That said, it was interesting to find the October 24, 1771 Massachusetts Spy had stacked one news brief about the repeal of the American tea bill on top of a blurb about Captain Preston of the Boston Massacre. See the ironic placement below.

Dunlap was the printer of the first copies of the Declaration of Independence although his Packet was second to print the full text of the Declaration (July 8, 1776) after The Pennsylvania Evening Post (July 6, 1776).  The Pennsylvania Packet eventually became the first daily newspaper in America with its September 21, 1784 issue.

Below is the full text of Dunlap’s colonial newspaper launch announcement, as published in the October 21, 1771 issue of The Massachusetts Spy. Click to enlarge.

All America is in a flame on account of Tea-Exportation. The New-Yorkers as well as the Bostonians and Philadelphians, are, it seems, determined that no Tea shall be landed. They have published a paper in numbers called the Alarm. It begins first with “Dear Countrymen,” and then goes on exhorting them to open their eyes, and like the Sons of Liberty throw off all connection with the tyrant their Mother Country. They have on this occasion raised a company of artillery, and every day almost are practicing at a target. Their independent companies are out at exercise every day. The minds of the lower people are inflamed by the examples of some of their principals. They swear that they will burn every ship that comes in; but I believe our six and twelve pounders, with the Royal Welsh Fuziliers, will prevent any thing of that kind.

The Alarm being referenced was a broadside authored by John Dickinson in which urged “Beware of the East-India Company.”

The exact excerpt from above, as published in the April 18, 1774 Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, under the dateline London, January 25, appears below. Following are two more interesting letter extracts from the same newspaper that present excellent perspective and insight into the colonial (not just Boston) tension percolating in late 1773 and early 1774.

Also read Boston 1775’s “Boston Mobilizes Against the Tea“.

According to the Packet, “it is said that the tea thrown into the Sea at Boston is valued at 18,000 l. at 1s. 6d. per pound. The whole sent to America is said to be worth about 300,000 l. which is returning home, not being suffered to be landed.”

Using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, £18,000 in 1774 (I rounded up) translates to £2,023,200 today.  That’s an average of two percent inflation per year. Converting £2.023 million to USD via XE.com, I found the value of the tea destroyed on December 16, 1773 to be $3,091,687 (more than $2 million higher than the History Channel’s estimate).

According to Wesley Griswold’s The Night The Revolution Began “the figure varies with nearly every source, and ranges from as low as £8000 to as high as £18000.”

So I checked to see if the History Channel was using the low estimate.  Using the £8000 variable, I found today’s value of the tea destroyed on December 16, 1773 is $1,374,083 (still much higher than the History Channel’s quote).

If £8000 was the low estimate and £18,000 was the high, that leaves £13,000 as the median estimate. Figuring £13,000 would be the most accurate measure, I threw it in the inflation and conversion calculators and found today’s value of the tea dumped in Boston harbor on December 16, 1773 to be $2,232,885.

Can anyone tell me how/where the History Channel came up with $1 million?  What’s the most accurate estimate?

“Besides the usual variety of general literature, this work contains a faithful summary of the public transactions of Boston during that eventful year, and great value is added to the work by the public documents preserved in its pages,” according to Samuel Burnside, Memoir of Isaiah Thomas, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society.

Below is an early — possibly the earliest — advertisement for the premier issue of Royal American Magazine, as published in Thomas’ Massachusetts Spy on October 14, 1773.

Freeman led the massive party to the Barnstable County Court House to protest an unfair British-imposed method of juror selection. For more background about this historic event, read Mary Hall Leonard’s Cape Cod Magazine article titled The Breaking Up of The Barnstable Court (1915).

The purpose of this post, however, is to raise awareness of what may be the Tory retaliation for Freeman’s march on the Barnstable Court. The October 24, 1774 issue of the Newport Mercury reports that six Tories attempted to murder Freeman. According to the report, pictured below, Freeman escaped and the six Tories eventually received their own justice from the Sons of Liberty.

Stamp duty. When these two words touched American soil in April 1764 — as a teaser of the internal tax coming after the Sugar Act — they set in motion a chain of events that forever altered the course of American history.  One ripple effect was the formation of the Sons of Liberty.

To some, Sons of Liberty was a generic label for any opponent of the stamp tax.  To others, including Pauline Maier, professor of American history at MIT and scholar of the American Revolution, it was an intercolonial network of organized resistance groups that eventually evolved from structured resistance into revolution.

As Maier wrote in From Resistance to Revolution (1992), “the idea of regularizing intercolonial cooperation against the Stamp Act sprang up independently in several widely separated colonies, but the most intense organizational effort began and remained centered in New York. It was there on either October 31 or November 6 [1765; the Stamp Act went into effect on November 1, 1765] that a meeting of some type appointed a committee to correspond with the other colonies.”

From November 1765 through March 1766, New York’s organized resistance aligned and opened communication channels with Philadelphia, New London, Boston, rural Massachusetts, Albany, Portsmouth, Newport, New Brunswick, Baltimore, Annapolis, Norfolk, etc.  According to Maier, by March  1766, the Sons of Liberty were an intercolonial network of great significance. “The emergence of organized local resistance groups and their often simultaneous merger into an intercolonial organization of a new type and significance began only in the closing months of 1765, and never really caught on until February 1766.”

To highlight the Sons’ early days of formal existence and cross-colonial communication, Rag Linen uncovered a few key colonial newspaper reports, which are pictured below (click images to enlarge). These pieces have also published as a permanent Rag Linen collection.

1. First row: Supplement to the Boston Gazette — January 27, 1766*
2. Second row: Boston Gazette – February 17, 1766**
3. Third row: Pennsylvania Gazette — March 20, 1766 (1)*** and Boston Gazette — May 21, 1770 (2, 3;  printed two and a half months after the Boston Massacre)****

*Featured in the first row are full-page pictures of the Supplement to the Boston Gazette for January 27, 1766, which include several exciting early details about the Sons of Liberty, such as their first meeting in Savannah, Georgia, at Machenry’s tavern.

**Of particular note is the third image in the second row from the February 17, 1766 Boston Gazette. Under the headline “Portsmouth, Feb 10″ is a report of the Sons’ letter from New York, Connecticut and Boston reaching New Hampshire.

***Another great clip is the first image of the third row from the March 20, 1766 Pennsylvania Gazette. Under the headline “Annapolis, March 6″ is a report of the inaugural Sons of Liberty meeting in the Maryland capital.

****The last image of the third row is from the May 21, 1770 Boston Gazette. It highlights a local meeting of the Daughters of Liberty.

The Print Shop at Colonial Williamsburg

Colonial newspapers are unsung heroes of the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War. Specifically, several newspapermen and women deserve recognition for their role in America’s founding, including:

• Benjamin Edes and John Gill, Boston Gazette
• Isaiah Thomas, Massachusetts Spy
• William Goddard, Pennsylvania Chronicle
• Peter Timothy, South Carolina Gazette
• Thomas Green, Connecticut Courant
• John Holt, New York Journal
• Solomon Southwick, Newport Mercury
• William Gradford III, Pennsylvania Journal
• Mary Goddard, Maryland Journal
• Anne Catharine Green, Maryland Gazette
• James Rivington, Royal Gazette
• Paul Revere, engraver for colonial newspapers (e.g., Massachusetts Spy and Boston Gazette)

One author who recognizes the revolutionary role of newspapers, and their printers and journalists, is Eric Burns, author of Infamous Scribblers (2006).

Marrying the story-telling flair of McCullough with the journalism history acumen of Mott and Emery, Burns says that the Boston Gazette, arguably the most influential newspaper the country has ever known, got us into the Revolutionary War, sped up the course of the war and may have even determined the outcome of the war. And a good chunk of Infamous Scribblers is dedicated to supporting this thesis.

As Burns admits, “Perhaps the importance of the press to the outcome of the war can be exaggerated, but not easily and not by much. It was newspapers that kept the colonies informed of the progress of the fighting in a way that letters and patterers could not have done, and in the process united the colonies in a way that was beyond the ability of the jerry-built wartime government.”

Burns points out that newspapers were the only form of media at the time and served as the great unifier of our nation during a time when America “needed unity as much as we needed ammunition.”

Below are a few other highlights from Infamous Scribblers:

On reporting and publishing during the Revolutionary War: “The Revolutionary War was not an easy one to cover. For one thing, once the fighting started there was more news than ever but no more shipments of ink or type or spare parts for the presses coming into American ports. There were no more shipments of paper either, and, as for the quantities still available or smuggled into the colonies from a friend in the motherland or a trader in another European nation, there were higher priorities for it than journalism.”

On a newspaper’s role in the Revolutionary War: “It was Franklin, though, who most succinctly and accurately assessed the role of the media in the days leading up to the war. It was he, astute as ever, who pointed out that the press not only can ’strike while the iron is hot,’ but it can ‘heat it by continually striking.’”

On an unlikely spy embedded as a printer: “Jemmy [James] Rivington’s Tory newspaper, the Royal Gazette, was extremely critical of George Washington. However, Rivington was also a spy who passed along secrets of the British navy to colonial leaders. On one occasion, Rivington helped break a British code that almost surely saved American lives during one of the war’s earlier battles.” Read the Rag Linen blog post on this topic.

Additional resources on the role and significance of colonial printers during the American Revolution:

• Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (Arthur Schlesinger, 1958)
• Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (Eric Burns, 2006)
• Back Issues: The Day the Newspaper Died (Jill Lepore, 2009)
• Boston 1775: Edes and Gill (J. L. Bell, 2006-2010)
• Rag Linen Collections: The Stamp Act of 1765 and 1776

Below is the presentation Eric Burns gave at a book store in Washington, DC, which aired on C-SPAN.