reached some momentous decisions. Newspapers carried updates about the work undertaken and news almost certainly reached even more colonizers via word of mouth, yet those were not the only means of learning about the debates and decisions of the ninety-seven delegates who participated in the congress.
On July 1, William Bradford and Thomas Bradford advertised that they published and sold “PROCEEDINGS OF THE PROVINCIAL CONFERENCE of COMMITTEES, Of the PROVINCE of PENNSYLVANIA,” less than a week after the meeting concluded. They were so eager to make the record of the Pennsylvania Provincial Congress and its outcomes available to the public that they did not wait to advertise the pamphlet in the next issue of their own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Journal, scheduled for July 3 (though they did also publish the same advertisement in that issue, giving it a prominent place right after news from Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety).
What decisions did the delegates to Pennsylvania Provincial Congress make? According to the overview of the sestercentennial commemorations sponsored by Carpenters’ Hall and other cultural, academic, and political institutions in Pennsylvania, they voted to “[d]eclare Pennsylvania’s independence from the British Empire, thus establishing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, [m]obilize the Pennsylvania militia for the American Revolutionary War, [and o]rganize elections to select delegates to a constitutional convention, which framed the influential Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776,” a constitution often considered the most democratic of all the state constitutions adopted during the War for Independence. (For more on the Pennsylvania Provincial Congress, see Carl G. Karsh’s short essay, “Pennsylvania: From Colony to State.”
The Bradfords and many other printers throughout the colonies published, advertised, and sold proceedings of provincial congresses and the Continental Congress. In so doing, they offered colonizers greater access and more complete coverage of those meetings, reporting not only the outcomes but also the processes and the debates that led to them. The publication and sale of the Proceedings of the Provincial Conference of Committees, of the Province of Pennsylvania and similar conventions in other colonies helped the public stay informed about current events and perhaps even shaped opinions during the transition from resistance to revolution.