Thirteen Clocks

How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence

Robert G. Parkinson

• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469662589
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In his celebrated account of the origins of American unity, John Adams described July 1776 as the moment when thirteen clocks managed to strike at the same time. So how did these American colonies overcome long odds to create a durable union capable of declaring independence from Britain? In this powerful new history of the fifteen tense months that culminated in the Declaration of Independence, Robert G. Parkinson provides a troubling answer: racial fear. Tracing the circulation of information in the colonial news systems that linked patriot leaders and average colonists, Parkinson reveals how the system's participants constructed a compelling drama featuring virtuous men who suddenly found themselves threatened by ruthless Indians and defiant slaves acting on behalf of the king. Parkinson argues that patriot leaders used racial prejudices to persuade Americans to declare independence. Between the Revolutionary War's start at Lexington and the Declaration, they broadcast any news they could find about Native Americans, enslaved Blacks, and Hessian mercenaries working with their British enemies. American independence thus owed less to the love of liberty than to the exploitation of colonial fears about race. Thirteen Clocks offers an accessible history of the Revolution that uncovers the uncomfortable origins of the republic even as it speaks to our own moment.

CHAPTER 1

NEWSPAPERS on the Eve of the REVOLUTIONARY WAR

Bostonians were on edge at the end of 1767, for more reason than the onset of yet another bitter New England winter. The Townshend Duties, Parliament’s second attempt at asserting its authority to tax the American colonies, had just gone into effect, and the Sons of Liberty were having a hard time convincing Bostonians to fight it with all their might. They wanted merchants to adopt a sweeping nonimportation boycott, but they were struggling to find support. Samuel Adams, James Otis, John Hancock, and their fellow patriot leaders were on the defensive.

So, when printers John Mein and John Fleeming brought out the premier issue of the Boston Chronicle on December 21, patriot leaders could not afford for it to be hostile to their sputtering resistance movement. When they saw that page one included an article from an English paper attacking William Pitt, they knew it spelled trouble. Pitt was a hero of the Sons of Liberty, and this was powerful evidence that the Chronicle was not going to be friendly to their political point of view.

Three weeks later, Otis and Adams responded in the Boston Gazette, the most radical patriot paper in Boston (and in America). Gazette printers Benjamin Edes and John Gill counted themselves as integral members of the patriot leadership, with Edes playing an active role in the Sons. The January 18, 1768, Gazette featured a provocative essay written by “Americus” that defended Pitt and heaped abuse on the Chronicle. Mein (pronounced “mean”) did not take this criticism lightly.¹

He burst into the Gazette’s shop on Queen Street, demanding to know who “Americus” was. Edes retorted that Mein, as a fellow printer, ought to know he would never reveal his sources. This did nothing to calm Mein down; the Chronicle printer returned that, if Edes wouldn’t name names, he must be “Americus,” and Mein threatened to do him harm. When Edes again refused, Mein stormed out. The next morning, as Edes arrived at work, he found Mein already skulking at the door, still seeking justice for the perceived slander against him and his paper. Edes again refused to divulge his sources; Mein came back again that evening and took his frustration out on the more diminutive John Gill by thrashing him in the street with a cane. Sam Adams, writing as “Populus” in the Gazette, would soon refer to the attack on Gill as a “Spaniard-like Attempt” to restrict the freedom of the press.²

This was only the start of John Mein’s combat with Boston patriots. Gill would sue Mein for damages, and, represented by John Adams, he forced Mein to pay a substantial fine for his violent outburst. During the year that Adams prepared for Gill v. Mein, political tensions in Boston went from bad to worse. Sporadic violence against imperial officials convinced the crown to send troops to occupy the city. In October 1768, twelve hundred British redcoats tramped up the Long Wharf and set up their tents on Boston Common, a block away from John Mein’s print shop on Newbury Street. This escalation convinced the city’s merchants that the Sons of Liberty were right: they should boycott all British imports for the entirety of 1769.³

Rather, it convinced some merchants. By the summer, there were more British goods on store shelves than there should have been. This was suspicious. Someone was breaking the boycott. Boston patriots began interviewing merchants and printed a handbill that admitted 6 of the 211 merchants had not been properly attentive to the boycott. John Mein blew his stack. This was a cover-up. He had information that 190 of the 211 merchants were violating the nonimportation agreement, and he boasted he would prove that Boston’s patriots were liars and hypocrites. For the rest of the summer of 1769, Mein and his partner Fleeming splashed dozens of ships’ manifests across the front pages of the Chronicle, giving documented evidence that patriots like John Hancock were not to be trusted.

This affront made the Chronicle printers marked men, and they knew it. As the summer faded, Mein and Fleeming stuffed pistols in their pockets everywhere they went. By October, the city’s town meeting condemned Mein as an enemy of his country. In early November, a large crowd confronted the printers on King Street, and a fight broke out. In the scuffle, while Mein was getting roughed up, Fleeming managed to draw his gun and pull the trigger. Luckily, he did not hit anyone, and the printers fled to hide out in the shelter of a British guardhouse. When Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to come to Mein’s aid, Mein decided he wasn’t safe in Boston anymore. In the middle of November, he sneaked aboard a ship bound for England. The feisty, confrontational loyalist printer was gone forever.⁴

John Mein’s clash with Boston patriots tells us several important things about newspapers and the American Revolution. First, it illustrates the increasing politicization of colonial newspapers in the 1760s. Earlier in the eighteenth century, printers in England and America boasted that “freedom of the press” meant their pages were open to all points of view. The Stamp Act changed all that. In 1765, Parliament placed a tax on paper in the colonies. Anyone who wanted to print anything on paper, from playing cards to legal documents, had to do so on sheets that bore the king’s stamp. Newspapers were right in the center of the controversy. The Stamp Act did more than politicize paper; the subsequent storm that the hated tax touched off also transformed what a “free press” meant. Newspapers in America became more overtly partisan, most siding with the infant patriot movement, and they also became progressively more polarized. Over the decade between the Stamp Act and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, any printers who tried to maintain a neutral or moderate stance on the imperial crisis failed. In every city, not just Boston, newspapers took sides either for or against the burgeoning patriot resistance movement. A “free press” was becoming one that claimed it was free from political pressure or force, not one that was open to both sides of this imperial debate.

The Mein episode reveals one important reason for the increasingly intense politicization: printers were becoming political actors themselves. Because publishing a newspaper by itself wasn’t the most lucrative business in the colonial marketplace, all printers angled to have the governor appoint them official printer of the colony’s laws and dollar bills. This was where the money was. In fact, it was the appointment to this position that eventually allowed Benjamin Franklin to retire from printing and enter politics. Printers, therefore, had long watched for sudden shifts in colonial politics. At the outset of the imperial crisis, many began to play leading roles in the resistance.

Benjamin Edes was not the only printer who joined the Sons of Liberty. Several other leading printers were also members of their local branches of the Sons: Pennsylvania Journal printer William Bradford in Philadelphia and Providence Gazette printer William Goddard, to name two. In 1766, when debts forced John Holt to stop operation of his New-York Gazette; or, the Weekly Post-Boy, the New York City Sons of Liberty helped him secure new equipment and start a new paper, the New-York Journal. Like the Boston Gazette, the New-York Journal would become one of the most important patriot papers in America.

If printers were becoming patriots, Mein’s clash also shows how patriot leaders were acting like printers, too. Mein was right to suspect that “Americus” was James Otis. Patriot leaders throughout the colonies understood how important print was to the success of their political efforts, and they made print shops sites of revolution. If we revisit those two shops on Boston’s Newbury and Queen Streets in the late summer of 1769, we find Mein and Fleeming working hard at the Chronicle’s press, publishing their run of fifty-five ship manifests and customs records to undermine the public’s confidence in nonimportation. They printed four thousand copies of the lists and sent them gratis all over North America. On the first Saturday of September, John Adams detailed in his diary how he, his cousin Sam, James Otis, and the Boston Gazette printers responded to the Chronicle’s assault. They passed long hours working in the Gazette print shop: “The evening [was] spent in preparing for the Next Days Newspaper. A curious Employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurrences etc.—working the political Engine!” Adams gives us a remarkable glimpse into the interconnectedness of political leaders and printers in the American Revolution. This was a symbiotic process; printers and political leaders needed one another.⁵

What did John Adams mean, exactly, by the phrase “cooking up”? Was this “fake news”? Perhaps. That term, one of the present day, has a pejorative connotation. But that should not keep us from seeing what the Adamses were doing in the Gazette offices that evening. They were manipulating the news. They would contend that they did so for serious reasons and that John Mein was a dangerous threat. According to one historian, Mein’s “cleverness, courage, resourcefulness, and journalistic skill made the task of silencing him both necessary and difficult.” His elimination was critical. If it took doctoring—or even fabricating—items in the newspaper to destroy the public’s confidence in Mein and his lists, they showed few qualms about doing so.⁶

“Cooking up” could mean many different things. One option would be to pen a scathing essay (today it would be called an op-ed) under a pseudonym. Doing so under the protection of a false name offered writers several advantages. They often adopted disguises from ancient Rome or Greece that allowed them to appear as public defenders (such as “Populus”) or ancient guardians of liberty or virtue (such as “Nestor” or “Cato”). Pseudonyms enabled them to deny authorship and maintain their ability to say that they would never get down in the political muck. Anonymity also increased the printer’s social and political power. Only Edes and Gill knew the identity of “Americus,” as John Mein found out the hard way. Printers were secret keepers. And by managing secrets well, they gained credibility with political leaders. Trust was a critical element in this burgeoning, fragile political movement.

But “cooking up” might not only include what we would call opinion items. The front page of the Boston Gazette that Otis and the Adamses helped to “cook up” did not feature an extended opinion essay but petitions and excerpts from English newspapers. The back page was full of notices of runaway servants and apprentices, as well as items for sale (not from Britain!), including Madeira wine, choice chocolate, and, jarringly, a “Likely Negro Girl,” for which interested buyers should “Inquire of Edes and Gill.” The printers were the keepers of many secrets. None of these things, however, seems to qualify for Adams’s notion of “cooking up.” Inside the Gazette was a different matter. Readers found an assortment of private letters, closely crafted “news” about Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson’s recent importation of tea, and poems attacking Governor Francis Bernard. All of these items constituted the fare that patriots scrupulously prepared the evening before. Were they accurate? They appeared in the Gazette as bare-bones facts and allegedly reliable accounts. Nonetheless, we should be wary. Adams wrote that he cooked up all sorts of dishes: “Paragraphs, Articles, Occurrences etc.” The deep and thorough interaction and mutual dependency between patriot leaders and printers meant that even these benign items we would judge as facts—as “news”—could be unreliable.⁷

The Mein episode reveals one final, crucial thing about the patriots’ resistance movement: it was fragile and did not convince everyone all the time. Even in Boston. Men who had a platform like John Mein were real threats. They needed to be silenced or discredited. Trust was an essential commodity that had to be continually monitored; even in the most radical place in America, it was a resource that could not be taken for granted. The Adams cousins tried to maintain public opinion via the pages of Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette, but if that didn’t work, crowds could drive the point home with force or threats of force. Physical violence lurks all around the verbal sparring between the Boston Chronicle and the Boston Gazette.

The fragility of the patriots’ cause was even more evident when they thought about how their movement might be received outside Boston. How might colonists far away perceive their actions? How dependable were people who called themselves friends in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or South Carolina? How powerful were their enemies? Did every colony have its own John Mein? As the stakes of the resistance movement increased, they realized their partnership with printers would have to be rock-solid in order to secure the essential resource of public trust. There were going to be a lot of late nights in the print shop to make the cause common.

Thanks to the ten years of protest known as the imperial crisis, when the shooting started, patriots enjoyed almost a monopoly on print throughout the thirteen mainland American colonies. Thirty-three American newspapers printed the news of the battles at Lexington and Concord. Twenty-nine papers would carry the news of independence fifteen months later. Ordinary calamities (fire and health) and extraordinary ones (war and politics) would close down several shops over those frantic months, while four new ventures started. Nearly all of these papers were pro-patriot.

One-third of America’s newspapers in 1775 were printed in New England. None of the newspapers in Boston that supported the crown survived the beginning of the war. The most pro-patriot printers, Isaiah Thomas of the Massachusetts Spy and Edes and Gill of the Boston Gazette, sneaked their presses out of Boston just before British troops occupied the city’s streets in April. There was more upheaval in Massachusetts, with one Salem paper, now called the New-England Chronicle, relocating closer to the scene of action to join the growing army camp in Cambridge. There were eight other newspapers in New England outside of Massachusetts: the Providence Gazette and the Newport Mercury in Rhode Island; the New-Hampshire Gazette and the Freeman’s Journal (both Portsmouth) in New Hampshire; and the Connecticut Courant (Hartford), Gazette (New London), Journal (New Haven), and Norwich Packet. All of these leaned toward the patriot cause.

Papers in the mid-Atlantic colonies were located only in Philadelphia or New York City during the first year of the Revolution. Philadelphia had a robust print market. Three of its papers rivaled the Boston Gazette for the most staunch patriot papers in the colonies: John Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, William and Thomas Bradford’s Pennsylvania Journal, and David Hall and William Sellers’s Pennsylvania Gazette. The Continental Congress would turn to these printers most often when they wanted stories to reach the broader American public. Benjamin Towne’s Pennsylvania Evening Post was the most unusual of colonial newspapers in 1775, in that it appeared three days a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Three newspapers in New York City published the news of the start of war. One was Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, published by the infamous loyalist James Rivington. He was even more talented and dangerous than John Mein. Rivington’s reputation for publishing items hostile to the rebellion was so notorious that patriot authorities in one community voted to burn every copy that came into the town. Inhabitants in another village hanged him in effigy. In March 1775, a young, snarling James Madison wrote to William Bradford, Jr. (brother and son to the Pennsylvania Journal printers), that he wished Rivington would spend just twenty-four hours in Virginia, and then he “would meet with adequate punishment.” Like John Mein, violence would indeed cut Rivington’s career short. Before 1775 was out, hostile crowds had invaded his shop, stolen his press, and put him out of business. Patriots far preferred John Holt’s New-York Journal, long sponsored by the Sons of Liberty. Two more patriot papers started over the course of 1775 and 1776 in New ...