I was honored to learn that Gary Gregory, founder of Lessons on Liberty and one of the participants in the 1770 reenactment, keeps the Rag Linen app on his iPhone. In fact, I was so flattered, I asked if I could snap a quick photo (at left, click to enlarge). Moments after snapping this pic of colonial iPhone usage, I found another colonial sipping a McDonald’s beverage. I love the juxtaposition.

UPDATE (3/10/10): Coincidentally, the same day this post was published, Colonial Williamsburg launched two free iPhone apps, including one called “Today in the 1770s“.

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.

According to the Origins of the American Revolution by John Chester Miller (1959):

“One of the chief reasons why Americans had rejoiced in the peace terms of 1763 was that the West seemed to have been thrown open to their expansion. The removal of the French menace had, it was believed, made possible at long last the settlement of the American West by British subjects… Since the Indians had taken to the warpath in 1763 partly because they fears they were about to be deprived of their lands by the advancing line of white settlement, the British government issued a proclamation which established a line of demarcation — roughly the summit of the Alleghenies — westward of which no British subject could purchase land or settle. Hastily drawn and designed only to meet a temporary emergency, the Proclamation of 1763 became the foundation of a permanent British policy toward the American West.”

To many colonists, particularly those on the frontier, who were often called the Piedmont, Mother England was being over protective of her American children. According to The Real History of the American Revolution: A New Look at the Past by Alan Axelrod, “after the Proclamation of 1763, [colonists] began to think of themselves as victims of tyranny.”

Below is the first report of the Proclamation of 1763 as published in the October 4 to 8, 1763 issue of the London Gazette.

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.