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

“TEA! (I ask pardon) [&] COFFEE kettles.”

In the spring of 1775, Frederick Bull advertised a variety of items available at his store in Hartford.  In addition to “earthen and delph WARE” and an assortment of liquors and groceries, he emphasized that he stocked the “most universal assortment of iron HOLLOW WARE perhaps ever brought into any one store in this town, such as large kettles and coolers, large, middle sized and small pots, spiders, bake pans, basons, [and] skillets.”  The list concluded with two items that likely drew attention because they appeared in capital letters: “TEA! [&] COFFEE kettles.”

The tea kettles may have caused some concern among readers.  After all, the third article of the Continental Association specified that “after the first Day of March [1775], we will not purchase or use any East India Tea whatever.”  If colonizers were abiding by the nonimportation and nonconsumption agreement devised by the First Continental Congress and not drinking tea then they should not have needed to purchase new tea kettles, yet Bull marketed them in the Connecticut Courant.  The first time his advertisement appeared, it ran one column over from an update about Samuel Adams and John Hancock from Massachusetts and Silas Deane and Roger Sherman from Connecticut making their way to Philadelphia to attend the Second Continental Congress following the battles at Lexington and Concord.  Their arrival in New York “was announced by the ringing of bells, and other demonstrations of joy.”

All the same, Bull advertised tea kettles for sale in Hartford.  He had the good graces to insert a brief note of apology.  The entire phrase read: “TEA! (I ask pardon) [&] COFFEE kettles.”  Most likely the tea kettles had been part of a larger shipment; perhaps he presented them to consumers as an option, leaving it to them to decide whether they could purchase them in good conscience.  That he included them in his advertisement at all indicated that there were limits to the amount of shame that Bull felt in hawking them.  Although he proclaimed, “I ask pardon,” that may have been an eighteenth-century version of “Sorry (not sorry),” a wink and a nod to prospective customers who continued to drink tea on the sly.  Bull acknowledged that he engaged in suspect behavior by selling tea kettles, yet he hoped that his apology combined with demand for those kettles would absolve him of any consequences.