Rag Linen | Online Museum of Historic Newspapers

“Always brutal and everywhere fierce, King Philip’s War, as it came to be called, proved to be not only the most fatal war in all of American history but also one of the most merciless,” Jill Lepore wrote in her award-winning book The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998).

The back cover summary of Lepore’s book reads: “In 1675 Algonquian Indians all over southern New England rose up against the Puritan colonists with whom they had lived peacefully for several decades. The result was the bloodiest war in American history, a terrifying conflict in which the Puritans found themselves fighting with a cruelty they had thought only the natives capable of.  By August 1676, when the severed head of the Wampanoag leader, King Philip, was displayed in Plymouth, thousands of Indians and English men, women, and children were dead. More than half of the new towns in New England had been wiped out, and the settlers’ sense of themselves as civilized people of God had been deeply shaken.”

One of the earliest printed accounts of King Philip’s War (that Lepore cited in several instances and even pictured in her book) appeared in the August 16 to 19, 1675 issue of the London Gazette.

As the lead report, spanning two-thirds of the London Gazette’s front page (the first time the Gazette had dedicated so much space to the American colonies, which alone underscored the severity and importance of the news), is a letter from Benjamin Batten, the son of Sir William Batten.

Benjamin Batten “happened to be in Boston when that fateful Indian uprising began, and my attention was drawn to him by a letter he wrote to Sir Thomas Allin, Comptroller of the Navy, relating in considerable detail the daily news of the trouble in Plymouth Colony down to the sixth of July, 1675.” (Benjamin Batten and the London Gazette by Douglas Leach, printed in the New England Quarterly 1963.)

The carnage is not diluted for the London Gazette readers:

• “In their journey they had seen lying the bodies of several English without heads, who had been murthered by the Indians…”
• “We had advice, that 16 English were killed in skirmishing and 7 Indians…”
• “And that 14 houses belonging to the English near Swansey, had been burnt…”
• “An Indian Spy had been executed at Plymouth…”
• “Having only seen ten Indians together, of whom they killed four; they found 6 English heads, and twice as many hands, being of those the Indians had murthered…”

Below is the famed issue of the London Gazette containing Batten’s letter about the first days of King Philip’s War. Click to enlarge.

On October 7, 1763, King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which legally restricted any westward expansion of American colonies beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The goal was to prevent the cost of any further conflict with the native Americans since the French and Indian War had just ended (browse Rag Linen’s French and Indian War Collection, which includes the Definitive Treaty of Friendship and Peace ending the war) .  However, the Proclamation resulted in what some historians consider the first cause of the American Revolution.

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.

On September 25, 1690, the first issue of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick hit the streets of Boston.  With that issue, Benjamin Harris published the first attempt at an American newspaper.

Harris intended for his newspaper to be printed monthly. It contained four pages — three with printed news and a blank one for readers to jot down personal reports before passing it along to family or friends. However, the first issue was printed without license and featured several eye-brow-raising reports, such as the King of France’s alleged affair with his daughter-in-law. The newspaper was immediately banned and all issues burned under the order of Governor Thomas Hinckley. No second edition was ever printed. In fact, the only original copy known to survive is held by the British Library, likely the issue sent back to the homeland by the Governor Hinckley. The issue’s three pages of printed news are shown above — click to enlarge.

With this one-issue-only asterisk next to its title in the history of journalism, Publick Occurrences is debated as the first American newspaper. Many historians give the title of first American newspaper or at least first successful American newspaper to the Boston News-Letter, which began publishing in 1704, almost 14 years after Benjamin Harris’s attempt. Check out the previous post to see a 1716 sample of the Boston News-Letter, when it was still the only newspaper being published in the colonies.

As a short digression, the reason for the 14-year gap partially falls on journalism trends and American reader interests during this time.  Copies of the popular London Gazette, which began publishing in 1665, were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean – usually taking four to eight weeks per voyage – to provide English and European residents in the New World with reports from their homelands. An intense hunger for news  from the motherland, satisfied by the thriving transatlantic readership of the London Gazette is, in part, the reason why we didn’t see the first successful newspaper printed on American soil until 1704.

Back to Benjamin Harris, whose career in publishing began in England during the 1670s. When strict press censorship under the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 temporarily lapsed from 1679 to 1685, Benjamin Harris was quick to begin printing news. On July 7, 1679, Harris launched the twice-weekly Domestick Intelligence newspaper that, as the title suggested, focused on local topics. Below are two photos from the October 31, 1679 issue of Harris’s Domestick Intelligence. Not long after the revival of the act, in 1686, Harris moved to Boston to avoid severe punishment for his politically- and religiously-charged reporting. According to The Public Prints (Clark, 1994):

“The timing could not hardly have been accidental. For violating the revived act, in fact, he had been pilloried and imprisoned just before coming to Boston in 1686. Prior to that, as an associate of Titus Oates, the vehement anti-Catholic publicist, and opponent of the accession of James, he had been prosecuted under common-law seditious libel proceedings during the earlier hiatus in the act. In Boston, he set up shop as a publisher, opened the London Coffee House, and engaged the printers of the town to print books and an almanac.”

The London Coffee House was a public place for people to read foreign newspapers (i.e., London Gazette) and books.  After Harris’s unsuccessful attempt at publishing an American newspaper in 1690, he continued to run the coffeehouse until 1695 when he packed his bags and moved back to London.  According to Clark:

“Boston printers, however, continued to produce broadsides, presumably with governmental sanction, that occasionally reported public events by printing excerpts from the London newspapers. In addition, the postmaster of Boston, a Scottish bookseller named Duncan Campbell, began exchanging news of Europe and the colonies with correspondents elsewhere in America. Thus the familiar devise of the hand-written newsletter took its place in the American communications chain in the 1690s.”

Duncan Campbell’s son John succeeded him as postmaster in 1702 and soon transitioned the handwritten newsletters into the printed and appropriately titled Boston News-Letter, the first successful newspaper in the colonies.

For more history on the first newspapers, check out our Beginning of Newspapers collection.