“A sotish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man”

Having whole-heartedly adopted the American cause, Thomas Paine embedded himself with the Continental Army in the fall of 1776.

That was not a good time for the Continental Army.

Returning to Philadelphia, Paine started to publish The Crisis, urging Americans not to let themselves fall back under the control of a tyrant:

Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sotish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.

I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being, who at the last day shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow and the slain of America.

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful.

It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war: The cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolfe, and we ought to guard equally against both.

In that quotation I followed the spelling and punctuation of the broadside issued “opposite the Court-House, Queen Street,” in Boston. That was how Edward Eveleth Powars and Nathaniel Willis, publishers of the Independent Chronicle, described their print shop, in a space originally used by James Franklin. The town hadn’t yet gotten around to giving the street a new, non-monarchical name.

“I would hope that you are the Sons of Liberty from principle”

I want to highlight the web version of Jordan E. Taylor’s Early American Studies article “Enquire of the Printer: The Slave Trade and Early American Newspaper Advertising.”

Produced using ArcGIS’s Storymaps platform, the article displays many newspaper ads from the eighteenth and nineteenth century pertaining to slavery, showing how printers were part of the process of selling people and hunting them down when they escaped.

The earliest newspaper ads about slavery in America appeared in the earliest ongoing newspaper in America, the Boston News-Letter, in 1704.

Taylor also documents a shift around the Revolution as some people began to speak out against slavery, or at least against the slave trade: “In 1777, as the American revolutionary war exploded around him, a man named William Gordon wrote a letter to Edward Powars and Nathaniel Willis, the editors of a Boston Patriot newspaper called the Independent Chronicle.”

Gordon’s letter said:

Messieurs PRINTERS,

I WOULD hope that you are the Sons of Liberty from principle, and not merely from interest, wish you therefore to be consistent, and never move to admit the sale of negroes, whether boys or girls, to be advertised in your papers. Such advertisements in the present season are peculiarly shocking. The multiplicity of business that hath been before the General Court may apologize for their not having attended to the case of slaves, but it is to be hoped that they will have an opportunity hereafter, and will, by an act of the State put a final stop to the private and public sale of them, which may be some help towards eradicating slavery from among us. If God hath made of one blood, all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth, I can see no reason why a black rather than a white man should be a slave.

Your humble servant,
WILLIAM GORDON.
Roxbury, May 12, 1777.

N.B. I mean the above as a hint also to the other printers.

Gordon (shown above) wasn’t just any man in Roxbury. He was one of that town’s ministers, so when he made a moral claim and dropped a phrase from the Bible, he spoke with religious authority.

Gordon was also a strong supporter of the Massachusetts Patriots, despite having arrived from England only a few years before. He was close to political leaders, whom his letter mildly chided for not having taken up the 13 January “petition of A Great Number of Blackes detained in a State of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & christian Country” before the end of the legislative session. 

As Taylor’s article shows, printers Powars and Willis went right on running advertisements about slaves. But they also printed this letter. They knew the morality of slaveholding was under debate and were ready to promote that debate, just as they promoted the trade. They may also have felt ready to give up slavery advertisements—so long as they knew all rival printers would do the same.

Constitution Day in the North End, 17 Sept.

Sunday, 17 September, is Constitution Day because that’s the anniversary of when the remaining members of the Constitutional Convention signed their proposal for a new national governmental structure.

Of course, that document had no legal standing at that time. It didn’t become the blueprint for the U.S. of A.’s government until it was ratified in the summer of 1788. But the ratification date is harder to pin down—was the crucial moment New Hampshire’s conditional approval as the ninth state on 21 June, or Virginia’s on 25 June, or New York’s on 26 July?

In any event, the Edes & Gill Print Shop and its host, Old North Church, are celebrating Constitution Day on Sunday with a free, family-friendly event from 2:00 to 4:00. There will be “hands-on activities, including postcard stamping, quill-writing and typesetting demonstrations.”

At 2:30 P.M., printer Gary Gregory will speak about the first printing of the proposed Constitution in Boston by Benjamin Edes. In addition to that text, Edes’s pamphlet included the convention’s resolution urging the American people to ratify the document and elect a President, and a letter from George Washington to the Continental Congress describing these steps as a way to consolidate the union.

The pamphlet went on sale at Edes’s shop on Marlborough Street (later renamed Washington Street) and Edward E. Powars’s printshop opposite the courthouse. Powars was then the publisher of the American Herald while Edes was still putting out the Boston Gazette.

Gregory and his staff are reprinting that pamphlet, setting the type and working the press by hand. Copies of that form of the Constitution will eventually be available for sale, though not at this event (as initially hoped).