A Ko-fi Reward, Cheap for Cash

At the end of last year, I announced a Boston 1775 membership tier on the Ko-fi platform.

And at the end of last month, on Tuesday, I posted the first reward for “Buff and Blue” members. It’s an essay titled “A Bankruptcy in Boston, 1765,” about Nathaniel Wheelwright’s financial failure and the effect it had on what became the Revolution. This is a much expanded, updated, and citation-festooned version of an article I wrote for Massachusetts Banker magazine way back during the Great Recession.

If you’ve signed up to make a small monthly contribution to Boston 1775, you should have received a message about this essay, or it’s waiting for you on Ko-fi. I’m not sure how exactly the platform works since this is the first time I’ve used it this way. If reading about the ripples of one colonial merchant’s bankruptcy sounds intriguing, you can sign up on Ko-fi this month now and I’ll get you the file. Thanks for your support in whatever form.

While revamping this article, I wondered if Boston shopkeepers became more eager for cash payments in 1765 as the Wheelwright bankruptcy and the impending Stamp Act made specie even more desirable. And how could I measure that?

Shopkeepers signaled that they gave discounts to customers paying with hard currency through the phrase “Cheap for Cash.” I decided to ask the newspaper database at Genealogy Bank to search through Massachusetts newspapers for “cheap for cash” (and “cheap for cafh,” since the system more often doesn’t recognize the long s) in each year of the 1760s.

I realized that approach could be thrown off by the arrival of a new newspaper, like the Boston Chronicle in late 1767, or simply by one or two businesspeople who liked that phrase and advertised with it week after week. Still, it’s better to have flawed data than no data.

Here’s the result as a bar graph:

The year 1765 was indeed the peak of “Cheap for Cash” advertisements. However, the big rise actually occurred the year before. Then the total tapered off until a big drop in 1769.

Looking at those lines brings me to these tentative conclusions:

• The post-Seven Years’ War economic recession started making business harder for Boston shopkeepers in 1764. That situation might well have been one stress on Wheelwright’s finances. His bankruptcy in January 1765 in turn made everyone else’s hunger for hard cash even more urgent.
• When the British military was active in the region, as in the war years and then in the occupation of Boston that started in late 1768, the paymasters and commissaries brought enough specie into the province that shopkeepers didn’t feel they needed to advertise special pricing for cash.

This is of course a crude methodology, and I’m sure specialized historians could improve on it. For instance, a more detailed count of advertisers could determine how many different shops used the phrase. Breaking years down into quarters or months might fine-tune the analysis. Other phrases besides “Cheap for Cash” might have carried the same message. The overall number of ads could have waxed and waned. But for ten minutes’ work, I’m happy with this.