What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“Furnish him with correct lists of the names of all gentlemen in office, proper for such a publication.”
The September 13, 1775, edition of Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy consisted almost entirely of news selected by the Isaiah Thomas. It featured only a few advertisements. Among them, one promoted one of printer’s upcoming projects. He announced that he “intends publishing as soon as may be, a compleat ALMANACK and REGISTER for the ensuing year.” The “REGISTER” portion would contain listings of officials, an especially useful resource at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Yet there had been so much upheaval in the five months since the battles at Lexington and Concord that Thomas needed assistance with this endeavor. To that end, he asserted that he “will be much obliged to gentlemen in this and the neighbouring provinces … to furnish him with correct lists of the names of all gentlemen in office, proper for such a publication.” He hoped that they would do so “with all convenient speed” so he had sufficient time to compile the almanac and register, take the combined volume to press, and market it before the new year.
Yet that was not the only information that Thomas wished to update in this annual publication. He also requested that correspondents submit “[w]hatever alterations there may have been in the names of persons who keep public houses, since the publication of the Almanack last year.” Taverns were important gathering places for discussing politics and current events as well as convenient places to deliver letters and newspapers. Thomas likely desired that information to aid in conducting his own business, not solely for publishing in the almanac and register. Other Patriot printers in Massachusetts joined Thomas in compiling an accurate list of the proprietors of public houses. The notice indicated that Benjamin Edes, “Printer and Watertown,” and Samuel Hall and Ebenezer Hall, “Printers in Cambridge,” also collected that information. Edes printed the Boston-Gazette and Country Journal, having briefly suspended the newspaper and moving out of Boston to Watertown once the fighting began. The Halls printed the New-England Chronicle. Until recently, they had published the Essex Gazette in Salem. They relocated to Cambridge and renamed their newspaper as the newspapers in Boston ceased or suspended publication. Although Thomas, Edes, and the Halls would eventually compete to sell almanacs, they pursued a common cause in compiling a listing of public houses.
Printers sometimes called on readers to participate in this eighteenth-century version of crowdsourcing. A year earlier, Nathaniel Mills and John Hicks, printers of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy, ran a notice to “beg the Favour” of tavernkeepers to submit their names for Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack, for the Year of Our Redemption 1775. Not long after that, they made a similar request for “Lists for their REGISTER,” asking “Gentlemen (both in this and the neighbouring Governments) that have been appointed into Office, either Civil, Military or Ecclesiastical” to submit their names for inclusion. When Thomas issued his request in the fall of 1775, he utilized a familiar practice.