Rag Linen | Online Museum of Historic Newspapers

After extensive archive and internet research, including a few email exchanges with the British Library, it is my conclusion that the first official British newspaper report of the actual July 4th Declaration was published in the August 10 to 13, 1776, London Chronicle.  While the full printing of the Declaration appeared four days later in the August 17 issue of the Chronicle, the August 13 issue features on page three a brief, but hugely significant and historically important breaking news announcement:

Advice is received that the Congress resolved upon independence the 4th of July; and, it is said, have declared war against Great Britain in form.

With this, the people of England learned for the first time that America had officially declared itself independent.  According to history.com, news of the Declaration arrived in London on Saturday, August 10, 1776, and, at approximately 1300 words, took some time to typeset.  The London Gazette also published an August 10 to 13, 1776, issue, but it lacked any mention of the Declaration.  As the official court organ, and perhaps to avoid royal embarrassment, the Gazette also refrained from printing the entire text of the Declaration while other “Mother Country” newspapers jumped at it, including the London Chronicle (Aug 17 – first in Europe), Edinburgh Advertiser (Aug 20), Edinburgh Evening Courant (Aug 21), Belfast News-Letter (Aug 27), etc.  Click the article image to enlarge and read the first British news of America’s July 4th independence, as reported in the London Chronicle, August 13, 1776.

As a follow up to the previous post about the eyewitness account of  George Washington’s 1789 inauguration, below are excerpts from the May 6, 1789 Massachusetts Centinel, which contains descriptions of the inauguration as well as the full text of Washington’s first inaugural speech, one of America’s 100 milestone documents.

President Abraham Lincoln was shot at 9:30 p.m. on Friday, April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theater. He was moved to a house across the street where he died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15. The news bulletins through 2 a.m. reached the New York Herald by telegraph in time to make its first edition, making it the first national report.

Interestingly, the news is still so fresh in the first edition of the April 15 New York Herald that there is still doubt about the assassin. One dispatch describes “the person who fired the pistol” as a “man about thirty years of age, about five feet nine, spare built, fair skin, dark hair, apparently bushy, with a large mustache.”

The very next sentence, however, quotes a witness who identified the shooter. “Laura Keene and the leader of the orchestra declare that they recognized him as J. Wilkes Booth the actor, and a rabid secessionist. Whoever he was, it is plainly evident that he thoroughly understood the theatre and all the approaches and modes of escape to the stage.”

An interior report isn’t so quick to name Booth — “The assassin had not been arrested up to the hour of our latest despatches. Who he is is not positively known, though suspicion points strongly to a certain individual.”

Perhaps the most bloodcurdling report from the Herald‘s first edition was the news of Lincoln’s brain oozing out of the bullet hole in his head.

Historic newspapers are the first drafts of history.  And this fist edition — known as the 2 a.m. edition — of the April 15, 1865 New York Herald is certainly the first draft of a major event, printed just hours after Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater.

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 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.

Paul Revere’s engraving of Boston’s “Bloody Massacre” is one of his most well known works. As of this posting, more than 60 percent of the Google image results for “Paul Revere engraving” return his engraved depiction of the Boston Massacre.

A lesser known engraving by Revere is his patriotic response to the Stamp Act, titled “A View of the Year 1765“. An advertisement for Revere’s 1765 political cartoon was published in the January 27, 1766 issue of the Boston Gazette (see original ad below). Contextual background on this Revere engraving and the January 27, 1766 Boston Gazette can be found on page 48 and 49 of A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere (Triber, 2001).

Edward Cave’s famous Gentleman’s Magazine, which he edited under the pen name “Sylvanus Urban,” is considered the first general interest magazine ever published and was the first use of the term “magazine”.

Here is the fifth edition of the January 1731 issue that got it all started.

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.

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)