Colonial America edged closer to revolution in the late 1700s. During that time, a fascinating music discourse evolved and helped spread the fervor for freedom. In fact, colonial newspapers published the first dissident music writing in America. That tradition continues today, animating popular music discourse in another era of “No Kings.”  

Introduction

As near beauteous Boston lying

On the gently swelling flood,

Without jack or pennant flying

Three ill-fated tea-ships rode.

Just as glorious Sol was setting,

On the wharf, a numerous crew,

Sons of Freedom, fear forgetting,

Suddenly appear’d in view.[1]

“As Near Beauteous Boston Lying” lyrics, the Virginia Gazette, 1774. 

One of the first American protest songs, “Beauteous Boston,” was sung across the 13 Colonies thanks to the editor of the Virginia Gazette. However, printing the lyrics of protest songs was just one of the ways that journalists in colonial America contributed to the nation’s music culture in the years leading up to and following the Revolution.   

Indeed, the musical discourse of Colonial America from 1750 to 1790 took many forms: news, commentary, advertisements, song lyrics, and announcements. It began in the 1730s, made possible by the launch of the first colonial newspapers in the 1690s. By 1750, there were 14 newspapers. Most were four-page weeklies published in major cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

The music writings in these newspapers foreshadowed centuries of music journalism ahead. These texts introduced themes relevant today, such as music aesthetics, questioning norms, and the role of music in society.

By the 1750s, articles and opinion pieces about music appeared alongside news of a rising tide of discontent that became open rebellion in the 1770s. Dissidence and culture mingled on pages of raw newsprint, manifesting colonial publishers’ fight for free expression.   

A Period of Growth in Colonial America

By 1750, the population of the Thirteen Colonies had grown to 1.5 million people. As a result, the original settlements – Boston, Philadelphia, New Amsterdam, and others – had grown into small cities, each with its own newspaper. Western expansion was underway, but there were no English-language newspapers published in those territories.

Yet, Colonial America diversified as non-English immigrants arrived from Ireland, Germany, and other countries. Despite this diversity, status and freedoms were often based on ethnicity (and gender), no more so than for the thousands of enslaved African Americans. Their numbers had grown from zero in 1610 to 247,000 in 1750, mainly in the South.

However, owners of enslaved Black Americans had emancipated a small number during the First Great Awakening in the 1740s. This awakening sparked a Protestant revival driven by a desire for salvation, redemption, and evangelism. However, the revival had its critics, skeptical of its fervor. For example, slave owners protested revivalist ministers for converting enslaved Africans and encouraging emancipation. 

It was through these conversions that enslaved Blacks began attending church services and learning Protestant hymns. Over time, these converts started holding their own informal religious gatherings on plantations, blending hymns with African musical traditions, such as call-and-response. Participants acquired hymn-singing practices that carried over to the first Black churches in the 1770s.  

But hymnody was just one of several types of music performed in Colonial America in the mid-1700s. Other types of music included:  

• Ballads
• Patriotic songs
• Dance music
• Musical theater
• Opera
• Concert music

The places where musicians performed also varied, from churches to saloons to grand homes to the first American theaters in Williamsburg and New York City.  

The American Enlightenment

Thus, music proliferated in Colonial America in the mid-1700s. This went hand-in-hand with the efforts of newspaper publishers to nurture cultural refinement within the colonies. These publishers and their writers were educated individuals. And, they were influenced by a movement called the American Enlightenment.  

Like its European counterpart, this homegrown version emphasized reason, logic, and empirical evidence. It promoted the ideals of egalitarianism, individual rights, tolerance, and social reform. In addition, proponents of the American Enlightenment cultivated an appreciation for the arts, especially within the middle class. This led to the promotion of public concerts of classical music.

Enlightenment thinking increasingly shaped the music discourse in colonial newspapers. For example, a Pennsylvania Gazette writer used music metaphors to illustrate the virtues of order. Even the title expressed a methodical approach to the subject, “An Essay Upon Frenzy, Total and Partial, General and Particular.”

The writer used the example of a stringed instrument to illustrate escalating levels of disorder:

One string may be out of tune, and consequently disconcern the order and true harmony, and this is not perceived by an unskillful and uncultivated ear … But when two or three strings are out of order, it is more discernible … [And] when all the strings are out of tune, half broken and disordered … then [even] to the most untunable ear … there is no harmony at all.[2]

Another example of musical metaphor from the Pennsylvania Gazette expressed an aspiration for a government in harmony with its constituents:   

The sweetest of all sounds is LIBERTY, and wholesome laws with good government make the most enchanting harmony. Music, like the last trumpet, will be heard in the remotest regions and collect Mankind from the most distant parts of the globe.[3]

First Musicians Classifieds

As Liberty’s trumpet began to resound, life went on in Colonial America. A growing number of newspaper subscribers had goods and services to sell.

As a result, advertising continued to be an essential part of Colonial music discourse. Typically, a page or more was dedicated to advertisements, including those related to music. These ads included America’s first “musicians classifieds.”

For example, an Annapolis musician announced:

If any gentlemen should want music to their balls or merry-makings, upon application made, they shall be diligently waited on by their humble servant, John Lamond.[4]

This ad referred to the social practice of wealthy colonists hosting musical performances at their houses. In fact, domestic ballrooms were among the first performance spaces in Colonial America. This text highlights the social stratification that continued in the Colonies, despite Enlightenment values.

Another music instructor used the eloquently complicated prose of the time to attract students:  

Edmund Larkin, organist from London, begs leave to inform such gentlemen and ladies who are desirous of being instructed in the art of playing upon the harpsichord, spinet, and singing with the instruments, that he proposes to teach them …[5]

Music Promotions

In addition to musicians like Larkin, music promoters also advertised in newspapers. Their ads, too, provide insight into the types of venues and performances of the time. For example, an advertisement in the Maryland Gazette announced an upcoming theater performance of a “ballad opera called Damon and Philida.”[6]

Although this ad appears to be another representation of colonial elitism, it actually portended the coming of middlebrow culture. Ballad operas used popular songs and emerged at a time when art music was finding a mass audience in the growing middle class. One of the most popular of these was The Beggar’s Opera by dramatist John Gay. Colonial newspapers were full of advertisements and references to these shows’ characters and dialogue.[7]

Other ads promoted classical music performances:

Tragically, those promotional advertisements sat side-by-side with ads for runaway enslaved Americans. As they had for decades, ads frequently referenced the musical skills of runaways. For example, another Maryland Gazette ad detailed an escapee’s excellent musicianship:

Ran away from the subscriber … Charles Love, a tall, thin man about 60 years of age. He [excels in] music, dancing, and fencing, and plays extremely well on the violin and all wind instruments. He stole, when he went away, a very good bassoon … which he carried with him, [along with] a fiddle [and] German flute, which is his own. He rode a small white horse.[8]

In another time and place in American history, Charles Love might have become an orchestral violinist or conductor. Or a flautist in a jazz fusion band.

Musical Taste in Colonial America

As the American Enlightenment spread, some journalists took on the role of cultural intermediaries. These taste-makers mediated between the production and consumption of artistic works, such as books and musical performances.[9] Enlightenment culture critics argued that refined tastes enhanced moral reasoning and political philosophizing.  

This can be seen in a 1751 piece from the Pennsylvania Gazette. It provides a glimpse into one writer’s views of music, pleasure, and taste:

Our tastes are various and produce good effects in the world. Some are pleased with concords, others more with discords, in music. Some prefer the cry of a pack of hounds to a concert; as a certain Scythian general preferred the neigh of a horse to the sound of a trumpet. Those things suit every man best which are most agreeable to him. Whatever is good or bad for us in our own imagination and experience is good or bad in reality …

As our taste must not regulate that of others, we should not call a pleasure unnatural, because it not it does not suit with our nature. Nor ought we to censure the inclinations of others merely because they contradict our own; but rather encourage every man to follow the bent of his particular nature and appetite …[10]

This passage highlights the American Enlightenment’s support for egalitarian tastes. It stands in stark contrast to earlier colonial writings that criticized those with no appreciation for fine music.  

An Unmanly Taste in Music

However, this didn’t stop some Colonial “music critics” from lambasting musicians and audiences for their lack of taste. And, like today, these writers had their pet peeves.

For example, Pennsylvania Journal writer John Brown despised ostentatious displays of musicianship so much that he published an essay about them in 1757. Brown called such displays “miscarriages” and derided a “depraved” culture for tolerating them:   

The principal view of this [essay] is to show that [a flamboyant performance] is not the accidental misconduct of individuals, but the depraved principles and manners of the times …[11]

He said:

[An] excess of effeminate delicacy has influenced every … [type of] entertainment. It has produced a low and unmanly taste in music. We do not go to concerts or operas to admire the composition, but the tricks of the performer, who is always most applauded when he runs through the compass of the throat, or traverses the fingerboard with the swiftest dexterity.[12]

Brown’s passage shows how the dominance of male performers at that time led to sexist expectations of a masculine performance style devoid of “delicacy” or flash. Yet, it also shows how music-loving writers in Colonial America took on the role of cultural intermediaries.  

A Very Remarkable Young Musician

However, not all music discourse in newspapers came from the pens of Colonial writers. These weeklies also reprinted articles about music published by English newspapers. At that time, across the Channel, European musicians ushered in a new era in art music, the Classical period.

This inspired British writers to publish essays on Classical musicians and their works. Editors in American newspapers, in turn, brought these essays to their readers. Doing so furthered the American Enlightenment’s mission of cultivating the tastes of colonists.

For example, the South Carolina General Gazette reprinted an essay about a nine-year-old prodigy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It was written by Daines Barrington, an English lawyer and naturalist known for his writings on child prodigies. Thus, when Mozart visited England in 1764, Barrington met with him and wrote an article called “Account of a Very Remarkable Young Musician.” It was first published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1770. The Gazette included this credential, bolstering Barrington’s expertise as a cultural intermediary.

Lengthy articles about European composers were rare in colonial newspapers. This full-page account of Mozart was an exception. An excerpt shows that Barrington’s interactions with the prodigy were extraordinary: 

Finding that [Mozart] was in humour, and as it were inspired, I then desired him to compose a song of rage, such as might be proper for the opera stage. The boy … looked back with much archness and began five or six lines of a jargon recitative proper to precede a song of anger.

This he did also about the same time with the songs of love; and in the middle of it, he had worked himself up to such a pitch that he beat his harpsichord like a person possessed, rising sometimes in his chair …

I must add [that] I have been informed by two or three able musicians, when Bach, the celebrated composer, had begun a fugue and left off abruptly, that little Mozart hath immediately taken it up, and worked it after a most masterly manner …  

[Mozart] had not only a most childish appearance, but likewise had all the actions of that stage of life. For example, whilst he was playing to me, a favorite cat came in, upon which he immediately left his harpsichord, nor could we bring him back for a considerable time.[13]

Contrast this with the lives of Black children in Colonial America. Immediately below the Mozart profile was an advertisement for three enslaved African Americans, including a six-year-old girl – a journalistic transition from the sublime to the horrific.  

Like Strokes of Lightning

In fact, newspaper articles about music shared column space with all kinds of texts, from essays to advertisements. And, in the early 1770s, these texts included news and commentary about rising political dissent. In particular, colonists protested taxation without representation. The rumblings of revolution had begun.

Out of this mood of dissatisfaction, an underground resistance formed. Militant organizations held secret meetings. Chief among these were the Sons of Liberty.

The group formed in response to the Stamp Act of 1765. This act required printed materials in the colonies to be produced on stamped paper from London, which included an embossed revenue stamp. A new slogan rose in dissident circles, “taxation without representation.”   

But it was another Royal Decree that sparked the American Revolution, the Tea Act of 1773.  The proclamation pressured colonists to purchase tea arriving from the British East India Company. The floundering business needed extra revenue. But the Crown had an ulterior motive; if colonists complied, they would tacitly agree to Parliament’s right of taxation, thereby quelling rising protests against taxation.

The Tea Act gave the Sons of Liberty a call to action. Newspapers already supported the group, as seen in an uncredited Virginia Gazette piece published on December 2, 1773. The writer framed the text as a thank-you card to the Sons of Liberty:    

[This is] a card, presenting compliments to all the Sons of Liberty in America, particularly to those of New York, to congratulate and acquaint them that I sincerely rejoice to find such a numerous body of high-spirited people here exerting themselves, with the most essential perseverance, in the good old cause of general liberty, am glad to find that Americans are still universal in the grand cause.

Like strokes of lightning, in a moment, your sentiments are penetrating to the very bottom of every iniquitous dark and futile scheme of endeavoring to catch old birds with chaff; a foreign chaff called tea, that for a considerable time past has very much disturbed our peace …[14]

Two weeks later, on December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as Native Americans and destroyed a shipment of tea from the East India Company in Boston Harbor. Word speedily spread by mouth and in print. 

Newspapers Disseminate Protest Songs

The Stamp Act and the Tea Act inspired the first American protest songs. Colonial newspapers played an essential role in disseminating these tunes. In doing so, publishers co-conspired with emergent dissident groups such as the Sons of Liberty.

In January 1774, the Virginia Gazette published one of the first of these topical songs, “As Near Beauteous Boston Lying.”[15]   

As near beauteous Boston lying

On the gently swelling flood,

Without jack or pennant flying.

Three ill-fated tea-ships rode.

Just as glorious Sol was setting,

On the wharf a numerous crew,

Sons of Freedom, fear forgetting,

Suddenly appear’d in view.

Arm’d with hammers, axes, chisels,

Weapons new for warlike deed,

Toward the tax-d-tea freighted vessels

They came boldly and with speed.

O’er their heads in lofty mid sky.

Three bright angel forms were seen.

This was Hampden, that was Sydney,

With fair Liberty between.

“Soon,” they cried, “your foes you’ll banish,

Soon the triumph will be won,

Scarce the setting sun shall vanish

Ere the glorious deed is done!”

Quick as though the ships were boarded,

Hatches burst and chests display’d;

Axes, hammers, help afforded,

What a crash that eve was made.

Deep into the sea descended

Cursed weed of China’s cost;

Thus at once our fears were ended!

British rights shall ne’er be lost!

Captains, once more hoist your streamers,

Spread your sails and plough the wave,

Tell your master they were dreamers

When they thought to cheat the brave!

Seven months later, the Gazette published another set of protest lyrics titled “The Liberty Song.”[16] It began with a call to unity:

Come join hand in hand, brave Americans all,

And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty’s call …

Following each verse, a refrain declared:

In freedom we’re born and in freedom we’ll live …[17]

Intolerable Acts

Lyrics like these expressed the open defiance of the Crown that swept the colonies after the Boston Tea Party. England immediately retaliated. The British Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts, a series of laws imposing taxes on Massachusetts colonists for protesting the Tea Tax. Colonists took these laws as a declaration of war.

Other colonies came to the defense of Massachusetts and formed the First Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774. It resolved to boycott British imports unless England rescinded the Intolerable Acts. Hostilities heightened between colonists and royalists. New patriot militias formed.

In the spring of 1775, militias took on the British Army in the Battles of Lexington and Concord. At Concord, Paul Revere made his famous midnight ride to warn the local militia of an impending British raid. The next morning, British soldiers attacked another militia in Lexington before marching to Concord, where the forewarned militia fought off the British troops. 

However, the revolutionaries knew it would take more than a handful of independent militias to win their independence. Colonial leaders convened the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in May 1775. That august body formed the Continental Army, a united front against the British.   

Dire Words

As Continental Congress leaders assembled their army, groups of colonists held town meetings to rally their spirits. Out of these meetings came rousing new songs with patriotic song lyrics such as this:

Here is success to our forces

True honor and honesty’s son

Our Congress will plan out our courses

We cheerfully take up our guns.[18]    

Colonial editors did their part by publishing these songs of freedom, thereby validating the cause and spreading patriotic fervor. But, more importantly, newspapers published calls to action by revolutionary leaders. Never in American history has the exercise of press freedom been so consequential.

For example, following the defense of Concord, the Hartford Courant published a resolution signed by John Hancock, who was then the president of the Massachusetts provincial congress:     

Whereas it is indispensably necessary for the safety of a free people and the preservation of their liberties, that they at all times keep themselves in a state of actual defense against every invasion or predation, and this colony being still threatened by a powerful army posted in its capital with a professed design of executing certain acts of the British parliament calculated to destroy our invaluable rights and liberties and the government of this colony, as by charter and law established therein:

Therefore resolved, that the measures that have heretofore been recommended by this and the former Provincial Congress for the purpose of putting this colony into a complete state of defense be still more vigorously pursued …[19]

Dire words. Shiver-inducing with today’s hindsight of the bloodshed to come. Furthermore, these were treasonous words, published by newspaper editors putting their lives on the line in the name of free speech.

Music of War

Other newspaper missives, while not as lofty, alerted colonists to impending danger. One example, from the Maryland Gazette, reprinted a handbill that arrived by “express”: 

Philadelphia, April 24, 1775.

To all friends of American liberty, be it known that this morning before break of day, a [British] brigade consisting of about 1,000 or 1,200 men landed at Phipps Farm, at Cambridge, and marched to Lexington, where they found a company of our colony militia in arms, upon whom they fired without any provocation, and killed six men and wounded four others.[20]

This was the time of the first American military bands, the fife and drum corps, which accompanied soldiers into combat. These ensembles played an essential role in battlefield communication, with drummers relaying commands over the sounds of battle. Back in camp, the fife and drum corps announced changes in daily routines, including the start times for meals.

Out of the corps repertoire came one of America’s most well-known patriotic tunes, as noted in this account of a battle outside of Boston:   

Five of six hundred marines, to reinforce the King’s troops, arrived at Boston on Saturday last from Halifax.

When the Second Brigade [of Patriot forces] marched out of Boston to reinforce the first, nothing was played by the fife and drums but Yankee Doodle …[21]

“Yankee Doodle” became the Boston Brigade’s favorite tune. It came into being after British troops tarred and feathered a colonist and paraded him “through the principal streets, under arms, with their bayonets fixed.”[22] As whimsical as the tune was, it became taken up by military bands across the colonies.

A Declaration

A year after this article was published, Continental Congress leader John Adams nominated George Washington as the commander-in-chief of the newly formed Continental Army. The following day, on July 4, 1776,  the Second Continental Congress published the Declaration of Independence.

Within days, newspapers published the Declaration. It was read by officials, soldiers, shop-owners, farmers, saloon keepers, clergy, and others across the 13 Colonies. One of the most consequential proclamations of democracy in human history, it was published under the unassuming title of “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America”:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness …[23]

But valiant words require battlefield victories if they’re to become reality.

Songs! Songs! Songs!

When victory came, it was hard-won.

For five years, five steaming summers and five freezing winters, George Washington’s Continental Army took defeat after defeat. Thousands of soldiers died or were taken prisoner. Mutiny was commonplace. In 1780, the Continental Army in the South ceased to exist after British troops took Charleston.  

Which is why it seems miraculous that, the following year, Washington defeated General Charles Cornwallis’s British troops in the battle for Yorktown, Virginia.

The news heartened American songwriters. An advertisement for song broadsides proclaimed:

Songs! Songs! Songs!

Just fresh from the press, on the glorious victory and surrender of Lord Cornwallis and his whole army, etcetera, to the illustrious and magnanimous General Washington.[24]

After the Battle of Yorktown, it became clear to the British that their defeat was inevitable. In February 1783, Great Britain officially recognized the independence of the United States and declared that it would cease hostilities.

Newspapers became a conduit for the joy sweeping the new nation. The Virginia Gazette posted an excerpt from a letter from Fredericksburg about a “rural entertainment” held upon the occasion of “the glorious news of peace”:[25]   

The afternoon was spent in a dance on the green with intervals of loud exclamation of joy. At night, they retired to their homes in a peaceable, orderly manner, with drums beating and fifes playing to the tune of Yankee Doodle or the Lexington March, which was, you know, the first tune set to martial music when the commencement of the war took place.[26]

That first sentence could have described a sixties be-in. A nation at peace celebrated with dancing and music.

The Horrors of an Embattled Army

Following the war, echoes of cannon fire and muskets lingered in the public consciousness, at home and abroad. In London, a conductor led a performance aimed at evoking the emotions of war that remained in the air.   

American readers read about it in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser:

On Monday evening last, one of the most extraordinary attempts to prove the power of music that ever yet has been made in this Kingdom, was exhibited in the style and under the title of a concert, at the assembly rooms, Saint James.

The idea was that of representing the martial music, din, and horrors of an embattled army, so as that the tones of the different instruments should cause the ear to believe a reality of the action whilst the eye was convinced of the inimitable deception.

The entertainment commenced with a grand overture composed for two orchestras and divided into Allegro, Andante, and Presto parts as a prologue to the battle.

To arms followed, and several random cannon and musket shots interchanged between the two orchestras were so distinctly imitated in music that we were led to imagine the actual preference of the. Bursting powder. The real noise of the whiffling ball. …

… The supposition of a defeat gave further scope to the inventive faculties of the designer and proved the executive powers of the band to imitate the total rout of the conquered army, the sound of the retreat, the signal to pursue, with the bustle, noise, and clamor naturally attending …

The straggling shots in the pursuit conveyed a soft, beautiful harmony in the corresponding music from one orchestra to the other, which, with the plaintive tones of the wounded and the lamentations of the expiring soldier, so naturally expressed, had a most powerful effect on the [audience].[27] 

Epilogue

This moving article foreshadowed the increasing coverage of music in post-Revolution America. And the greater depth of writing to come.

The same week the Advertiser published this account, representatives of the United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the war.

Colonists went to work creating a governing body for the new nation. Six years later, General George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States of America in April 1779.

Eight years later, delegates convened in Philadelphia to draft a governing document for the fledgling country. Their work culminated in the signing of the U.S. Constitution on September 17, 1787. However, debates about the Constitution persisted for over a year.

The final round of discussions began when the first Congress met in New York City in March 1789. That September, they proposed 12 amendments. Congress ratified these additions as the Bill of Rights in December 1791. In just over 15 years, American colonists declared and secured their independence from Britain and established the foundational documents that still govern the nation —all without the internet, telephones, automobiles, or even electricity.

The completion of the founding documents was a triumph for American journalists. Protections for their profession had been enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

These words codified the essential role of the press in a democracy. To this day, journalism remains the only profession safeguarded by the Constitution.

Conclusion

From 1750 to 1790, colonial journalists produced a continuous discourse about music despite a war and the growing pains of a fledgling republic. They laid the foundation for centuries of music journalism to follow.

The American Enlightenment motivated these writers. Some assumed the mantle of cultural intermediaries, shaping the tastes of colonial readers.

But above all, these newspaper publishers, editors, and journalists asserted their free speech. Speech that rattled social conventions. Speech that cultivated a cultural awakening. Speech that spoke truth to power, even in the midst of war.  

Notes

---

[1] Uncredited. Virginia Gazette, Jan. 20, 1774: 3

[2] Uncredited. “An essay upon frenzy, total and partial, general and particular,” Pennsylvania Gazette, Dec. 6, 1745: 1.

[3] Uncredited, untitled, Pennsylvania Gazette, May 18, 1748: 2.  

[4] Advertisement, Maryland Gazette, Nov. 21, 1750: 3.

[5] Advertisement, South Carolina Gazette, Nov.8, 1751: 2.

[6] Advertisement, Maryland Gazette, July 23, 1752: 2.

[7] Advertisement. “By Permission of His Honor the President,” Maryland Gazette, Aug. 27, 1752: 3.

[8] Advertisement. Maryland Gazette, Sept. 29, 1757: 3.

[9] Jennifer Smith Maguire and Julian Matthews, editors. The Cultural Intermediaries Reader, Sage, 2014: 1.

[10] Uncredited. Untitled, Pennsylvania Gazette, July 4, 1771: 1.

[11] John Brown. “Some Account of an Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times,” Pennsylvania Journal, Aug. 4, 1757: 1.

[12] John Brown. “Some Account of an Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times,” Pennsylvania Journal, Aug. 4, 1757: 1.

[13] Daines Barrington, “Literary Article,” South Carolina General Gazette, Nov. 4, 1771: 4.

[14] Uncredited. “A Card,” Virginia Gazette, Dec. 2, 1773: 1.

[15] Uncredited. Virginia Gazette, Jan. 20, 1774: 3

[16] Uncredited. Virginia Gazette, Aug. 11, 1774: 4.

[17] Uncredited. Virginia Gazette, Aug. 11, 1774: 4.

[18] Uncredited. Virginia Gazette, July 27, 1775: 4.

[19] John Hancock. “Boston,” Hartford Courant, April 3, 1775: 2.

[20] Uncredited, “Annapolis,” Maryland Gazette, April 27, 1775: 2.

[21] Untitled. Uncredited, Pennsylvania Evening Post, May 25, 1775: 2.

[22] Untitled. Uncredited, Pennsylvania Evening Post, May 25, 1775: 2.

[23] John Hancock. “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America,” Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, July 8, 1776: 1.

[24] Advertisement, Poulson’s American Advertiser, Feb. 26, 1782: 3.

[25] Uncredited, “Richmond,” Virginia Gazette, May 17, 1783: 1-2.

[26] Uncredited, “Richmond,” Virginia Gazette, May 17, 1783: 1-2.

[27] Uncredited, “London, June 9, 1783,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Sept. 25, 1783: 3.