Protest

January 27

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , ,

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

Massachusetts Spy (January 27, 1774).

“NO TEA.”

More than a month after colonizers disguised as Indians dumped tea into Boston Harbor to protest the duties imposed by Parliament in the Tea Act, the subject of purchasing and consuming tea continued to animate conversations around town and in the public prints.  On January 27, 1774, the Massachusetts Spy published a letter from “DEBORAH DOUBTFUL,” who may have been a concerned woman or, in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin’s Silence Dogood, may have been a man masquerading as a woman.  The message mattered more than the messenger.  In this case, Deborah Doubtful issued a warning to anyone who sold or purchased tea.

The writer claimed that colonizers in Boston “hear and read so much of indulging the sale of undutied teas through comparatively a small number of the citizens countenance the use of any tea.”  That disparity prompted “a number of the female friends to liberty” to “agree to enquire into the number of those who still continue the use of that detestable drug.”  Terminology for tea had shifted.  Rather than a pleasure to imbibe, it became something worse than any of the patent medicines so widely advertised in early American newspapers.  Deborah Doubtful warned that unless those who still consumed tea “very speedily reform,” her committee would “resolve to take such measures with them, as will perhaps cause them to repent their love to their country runs so low in so trying a season.”  Those measure could include public shaming, but both men and women sometimes resorted to other forms of protest.

Deborah Doubtful made it clear that colonizers needed to be very careful about what they chose to sell or drink.  “Dealers in Dutch tea are informed form the same society,” she cautioned, “that a strict watch will be kept over them, and the smugglers exposed as they deserve.”  Her committee extended their purview beyond just those teas imported from Britain and subject to the Tea Act, refusing to accept smuggled tea as an alternative.  “The only sure way to avoid being imposed upon by dutied tea,” Deborah Doubtful proclaimed, “being to oppose the trade in all tea.”  That the author so obviously used a pseudonym put readers on notice that anyone, both men and women, could participate in surveillance of their friends and neighbors, report them to a committee composed of “friends of liberty,” and cause problems for them as result of the choices they made in the marketplace.

Joseph P. Palmer did not need to read Deborah Doubtful’s letter to reach that conclusion.  He already arrived there when he submitted his advertisement for “GRENADA RUM” and various groceries to the printing office.  It concluded with a list of “Cheese, Coffee, Chocolate, &c. as usual,” but something was missing.  In a nota bene, centered and in a larger font to make it all the more visible, Palmer declared “NO TEA.”  Merchants, shopkeepers, grocers, and other who carried coffee and chocolate usually stocked tea as well, but given the climate in Boston at the time, including Deborah Doubtful’s letter and other items about tea in that issue of the Massachusetts Spy, Palmer stayed away from the problematic commodity.  He may have done so as a matter of his own political principles, but that might not have been his only motivation.  At that moment, conducting business and remaining in the good graces of the community meant going along with prohibitions on selling and drinking tea.

March 8

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial newspaper 250 years ago this week?

Mar 8 - 3:7:1766 New-Hampshire Gazette
New-Hampshire Gazette (March 7, 1766).

“This masterly Performance merits the closest Attention and Consideration of every true SON OF AMERICA, the Propriety of imposing TAXES on free Subjects.”

Yesterday’s advertisements from the New-Hampshire Gazette testified to the connections between slavery and consumer culture in eighteenth-century America. Slavery was discussed elsewhere on the same page of that issue, though it was slavery of a different sort. The printers inserted several letters forwarded by the “true born Sons of Liberty” concerning the continuing controversy over the Stamp Act. The American protestors were “determined to use there utmost Efforts to prevent even the Appearance of Slavery.” Meanwhile, readers who glanced two columns to the left would have seen the advertisements for “BARBADOS whitest LOAF SUGAR” and “A NEGRO BOY.”

Today’s advertisement appeared on the previous page. It does not include the word “slavery,” but other items published in the same issue demonstrate that many readers consciously linked the Stamp Act and enslavement (even as they may have attempted to eschew associations between sugar and slavery). In American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Edmund S. Morgan explored the paradox of the founding of the American nation: the rhetoric of freedom and equality during the Revolution and after occurred with the enslavement of black laborers as its backdrop throughout the colonial era and beyond. The liberty of white Americans was contingent in many ways on the enslavement of Africans and African Americans, a distressing contradiction.

Today’s advertisement is certainly evidence that advertising and consumer culture took on a political valence in the years of the imperial crisis, but a story of patriotic advertising would be an incomplete story. Just as yesterday’s advertisements for sugar and an enslaved boy were bound together, the stories of Americans advocating (and eventually fighting) for their liberties and simultaneously continuing to practice slavery cannot be separated from each other.

January 30

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial newspaper 250 years ago today?

Jan 30 - 1:30:1766 Massachusetts Gazette
Massachusetts Gazette (January 30, 1766)

“This masterly Performance merits the closest Attention and Consideration of every true SON of AMERICA the Propriety of imposing TAXES on free Subjects without their Consent.”

The Stamp Act crisis and protests spilled over into advertisements for consumer goods in colonial newspapers.  In late 1765 and early 1766 newspapers were filled with editorials opposing the Stamp Act as well as news items about debates and protests reprinted from far and wide.  Nonimportation agreements altered consumer culture, but, as this advertisement and others indicate, the imperial crisis transformed the meaning of consumption in other ways as well.

Printers and booksellers might be considered opportunistic for taking advantage of a political crisis to market and sell newspapers, books, and pamphlets, but believing in a cause and being entrepreneurial were not mutually exclusive.  Publications that considered “the Propriety of imposing Taxes in the British Colonies” based on “Knowledge of the Laws of our Mother-Country” reflected many printers’  views and likely shaped the political attitudes of many colonists, prompting them to further consider resistance efforts and, eventually, revolution.

Even if colonists did not buy and read such any particular publication, encountering  advertisements like this one yielded a certain consistency throughout the various sections of the newspaper.  Commerce and consumption could not be separated from politics in an easily classified manner.