Supplementing his weekly Massachusetts Spy newspaper, perhaps to satisfy a demand for more hard-hitting anti-British essays and illustrations, Isaiah Thomas printed the first issue of Royal American Magazine in January 1774. The magazine was published every month until the eve of the Revolutionary War and featured Paul Revere and John Hancock among its many contributors.
“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.
The October 16, 1781 Pennsylvania Packet includes several early October reports about the American and French forces surrounding Cornwallis at Yorktown. Here is the first one from that issue.
The 235th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord is quickly approaching, so the unveiling of this collection is very timely. Below is the introduction to Rag Linen’s Battle of Lexington and Concord collection.
“The New England militia were elaborately organized and actively led. On the morning of April 19, 1775, they stood against Thomas Gage’s Regular Infantry in fixed positions and close formations at least six times. Twice the Regulars were broken. In the afternoon, the American leaders changed their tactics. Now facing a larger enemy and artillery, they forged a moving ‘circle of fire’ around the British force and maintained it for many hours — an extraordinary feat of combat leadership with citizen soldiers.
“After the fighting was over, many of these same men, including Paul Revere and Thomas Gage, fought the second battle of Lexington and Concord. This was a contest for what their generation was the first to call popular opinion, and even more decisive than the battle itself. Yankee leaders were victorious in spreading their version of events through the colonies. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine all testified that the news of Lexington was, in Adam’s phrase, their revolutionary Rubicon,” according to Paul Revere’s Ride by David Hackett Fischer (1994).
Rag Linen’s Battle of Lexington and Concord collection provides evidence of the rush, by both sides, to influence public opinion via the rapid dissemination of letters, newspapers and commentary. The collection features an exciting mix of primary source material from the days, weeks and months following April 19, 1775.
The first item, the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal dated April 27, 1775, is the only one of its kind known to exist in either institutional or private hands. It includes extracts from three letters, two of which may be whole, and one that was penned on the same day as the battle. Also featured is a London newspaper printing Gen. Gage’s official battle account. American newspaper printers, after reading Gage’s report, took their turn correcting and commenting on his version of events. As part of the counterpoint, the Connecticut Journal on August 23, 1775, prints: “To reason on the facts, which are now indisputable, is to talk which will better suit some future opportunity. The public have but to ponder on the melancholy truths thus attested by government. The sword of civil war is drawn and if there is truth in Heaven, THE KING’S TROOPS UNSHEATHED IT.” Click here to view the collection.
The May 9, 1775 Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia) included a short description of the Massachusetts and Connecticut delegates arriving in New York en route to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, which was the congress that managed colonial affairs during the Revolutionary War and declared independence from Britain 14 months later.
Dateline: New York, May 8, 1775
“They were met a few miles out of town by a great number of the principal gentlemen of the place, in carriages and on horseback, and escorted into the city by near a thousand men under arms; the roads were lined with greater numbers of people than were ever known on any occasion before. Their arrival was announced by the ringing of bells, and other demonstrations of joy. They have double centries placed at the doors of their lodging.” See the full article below.
Later in the same issue, under the dateline Philadelphia, May 9, we read about the arrival of the delegates from Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, etc.
Last week, J.L. Bell wrote on his Boston 1775 blog about Gen. George Washington’s arrival in Cambridge to take command of the Continental Army. Washington was accompanied by Gen. Charles Lee, an experienced British officer who was bitter about not being appointed Commander in Chief and, according to Wikipedia, had nothing but the utmost disdain for Washington. The Boston 1775 blog post references a letter in which Lee wrote: “We arrived here on Sunday before dinner. We found every thing exactly the reverse of what had been represented.”
Lee’s privately-shared frustration with the actual state of the army may have also been publicly evident from his short one-paragraph response to his welcome address. By comparison, Washington wrote a three-paragraph response. Certainly, this may be an analytical stretch, but it’s interesting to read Lee’s private critical assessment and compare it to his public response, as published in the June 29 to July 6, 1775 New England Chronicle. This newspaper was printed from Stoughton Hall at Harvard College in Cambridge, making it the likely first report of Washington’s July 3rd arrival.
Washington’s response, printed in the same issue, is straight forward and sympathetic to the circumstances under which the army was formed. As J.L. Bell comments, the army was still reeling from the Battle of Bunker Hill. In the second paragraph of his response, Washington states:
“The short space of time which has elapsed since my arrival does not permit me to decide upon the state of the army. The course of human affairs forbids an expectation that troops formed under such circumstances, should at once possess the order, regularity and discipline of veterans — Whatever deficiencies there may be, will I doubt not, soon be made up by the activity and zeal of the officers, and the docility and obedience of the men. These qualities united with their native bravery and spirit will afford a happy presage of success, and put a final period to those distresses which now overwhelm this once happy country.”
Click the detail image above or this link to read the entire page from the July 6, 1775 New England Chronicle that features the welcome addresses and responses from Washington and Lee upon their arrival at Cambridge.
Colonial newspapers are unsung heroes of the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War. Specifically, several newspapermen and women deserve recognition 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 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:
If a finger had to be pointed at one person for causing the American Revolutionary War, a strong case can be made for pointing it at Thomas Hutchinson.
According to Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution by Andrew Stephen Walmsley (1999):
Rarely in American history has a political figure been so pilloried and despised by his contemporaries as Thomas Hutchinson… Vilified, stigmatized, and ridiculed, he eventually became the pre-eminent bete noire or scapegoat of America’s most vigorous radical activists. By 1774 he was arguably the most unpopular man in North America. His name had become synonymous in the popular imagination with detested loyalism, hated toryism and treason… One of the greatest challenges to confront Massachusetts’ radicals throughout the years of imperial crisis was to develop an effective formula for ousting Hutchinson. Without him as their foil, Boston’s radicals would have had a far more difficult time engineering the crisis that produced the Revolution.
The Hutchinson letters affair was one of the most famous controversies tied to Hutchinson, as well as Benjamin Franklin. The Hutchinson letters that Franklin leaked to his friend in Boston were eventually published in June 1773 in the Boston Gazette. Likely used as war propaganda, the New-England Chronicle republished the Hutchinson letters in June and July of 1775 — click here to read some of the Thomas Hutchinson letters printed in the June 29 to July 6, 1775 issue of the New-England Chronicle.
Equally interesting about the Hutchinson letters affair is the Benjamin Franklin confession (but no apology). According to Walter Isaacson’s biography on Franklin:
In December, two men engaged in an inconclusive duel in Hyde Park after one accused the other of leaking the letters. When a rematch seemed imminent, Franklin felt he had to step forward… he wrote… a letter to the London Chronicle on Christmas Day (published December 27). But he did not apologize.
The Rag Linen 1776 collection begins with important news from Parliament in London at the end of 1775 and concludes with Washington’s victory letter from his headquarters just outside Trenton on December 26, 1776. Between, we make stops to read period reports of the Fortification of Dorchester Heights, the Siege of Quebec, the Declaration of Independence, the pulling down of the equestrian statue of King George III in New York City, the Battle of Long Island and the Articles of Confederation. According to the synopsis for David McCullough’s 1776 book, “The darkest hours of that tumultuous year were as dark as any Americans have known. Especially in our own tumultuous time, 1776 is powerful testimony to how much is owed to a rare few in that brave founding epoch, and what a miracle it was that things turned out as they did.”
New with this collection is a supplemental video to help set the tone and importance of the pieces included in the 1776 collection. Enjoy.
If a finger had to be pointed at one person for causing the American Revolutionary War, a strong case can be made for pointing it at 
