I’ve commented before about the innate delays in 18th-century reporting. Because the latest news could travel only as fast as a horse could run or a ship could sail, it took some time for it to move through the communications networks of the Anglo-American world. When deciding what pieces to reprint from months-old British newspapers and magazines, Maryland Gazette publisher Anne Catharine Green had to consider what her readers would still find interesting and informative.
In March 1771, one of the items Mrs. Green chose to run was an anonymous public letter from the November 6, 1770 London Chronicle. Written by “An American, to those Englishmen who virulently write and talk against his Countrymen,” the letter succinctly exposed the inconsistencies between what some Britons said about the colonists and how they acted toward them.
Each paragraph posed a series of questions:
1. If some of you Englishmen say that we Americans don’t observe our own nonimportation agreements but instead secretly import and use British goods, then why are you so angry with us and why do you propose compelling us to trade by force?
2. If others of you say we do observe our boycotts but that we can’t keep doing so for long, then why can’t you exercise a little patience and just wait for us to fail?
3. Do you think that insulting Americans in the British press will put us in a good mood and make us want to buy more imports from you?
4. Are you really so certain that we can’t supply ourselves with goods from sources other than Great Britain?
5. If, as you assert, the high cost of labor makes manufacturing impracticable in America, then why not let us discover that truth for ourselves? The hard realization would only strengthen our commercial reliance on you. Do you think you’re doing us a favor by trying so hard to prove that American manufactures can’t succeed? Or are you out to show that mistreating the colonies won’t jeopardize the Mother Country’s commercial advantages?
6. If, as you say, some colonies entered into the boycott agreement because we’re deep in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy, then is our refusal to dig ourselves into a deeper hole so terrible an offense that you must threaten official retribution against us?
7. If Americans are truly as bad as you Englishmen say we are, then why do you want to do business with us so desperately? Why such rage when we refuse to trade with you? Why such elation when you hear that some of us have dropped the boycott?
8. If the American trade is really so insignificant, then why punish us for inflicting what you claim to be no serious harm on your interests? If Americans only hurt themselves by boycotting British goods, then why not let us do so like disobedient children?
9. But, if American commerce and friendship really benefit the Mother Country, then what makes you think your abuses of us should be applauded?
10. Might not rising civil discord between America and Great Britain encourage foreign interference? What good can come of destroying the bonds between us? Is there anything worse than provoking civil war, turning a monarch against his subjects and fathers against their children, and encouraging deadly strife between members of the same family?
11. Might there not come a time when England must turn to America for help? When in “the Course of human Affairs” Britons must look to America as a safe refuge? In such a time of danger and need for support, wouldn’t it be better “to find there Liberty and Friends than Slavery and Enemies?”
In that last paragraph, I’m struck by the phrase “the Course of human Affairs” and its future echo in the opening line of the Declaration of Independence: “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 require that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
More than five years before Thomas Jefferson catalogued and submitted a list of those causes “to a candid world,” the anonymous author of this letter called out the English attitudes and actions that would eventually make American separation necessary.
You can read the March 14, 1771 issue of the Maryland Gazette starting here: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001281/html/m1281-1241.html
Glenn E. Campbell
HA Senior Historian
