What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“AMERICAN MADE DRUMS.”

“Buy American” and “Made in America” are familiar marketing appeals in modern America.  They are also appeals with a lineage that goes back to the eighteenth century, emerging in advertisements in American newspapers even before the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence.  Colonizers participated in a transatlantic consumer revolution that gained significant momentum by the middle of the century.  As part of the process, they followed the lead of their counterparts in Great Britain, both by purchasing an expanding array of clothing and housewares and by thinking about the role of the colonies in an empire defined by commerce rather than by conquest.  On both sides of the Atlantic, people thought of Great Britain as the producer of goods and the colonies as the consumer of goods.  That led to a trade imbalance that some colonizers sought to address by producing more good for their own consumption, rather than exporting raw materials, even before the imperial crisis.

Once Parliament attempted to regulate trade and impose duties on imported goods after the Seven Years War, some colonizers became more insistent that they should increase their “domestic manufactures” or goods produced in the colonies for local consumption.  A series of nonimportation agreements adopted for the purpose of gaining political leverage via commerce (or the lack of commerce) in the 1760s and 1770s made “Buy American” and “Made in America” appeals even more common as producers and consumers both imagined alternatives to goods imported from Great Britain.  Once the Revolutionary War began, such appeals had even greater significance.  Advertisers sometimes included short editorials in their newspaper notices to convince consumers to purchase their “domestic manufactures,” but not everyone considered that an essential part of their marketing efforts.  For instance, a brief advertisement in July 31, 1776, edition of the Constitutional Gazette – just three lines – proclaimed, “AMERICAN MADE DRUMS, Sold by PHILIP PELTON, At the Foot of Cowfoot-hill, in NEW-YORK.”  Pelton did not consider it necessary to elaborate on the drums he sold.  He apparently considered “AMERICAN MADE” a sufficient pitch to attract customers looking to outfit companies of soldiers fighting the war for independence.