The Russells’ Poetic Broadside on Bunker Hill

After the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Ezekiel Russell print shop in Salem issued “AN ELEGIAC POEM” on the battle. That broadside probably appeared toward the end of 1775 since a note on its bottom said Russell’s almanacs for the following year were “now in the press.”

The Russell broadside is a useful snapshot of how New Englanders wanted to remember the battle in 1775:

THE NEVER-TO-BE-FORGOTTEN
TERRIBLE AND BLOODY BATTLE
FOUGHT AT AN INTRENCHMENT ON
BUNKER-HILL,

Now justly called (by the Regulars) BLOODY-HILL, situated two miles from the head-quarters of the Regulars at BOSTON, and one mile northward from the centre of the town of CHARLESTOWN, in NEW-ENGLAND, in AMERICA, which was wantonly and inhumanly set on fire and consumed, previous to the engagement: This town contained one large meeting-house, about three hundred dwelling-houses, a great number of which were large and elegant, besides one hundred and fifty or two hundred other buildings, whereby about six or seven hundred of its distressed inhabitants are now forced from their dwellings, and obliged to seek new habitations for themselves, many of whom having left, on this calamitous occasion, their houses, cloaths, furniture, and in short every thing that was valuable, depend at this time entirely on the benevolent charity of their kind and simpathizing brethren and friends in the country; who have the unfeigned and hearty thanks of all such as have been relieved: May whole kindness, shewn to the distressed people who have been obliged to take refuge from that or any other town, be rewarded an hundred fold in this world, and in the world to come may they receive life everlasting, is the sincere and fervent wish of every true Friend to the RIGHTS and LIBERTIES of the AMERICAN COLONIES!—

We are sure an attempt to delineate the horrible and shocking situation the distressed souls were in, that still remained in that unfortunate town, at the time the cannonading began, would melt the stoutest heart, and give a shock to the human imagination, which would very far surpass the compass of this sheet; but the relation of this wicked and cruel affair may perhaps hereafter afford matter of speculation to the Historian, and serve to fill many pages in the history of AMERICA.—

What soul but must be filled with horror at viewing the aged and decrepit ones begging for the assistance of the youth, who were now flying through the red-hot cannon balls and smoke occasioned by the flames of their dwellings? What heart but must melt at beholding the Women with their helpless little ones around them, in the greatest confusion seeking a refuge from the devouring jaws [of] destruction, and from the violent fury of their cruel and barbarous enemies? It is said this diabolical transaction was executed by orders from that arch-traitor and worst of villains T[homas] G[age], whom posterity will forever curse, so long as his name shall be remembered.—

This bloody battle was fought about four o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday the seventeenth of JUNE, one thousand seven hundred and seventy five, between an advanced party of seven hundred Provincials, and fourteen regiments and a train of artillery, of the Ministerial forces, the former of whom after bearing about two hours, with the utmost fortitude and bravery, as severe a fire as perhaps ever was known, and many having fired away all their ammunition, they were over-powered by numbers, and obliged to leave the intrenchments, with three pieces of cannon, and retreat about sun-set to a small distance over Charlestown-neck.—

By the returns made in the Provincial and Ministerial Armies it appears, that there were of the Provincials one major-general, one colonel, one lieutenant-colonel, two captains, three lieutenants, and ninety privates, killed, among which number, to the inexpressible grief of our whole army, is that honorable, renowned, and magnanimous Hero, MAJOR-GENERAL JOSEPH WARREN, Esquire, who commanded on this occasion, as also the brave and intrepid Colonels [Thomas] GARDNER and [Moses] PARKER; there were one lieutenant and two hundred and fifty privates wounded: Total killed and wounded three hundred and twenty four.—

On the side of the Regulars there were one lieutenant-colonel, four majors, eleven captains, thirteen lieutenants, one ensign, one hundred and two serjeants, one hundred corporals, seven hundred and fifty-three rank and file, killed; one quarter-master, three majors, fifteen captains, nineteen lieutenants, six ensigns, and five hundred and four wounded; Total of killed and wounded, fourteen hundred and fifty.—

The above account, which contains in substance as accurate a detail as can be collected from the different advices received from Boston and elsewhere, of the transactions of both armies on that ever-memorable seventeenth of June, is here annexed to the proceeding Poem, and printed in this form at the request of a great number of Friends to the AMERICAN CAUSE, to whom (but more especially those belonging to the Continental Army, who may have this sheet very cheap) it is recommended to preserve, not only as a token of gratitude to their deceased Friends, we mean those immortal and heroic WORTHIES, who lately so nobly bled in defence of the RIGHTS, LIBERTIES, and PRIVILEGES of NORTH-AMERICA: This sheet may be thought necessary to keep in eternal remembrance the heroic BATTLE of CHARLESTOWN, where a few hundreds of Americans several times repulsed eight times their number of Ministerial Troops of Great-Britain.

This broadside greatly overstated the number of British involved in the battle and the number of those troops killed, apparently by double-counting the wounded. It also understated the number of Americans engaged, their casualties, and the number of cannon they left on the field (five).

Evidently in 1775 the people of Massachusetts recalled Dr. Warren as leading the American forces, but in later years authors repeated Col. William Prescott’s story that the doctor had refused a command position. The broadside’s description of the British attack as lasting “two hours” is an interesting contrast to Samuel Paine’s account of an assault taking about an hour.

After that far-from-brief introduction came an all-too-long set of verses. Just a taste:

ADIEU to wanton songs and foolish joys,
  To idle tales that fill the ear,
A mournful theme my heart employs,
  And hope the living will it hear.
A horrid fight there hap’d of late,
  ’Twas on June seventeen,
When a great number met their fate
  In fighting on the green.
Yes, hundreds of poor souls are dead,
  In battle they were slain,
Both sides met with a heavy stroke,
  T’ rehearse it gives me pain.

You can read the whole poem, and view the broadside, at the Massachusetts Historical Society’s website.

As I noted back here, Isaiah Thomas reported that the Russell shop printed a lot of ballads decorated with coffins like this one. Thomas first stated that Russell’s wife Sarah composed the elegiac verses, but later penciled in a note that “a young woman” working in the shop did so. (I still think it was Sarah.)

TOMORROW: But wait, there’s more!

The Art of Peter Fleet

Finally I’m getting back to the family of enslaved printers in pre-Revolutionary Boston, Peter Fleet and his sons Pompey and Caesar.

In his history of printing, Isaiah Thomas mentioned the last two by name, so when scholars spotted the initials “P.F” at the bottom of the woodcut shown here, they guessed it had been carved by Pompey Fleet.

In fact, Thomas had written that Pompey’s father had carved woodcuts for Thomas Fleet, Sr. Once people remembered the 1743 will of a slave named Peter owned by the Fleet family, they realized that “P.F” could also stand for Peter Fleet.

I’m inclined to credit this cut to Peter, the father. According to E. Jennifer Monaghan’s Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, Thomas Fleet first advertised this book, The Prodigal Daughter, in his Boston Evening-Post in 1736. We don’t have any definite examples of that edition because the several copies that survive don’t include printing dates. Some copies are estimated as early as 1742. So either Peter Fleet carved that woodcut or the estimated dates are way off because Pompey Fleet wasn’t old enough to do such work until the late 1750s. And Isaiah Thomas never said Pompey made woodcuts.

The Prodigal Daughter is a narrative poem describing how a wicked daughter plotted to poison her wealthy parents in Bristol, England. Luckily, those parents were saved by angels casting the girl into a coma. She lay apparently dead for a few days and then returned to repent and share a vision of the afterlife.

Naturally, the descendants of Boston’s Puritan founders thought that this story, when decorated with several woodcut illustrations of devils and near-dead people, was a wonderful gift for children. Indeed, the earliest copy in Readex’s Archive of Americana database was given to Richard Knowles by his mother.

Thomas Fleet’s sons inherited his business in 1758 and kept printing The Prodigal Daughter with the same illustrations. After the republican Revolution they changed their business sign from “the Heart and Crown” to “the Bible and Heart,” and they kept printing this book.

Isaiah Thomas issued his own edition of The Prodigal Daughter in 1772. Ezekiel Russell issued his in 1790, 1791, and 1797. Both those printers commissioned new illustrations, but the results bear a strong resemblance to those in the Fleet edition. I think Peter Fleet’s style is notable for its heavy vertical hatching.

Nathaniel Coverly, Jr., published The Prodigal Daughter in Boston in the 1810s, using the old Fleet woodcuts—but with the “P.F” scraped off. By then Peter Fleet had probably been dead for more than fifty years. This webpage from Princeton shows three different variations of the book (crediting the art to Pompey Fleet).

The Massachusetts Historical Society exhibits another image from the Fleet print shop probably carved by Peter Fleet. That woodcut originally headed a broadside titled “New England Bravery,” celebrating the conquest of Louisburg in 1745. Thirty-odd years later the (white) Fleet brothers used the same woodcut of a city on a broadside titled “Two Favorite Songs Made on the Evacuation of Boston.” Thus, generations of Bostonians saw the art of Peter Fleet.

TOMORROW: The (black) Fleet brothers go separate ways.

The Mysteries of Ezekiel Russell’s Wife

I’ve been writing about printer Ezekiel Russell’s wife, who, according to Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing, was a great help to him in his business. Indeed, as I quoted yesterday, the first edition of that book said she learned the printing business and wrote memorial verses for broadsides.

Since 2009 I’ve been calling that woman Penelope Russell because that’s what later printing historian Josiah Snow called her in 1847. But over the past few days I’ve realized that her name was Sarah Russell.

That’s clear from a series of documents:

• The record of the marriage of Ezekiel Russell and Sarah Hood in Hampton, New Hampshire, on 7 Oct 1773.
  
• Biographies of their oldest (surviving) child, Nathaniel Pope Russell, born in Danvers in 1779.
• The births of two younger children in Boston in 1785 and 1787.
  
• The baptisms of four younger children at Ezekiel Russell’s house by the minister of the Hollis Street Meetinghouse, all on one day in May 1787.
  
• Real estate records from Boston in the 1780s and 1790s.
  
• Ezekiel’s death notice in the 12 Sept 1796 Federal Orrery, and Sarah’s notice for administering his estate in the 7 Oct 1796 Massachusetts Mercury.
  
• Sarah’s unusual listing as a printer in the 1798 Directory of Boston.
  
• Sarah’s death notices in the 16 Oct 1806 Boston Gazette and 24 Oct 1806 Farmer’s Museum.
  

And then there’s this letter that a descendant has shared online, sent by Sarah’s mother from besieged Boston in January 1776 when the Russells were living in Salem.

So where did the name Penelope Russell come from? Was she just an error by Snow, repeated by later authors through to me? Or, since Waters linked her to the Censor, published in 1771-72, perhaps she was Russell’s first wife (though I haven’t found any other trace of her). If the latter, that could mean both of Russell’s wives were active in the printing house.

Another question: Bostonians didn’t go up to Hampton, New Hampshire, to be married by a Presbyterian minister unless they were eloping. What was the story behind the Russells’ marriage in 1773? Did they have any children in the mid-1770s? Why did they have four children baptized by a Congregationalist minister at their home in 1787, but not the oldest, Nathaniel Pope Russell? (If there was illness in the family, the baby survived, but I don’t know about the middle children.)

What Isaiah Thomas Wrote about Ezekiel Russell’s Wife

Back in 2009, I quoted the passsage above from Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in America (1874 edition) about Ezekiel Russell and his wife. I then added:

Josiah Snow’s [1847] account (quoted yesterday) credited those ballads to Penelope Russell herself, even saying she could compose them while she set the type. Perhaps Thomas’s phrase “A young woman who lived in Russell’s family” was a coy way of alluding to Penelope without pointing the finger directly. Or perhaps Ezekiel Russell’s struggling shop was kept afloat by the work of two young women instead of just one.

After I mentioned the Russells in my lecture on Friday, I checked out Thomas’s history again—but this time the original, 1810 edition. And here’s what Thomas first published.

So no wonder Josiah Snow thought Ezekiel Russell’s wife wrote those ballads—that’s exactly what Thomas’s book said. The “young woman” didn’t appear in print until decades later.

Thomas left a copy of his book with handwritten corrections at his American Antiquarian Society, which undertook to update and republish it. If that copy still exists, it could confirm if Thomas himself entered the revised information about the Russell printing house.

Given that Thomas and the Russells were both printing in Boston in the early 1770s, and that Thomas kept track of Ezekiel Russell in his movements to Salem, Danvers, and back to Boston, it seems odd for him not to know who wrote those tragical ballads. The passages also shift away from saying that Russell’s wife “made herself acquainted with the printing business,” leaving her just assisting.

That again raises the possibility that the mention of a “young woman” was a ruse designed to fit Mrs. Russell into a more traditional “help meet” model rather than a business partner writing for publication. The couple’s son, Nathaniel Pope Russell (1779-1848), became an important insurance broker in ante-bellum Boston. (In fact, his business records are at the American Antiquarian Society.) So the family may have wished for a more genteel portrait of their ancestress.

TOMORROW: More revisions about Ezekiel Russell’s wife.

“A sad tale to relate”

Yesterday I noted a mistake I made in Reporting the Revolutionary War, saying that John Derby took the 28 Apr 1775 issue of the Salem Gazette to London to convince folks there that a war had broken out in New England.

Derby left Salem on 28 April, so he could have carried a copy of that day’s Salem Gazette—if there were one. But no copy of that issue exists.

It looks like printer Ezekiel Russell closed his newspaper only one issue into the war. He might have worried about economic disruptions and lack of supplies. He might have lost patronage; in Boston, friends of the royal government had paid him to put out the Censor, so folks in Salem could have seen him as a “Tory.”

But Russell was really an opportunist. He reissued his report on the first day of fighting as a broadside titled “A Bloody Butchery by the British Troops.” At the bottom was “A Funeral Elegy to the Imortal Memory” of the fallen militiamen, beginning:

Aid me ye nine! my muse assist,
A sad tale to relate,
When such a number of brave men
Met their unhappy fate.
At Lexington they met their foe
Completely all equip’d,
Their guns and swords made glit’ring show,
But their base scheme was nipp’d.

(Complete transcription of a later, inexact reprint here.)

TOMORROW: Who wrote that elegy?

“Boston’s Newspaper Wars” at the B.P.L., 6 Nov.

Next week on Wednesday, 6 November, I’ll speak in the Boston Public Library’s Local and Family History Series on “Boston’s Pre-Revolutionary Newspaper Wars.”

During that period, Bostonians had several newspapers to choose from: the Boston Gazette and eventually Massachusetts Spy on the left, the Boston News-Letter, Boston Post-Boy, and for a while Boston Chronicle on the right, and the Boston Evening-Post in between. (Those are the short, consistent versions of their names.) Some printers tried to publish more than once a week, but that schedule was tough to sustain, so most appeared on either Monday or Thursday.

The printers were the conduits of political arguments and sometimes found themselves in the middle of political violence. Benjamin Edes was one of the Loyall Nine businessmen who organized the anti-Stamp protests of 1765. But his partner, John Gill, had the misfortune of being in the office when rival printer John Mein, of the Chronicle, came by demanding to know who had written a particular pseudonymous article. That conversation didn’t go well, and Gill ended up suing Mein for assault. A few months later, a covey of merchants threatened Mein on the street. He pulled a pistol and went into hiding. That’s what I mean by “newspaper wars.”

This talk will begin at 6:00, and is free and open to the public.

(The image above shows one of the woodcuts from the masthead of the Boston Post-Boy, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

“We can be good here as well as any where”

Newspapers weren’t the only forum for New Englanders to discuss the custom of bundling in the 1790s. Another popular print form, the almanac, also printed items on the topic.

Printer Ezekiel Russell, formerly of Boston, extracted the passage on bundling from the Rev. Samuel Peters’s history of Connecticut in Russell’s Newhampshire & Vermont almanack, for the year of creation, according to Mosaic history, 5756; and of the Christian aera, 1794, published at Concord, New Hampshire.

And the back of the Vermont Almanac and Register for 1799 offered this “ANECDOTE”:

While the American troops were at Cambridge, 1775, an Indian chief from one of the western tribes, was on his way to visit them. It happened that he was detained a number of days at a gentleman’s house in ——.

While he was there the gentleman’s daughter received a visit from her suitor. One evening the honest native, thinking to divert himself a little in their company, went up stairs: But when he entered their chamber, he stood in amaze, crying out, “Ho! bed—No do fo me Indians!”

[“]Why (says the spark [i.e., the young man],) we can be good here as well as any where.”

“Yes! yes! but you can be wicked more better!”

It’s interesting that the voice of caution and polite behavior in this joke was the “Indian chief,” not the “gentleman” or his family. Even more telling is that the story was set nearly a quarter of a century before it saw print, either because it had circulated orally since the start of the Revolutionary War or because the storyteller decided to set it back there.

Either way, this publication suggests that New Englanders were no longer viewing bundling as a common practice, embarrassment, or source of controversy. Instead, it was now a quaint custom of past generations that folks could share a laugh about.

Was Three Shillings Too Much to Ask?

As I’ve discussed in recent postings, Bostonians of the early 1770s appear to have accepted that Phillis Wheatley wrote the poems ascribed to her; the people who voiced skepticism in surviving sources lived elsewhere. Her neighbors might still have refused to buy her first proposed book because of racism, of course. But I suspect there was another factor at work: cost.

In his early 1772 advertisements for the collection, printer Ezekiel Russell announced:

The Price to Subscribers, handsomely bound and lettered, will be Four Shillings.——Stitched in blue [i.e., paperback], Three Shillings.

Those prices were much higher than Russell’s usual offerings. My unsystematic sampling of his advertisements in the early 1770s found these titles and prices:

• James Allen, The Poem Which the Committee of the Town of Boston Had Voted Unanimously to Be with the Late Oration (1772): 30 pages, “one Pistareen,” or about 1s.3d.
• Death Realized; Or, Mr. Allen’s Dying Soliloquy (1773): 6d.
• Isaac Skillman?, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty (1773): 80 pages, 9d. at first, raised to 1s. ten days later.
• Francis Hargraves, An Argument in the case of James Sommersett (1774): 56 pages, 1s.

[I can always use this reminder: “12d.” = 12 pence = 1 shilling = “1s.”]

Russell’s catalogue seems typical of Boston printers. In 1773, Isaiah Thomas printed A New Book of Poems for the Rev. Elhanan Winchester, Jr.; it filled 72 pages, and was priced at 1s.4d. I haven’t found the price for Jane Dunlap’s poems about the Rev. George Whitefield, but they ran to 20 pages.

In sum, Russell’s proposed price for Wheatley’s volume was two to three times as expensive as similar material he was offering. To be sure, her book was also supposed to be much larger than the other titles: “about 200 Pages.” So on a per-page basis, it might have offered more value. (Then again, Russell’s length estimate was way off. The London edition of Wheatley’s work, containing considerably more poems, came to only 128 pages.)

Three or four shillings for a book of poetry looks like an unusually hefty investment for Bostonians in 1772. Secular books were already a luxury item; Gloria T. Main’s study of New England probate inventories found that they were concentrated in the top fifth of estates.

In those years I found only one American poetry collection advertised in New England newspapers for a price higher than Wheatley’s. In September 1771, three Boston papers ran ads from Philadelphia printer John Dunlap seeking subscriptions for a collection of poems and other writing by the late Rev. Nathaniel Evans of New Jersey. The announced price for that book was five shillings bound.

Evans’s book had been a tough sell. His former teacher William Smith first proposed it in Philadelphia in January 1770, with a long extract in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. In March 1771, a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette said the book was “ready to be committed to the Press.” Yet that fall printer John Dunlap was still soliciting orders in New York and Boston. He also printed special handbills.

Evans’s Poems on Several Occasions with Some Other Compositions was finally published in 1772, filling 188 pages. I don’t know how many Bostonians bought copies, if any. (Evans was an Anglican minister.)

It thus took more than two years and advertising in three American cities to collect the subscribers for Evans’s five-shilling collection. Phillis Wheatley and her supporters didn’t wait that long for three hundred orders. Less than a year after Russell started advertising her collection in the soon-to-fold Boston Censor, the Wheatleys had sent her manuscript to London.

A more thorough survey of sources about publishing in Boston in the early 1770s might produce more data and a better picture of how Wheatley’s proposal fit into that economy. But I don’t think we can overlook price as a factor in what her fan John Andrews called “the want of spirit to carry on any thing of the kind here.” And we should also credit Wheatley with as much desire as any other author to seek the best publishing opportunity.

TOMORROW: Phillis Wheatley’s book takes shape in England.

(Photograph of a hand-operated printing press above courtesy of the Printing Office of Edes & Gill, open to visitors in Boston’s North End.)

John Andrews: “In regard to Phillis’s poems”

On 24 Feb 1773, the Boston merchant John Andrews, who had signed up for a book of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry months before, relayed news of the project to his brother-in-law in Philadelphia. That letter came back to the Massachusetts Historical Society, and today it’s available for online viewing.

In 1977, William H. Robinson published what I think was the first transcription of the relevant passage in his book Black New England Letters:

In regard to Phillis’ poems, they will originate from a London press, as she was [illegible, blam’d?] by her friends for printing them here & made to expect a large emolument if she sent the copy home [sic, i.e., England], which induc’d her to remand it of the printers & also of Capt Calef who could not sell it by the reason of their not crediting the performances to be by a Negro, since which she has had had [sic] papers drawn up & sign’d by the Gov. Council, Ministers & most of the people of note in this place, certifying the authenticity of it; which Capt Calef carried last fall…

The transcription on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s webpage for this document is similar.

However, in 1989 Julian D. Mason published an edition of The Poems of Phillis Wheatley which transcribed the same letter in a different way:

In regard to Phillis’s poems they will originate from a London press, as she was blamd by her friends for printg them here & made to exp a large emolument if she sent ye copy home, which inducd her to remand it of ye printer & dld it Capt Calef, who could not sell it by reason of their not crediting ye performance to be by a Negro, since which she has had a paper drawn up & signed by the Gov. Council, Ministers & most of ye people of note in this place, certifying the authenticity of it, which paper Capt. Calef carried last fall…

I shared my own interpretation of the letter back here. You can also download a big image of Andrews’s page for yourself.

One crucial difference is the phrase before “Capt Calef.” Did Wheatley take her manuscript back from printer Ezekiel Russell “& also of” Calef? Or did she take it back from Russell “& dld [i.e., delivered] it” to Calef? Andrews used the “dld” abbreviation in other letters; for example, on 28 Jan 1774 he finally wrote: “After so long a time, have at last got Phillis’s poems in print, which will be dld you by Capt Dunn.”

We know that Robert Calef made regular runs between Boston and London for the Wheatley family firm. That suggests he wouldn’t have been in Boston long enough to help sell the manuscript in there. But he would have been (indeed, we know he later was) the family’s agent promoting the project in London.

Then we have to interpret what pronouns mean. Does the “who” in “who could not sell it” refer to the Boston printer(s) and Calef together, or Calef alone? Does the “their” in “their not crediting ye performance” refer to book-buyers in Boston or publishers in London?

TOMORROW: My perspective.

Phillis Wheatley’s Early Published Work

When Ezekiel Russell invited readers of the Boston Censor to order a collection of poems by Phillis Wheatley in early 1772, she was already known in town as a poet.

Wheatley’s verses circulated in manuscript, and some had been printed. Her first published work was a 1766 poem on two sailors who had nearly been lost at sea, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin”; it appeared in the Newport Mercury on 21 Dec 1767. A note in that Rhode Island newspaper described her as “a Negro Girl (belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston).” When Hussey and Coffin dined at John Wheatley’s house and “told of their narrow Escape, this Negro Girl at the same Time ’tending Table, heard the Relation, from which she composed the following Verses.”

In 1770, Wheatley wrote her poem on the death of the immensely popular Rev. George Whitefield. Russell and John Boyle published that on 11 October in two different forms in Boston—broadside and pamphlet. Those editions stated that the author was “PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, belonging to Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of Boston.—And has been but 9 Years in this Country from Africa.” The printers went to the expense of advertising one form (which cost “7 Coppers”) in the Boston News-Letter.

Boosted by Whitefield’s popularity, that poem was reissued by other Boston printers, and by printers in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and London. It was appended to the back of the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton’s sermon on Whitefield’s death, published in both Boston and London, with the name of “PHIILIS, a Negro Girl, of Seventeen Years of Age,” on the title page (as shown above).

The following year, a Boston woman named Jane Dunlap published a pamphlet titled Poems Upon Several Sermons Preached by the Rev’d and Renowned George Whitefield While in Boston, She alluded to Wheatley’s reputation with these lines:

Shall his due praises be so loudly sung
By a young Afric damsels virgin tongue?
And I be silent!

In 1771, a broadside titled “To Mrs. Leonard, on the Death of her HUSBAND” was published with the credit “Phillis Wheatley” at the bottom. (This is a rare example of her being identified with a surname before she became free.) Her “On the Death of Doctor Samuel Marshall” appeared anonymously in the Boston Evening-Post on 7 October. Some scholars suggests other poems in Boston newspapers, including one on the Boston Massacre, were also Phillis Wheatley’s work.

Obviously, all those printers accepted that those poems were worthy of publication. Almost all gave Wheatley credit for them, highlighting rather than hiding her status as a young slave from Africa. Jane Dunlap acknowledged her as a poetic forerunner.

Furthermore, in nearly two centuries of research about Wheatley, no one has yet found any Bostonian expressing doubt that she composed her own verses. No one wrote to those newspapers pooh-poohing their credits—and Bostonians weren’t shy about arguing in the newspapers. No letters survive voicing skepticism about the Wheatley family’s outlandish claims about their slave girl.

I’m sure that some Bostonians were surprised at the notion of an enslaved teenager who had arrived in America only in 1761 being able to write poetry in the high style. It was a remarkable achievement. But the only person we know put that surprise into writing was Thomas Wooldridge, visiting from New York, and he was quickly convinced.

So where’s the evidence that Bostonians were “piqued” about Phillis Wheatley’s poetry?

TOMORROW: Two readings of one letter.

“As soon as three Hundred Copies are subscribed for”

On 29 Feb 1772, this announcement appeared in the Boston Censor magazine:

PROPOSALS
For Printing by Subscription,
A Collection of POEMS, wrote at several times, and upon various occasions, by PHILLIS, a Negro Girl, from the Strength of her own Genius, it being but a few Years since she came to this Town an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa. The Poems having been seen and read by the best Judges, who think them well worthy of this Publick View, and upon critical examination, they find that the declared Author was capable of writing them.

There followed a long list of poem titles, many including the names of prominent New Englanders: the Rev. Dr. Samuel Sewall, Christopher Seider, Samuel Quincy, James Sullivan, and so on. Of course the list included Phillis Wheatley’s most famous poem at the time, “On the Death of the Rev. George Whitefield.”

The notice concluded:

It is supposed they will make one small Octavo Volume, and will contain about 200 Pages.

They will be printed on Demy Paper, and beautiful Types.

The Price to Subscribers, handsomely bound and lettered, will be Four Shillings.——Stitched in blue [i.e., paperback], Three Shillings.

It is hoped to Encouragement will be given to this Publication, as a reward to a very uncommon Genius, at present a Slave.

The Work will be put to the Press as soon as three Hundred Copies are subscribed for, and and [sic] shall be published with all Speed.

Subscriptions are taken in by E. RUSSELL, in Marlborough Street.

Ezekiel Russell was also the printer of the Censor. He had co-published Wheatley’s poem on the death of Whitefield, adorned with the woodcut of the minister’s body shown above. In fact, according to Isaiah Thomas, the Russell shop was known for printing “ballads on recent tragical events,…immediately printed, and set off with wooden cuts of coffins, etc.”

“Printing by Subscription” meant that Russell was ready for advance orders. Only after three hundred people had signed up for copies of the book would he invest the work and materials necessary to produce it—rather like Kickstarter.

The Censor repeated that ad in its issues of 14 March and 18 April, so Russell was still waiting for three hundred orders. And the magazine folded after its 2 May issue, having lasted less than six months. That couldn’t have made Russell more eager for a speculative project.

We know that the merchant John Andrews subscribed for a copy of Wheatley’s book because on 29 May he told a relative:

Its above two months since I subscribed for Phillis’s poems, which I expected to have sent you long ago, but the want of spirit to carry on any thing of the kind here has prevented it, as they are not yet publish’d.

In a chapter of his Black New England Letters, published by the Boston Public Library in 1977, William H. Robinson interpreted that “want of spirit” to mean “racist indifference from piqued Boston whites” who didn’t believe Wheatley actually wrote those poems.

TOMORROW: Testing that hypothesis.

“A happy Year may all enjoy”

As in previous New Year’s seasons, Boston 1775 offers a “carriers’ verse,” one of the poems or lyrics that newspaper delivery boys printed at the end of the year as part of their request for tips from customers.

This one with best wishes for 1772 is unique in that it comes from the boys of the Censor. Friends of the royal government paid Ezekiel Russell to launch that magazine in November 1771 as a home for their arguments. This carriers’ verse was thus directed to readers on that side of the political debate, and reflected their views of who was responsible for the turmoil and what was at stake.

The Carrier of the
CENSOR,
Wishes all Happiness to his generous
Customers.

What means this Clamour? why this strife?
To poison all the Joys of Life;
Ah why will Friend ’gainst Friend engage?
And brethren meet with hostile rage?

Say Candidus, rude Mucious say,
“It is such Slavery to obey?”
“Are Rulers Tyrants?—to be free,
“Must we destroy Society?”

Ye Friends to order! ’tis my pride,
To combat on the honest side:
Let Faction rave, or Villains brawle,
The CENSOR nobly scorns them all

May Government her Laws defend,
And foul Misrule to Hell descend;
A happy Year may all enjoy,
And may your FAVOURS bless your Boy.

“Candidus” was one of Samuel Adams’s pseudonyms for newspaper essays. “Mucius Scaevola” was the pen name Joseph Greenleaf had used for his attack on Gov. Thomas Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Spy a few months before; the Censor’s first issue responded to that essay.

Because the Censor stopped publishing a few months into 1772, this is the only New Year’s verse its carriers ever got to distribute. Fellow printers recalled that a woman in Russell’s print shop—possibly his future wife Sarah—composed occasional verses for his newspapers, so this might be one of her compositions.

The Censor’s Recipe for a Patriot

As I’ve recounted, friends of the royal government paid Ezekiel Russell to publish The Censor as a forum for responses to the Whig essays published in the Boston Gazette and Massachusetts Spy. The fact that the magazine lasted less than six months shows how few friends the royal government had.

According to James Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts, a highly sympathetic chronicle, “In succeeding numbers the controversy was prolonged with increasing bitterness, and at last became intensely personal.” How bitter? How intensely personal? Here’s a passage from the 8 Feb 1772 issue:

Take of impudence, virulence and groundless abuse quantum sufficit,

atheism, deism and libitinism ad libitum;

false reports, well adapted and plausable lies, with groundless alarms, one hundred wt. avoirdupois;

a malignant abuse of magistracy, a pusilanimous and diabolical contempt of divine revelation and all its abbettors, an equal quantity;

honor and integrity not quite an atom;

fraud, imposition, and hypocrisy, any proportion that may seem expedient;

Infuse therein the credulity of the people one thousand gallons,

as a menstrum stir in the phrenzy of the times,

and at the end of a year or two this judicious composition will probably bring forth a A*** and Y*** an O*** and a M*****.

That would be, a everyone in Boston could recognize, a Samuel Adams, a Dr. Thomas Young, a James Otis, and a William Molineux.

It’s never wise to talk about “the credulity of the people” if you’re trying to win them over. But by this time The Censor’s contributors were just complaining among themselves.

The Censor’s Search for a Motto

The first issues of The Censor, the political magazine printed by Ezekiel Russell of Boston in late 1771, carried the motto “Vexat censura columbas.” That’s the last part of a line from the Roman satirist Juvenal, which literally means, “The censor forgives the crows and harasses the doves.” So The Censor was telling readers, “The censor harasses the nice birds,” which hardly puts The Censor in a good light.

I suspect that the gentlemen behind the magazine meant that motto as a dig at their political opponents, implying that the Boston Whigs’ sanctimonious activism was misdirected at the best of public servants. But as a political slogan it had two big problems:

• Its sarcastic meaning was too smart for the room.
• It was in Latin, so most people in Boston couldn’t understand it, anyway.

With the 21 March 1772 issue, The Censor’s epigraph shifted to a couplet from Alexander Pope (shown above):

Know while I live, no rich or noble Knave,
Shall walk the World in credit to his Grave.

That had the chance of communicating to all the readers in Boston since it was in English. And it promised to speak truth to power. But it was an odd choice for a magazine funded by the upper-class elite with a message that it was best to defer to royal authority.

Finally, for what turned out to be its last issues, The Censor landed on a motto from Cicero:

Ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veil non audeat.

“Let him not presume to utter any falsehood, but be bold in promulgating every truth.” Finally the magazine led with a straightforward statement of its principles. Once again in Latin.

As I described yesterday, The Censor wasn’t cut out to appeal to the common people.

TOMORROW: The Censor goes on the attack.

What the Censor Did Wrong from the Start

In the first issue of The Censor, dated 23 Nov 1771, printer Ezekiel Russell announced that it would be a weekly publication “if suitable Encouragement is offered,” and that the price was “Two Pence per Number to Subscribers, and Four Pence single.” The masthead stopped mentioning the single-issue price after that. But even the subscription rate would have come to eight shillings, eight pence for an entire year.

Around the same time, Isaiah Thomas announced in his almanac for 1772 that the price for a year of his weekly Massachusetts Spy was six shillings, eight pence. So The Censor was over 20% more expensive than the publication it was created to counteract.

Furthermore, the Spy was a newspaper, with news reports from other cities, public notices, business advertisements, and other practical information. You got a lot for your money. The Censor was completely devoted to local political arguments, starting with a refutation of an attack on Gov. Thomas Hutchinson that had appeared in the Spy.

The Censor was easier on the eyes, to be sure. It was in magazine format, with white space between paragraphs instead of crowded columns. But again, that meant readers got less material for their eight shillings.

Russell apparently tried to broaden the publication’s appeal and/or revenue on 29 Feb 1772 by adding a two-page “postscript” which looked very much like a newspaper. It had two columns of closely spaced news from London and from other newspapers with advertisements at the back, including the first solicitation for a book of poems by Phillis Wheatley (eventually published in Britain).

The number of advertisements grew in the following issues. Almost all from merchants who would be Loyalists. For example, William Jackson offered tea for sale, defying the Whig boycott (which had become weak and tepid anyway). The 11 April “postscript” was four pages, almost half advertising, and two weeks later the two extra pages were more than half covered with ads.

But the “postscripts” didn’t change the fact that The Censor was a luxury product, aimed at gentlemen rather than busy shopkeepers or workers, even those interested in politics. The magazine was designed to be a forum for pro-Crown views, but it wasn’t designed well to change people’s minds.

I see The Censor reflecting how Massachusetts’s royalist elite viewed politics—those gentlemen never understood the resistance to Parliament’s new taxes and other laws as a popular movement. They saw crowds as being manipulated by shameless or devious gentlemen, rather than as lots of people acting from their own grievances or principles. Most of the court party felt that if they won over enough other members of the elite, the people would follow. And so they kept being surprised by how persistent and strong the opposition was.

Meanwhile, Thomas was aiming his Massachusetts Spy newspaper at the working class, in price and in content. Guess which publication had more readers. Guess which one went out of business after less than six months.

TOMORROW: The Censor’s changing motto.

What Kind of Name for a Magazine was The Censor?

A while back I discussed whether Penelope Russell took over The Censor from her husband Ezekiel, or was simply his indispensable partner in the business. But I didn’t address the obvious question: What kind of name for a magazine was The Censor?

We associate the word “censor” with not allowing stuff to be published. So issuing a magazine with that name looks like calling a street “Roadblock Road,” or an airline “Grounded Air.”

But in the eighteenth century the word “censor” still had a more general meaning of an official in charge of upholding public morals. The Roman republic had censors, and if it was good enough for the Roman republic, then it was good enough for eighteenth-century British gentlemen.

When supporters of the royal government in Massachusetts sponsored The Censor, they chose the name because they saw themselves as responding to public immorality: riots, intimidation, law-breaking, and lack of respect for royal officials. Since many of the men funding and writing for the magazine were royal officials, they felt this keenly. Among the contributors were Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver (shown here, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery), his brother Judge Peter Oliver, and (anonymously, at least according to later rumors) Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr.

The magazine’s first issue was devoted to answering an attack on Gov. Thomas Hutchinson written by Joseph Greenleaf and printed in the Massachusetts Spy. Eventually the royal party chose a different strategy and tried to have Greenleaf, Spy printer Isaiah Thomas, and others indicted for libel, but the local grand jury refused to return an indictment against any of those Whigs.

One big challenge for the men writing The Censor was that the Whigs also presented themselves as fighting public immorality. They spoke of “liberty,” but they didn’t condone any excesses of personal liberty of the sort that censors guarded against. Samuel Adams was the last of the New England Puritans, and no one could outflank him in scolding the world about public immorality. The Whigs meant political and economic liberty. Their newspaper essays assured the people of Massachusetts that they already had fine morals, but had to guard their way of life from corrupt officials enforcing unconstitutional laws.

TOMORROW: Why The Censor was doomed from the start.

Sarah Russell: “a very industrious, active woman”

[This posting has been updated to reflect newer research on Ezekiel Russell’s wife.]

Yesterday I discussed how, contrary to later reports, Penelope Russell didn’t succeed her husband Ezekiel as publisher of The Censor since he outlived that magazine by almost a quarter-century. But Ezekiel’s wife, who was really named Sarah, definitely helped him to print that magazine, as recalled by a fellow Boston printer, Isaiah Thomas.

In his History of Printing in America, Thomas wrote:

Ezekiel Russell was born in Boston, and served an apprenticeship with his brother, Joseph Russell, the partner of John Green [in printing the Boston Post-Boy]. In 1765, he began printing with Thomas Furber, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the firm of Furber & Russell. Not succeeding in business, they dissolved their partnership, and Russell returned to Boston.

He worked with various printers until 1769, when he procured a press and a few types. With these he printed on his own account, in a house near Concert Hall. He afterward removed to Union street, where to the business of printing he added that of an auctioneer, which he soon quitted, and adhered to printing. Excepting an edition of Watts’s Psalms, he published nothing of more consequence than pamphlets, most of which were small.

In November, 1771, he began a political publication entitled The Censor. This paper was supported, during the short period of its existence, by those who were in the interest of the British government.

Friends of the royal government sponsored the Censor in an attempt to counteract all the Whig essays appearing in Boston’s biggest newspapers. In other words, it was the voice of Loyalism. This fact never seems to arise in items describing Sarah Russell as an early American female printer.

That said, the Russells don’t seem to have been committed Loyalists. They apparently took the Censor job because they needed the money. Ezekiel’s brother Joseph went to Canada with the British military in 1776, but Ezekiel and Sarah stayed in Massachusetts. Thomas tried to trace all the places that the Russells set up shop, but I’m not sure he timed their moves exactly:

Russell afterward removed to Salem, and attempted the publication of a newspaper, but did not succeed. He again removed, and went to Danvers, and printed in a house known by the name of the Bell tavern. In a few years he returned once more to Boston; and, finally, took his stand in Essex street, near the spot on which grew the great elms, one of which was then standing, and was called Liberty tree. Here he printed and sold ballads, and published whole and half sheet pamphlets for peddlers. In these small articles his trade principally consisted, and afforded him a very decent support.

Among the items Russell issued was Phillis Wheatley’s elegy on the Rev. George Whitefield. In 1773 he printed four enslaved men’s petition for an end to slavery, again probably for the money rather than a sign of his political commitment. Late that year he printed a pamphlet against the tea protests, which was condemned by a Boston town meeting and may well have led to his decision to relocate to Salem in early 1774. In the summer of 1776 Russell was still in Salem, and got the contract to print copies of the Declaration of Independence for every town in the new state.

Russell probably moved back to Boston and settled on Essex Street only after Liberty Tree was cut down. He didn’t advertise or label any publications as being printed near the tree when it was famous, but in the 1790s used such identifications as “Printed by E. Russell, next Liberty-Stump.”

And as for Sarah, here’s what Isaiah Thomas wrote in 1810:

The wife of Russell was indeed an “help meet for him.” She was a very industrious, active woman; she made herself acquainted with the printing business; and, not only assisted her husband in the printing house, but she sometimes invoked her muse, and wrote ballads on recent tragical events, which being immediately printed, and set off with wooden cuts of coffins, &c., had frequently “a considerable run.”

The 1874 edition of Thomas’s book is different. That edition credited the ballads to “A young woman who lived in Russell’s family.”

The broadside I discussed back here and show above was one of that shop’s coffin-decorated poetic creations. It was “Printed and Sold next to the Writing-School, on Queen Street,” the same address Russell used in newspaper ads in late 1769 and 1770.

Ezekiel Russell died in September 1796 “after a lingering illness” at the age of fifty-three. Thomas reported that Penelope Russell “continued the business.” But he didn’t give her a separate biographical entry in his book, and he didn’t record when she died.

ADDENDUM: New documentation on Penelope Russell’s business transactions.

Penelope Russell and The Censor

Penelope Russell of Boston is listed in many books and websites as one of the first female printers in the U.S. of A. All these citations seem to funnel back to the first volume of The History of Woman Suffrage (1881), which included this statement:

Penelope Russell printed The Censor in Boston, Mass., in 1771. She set her own type, and was such a ready compositor as to set up her editorials without written copy, while working at her case. The most tragical and interesting events were thus recorded by her.

Matilda Joslyn Gage (shown here, courtesy of the National Park Service) wrote that volume’s chapter on female printers, though she later complained that her coauthors, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, rewrote all her material and pushed her out of the creation of the following volumes.

Gage went on to publish her more radical feminist ideas in Woman, Church, and State (1893), but her biggest contribution to American letters was encouraging her son-in-law L. Frank Baum to write down those fairy stories he was telling the children.

Gage’s remark about Penelope Russell has no citation, but with Google’s help I traced it back through early feminist pamphlets and general-interest magazines to what may be the ur-source: an article by Josiah Snow of Rochester titled “Early Printers, Male and Female”, dated 11 Jan 1847 and published in a History of the Press of Western New-York:

Penelope Russell succeeded her husband in printing the “Censor,” at Boston, in 1771. She was a very industrious and active woman. She not only set type, but while at her case, invoked her muse and put up type on tragical events, in an interesting manner, without any written copy.

Obviously Snow was passing on professional lore; he wouldn’t have seen Russell at work seventy-five years earlier. And some details got mangled along the way.

[ADDENDUM: Perhaps the most important detail is that the wife of Ezekiel Russell, who helped him in his print shop and kept it running after his death, was actually named Sarah Russell.]

The Censor was indeed printed in Boston from 23 Nov 1771 to 2 May 1772. However, at the time Penelope Sarah Russell’s husband Ezekiel was very much alive, and listed on the magazine’s masthead as its publisher. He was, indeed, still in his late twenties. Only after Ezekiel died in September 1796 did Penelope Sarah Russell succeed him as head of the print shop.

TOMORROW: Isaiah Thomas on Ezekiel and Sarah Russell—and he actually knew them.

This Declaration of Independence Not a Public Record

An anonymous Boston 1775 reader alerted me to this A.P. dispatch describing how a Virginia court just ruled on the ownership of a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

In the summer of 1776 the newly independent state of Massachusetts had this copy of the Declaration printed by Ezekiel Russell, then working in Salem, and sent it up to the town of Wiscasset, Maine. In November the town clerk copied the Continental Congress’s words into Wicasset’s official records.

The printed document was later found in the attic of Solomon Holbrook, Wiscasset’s town clerk from 1885 to 1929. His family put it on the market, and after passing through different hands it ended up with a Virginia collector a few years ago. Officials in Maine heard about the sale and sued to get the paper back, on the grounds that it remained an official public record.

The Virginia Supreme Court’s decision (here’s the P.D.F. download) holds that the official Wiscassit record of the Declaration is the version that the clerk copied in 1776—or at least that Maine couldn’t prove the printed document was still a government document.

If the printed Declaration had descended in the family of the 1776 town clerk, then I think it would be easy to accept that the town stopped treating it as government property once that clerk had used the text. But the fact that the paper was in Holbrook’s possession implies that it came to him in his role as clerk, and should have gone on to the next clerk. Holbrook died in office, so he wasn’t involved in that transfer of authority and papers. I suspect the Maine Supreme Court might have decided this case another way.

This story highlights how much public officials’ private and public papers were mixed together until the last century. Indeed, the question of whether U.S. Presidents owned their own presidential papers wasn’t settled until the nation had to preserve its historic record from tampering by Richard M. Nixon.

Back in the eighteenth century, many office-holders worked out of their homes. Very few towns had municipal buildings where officials could store papers. Even in Boston, which had Faneuil Hall, the Committee of Correspondence documents stayed with Samuel Adams’s personal papers, and are all now at the New York Public Library. Gen. Thomas Gage’s letters and files as royal governor of Massachusetts went home to England with him, and his descendants eventually sold those papers to the Clements Library in Ann Arbor.