Rag Linen | Online Museum of Historic Newspapers

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.

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.

At a town meeting on March 12, 1770 — one week after the Boston Massacre — James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren and Samuel Pemberton were appointed to a committee to prepare the Patriot account of the massacre.

According to John Doggett Jr.’s 1849 enhanced edition of the Patriot account, during that March 12 meeting a “report made by John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, and others” was presented to the citizens of Boston.  “The whole presenting, it is believed, the most complete and authentic account which has been published of the massacre.”

This report by Hancock, Adams, Warren, et al. was also published in the March 13 to 20, 1770 issue of the Essex Gazette, printed in Salem, Massachusetts, about 18 miles north of Boston. To help commemorate this Friday’s 240th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, below are 24 images from that famous edition of the Essex Gazette.

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.

Franklin’s public confession led to his appearance before the Privy Council, which many historians point to as the moment when Franklin officially stopped supporting Britain and became an American revolutionary.

Below is Benjamin Franklin’s public confession to leaking the Hutchinson letters as published in the March 7, 1774 Boston Gazette.

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.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died only hours apart on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.  One of the best newspaper reports covering their deaths was the July 15, 1826 Niles’ Weekly Register, which also included biographical backgrounds and respects for each.  Here are the first few pages from that issue:

Thanks to the tip from @bostonhistory, we learned today that photographs and video will be banned in the Rotunda of the National Archives, home to the original Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. The ban goes into effect February 24, 2010.

For an excellent history on the conservation and preservation of the historic documents, check out NOVA’s “Saving the National Treasures“.

While photos and video will soon be prohibited, you can still download high resolution images of the Charters of Freedom at archives.gov or check out the our poor-quality photos we took while visiting Washington DC in 2009 (below). The documents are stored in $5 million state-of-the-art cases, which are housed in the dimly lit Rotunda of the National Archives.

The Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Paris (1783), the Constitution of the United States (1787), the Bill of Rights (1791) — all of these are widely recognized for being among the most important documents in American history. Another milestone document was President George Washington’s Farewell Address (1796), in which Washington declared he would not seek reelection for a third term.

“The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.”

Aside from helping to define the term limit for the President of the United States by voluntarily surrendering the office after two terms, it also served as the foundation for American non-interventionism.

“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.”

Washington’s Farewell Address to the People of the United States was originally published in the American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, then Capital of the United States) on September 19, 1796. Below are images from the full printing that appeared on September 21, 1796, in The Herald: A Gazette for the Country (New York). Links to additional background and transcripts are also provided below.

• Primary Documents in American History: George Washington’s Farewell Address
  (Library of Congress)
• 100 Milestone Documents: President George Washington’s Farewell Address
  (Our Documents)

On the morning of July 11, 1804, a sitting Vice President of the United States shot and subsequently killed a Founding Father. Imagine the headlines and talk shows if that happened today!?

There are plenty of books and websites — even films and humorous web videos — to browse for background and analysis on the famous duel.  Going back in time to a key primary source, the July 25, 1804 Massachusetts Spy printed 12 letters exchanged between Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton and their seconds in the days that preceded the duel.  The issue also contains a wealth of other important content related to the event, including Alexander Hamilton’s last will and testament, which he wrote the day before the duel. Click the images below to browse the July 25, 1804 “extra” issue of the Massachusetts Spy.