“Packed up his presses and types”

Back in 2011, I quoted Isaiah Thomas’s own account from October 1775 of how he’d slipped his printing press out of Boston just a couple of days before the outbreak of war.

For his 1810 History of Printing in America, Thomas wrote a bare-bones version of this event. The 1874 reissue of that book included a descendant’s longer telling, drawn mostly from family lore but also citing that 1775 letter.

According to this account, early in 1775 Timothy Bigelow invited Thomas to start a Whig newspaper in Worcester. That would have been an addition to the Massachusetts Spy in Boston.

It’s not clear whether that venture had gotten anywhere beyond the talking stage, but it meant that Thomas had already thought about moving a press and type to Worcester.

Actions in Boston sped up that process. A mysterious note and a parade by the 47th Regiment threatened the town’s radical printers. Rumors went around that the government in London had told Gov. Thomas Gage to start arresting people. (It had, but the ministers wanted him to start with politicians, not printers.)

According to the 1874 account, Thomas ”sent his family to Watertown to be safe from the perils to which he was daily exposed.” It doesn’t mention that at the time Thomas was breaking up with his wife Mary because she had had an affair with Benjamin Thompson.

The later version continued:

…his friends insisted upon his keeping himself secluded. He went to Concord to consult with Mr. [John] Hancock and other leading members of the Provincial Congress. He opened to them his situation, which indeed the Boston members well understood. Mr. Hancock and his other friends advised and urged him to remove from Boston immediately; in a few days, they said, it would be too late. They seemed to understand well what a few days would bring forth.

He came back to Boston, packed up his presses and types, and on the 16th of April, to use his own phrase, ”stole them out of town in the dead of night.” Thomas was aided in their removal by General [Joseph] Warren and Colonel Bigelow. They were carried across the ferry to Charlestown and thence put on their way to Worcester.

Two nights after, the royal troops were on their way to Lexington, and the next evening after, Boston was entirely shut up. Mr. Thomas did not go with his presses and types to Worcester. Having seen them on their way he returned to the city. The conversation at Concord, as well as his own observation, had satisfied him that important events were at hand.

Thomas was using his old master and partner Zechariah Fowle’s press, made in London in 1747. It remains today at the American Antiquarian Society, which recently celebrated the 250th anniversary of its flight from Boston.

TOMORROW: Important events.

The New Massachusetts Spy

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Massachusetts Spy had gone a full month without a new issue.

Zechariah Fowle and Isaiah Thomas had launched that newspaper in the summer of 1770 with ambitious goals. As described back here, it was smaller than the established Boston papers but promised to make up for that by appearing three times a week.

By October, Fowle had dropped out of the enterprise, and the Spy was appearing only twice a week. Thomas was still trying to appeal to more working-class readers than his competitors.

On 2 Feb 1771, Thomas published his last Saturday issue. And the last issue on any day for more than a month. He had already started to solicit subscriptions for a paper with a different design.

On 7 March, Thomas brought the Massachusetts Spy back, now as a weekly newspaper with four pages and four columns per page. In other words, printed in much the same format and at the same schedule as every other Boston newspaper.

The main distinction was that Thomas’s Spy came out on Thursdays, a day that Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter had had to itself for many years. The three other surviving newspapers, including Edes and Gill’s fervently Whig Boston Gazette, were published on Mondays.

Thomas later wrote about how the change in publication affected his business:

The majority of the customers for the former Spy preferred the way in which it had been published, and withdrew their subscriptions. On the appearance of this, the subscribers did not amount to two hundred; but after the first week they encreased daily, and in the course of two years the subscription list was larger than that of any other newspaper printed in Newengland.

I frankly don’t believe that last claim, but there’s no way to know for sure.

As for the newspaper’s editorial line, Thomas claimed political neutrality, printing the front page with the motto: “A Weekly, Political and Commercial PAPER; open to ALL Parties, but influenced by None.” He later wrote:

A number of gentlemen supplied this paper with political essays, which for the time were more particularly calculated for that class of citizens, who had composed the great majority of its readers. For a few weeks, some communications were furnished by those who were in favor of the royal prerogative, but they were exceeded by the writers on the other side; and the authors and subscribers, among the tories, denounced and quitted the Spy. The publisher then devoted it to the cause of his country, supported by the whigs, under whose banners he had enlisted.

In fact, Thomas’s own Whig leaning was in display from that first weekly issue. The first item was a column with thick black borders and a skull ornament mourning “Preston’s Massacre” one year before. With the second issue Thomas added a woodcut of “the goddess of Liberty sitting near a pedestal” to the left of the newspaper’s name. The Massachusetts Spy was another paper firmly behind the liberty party.

(One can buy a poster of the front page of the 7 Mar 1771 issue of the Massachusetts Spy here.)

“The First BIBLE ever printed in America”?

As I quoted yesterday, Isaiah Thomas grew up as an apprentice printer hearing stories about how his master, Zechariah Fowle, had helped to secretly print a New Testament in the late 1740s.

Thomas also heard about a complete Bible completed by another Boston printing partnership, also surreptitiously, by 1752.

However, it’s worth noting that in his History of Printing in America (1810), Thomas admitted about the New Testament publication, “I have heard that the fact has been disputed.” While he claimed John Hancock had owned a copy of the full Bible, he couldn’t point to any extant examples or describe how they might be recognized.

Indeed, in 1770 another Boston printer publicly denied the existence of any previous American-made Bible. The 3 Dec 1770 Boston Evening-Post included a large advertisement that began:

The First BIBLE ever printed in America.

PROPOSALS
For printing by Subscription, in a most beautiful and elegant Manner, in two large Volumes Folio.
The HOLY BIBLE,
Containing the OLD and NEW TESTAMENTS,
Or a FAMILY BIBLE,
With Annotations and Parallel Scriptures.
By the late Rev. SAMUEL CLARK, A.M.

The following paragraphs promised large and elegant type and paper manufactured in America—or “superfine Imperial Paper” for those few ready to pay double for extra quality. The book was to be delivered in seventy installments of five pages each, starting two weeks after three hundred people had subscribed.

The printer making this offer was John Fleeming, late of the Boston Chronicle, now working out of “his PRINTING OFFICE, in Newbury-street, nearly opposite the WHITE-HORSE Tavern, Boston.” He had married Alice Church in August and was probably looking for a way to support a family.

The annotator Samuel Clarke (1626-1701) had been a Nonconformist minister in Britain who first published his edition of the Bible in 1690. That book was reprinted in Glasgow in 1765, which is probably how Fleeming, a Scotsman, got the text. The Rev. George Whitefield praised Clarke’s work, and of course Americans widely admired Whitefield. Indeed, almost half of Fleeming’s advertisement was a quotation from Whitefield.

Within the next two months, the same ad appeared in many other New England newspapers and in New York. However, Fleeming must not have collected the subscriptions he hoped for. In modern terms, his Kickstarter campaign failed. That edition was never published.

In 1782 the Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken likewise announced that he would print the first English Bible in America. And he actually completed the job that September. The Continental Congress and George Washington both praised the enterprise. Many copies survive.

Obviously Fleeming and Aitken didn’t acknowledge the editions that Isaiah Thomas had heard about. Thomas would have said that was because the Kneeland and Green Bible, and the Rogers and Fowle New Testament that preceded it, had been disguised as London publications in order to get around a special grant to certain British printers.

In different writings Thomas specified that the Boston Bible appeared in 1749 and carried the imprint “London: Printed by Mark Baskett, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty”—but that man didn’t start publishing Bibles until the 1760s. Was this a mistake for Thomas Baskett, who did issue Bibles in the 1740s? Or is its main significance as evidence that Thomas hadn’t actually seen the Bible he believed did exist?

Many book collectors have searched for the fake Baskett Bible that was actually printed in Boston. Presumably this means finding a Bible with a London Baskett imprint but with typography that didn’t match copies known in Britain.

However, only one candidate for such a book has been found, surfacing in 1895, according to an article in the Boston Globe. Three decades later, Dr. Charles L. Nichols’s close examination showed that was actually a genuine Baskett Bible from 1763 that someone had altered by removing one volume’s title page and clumsily changing the date on the other to 1752. See his findings delivered to the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

Nonetheless, as Nichols stated in a follow-up paper for the American Antiquarian Society (P.D.F. download), he remained convinced that there was a Bible published surreptitiously in Boston, even if Thomas didn’t have all the details right.

Subsequent scholars, including Randolph C. Adams in The Colophon in 1935 and Harry Miller Lydenberg in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1954, were more skeptical. They concluded that Thomas’s report was simply wrong.

Perhaps the digitization of books will produce the anomalous copy of a Baskett Bible that collectors have sought. More likely, however, Zechariah Fowle just lied to little Isaiah about how he’d labored long and hard over a secret publication of the Bible.

London Imprints on Boston Bibles?

In 1756 the Boston Overseers of the Poor indentured Isaiah Thomas as an apprentice to the printer Zechariah Fowle (1724-1776). He was seven years old and didn’t yet know how to read.

Isaiah’s father had died, and his mother apparently felt she couldn’t support him by herself. The Overseers were used to finding masters for children in that situation.

As he grew up, Isaiah listened to stories from Fowle, from other printers, and from a former printer named Gamaliel Rogers (1685-1775) who ran a nearby bookshop. About Rogers he later wrote:

I went frequently to his shop, when a minor. He knew that I lived with a printer, and for this, or some other reason, was very kind to me; he gave me some books of his printing; and, what was of more value to me, good advice.

Isaiah developed less respect for Fowle, whom he came to see as lazy, not “enterprising” like some earlier printers. Thomas himself was quite enterprising—releasing himself early from his apprenticeship, cajoling his former master into co-publishing the Massachusetts Spy, and finally building a lucrative publishing network in the new republic.

Among the stories young Isaiah heard were tales of the surreptitious printing of a New Testament and of a Bible in Boston just a few years before he entered the profession. In his 1810 History of Printing in America, Thomas wrote:

[Samuel] Kneeland [1696-1769] and [Timothy] Green [1703-1763] printed, principally for Daniel Henchman [1689-1761, bookseller], an edition of the Bible in small 4to. This was the first Bible printed, in the English language, in America.

It was carried through the press as privately as possible, and had the London imprint of the copy from which it was reprinted, viz. “London: Printed by Mark Baskett, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” in order to prevent a prosecution from those, in England and Scotland, who published the Bible by a patent from the crown; or, Cum privilegio, as did the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

When I was an apprentice, I often heard those who had assisted at the case and press in printing this Bible, make mention of the fact. The late governor [John] Hancock was related to Henchman, and knew the particulars of the transaction. He possessed a copy of this impression.

As it has a London imprint, at this day it can be distinguished from an English edition, of the same date, only by those who are acquainted with the niceties of typography. This Bible issued from the press about the time that the partnership of Kneeland and Green expired [which was in 1752]. The edition was not large; I have been informed that it did not exceed seven or eight hundred copies.

Not long after the time that this impression of the Bible came from the press, an edition of the New Testament, in duodecimo, was printed by [Gamaliel] Rogers and [Daniel] Fowle [1715-1787], for those at whose expense it was issued. Both the Bible and the Testament were well executed. These were heavy undertakings for that day, but Henchman was a man of property; and, it is said, that several other principal booksellers, in Boston, were concerned with him in this business.

The credit of this edition of the Testament was, for the reason I have mentioned, transferred to the king’s printer, in London, by the insertion of his imprint. . . .

Zechariah Fowle [brother of Daniel], with whom I served my apprenticeship, as well as several others, repeatedly mentioned to me this edition of the Testament. He was, at the time, a journeyman with Rogers and Fowle, and worked at the press. He informed, that on account of the weakness of his constitution, he greatly injured his health by the performance. Privacy in the business was necessary; and as few hands were intrusted with the secret, the press work was, as he thought, very laborious. I mention these minute circumstances in proof that an edition of the Testament did issue from the office of Rogers and Fowle, because I have heard that the fact has been disputed.

Elsewhere in the same edition Thomas said Rogers and Fowle printed “about two thousand copies” of their New Testament before Kneeland and Green printed their Bible. In the 1874 edition of Thomas’s history, incorporating his notes, the passage above was amended to state that chronology.

Among his papers at the American Antiquarian Society, Thomas also left multiple lists of books published in Boston before the Revolutionary War. Under the date 1749 one of those lists include a “Bible containing the Old and New Testament (this had a London imprint about 1749 or 1750).”

When in 1770 some Boston printers wanted to sell copies of the Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre despite the town ordering them not to, they had undoubtedly heard the same stories as Isaiah Thomas. They knew the trick of putting a fake London title page on a book to make it appear aboveboard.

The Bibles that Thomas described being printed in Boston around 1750 went completely undetected. In fact, those books might never have existed.

TOMORROW: The hunt for Boston’s phantom Bibles.

In the Spy 250 Years Ago

On 30 Oct 1770, 250 years ago today, John Adams turned thirty-five years old.

Two years later, he wrote in his diary: “Thirty Seven Years, more than half the Life of Man, are run out.—What an Atom, an Animalcule I am!-The Remainder of my Days I shall rather decline, in Sense, Spirit, and Activity.” Was Adams in the same mood when he hit exactly half of threescore years and ten? We don’t know because, darn it, he wasn’t keeping his diary in late 1770.

Also on 30 October, printer Isaiah Thomas put out the first issue of the Massachusetts Spy in his own name. Back in August, he’d started publishing the newspaper with his old master, Zechariah Fowle, but evidently that man wanted out. (The preceding issues had no printers’ names attached, so the transition might have been gradual.)

Thomas was still publishing at the unusual pace of two pages on three days of the week. With the next issues he would switch to two days a week, Mondays and Thursdays, thus going head to head with all of Boston’s established papers.

But on this Tuesday, 30 October, the Massachusetts Spy was the only new newspaper to appear, and Thomas thus had an exclusive on that morning’s big news from the courthouse:

John Adams, Josiah Quincy, and Robert Auchmuty had gotten their client off on the charge of murder.

The Launch of the Massachusetts Spy

On Tuesday, 7 Aug 1770, 250 years ago today, the second issue of the Massachusetts Spy appeared.

The very first issue, dated 17 July, was a test to drum up subscriptions, distributed for free. The printers had projected regular publication to start at the end of the month. That schedule slipped, and the 7 August issue was their first attempt to publish on a steady schedule.

The men behind the Massachusetts Spy were twenty-one-year-old Isaiah Thomas and his former master, Zechariah Fowle.

Since Thomas had ended their initial relationship unilaterally—i.e., he ran away to Nova Scotia in 1765 and to North Carolina the next year—one might expect Fowle to be leery of a becoming partners with him.

But Thomas had settled down a bit during his second stint away from Boston, which he spent mostly in Charleston, South Carolina. There he had worked steadily as a journeyman for a printer and bookseller named Robert Wells.

Thomas had also gotten married to a woman from Bermuda named Mary Dill. Their first child (and perhaps the reason for their marriage) was stillborn, but they were having more. Thus, when Thomas returned to Boston in the spring of 1770, he was no longer a headstrong apprentice but a practiced printer with a family to support.

Boston already had more weekly newspapers per capita than any other port in British North America, but the closing of Mein and Fleeming’s Boston Chronicle on 25 June appeared to open space for something new.

Thomas later described his business strategy like this:

The Massachusetts Spy was calculated to obtain subscriptions from mechanics, and other classes of people who had not much time to spare from business. It was to be published three times a week, viz. on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Twice in the week it was to be printed on a quarter of a sheet, and once on a half sheet. When published in this way, news was conveyed fresh to subscribers, and the contents of a Spy might with convenience be read at a leisure moment.

All the other Boston papers appeared only once a week—three of them on Monday and the Boston News-Letter on Thursday. The Chronicle had issued two full issues each week, but Mein and Fleeming had the financial backing of the Customs office and a subscriber base drawn from the friends of the royal government. Three issues a week, even if they used no more paper than one weekly, would be a strain.

Thomas and Fowle announced their price as “Five Shillings, Lawful Money per Annum.” In contrast, the Boston Chronicle charged 6s.8d. in 1767, as did the Salem Gazette in 1768 and the Norwich Packet in 1773. The Massachusetts Spy was thus a discount paper—smaller price, smaller sheet, maybe a little less news, but more often.

The July preview invited people who wanted to subscribe to visit Fowle “in Back-Street” or Thomas “in School-House-Lane, near the Latin School”—i.e., School Street. By August, the partners were issuing the paper from “the New Printing-Office, in Union-Street,” near the center of town.

“Now they all in Heaps of Ashes lay”

The woodcut image above appeared on another religious response to the fire that started at the Brazen Head: a broadside ballad titled A Poem on the Rebuke of GOD’s Hand In the Awful Desolation Made by Fire in the Town of Boston, on the 20th Day of March, 1760.

Like the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew’s sermon, quoted yesterday, the ballad started with the Biblical verse of Amos 3:6: “Shall there be Evil in a City, and the LORD hath not done it?”

Then came 87 lines of verse. Here’s a sample:

Then can we clear ourselves, a’n’t we to blame
Who sin without Remorse, and cast of Shame
And pay no Rev’rence to his holy Name?—
This is the Cause He sent this Judgment down,
This awful Desolation! on the Town.
The North-west-wind, and Flame he did employ,
Our stately Habitations to destroy.
What spacious Structures stood but th’ other Day,
And now they all in Heaps of Ashes lay,
I know not how to write, or to express
The awful Time, or paint the sad Distress
Of those our Friends who did to Bed retire
And wak’d surrounded by a Flame of Fire!--

This broadside moved on to a long and equally fiery description of the Day of Judgement. Mayhew, who wasn’t an entirely enthusiastic Calvinist, didn’t get to that topic until nearly the end of his sermon.

The broadside was issued by the print shop of Zechariah Fowle and Samuel Draper on Marlborough Street. Two years later Fowle and Draper used the same woodcut to illustrated another broadside about fire: The Dying Confession and Declaration of Fortune, a Negro Man, Who was Executed in Newport, (Rhode-Island) on Friday the 14th of May, 1762, for Setting Fire to the Stores on the Long Wharf.

The block of wood carved to print this image actually survives, and in 2005 Early American History Auctions put it on the market—and on the internet. The firm titled it “The Angel of Death and the Great Boston Fire.” Since no one actually died in the 1760 fire, I think the figure in the sky is more likely one of the “Obsequious Angels” that the poem describes accompanying the Almighty on the Day of Judgment.

There are several mysteries associated with the Rebuke of GOD’s Hand broadside. First, the poem is signed with initials that have been read as “A.F.” and “A.J.”—more likely the latter. Mid-twentieth-century bibliographers guessed that was Andrew Johonnot. There were two genteel men of that name in Boston at the time, father (1705-1760) and son (1735-1804). However, I see no indication that either was in the habit of writing poetry.

Another question is who created the woodcut. Young Isaiah Thomas was apprenticed to Fowle at the time, and he later described learning how to cut such blocks—not well, but as well as anyone else in town. However, it’s always possible that this cut wasn’t made just after the 1760 fire but had been part of the printers’ armament for years.

Finally, in 1900 the city of Boston reproduced a somewhat ragged copy of this broadside in a printed collection of town papers about the fire. William S. Appleton displayed that sheet at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society. But that was apparently the only surviving copy, and nobody knows where it is now.

COMING UP: Relief efforts.

Colonial Newspaper Subscription Prices

Last month I posted twice about the cost of advertising in colonial American newspapers.

One source of those articles, the 1884 U.S. Census Office report “The Newspaper and Periodical Press” by S. N. D. North, also discussed what pre-Revolutionary newspapers charged their readers for subscriptions:

The colonial newspapers were sold at prices which varied according to the location and the currency of that location. The latter fluctuated so frequently in value that it is not always possible at this date to determine precisely the sum that the publisher regarded himself entitled to receive from his patrons; but there is sufficient reason to believe that this sum was a nearly uniform one in the respective colonies, and that it did not vary greatly in any one colony from the standard established in all the others.

John Campbell, when he founded the News-Letter in 1704, may be said to have established for his own and for subsequent generations the prevailing price of the weekly newspaper. He received the equivalent of $2 of our present currency, but did not think it worth while to advertise his price of subscription in the paper itself. This was a neglect to take advantage of an opportunity which found several imitators in the subsequent colonial newspapers. The Boston Gazette and Weekly Journal (1719) was sold for 16s. a year, and 20s. when sealed, payable quarterly, and at the value of currency at that time this was equivalent to $250 in our present money.

The American Magazine, a monthly periodical of 50 pages, founded in 1743, was sold for 3s., new tenor, a quarter, being at the rate of 50 cents, or $2 per annum. The Rehearsal, founded in 1731, was sold originally for 20s., but was reduced from that price to 16s. when [Thomas] Fleet took possession of it in 1733.

The Boston Advertiser was sold for 5s.4d. “lawful money”, and the Boston Chronicle (1767) for 6s.8d.—“but a very small consideration for a newspaper on a large sheet and well printed,” according to [Isaiah] Thomas, but likely to be regarded as a high price for a similar newspaper in these days.

The Christian History, weekly, 1743, was sold for 2s., new tenor, per quarter, but subsequently 6d. more was added to its price, “covered, sealed, and directed.” The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, a monthly of 50 pages, sold for 3s., new tenor, per quarter, the equivalent of $150 per year.

Nevertheless, 6s.8d. appears to have been the ruling price at this period, for the Salem Essex Gazette (1768) and the Norwich Packet (1773) were vended at that rate. The New Hampshire Gazette (1756) was sold for “one dollar per annum, or its equivalent in bills of credit, computing a dollar this year at four pounds, old tenor”. The Portsmouth Mercury (1765) was sold for “one dollar, or six pounds o.t. per year; one-half to be paid at entrance”.

Thomas Fleet, who discontinued the Weekly Rehearsal in 1735 and began the publication of the Boston Evening Post on a half sheet of large foolscap paper, regarded the prevailing price for newspapers altogether too low, and in a dunning advertisement to his subscribers he declared:

In the days of Mr. Campbell, who published a newspaper here, which is forty years ago, Paper was bought for eight or nine shillings a Ream, and now tis Five Pounds; his Paper was never more than half a sheet, and that he had Two Dollars a year for, and had also the art of getting his Pay for it; and that size has continued until within a little more than one year, since which we are expected to publish a whole Sheet, so that the Paper now stands us in near as much as all the other charges.

In Pennsylvania the prices of newspapers were more uniform than in New England. The Philadelphia American Weekly Mercury, the first paper founded in that city, and the first outside of New England, being the third in the colonies, was sold for 10s. per annum. The Philadelphia Gazette (1733) was sold for the same price, as was also the Philadelphia Journal (1766), the Chronicle (1767), and the Ledger (1775). The Philadelphia Evening Post, founded in 1775, and issued three times a week, was sold at a price of two pennies for each paper, or 3s. the quarter. The Dutch [actually German] and English Gazette was sold for 10s. in 1749, when it was a weekly publication, and for 5s. in 1751, when it became a fortnightly publication.

The New York Weekly Journal (1733) was sold for 3s. the quarter. The Virginia Gazette (1766) was 12s.6d. per year [Purdie and Dixon offered that price in 1770, William Rind the same in 1771]. There was a notable increase in prices during the war in several cases, and the New Jersey Gazette, which was founded in 1777, fixed its price at 26s. per annum.

Supplementing North’s rundown, here are the subscription prices I found this spring:

• New-England Courant under (nominally) Benjamin Franklin, 1723, 12s. per year or 4d. each issue.
• New-York Mercury under Hugh Gaine, 1756, 12s. per year, rising to 14s. in 1757 to defray the cost of a provincial stamp tax, plus another 7s.6d. for delivery to Connecticut.
• Massachusetts Spy under Zechariah Fowle and Isaiah Thomas, 1770, 5s. 
• Massachusetts Spy under Thomas alone, 1774, 6s.8d. unsealed, 8s. “sealed and directed.” Thomas continued to charge that price after moving to Worcester in 1775.
• Pennsylvania Packet under John Dunlap, 1771, 10s.
• North-Carolina Gazette under James Davis, 1775, 16s.
• New-York Packet under Samuel Loudon, 1776, 12s.

Isaiah Thomas’s Travels and Togs

When Isaiah Thomas reached Halifax in early 1765, he didn’t have much. That’s what happens when you leave your apprenticeship early. Having worked for printer Zechariah Fowle for nine years, the sixteen-year-old knew he was taking a risk.

According to his grandson Benjamin Franklin Thomas, “He used to say, not without satisfaction in the contrast with his affluent condition in later life, that his linen was reduced to one check shirt, and that the only coat he had he sent to a tailor to turn, and the tailor ran away with it.”

But we know that Thomas built up his wardrobe quickly. In 1846 the Portsmouth Journal and Boston Courier reported that builders had discovered a document inside an “old building belonging to Mr. Supply Ham.” It was “a marble covered memorandum book” with the inscription “Isaiah Thomas His Book 1766,” and its text recorded the young printer’s travels and compensation:

Left Mr. Fowle the 19th of September 1765, and sat sail the next Day about 10 o’clock for Halifax, and arrived there on the 24th Day about 10 o’clock, which was just four Days from the Time I left Boston.

Went to Mr. [Anthony] Henry’s and engaged work with him for 3 Dollars per month and he to find me Boarding, Washing, &c. Work extremely scarce.

Received of Mr. Anthony Henry the following Articles, viz.
1 Pair of Broadcloth Breeches 0 15 0
Two pair of Stockings 7 0
1 pair of Shoes 8 0
Two Check Shirts 16 0
1 Pistereen 1 0
1 Bottle of [torn] 1 0
Two Dollars in Cash 10 0
To 1 yard of Black Shallon 4 0
To 1 yard of Blue Ditto 3 9
______________________
Halifax Currency 3 5 9

Work’d with Mr. Henry 5 months, 3 Weeks and 3 Days. Sailed from Halifax the 19th day of March, 1766, and arrived at Old York [Maine] the 27th (at Dark) of said Month.

Work with Mr. [Daniel] Fowle of Portsmouth [New Hampshire] 13 Days.

Friday, April 10, 1766. Came to work with Messrs. [Thomas] Furber & [Ezekiel] Russell for eight Dollars per month and my Board.

Received of Messrs. Furber & Russell 5 yards & half of Black Serge at 9 Shillings Lawful money per yard 2 9 6.

Thomas later said that friends in Boston recognized his work in Furber and Russell’s newspaper. He suggested that was the quality of his typesetting, but it may have been his woodcuts. Or Daniel Fowle may simply have written to his brother Zechariah that his wayward apprentice had reappeared, hungry for work. In any event, the Boston printer invited young Isaiah to return.

Thomas’s grandson wrote, “On his arrival at Portsmouth the people were celebrating with great enthusiasm the repeal of the Stamp Act.” But 27 March was too early for that. The young printer might have stayed in Portsmouth through that town’s celebration in May, but it’s also possible that he returned to Boston just in time for its big celebration on 19 May, and the memory got garbled.

According to Benjamin Franklin Thomas, back in his old master’s shop the teenager “gets along quietly for a few weeks. In July 1766, on the day of the funeral of Jonathan Mayhew [11 July], whom the whole town followed to his grave, he has fresh trouble, but the difficulty is compromised and he lives with him once more. He remains but a few weeks and then, with the full consent of his master, leaves his service finally.”

Isaiah Thomas’s next stop: Wilmington, North Carolina.

Isaiah Thomas’s Second Job

In mid-1765 Isaiah Thomas was sixteen years old and apprenticed to the Boston printer Zechariah Fowle. But he was nowhere near Boston. Having worked for Fowle since he was seven, the teenager had gotten fed up and run away.

In Thomas’s own words later, “he went to Novascotia, with a view to go from thence to England, in order to acquire a more perfect knowledge of his business.” Benjamin Franklin had blazed that trail.

In Halifax, Thomas found work with “a Dutchman, whose name was Henry.” This was Anthony Henry, who was actually born in France of German parents. Henry had come to America as a fifer in the British army and settled in Halifax in 1760, taking over the colony’s main print shop the next year.

According to Thomas:

He was a good natured, pleasant man, who in common concerns did not want for ingenuity and capacity; but he might, with propriety, be called a very unskilful printer. To his want of knowledge or abilities in his profession, he added indolence…

Thomas clearly had no more respect for his new boss than for his previous one. He also deemed Henry’s shop antiquated and poorly equipped. But working there gave the teenager a taste of autonomy—Henry appears to have given him free run in printing the weekly Halifax Gazette.

On 1 November, the Stamp Act went into effect in all of Britain’s North American colonies. According to A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints by Marie Tremaine, the issue of the Halifax Gazette published on that date appeared on stamped paper. Its printer’s notice stated, “Advertisements are taken in and inserted as Cheap as the Stamp Act will allow.”

Later that month Thomas was a little more forthright about his opposition to the new law as he reported, “the People of this Province are disgusted with the Stamp Act.”

TOMORROW: And that was enough to get him and his boss in trouble.

The Marriage of Isaiah Thomas and Mary Dill

Isaiah Thomas (shown at right as a prosperous old man, courtesy of Amherst College) was apprenticed to the printer Zechariah Fowle on 4 June 1756, at the age of seven. Although his mother was still alive, Boston’s Overseers of the Poor arranged this indenture for Isaiah as “a poor boy belonging to said Boston.”

Isaiah was supposed to work for Fowle until he turned twenty-one on 8 Jan 1769. However, he released himself on his own recognizance in September 1765, sailing off to the excitement of Nova Scotia. In Halifax, Isaiah worked for a Dutch-born printer named Anthony Henry. After a couple of years, the young man tried working on his own in the Carolina colonies.

While there, Thomas married a woman from Bermuda named Mary Dill on 25 Dec 1769. She had a stillborn child sometime in the following year, so it’s possible they had to get married. Later Thomas wrote that “soon after his Marriage to his Astonishment he found that his Wife had had a bastard some Years before & that she had been prostituted to the purposes of more than One.”

The couple sailed to Boston, perhaps for a new start. In late 1770 Isaiah renewed his acquaintance with Zechariah Fowle and convinced him to become a partner in printing a new newspaper, the Massachusetts Spy. After a tough start—the men found they couldn’t make money selling three issues a week, as originally planned—the Spy established itself as Boston’s second radical Whig paper.

In 1772, however, Mary Thomas expressed “a great desire of Living in her native country (Bermuda).” Isaiah wrote to some officials or wealthy merchants on that island asking if they would support a new newspaper there. He even made an implicit offer to tone down his politics, explaining in an 18 March letter that “one of my profession here must be either of one party or the other, (he cannot please both).” Fowle heard through Dr. Thomas Young that Thomas might be planning to leave, and insisted on dissolving their partnership immediately.

No openings in Bermuda seem to have presented themselves, and Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy was pulled further into the resistance movement. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson even tried to prosecute the printer and some of his political essayists, but the Suffolk County grand jury refused to hand down an indictment.

By early 1775, Mary and Isaiah Thomas had had three children together, but the couple was drifting apart. Mary was, according to Isaiah, showing a “petulance of Temper & unhappiness of Disposition which she daily exercised to the disturbance of domestic Peace.” And of course they were still in Boston.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?