“Let him take care of His House, Person & Effects”
It’s a piece of paper with this message written on it:
Pro PatriaLt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden, soon to be the target of anti-Stamp Act rioters, sent a similar document over to London on 26 Oct 1765, reporting that it had just been posted around New York City.
The first Man that either
distributes or makes use of Stampt
Paper, let him take care of His
House, Person & Effects,
Vox Populi;
We dare
John Romeyn Brodhead made a facsimile of that paper in the British government archive in 1843. That image was published in the Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York series in 1856.
Last November, historian Michael Hattem shared a photo of the British National Archives’s copy on his Twitter feed (see below). He also wrote a thorough essay on the background of the Christie’s document, published on the auction house’s website.
The Brodhead facsimile and the document now offered for sale look very similar, down to the triangular tear at the bottom. They are not identical, though; the first capital T is different, and the word “His” shifts a line. Aside from the capital T and the ampersand, the handwritings are nearly identical; curiously, neither message was written with the long s.
Christie’s says:
The present example was found by the antiquarian, Joshua Brookes, who added a note on the recto: “I have reason to believe that this is an original paper stuck up in New York as mentioned in [William] Gordon’s History of War, page 131 Vol. 1. in 1765”Brookes died in 1859, so he could very well have seen the image published three years earlier, but he didn’t cite that authority.
I’m still wondering how the triangular tear got into both copies.
Christie’s estimate for the copy in New York is $4–6,000,000. Bidding starts in four days.
4 comments:
One striking implication of these handwritten handbills is that the anti-Stamp movement in New York didn’t call on a printer to make the signs. Printers were among the professions most affected by the Stamp Act, and most were foursquare against it. New York newspapers criticized the law, and someone printed the Constitutional Courant satire, reviving the “Join or Die” for a new campaign. But instead of printing these handbills the activists wrote them.
One possibility is that at that point the meme of Stamp Act protests was for handwritten or hand-painted signs, of the sort that had appeared on the effigies on Boston’s Liberty Tree and then many other events. Although Benjamin Edes was a member of the Loyall Nine behind the Boston protests, the earliest example of printed material made for them that I could find this morning dates from December, after the law seemed close to dead.
Another possibility is that no New York printer was willing to risk the placards being traced back to his shop.
I have to say I have looked at a lot of 18th-century handwriting and boy, this hand doesn't look terribly 1770s to me...But maybe my sample size is more limited than I realize.
The handwriting immediately struck me as strange, too—it’s certainly not the style people used in letters. But perhaps they wrote not only bigger but in a different hand when they made placards like this one.
Initially I was skeptical about the document being offered for sale because of the long-s issue. But if that’s not authentic, how did such a similar document get into the British archives attached to the lieutenant governor’s letter from 1765?
Just for fun, aside other small differences, the other copy used an 'oxford comma' for the list of what to attend to.
Post a Comment