Biographers and historians agree that Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) was the best journalist in colonial America and his Pennsylvania Gazette the best newspaper. Founded in 1728, the Gazette was the second newspaper to be produced in Philadelphia. In 1729, the twenty-three-year-old Franklin and a partner, Hugh Meredith (ca. 1697- ca. 1749), bought the struggling paper and quickly turned it into a well-written, well-edited, and well-printed newspaper. In format, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was like other colonial American newspapers. The emphasis was on news, not literary or political essays, and most of that news was copied from European papers. But Franklin had a knack for selecting, editing, and rewriting. And, if his autobiography is to be believed, the Gazette “prov’d in a few Years extreamly profitable.”

This 1745 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette is typical in some ways, atypical in others. As usual, the paper is filled with European news of war and diplomacy. But in 1745 some important war news came to Philadelphia via Boston. Under a “Boston” heading, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported the big news of the day: the siege of the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island at the Gulf of St. Lawrence, mounted mainly by New Englanders. This issue of the Gazette is quite unusual in that it has two extra pages and a woodcut map, a “PLAN of the Town and Harbour of LOUISBOURGH.” This map, probably cut by Franklin himself, marks the first illustrated news story in American journalism. Yet in the midst of much serious war news, a bit of Franklinesque fluff also appears: “They write from Paris, that the Diamonds of the Lords and Ladies of the Court at Versailles, at the grand Ball on the 25th of last Month, were valued at 250 Millions, which is near 12 Millions Sterling.”

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]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> The first newspaper in New York was the New-York Gazette, founded in 1725 by William Bradford (1663-1752). The New-York Weekly Journal appeared eight years later, and from its beginning it was more than a business competitor to the Gazette; it was a political adversary. In the 1730s, New York was the most politically fractious of the British American colonies, and the Weekly Journal represented the faction of Chief Justice Lewis Morris (1671-1746) against Governor William Cosby (1690-1736). The printer of the Journal, John Peter Zenger (1697-1746), is remembered and celebrated because it was he, not the actual writers of the paper’s political essays, who ended up being prosecuted for seditious libel at the behest of the governor in 1734. Zenger’s acquittal became a cause célèbre in the history of press freedom in colonial America and beyond.

After his acquittal, Zenger made his paper less an organ of political faction and more a standard newspaper. The 1745 issue seen here is an example of the Journal in the last year of Zenger’s editorship; he died the next year. It illustrates how war—in this case, King George’s War—could thoroughly dominate the news. In 1745 a New England force was mounting a siege of the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island at the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Journal reported the news of this important expedition mainly by gathering news from Boston, much as Benjamin Franklin was doing in Philadelphia. This war with France and the later Seven Years’ War of the 1750s and 1760s did not produce an American patriotism in the British colonies. But they did produce among the colonies a sense of shared American interest and identity. From New England down the Atlantic seaboard, newspapers shared and reprinted North American news for people who were beginning to think of themselves as Americans.

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]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Public executions had long been popular news events in Europe, and they fit well into the news environment of Puritan New England. They were sensational, which appealed to the voyeurism of audiences, but they were also morally instructive, which appealed to the religious sentiments of public officials and ministers. And printers liked executions because accounts of them could be sold in news broadsides, sermons, and newspapers. Indeed, one of the first products of the first commercial press in Boston in 1675 was a sermon on the execution of two men for murder. The author was New England’s most famous collector and interpreter of providential news events in that era: Reverend Increase Mather (1639-1723).

In 1737 the execution in Worcester of a habitual criminal named Hugh Henderson was reported in Boston. (There was no printing press in Worcester at that time.) The coverage appeared in three different media formats: broadside, sermon, and newspaper. The broadside, typically a small sheet printed on one side, was a favored medium for getting a news story out quickly, cheaply, and profitably. This one includes both a cautionary poem and Henderson’s confession, which covered the standard list of sins driven by drink: cursing and swearing, gaming, Sabbath-breaking, whoring, robbery, and burglary. The confession was published by the Boston printers Samuel Kneeland (1697-1769) and Timothy Green (1703-63) in two formats: first as a broadside and then as an appendix to the sermon preached by Reverend John Campbell (1691-1761) at Henderson’s execution. The broadside, which reused a woodcut that Kneeland and Green had used in 1734, was rushed into print and available for sale in time for the execution. The execution itself was reported in the Boston newspapers, most fully in the Weekly Journal, which was also published by Kneeland and Green. The printers even tucked an ad for their broadside into the middle of the Journal’s December 6th story on the execution. An anonymous Boston newspaper indexer was a Kneeland and Green customer: he listed both the broadside and the newspaper story in his 1737 index.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> The most formal medium of news dissemination in colonial New England was the government proclamation, issued by the governor or other high official and printed elegantly in broadside form. Proclamations often announced special days of thanksgiving for military victories or other signs of divine deliverance. Proclamations were designed to be consumed in public: they were posted on public buildings and often formally read aloud in public spaces, sometimes announced by the beat of drums. Newspapers typically reprinted them as well.

In Boston two official proclamations were issued in response to the March 1737 market riot, one by Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips (1685-1757) and the other by Governor Jonathan Belcher (1682-1757). Both, as expected, denounced the rioters. But Belcher’s proclamation was highly unusual in one regard. It printed the full texts of another important, but completely unofficial, medium of public communication: a manuscript open letter. In response to the first proclamation by the lieutenant governor, the mob leaders had circulated handwritten copies of their own proclamation around town and posted one on the town house door. (No original copies survive.) They demanded that the authorities abandon their efforts to arrest the “good Fellows” who had pulled down the markets. Further investigations, they said, would bring on a “Bloody Ending” and perhaps “Civil War.” They also wrote an open letter to the sheriff of Suffolk County boasting that hundreds of men were ready to resist any use of force against them. The local newspaper editors, who had been wary of publishing the rioters’ words, were delighted to publish them once the governor himself had printed them in his own official proclamation.

This document, therefore, illustrates both ends of the news-media continuum in Boston in 1737: the official, top-down flow of news from the government as well as the insurgent, bottom-up flow of news from the streets of the city.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> In New England, even in the age of newspapers, which began modestly in 1704 with the launch of the Boston News-Letter, the sermon remained a vital public communication medium for the discussion of news. Though most sermons, especially Sunday sermons, dealt with piety and theology, some sermons were linked directly to public events. For New Englanders the news of the day often carried religious meaning. Preachers discerned in natural and political occurrences the providential hand of God. These event-related sermons sometimes focused on routine and scheduled events such as elections, funerals, or executions. They also commented on unexpected events such as earthquakes, comets, storms, crimes, shipwrecks, and military victories and defeats.

In Boston in 1737 one of the most influential ministers was Benjamin Colman (1673-1747), who had assumed the pulpit of the new Brattle Street Church in 1699. Early in the morning of March 4, 1737, a fire swept through the workshop of cabinetmaker John Brocas. The fire was quickly extinguished, but in a crowded, wooden city such as Boston, a building fire was always a terrifying hazard and, therefore, compelling public news. Diarists such as John Burt and Thomas Prince noted the Brocas fire in their diaries, and over the following week all the Boston newspapers, including the Weekly Journal, carried reports of it. And on the very morning of the fire, the Reverend Colman preached a sermon on it. “It is of the Lord’s Mercies that we are not consumed,” Colman declared, quoting from Lamentations, chapter three, “because His Compassions fail not; they are new every Morning.” One of Colman’s listeners was John Burt, who mentioned in his diary that he attended services that day at the Brattle Street Church.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> The oldest of the five newspapers in Boston in 1737 was the Boston Weekly News-Letter. Founded in 1704, it was also the oldest newspaper in America. The proprietor of the News-Letter after 1732 was John Draper (d. 1762), who, like most newspaper publishers of that era, ran a general printing shop. For example, Draper printed the Benjamin Colman sermon on the Brocas workshop fire for the Boston booksellers Joseph Edwards and Hopestill Foster. Draper was also the official printer to the governor and council of Massachusetts, which placed him at the heart of the political establishment of the province. It was Draper who printed the official broadside proclamations on the March 1737 market riot.

The April 1, 1737, issue of the Weekly News-Letter, seen here, is typical in the range and organization of its news coverage, though the local news that day is unusually dramatic. In this issue, Draper was the first newspaper publisher to print an account of the market riot, in which a mob opposed to regulated markets tore down the public market sheds in the central part of the city. Draper broke the story in part by reprinting a proclamation by Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips (1685-1757) condemning the rioters, which had already been circulated and formally read at public gathering places in the city. The other Boston papers could have published accounts earlier, but they did not. They seemed content to wait to see how Draper, the governor’s printer, would handle this politically sensitive story. After this issue of the News-Letter was in print, the other newspapers followed suit, publishing accounts of the riot, the official response, and the political aftermath.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View more issues]]> The New England Weekly Journal was founded in 1727 as a literary paper, along the lines of the Spectator in London and New England Courant in Boston, the newspaper that launched the career of Benjamin Franklin. But the Weekly Journal was more aligned with the local religious establishment than the Courant had been. One of its founders and an occasional contributor was Thomas Prince, who cared more about providential news and religious revival than the clever satire that characterized much of the Courant’s content. For example, the Weekly Journal devoted much attention to the earthquake of 1727 and to the revivals that began in the 1730s at Northampton, led by Rev. Jonathan Edwards (1703-58). The Weekly Journal’s printers were Samuel Kneeland (1697-1769) and Timothy Green (1703-63), who also published many sermons and pamphlets on religious revivals. Kneeland was a member of Prince’s church.

By 1737 the New England Weekly Journal had become less literary and more newsy, with the usual assortment of European news culled from London newspapers, items from other American colonies, and local Boston news. The news often recounted events that seemed to carry providential meaning. For example, the Weekly Journal devoted more attention than other Boston papers to the execution of Hugh Henderson. Henderson’s jailhouse repentance was the central theme of the newspaper’s coverage and of a sermon and poem written for the event, all published by Kneeland and Green. During the brutally cold winter of 1737, the newspaper carried many short news items from Boston and from around the country about fires and deaths. This March 8, 1737, issue has an item about the fire in John Brocas’s woodworking shop, as well as a preview story about an upcoming town meeting, always an important venue for the making and sharing of news. At the March town meeting, the citizens of Boston were expected to discuss two vital issues of public policy made more serious by the severe winter cold: “some more Effectual method for preventing the Danger of Fire by Chimneys” and “Providing the Town with Wood.”

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View more issues]]> John Burt (1716-75) was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College in 1736. At the time he kept his diary, he was reading theology with a local minister in Boston. He later accepted a call to the pulpit in Bristol, Rhode Island, and spent his career there until his death. Burt’s diary for 1737 is written into an interleaved almanac, the same issue of the Ames Almanack that Thomas Prince used for his diary that year. Like Prince, Burt intermingled personal, professional, and public events in his entries. He wrote about dinners and church services as well as fires, accidents, and deaths—and the market riot in March, during which a mob tore down several of the city’s market sheds. Some of those events, such as the fire at John Brocas’s woodworking shop and the market riot, were reported in the local newspapers and discussed in sermons that Burt attended. At times, Burt probably learned about an event before it was written up in the newspapers; at other times, he may have gleaned his information from the papers.

Although the Prince diary and the Burt diary include some of the same events, they also have variations. As a young man not yet part of Boston’s elite, Burt had a slightly different perspective than Prince on the news of the day. In his entry for March 4, for example, Burt writes about a salacious bit of news he got by word of mouth: “I heard that there was a whore house kept by one Green broke & a list of those that frequented it carried to Major Savage. There were in it some of the greatest Gentlemen to live in town.” Brief reports of this news event did appear in a couple of the Boston newspapers, but without mention of a list of the brothel’s patrons. The event did not appear at all in Prince’s diary, though Prince and most of the people of Boston undoubtedly knew about it via the age-old news medium of gossip.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View more pages from this diary]]> In colonial America, newspapers were delivered to their readers in a variety of ways. In the cities, customers often picked up their papers at the printing office. In the countryside, post riders delivered newspapers. Having free access to the postal service was so valuable that newspaper publishers competed to be named postmaster in their cities. Newspaper copies destined for other cities might be sent by stagecoach or even coastal schooner. As cities grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, another feature of the local delivery system became more common: the paperboy. And along with the paperboy came the paperboy’s annual plea for a holiday tip.

This 1770 broadside “carrier’s address” is a “Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year” verse printed for the carriers of the Massachusetts Spy: “Kind Sirs! your gen’rous bounty show, / few shillings on your Lad bestow.”

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) would become a prominent Patriot printer during the American Revolution and eventually one of the wealthiest men in the United States, but at sixteen he illegally left his apprenticeship in Boston with a poor printer named Zechariah Fowle (1724-76) to learn his trade in London. He never made it to London and instead found himself in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1765.

In Halifax he worked for the town’s only printer, Anthony Henry (1734-1800), who turned out to be inept at his business and soon left the newspaper, the Halifax Gazette, in the care of Thomas. Thomas, like many printers at this time, hated the Stamp Act, as it was harmful to business. During the several months he stayed in Halifax, he published many articles against the act, printed the tax stamp upside down, and even created images of the devil attacking the stamp, before he resorted to cutting all the stamps off of his supply of paper. According to Thomas, these protests “made no trifling bustle in the place,” including causing the Gazette to briefly lose its government patronage.

The two images from the Halifax Gazette shown here illustrate some of the ways Thomas spoke out against the Stamp Act. The first, the front page of the December 12-19, 1765, issue of the paper, replicates the Pennsylvania Journal, which came to Halifax via a sailing vessel and featured black mourning bars and a skull and cross bones illustration to signify the potential death of the paper due to the Stamp Act. The second shows a woodcut of the devil attacking the Stamp Act, which appeared on the second page of the issue for February 6-13, 1766. This woodcut was created by Thomas himself.

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