How Philadelphia Printers Shared News of the Declaration

John Dunlap printed official broadsides of the Declaration of Independence for the Continental Congress, but other printers were issuing the same text in other forms.

And that was how the Congress wanted it. The point was to spread the news through newspapers, broadside reprints, and public readings, not to keep it confined.

Back on Tuesday, 2 July 1776, the Pennsylvania Evening Post was the first newspaper to report that the Congress had voted for independence. Since Benjamin Towne and his staff laid out and printed the last page of that paper in the afternoon, they could slip in one more line of fresh news:

This day the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS declared the UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES.

The next morning, David Hall and William Sellers’s Pennsylvania Gazette shared the same item.

The only Philadelphia newspaper to publish on Friday, 5 July, was Heinrich Miller’s Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote, printed in German. Miller ran two paragraphs about independence and the Declaration being on the press at the start of his local reports.

On Saturday, 6 July, 250 years ago today, the Pennsylvania Evening Post ran the full text of the Declaration starting on the front page. Towne’s print shop had probably laid out that text the previous day since newspapers usually printed the front page first.

Only a few Americans saw the Dunlap broadside and other government publications, but thousands would read the Declaration text in newspapers over the following weeks.

“Stamp Act Memes” Online Talk on 9 Sept.

On Thursday, 9 September, I’ll deliver the latest version of my online talk “How Americans Fought the Stamp Act with Memes” via the American Revolution Round Table of New Jersey.

For details about that event and how to cadge an invitation, see this description.

This event feels bittersweet because I had the pleasure of speaking to this group in Morristown once and had planned to be there again. I was even building a longer trip around the event with archive and family visits. But “community spread” of the Covid-19 virus has risen again, and we decided that it’s safer to avoid large gatherings.

Speaking of large gatherings, my talk will explore how crowds, with the help of newspaper printers, defined the details of an anti-Stamp Act protest in August 1765, and then repeated that action with variations for months until they made the law a dead letter.

We can see that effect in this 6 September letter from the Philadelphia printer David Hall to his mentor and business partner in London, Benjamin Franklin:

We are all in a Ferment here, as well, as in the other Governments, about the Stamp Law taking, or not taking place.

You, very probably before this can reach, may have heard of Mr. [Andrew] Oliver, the Stamp officier being hanged in Effigy in Boston; a House pulled down, which was supposed to have been erected for the Business of the Stamp Office, and other Damage done him; upon which he resigned and, it is said, wrote home to the Commissioners of the Stamp-Office, letting them know that he could not put the Law in Execution; and that he believed it impracticable for any One else to do it.

Soon after this Mr. [Augustus] Johnston, appointed for Rhode Island; Mr. [James] McEvers for New York, and Mr. [William] Coxe for New Jersey, all gave up their Commissions.

At New-London the Stamp Officer has likewise been hanged in Effigy. And at New-Haven the House of the Officer there, has been beset by a Number of People, who desired to know whether he intended to act in that office, or resign? His Answer, it is said, was, that having accepted the Office in Person he did not think he had Power to resign. They then demanded whether he would deliver the Stamp Materials, as soon as they arrived, to them, in Order to make a Bonfire, or to have his House pulled down? Upon which he promised, that when they Arrived, he would either reship them to be sent back, or that when they were in his House, his Doors should be open, and they might then act as they thought proper, on which they despersed.

Mr. [Jared] Ingersoll has likewise been hanged in Effigy [actually, all those preceding Connecticut events were aimed at Ingersoll], as has Mr. [Zachariah] Hood, the officer for Maryland.

Mr. [George] Mercer, the Officer for Virginia, is not yet Arrived, but the People of that Colony, are much enraged.

Mr. [John] Hughes [of Pennsylvania] has not yet resigned; whether he will, or not, I cannot say, but I understand his Friends are all endeavouring to get him to resign.

In short, there seems to be a general Discontent all over the Continent, with that Law, and many thinking their Liberties and Privileges, as English Men lost, or at least in great Danger, seem Desperate. What the Consequences may be, God only knows; but, from the Temper of the People, at Present, there is the greatest Reason to fear, that the Passing of that Law will be the Occasion of a great Deal of Mischief.

The most awkward part of the news for Franklin was that he had used his influence as a lobbyist to get Coxe, Hughes, and Hood appointed as stamp agents in their respective colonies. The patronage job was supposed to be a pleasant surprise. Instead, those men came under threat, and Hood actually had to decamp for New York.

Ledgers, Laches, and the Law

The New York Law Journal ran an interesting report earlier this month on a legal decision involving a ledger from the Pennsylvania Gazette print shop.

That ledger was kept by printer David Hall from 1759 to 1766. Hall published the newspaper as the younger partner of Benjamin Franklin, who spent nearly all those years in London.

The book was donated to the New York Public Library in 1929 and remained there for about sixty years. Sometime between 1988 and 1991, the library has said, it vanished from the shelves. But the library didn’t report the ledger as having been stolen. It’s not even clear when the institution recognized that it was gone.

In 2014 a woman named Margaret Tanchuck brought the ledger and some antique Bibles to a book appraiser, saying she had recently found them in her late father’s jewelry shop. The appraiser spotted some questionable details, namely “New York Public Library call letters on the spines of certain books and one with a library ownership stamp.” So it contacted the library, which immediately made a legal claim on the items and alerted prosecutors.

Tanchuck refused to simply return the library books, which were valued at well over $2 million, the Franklin & Hall ledger being the most valuable. Last year, she asked a court to declare that the books were the property of her parents’ estate.

Tanchuck claimed that her father first mentioned having valuable books in his store around 1990, presumably these. Under a legal doctrine called laches, her attorneys argued, the New York Public Library forfeited its claim on those items since it didn’t pursue them diligently within three years. The library’s attorneys argued instead that the three-year clock should start when it became aware that it was missing its stuff.

Last year a judge stated that the applicable law meant that the library’s claim should start “when the true owner makes demand for return of the chattel and the person in possession of the chattel refuses to return it”—i.e., in 2014. However, he acknowledged, the legal situation is different if a stolen object is “in the possession of the thief”; in that case, “the statute of limitations runs from the time of the theft, even if the property owner was unaware of the theft at the time that it occurred.”

Thus, Tanchuck’s claim had more legal support if the court assumed that her father stole those books than if it assumed that he came into possession of them in some unknown and possibly legal way. Not that she was explicitly making that claim.

The judge decided that, although he had to assume the late jeweler knew he had stolen books, he wouldn’t assume the man had been involved in stealing them. Newsday quoted his ruling:

In view of the value and cultural significance of the property, the library’s capacity as a public custodian, the strength of the library’s title, and the vague and unspecified nature of Tanchuck’s claim to title, it would be inequitable to permit Tanchuck to assert the statute of limitations.

This month the judge affirmed that ruling. The case remains in court and the books, it appears, in government hands.

Natural Protection against Counterfeiting

Sure, I’m intrigued by a mysterious box found under a government building filled with rare coins left by Freemasons, Revolutionaries, and Know-Nothings.

But the news story from last week about eighteenth-century money that really caught my interest was this discovery from Pennsylvania.

During the Seven Years’ War, Delaware issued a bunch of paper notes to circulate as currency. Benjamin Franklin and his business partner, David Hall, won the contract to produce those notes. To do so, they had to create a design that was distinctive and hard to counterfeit.

The Franklin and Hall shop gathered sage leaves, captured their vein patterns in plaster, and then used that plaster to create metal blocks that could print the leaf patterns in the center of each note. The twenty-shilling piece appears above. The result was a naturally intricate design that was hard to duplicate with available technology. Just to drive home the point, the printers added the words “To Counterfeit, is DEATH.”

Laws usually required the people who printed money to deliver the engraved plates to the government to ensure that neither they nor anyone else printed more without authorization. That’s how we have the copper plate that Paul Revere used to engrave his Boston Massacre image (actually Henry Pelham’s Boston Massacre image, cribbed): Revere used the other side of the plate to engrave currency for Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War and then handed in the piece of metal. It’s still property of the Massachusetts Archives.

As for Franklin and Hall, they would have had to turn over the metal plates of each unique leaf pattern (and perhaps the plaster molds as well). But eventually people lost track of them. They didn’t look like engravings of currency; they looked like pieces of metal with raised leaf patterns.

Recently the University of Connecticut historian Jessica Linker, who was actually at the Delaware County Institute of Science to study early female botanists, recognized that one such metal block with a leaf pattern wasn’t just a floral specimen. It matched Delaware’s 30-shilling piece. No similar printing block had been recognized before.

That artifact is now on loan to the Library Company of Philadelphia, which Franklin founded in 1731, as it prepares an exhibit about printing currency.

The same New York Times column that told that story also reports that in 2016 the Historical Society of Old Newbury will open an exhibit at Jacob Perkins’s engraving plant in Newburyport. Perkins developed a way to engraving on steel that was considered even harder to counterfeit. To tie everything together today, one of his earliest jobs was making the die for Massachusetts’s 1787 copper cent, one of the coins inside the State House time capsule.