From the beginning, the newspaper sought a wide audience. It served first as an advocate for the Cherokee Nation, fighting especially against its removal from the eastern states. By 1829 its coverage had broadened to other Native American issues, prompting a title change to Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate. The paper ceased publication on May 31, 1834. There were thoughts of reviving it the next year, but the Georgia Guard confiscated the press and threw out the type.

In this 1835 issue of the Temperance Family Almanac, the cover image foreshadows the admonitions found within. Entitled “The Pillars of a Grog-Shop,” the image depicts a cautionary tale. An inebriated mother and father lean against opposing pillars, each with a glass in hand, while their children are left to their own devices. The daughter huddled at her mother’s feet and the son bearing a pained expression at his father’s side provide a stark visual representation of drunkenness’s filial perils. Moreover, a devil can be found lurking in the background of the image, warming itself by the still’s flame—a reference to liquor’s transgressive appeal and also likely intended to remind the viewer that alcohol abuse is not only a moral failing, but a sin as well.

From a nineteenth-century viewer’s perspective, the implications of this illustration would be glaringly clear. Not only has the father forsaken his role as provider and protector, a common trope in print materials of this kind, but the mother has also failed to perform her maternal and civic duties of raising her children to be virtuous citizens of the republic. The sins of the parents will be visited on the children and, what is more, society will be made to bear the costs as well.

In dialogues, poems, scientific data, and various other forms, this refrain repeats throughout the almanac.

In one particularly graphic engraving, an enslaved woman holds a knife over the heads of her sleeping children, about to kill them. Accompanying the engraving is a dialogue between a young girl living in Massachusetts and her uncle that explains the engraving’s gruesome subject. The child asks the older man why the woman would be so hateful as to kill her own children. The uncle explains that the woman’s life as a slave was wretched, with the one exception of being reunited each day with her children. On that particular night, the mother learned that her children were to be sold the next day to another farm over six hundred miles away. Heartbroken that they would be separated from her and thinking of the years of misery and toil that they would face as slaves, she chose to kill them, thinking that even death by her own hands was a better fate. When the girl asks how murder—even in those extreme circumstances—can be excused, the uncle answers that the mother has never had the opportunity to learn to read and study the Bible, and can therefore be forgiven because of her ignorance. Through this dialogue not only is the fictional young girl educated about the evils of slavery, but so are the real readers of the almanac.

Though this particular story was fictional, there were several real cases involving slave infanticide. One of the most sensational cases took place almost twenty years later in January 1856, when a fugitive slave woman named Margaret Garner from Boone County, Kentucky, finding herself surrounded by slave catchers and U.S. Marshals, tried to kill her children and herself rather than be sent back into slavery. She succeeded in killing one of her children before being stopped.

With the American victory at Yorktown, however, the tide had shifted. The British “have seen one great and prosperous effort overcast all their shining prospects, and dissolve the gay air castle they have been so long employed in building….Conquest, their beloved object, although long viewed by us, and by other nations, as a dream, with which none but a sleeping country could amuse itself, will now probably awake them also; when they will perceive, that all the alluring scenes it presented, all the golden mountains it promised, are…removed forever beyond the power of recovery.” And though Dwight had great hopes for progress and freedom of thought and religion in the establishment of America, he warns his congregation that “Sins of the deepest dye, and of an inconceivable multitude, blacken our character also, and provoke the vengeance of Heaven.” While there was reason for hope, there should also be repentance and caution of repeating the same mistakes. The news of the victory was cause for joy, but also for reflection as to what might come next.

Dwight became a prominent author, preacher, educator, and theologian. He served two terms in the Massachusetts legislature and over twenty years as the president of Yale University, and was an influential force in the Second Great Awakening.

Stephen Salisbury was a wealthy merchant in the central Massachusetts community of Worcester, which was also the hometown of Bigelow. The two men were friends, having served together on the town’s Committee of Correspondence before war broke out. As a storekeeper, Salisbury would have been in possession of plenty of sugar and capable of sending it to Bigelow as he requests in the first letter.  

A transcription of the letters can be found here.

In this particular article, Adams argues that love and liberty are basic and profound human needs, that all men are created equal, and that kings are to serve the will of the people. These principles, he claims, are evident throughout history from Aristotle to Locke.

Adams’s articles, along with those written by Daniel Leonard under the penname Massachusettensis, show the spirited dialogue that occurred among various parties in the press during the crisis with Britain. The different meanings of Leonard’s and Adams’s pseudonyms were also indicative of expanding colonial unity: “Massachusettensis” literally means “of Massachusetts,” while “Novanglus” stands for New England, signifying a unified voice among the colonies.

Also of note in this issue of the Boston Gazette is the publication of the play The Group by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), a political writer and satirist who was also the wife, sister, and friend of leading patriots. The Group, along with other political poems and plays Warren wrote, served as a popular satirical voice for the colonial cause. Though she published anonymously until 1790, many knew of her early authorship. She was encouraged in her writing through her close friendship with John Adams. In 1805 Warren published one of the earliest histories of the American Revolution, a three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution.

Poor Julian is an early example of a “last speech” broadside printed in Massachusetts. Julian was a Native American held as a servant (probably a slave) who had escaped captivity. He was recaptured, but then he killed the bounty hunter who was returning him to his master. In his speech, Julian warns other servants to “beware of Drunkenness, of Sabbath-breaking, and of running away from your Masters.” Three competing broadsides were published about this one execution. In this version, Julian thanks Thomas Fleet (1658-1758), the Boston bookseller who arranged for its publication, and he disavows the other broadsides as inauthentic frauds. Fleet was not a printer himself, but he had a good eye for what would sell, and he frequently played the role that would later be termed “publisher.” In the end, were these the actual words of “poor Julian”? No one knows. 

The most striking natural occurrence in Boston in 1737 was the extraordinarily cold weather. Cooper took the “Irresistable Power of God’s Cold” as his subject in a sermon preached in January. In the sermon, Cooper struggles to explain the science of cold to his shivering listeners; the published version of the sermon even includes a footnote to Robert Boyle’s 1665 Experimental History of Cold. But the physical causes of cold—“frigorisick particles,” Cooper hypothesizes—were but “second causes only.” God was the “first cause,” and “these particles are of God’s making.” And what message did God send with his cold? According to Cooper, the frigid winter was a display of God’s restraint as well as his power. Yes, some Bostonians had frozen to death, but the city so far had been spared the communal judgment of a major fire, which, he said, loomed as a serious threat with town pumps and docks frozen. But perhaps most important, God’s cold called people to charity. “Next to the love of God,” Cooper declares, “we shou’d keep up a warm love to our neighbour . . . . Therefore the colder the season is, the warmer shou’d our charity be; for then the needs of the poor are greatly increased.”

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