As Secretary of the Council of Safety Peter Timothy had a major administrative role in the new revolutionary government. On December 4, 1775, he prevented a British ship from clearing the harbor likely carrying Loyalists fleeing Charleston. He also denied a permit “for no less than five hundred pounds of fresh beef to be sent on board the Scorpion.”

At the full Council’s meeting that day, a Loyalist militiaman, Mathew Floyd, asked to take a message to William Campbell, the royal governor holding court on the Tamar. The message contained the terms of the cease-fire between Loyalists and revolutionaries in Ninety Six, a good ten-day ride from Charleston. The Council allow him to go, if accompanied by a “proper person … who must be present at the interview and conversation between him and Lord William.” It gave Timothy the job of selecting the “proper person.” He tapped Benjamin Marchant—his son-in-law.

The Council instructed Marchant to tell the governor that he must accompany Floyd at all times or return with Floyd, “… but not return without Floyd, unless ordered and obliged not to.” As it turned out, Marchant had a hard time keeping tabs on his charge.

December 5, Floyd and Marchant boarded the Cherokee and met Campbell and his secretary Alexander Innes. The next day, Marchant gave the Council the following account:

“After saluting my Lord, I delivered the message, then Lord William went down into the cabin and Floyd was sent for; whereupon I immediately desired to speak with his Lordship, who answered ‘presently’ and in a few minutes I was desired to walk down.”

Marchant then repeated the conditions of the meeting. The Council’s minutes provide the dialogue Marchant recounted:

Innes: Who are you?

--I am a private person, entrusted with a message from the Council of Safety.

Innes: Do they intend to deliver up Cunningham?

-- I don’t know.

Innes: Are you only a messenger for them?

-- Yes.

Innes: And do you think my Lord will treat with them?

-- Yes, sir.

“Mr. Innes then addressed himself to Lord Wm Cambell and said ‘then my Lord, there must be no conversation’ and withdrew, calling his Lordship after him. Lord William soon returned and said he must detain me a little, that he was sorry he was obliged to do many things contrary to his inclination—that it was hard not to be supplied with necessaries, and even now Lady William was denied to come down.’”

Campbell and Innes then left Marchant and Floyd alone with the ship’s surgeon until “Floyd was sent for by Mr. Innes who was then alone in the cabin.” At about seven o’clock Innes returned without Floyd and told Marchant “my Lord desires you return, and inform the persons who sent you, that as [Floyd] is a messenger from a friend to government, he must detain him until he had determined on a proper answer.”

Marchant saw four field cannons brought on board the Cherokee before he left.

The Council of Safety asked Timothy to write letters calling for the arrest of Floyd. To the man in whose care Floyd left his horse: “not to deliver the horse to any said person, and forthwith give notice thereof, either to Mr. President or the Secretary.” To a captain of the militia near the backcountry: “place proper persons at proper places … to apprehend one Mathew Floyd.”

By December 8, Floyd had been arrested and brought before the Council, where he confirmed the substance of Marchant’s report and said Campbell told him to “tell people in the back country to do everything they can for the best advantage; that he did not desire any effusion of blood but whatever they should do would meet with his consent.”

On December 9, Floyd was imprisoned in the common jail, suspected of being a spy “and of other high crimes and misdemeanors against the liberty of the colony.”

Rebellion Road is the anchorage out of reach of Charleston’s guns, named for or by the pirates that menaced South Carolina between 1680 and 1740.

Campbell on the Tamar: Savages Ought to Blush: The Radical Printer January 1, 2025

Benjamin and Frances Timothy Marchant named their son, born the previous year, Peter Timothy Marchant

Henry Laurens wrote to an acquaintance on December 4 that Floyd “has appeared before us, and declared that being drunk, he had lost all his papers at Orangeburg.”

Robert Cunningham was a Loyalist charged with sedition and jailed in Charleston October 23, 1775.

Lady William joined her husband in the harbor December 15 when a black fisherman took her to his ship: Peter McCandless, Remarkable Charlestonians in the American Revolution, p. 65, and Peg Eastman, Meeting Street Memories, Charleston Mercury

Naval Documents of the American Revolution, edited by William Bell Clark, was the source for the Journal of the Council of Safety and letters of Henry Laurens.

The immigrants came, many in the wake of the Cherokee War, which ended in 1761. By 1767, three quarters of the white people in the colony lived more than forty miles from the coast, connected by creeks, rivers, and trading paths. Farms, plantations, and mills sent livestock, indigo, tobacco, iron ore, and flour to Charleston for consumption and export.

The backcountry was populated mainly with immigrants from Virginia and Pennsylvania “whose industry and manufactures does them much credit, cultivating their lands by the manual labour of their own numerous families,” wrote James Cook, in a letter printed August 1768 in the South-Carolina Gazette. Cook was the colony’s surveyor, which made him an expert on who was where, and the country was growing fast. Two settlements, “which four years ago had not a house in every five square mile,” had in the previous year celebrated 103 marriages and 323 christenings.

But Cook identified a troublesome vacuum in large tracts granted to and ignored by the original royal proprietors, each comprising ten thousand acres. “So many baronies hinder the settling of it like other places … They are a kind of asylum for villains, who flies to elude justice, that either live obscure or easely creep to the Creeks or Cherokees, and back again, as the case requires. Agriculture and manufactures makes a small progress here ….”

The colonial government had not prepared for an influx of people—no courts, no jails, no law enforcement. Debt collection was a joke. Registering land ownership required an expensive trip to Charleston. Challenging ownership required the same. Enterprises down to the smallest family farms and cross-roads stores were vulnerable to outlaws, treachery, and exploitation. To protect themselves, some settlers took the law into their own hands. In January of 1767, the South-Carolina Gazette carried this notice among the runaways and stray livestock:

Mark Netles informs me of his having taken from Walter Kelly, as he was pursuing him and other fellows (noted horse stealers), a trotting horse of a sorrel colour, with a white blaze on his forehead and a hagg’d mane, about thirteen hands high, the hindmost feet white above the fetlock, and has a black spot upon his hip. The property must be proved at Pine Tree Hill. —it is apprehended, that this horse was brought out of North-Carolina.

Pine Tree Hill was a major intersection on the Great Wagon Road, about 120 miles northwest of Charleston, a hard five days travel over land, but the notice had a decent chance of reaching the horse’s owner. The Gazette circulated to more than forty locations from Pine Tree Hill to Ninety-Six, north to Brunswick and Wilmington, and south as far as St. Augustine and Mobile.

August 3, the Gazette blamed “gangs of villains from Virginia and North-Carolina” for a plague of horse thievery. Numbering “more than 500,” they employed “a chain of communication . . . and have places of meeting, where they form plans of operation and defences …. Instances of their cruelty to the people in the back settlements ... are so numerous and shocking that a narrative of them would fill a whole Gazette and every reader with horror.”

Two weeks later, the Gazette reported positive developments: “Since our last, four of the gang of villains that have long annoyed the back parts of these southern colonies were brought to town and committed to jail; and proper measures are taken to get many more of them apprehended and brought to justice.”

The next week, the governor weighed in with a proclamation offering a reward of £30 “to any person or persons, who shall apprehend, and bring to the common jail in Charles Town, any of the persons who have been principals in any of the murders and robberies committed in the western parts of this province, for each person so apprehended and brought to jail.”

The reward was not enough to cover the cost of traveling to Charleston, much less incentivize anyone to capture and carry a member of a gang of thieves and murderers.

Nevertheless, the next April, the Gazette reported that the governor said, “It gives me great satisfaction to inform you the riots and disorders that lately [described in] remote parts of this province [are ended and] tranquility is restored.”

As usual, the governor was too quick to declare problems solved.

In the June 13, 1768 Gazette, Peter Timothy reported: “… we daily hear of new irregularities committed by the people called Regulators, who, seeming to despair of rooting out those gangs of desperate villains that remain among them any other way, still take upon themselves to punish such offenders as they can catch.”

The Regulators punished two captives with “500 lashes each.” Another was killed in a shoot-out. The Gazette editorialized: “It seems hardly probable that the disturbances in our Back-Settlements will entirely subside, notwithstanding all the prudent steps that have been or can be taken by the Government to suppress them, until the late act of the General Assembly of this province for establishing Circuit Courts takes place.”

Meanwhile, the Assembly authorized two companies of Rangers to capture and punish outlaws, essentially deputizing leaders of the Regulators. The Rangers managed to restore some order. But then they went rogue, going after anyone they didn’t like. They punished deer hunters as “vagrants”. They used torture and harassment to settle scores. They ignored the lieutenant governor’s order to cease their excesses.

In the July 11, 1768, Gazette, the printer complained: “The people in the back parts of this province, who have assumed the name of REGULATORS, … are far from being inactive; but … it is almost impossible to discover which of them can be relied on, however it is certain, that some of them do not pay that regard to the civil authority which prudence should dictate.”

August 15 the Gazette reported that an armed company of Regulators, "headed by one Gideon Gibson, on the 25th past, near Marr's Bluff, surrounded a constable and twelve men, who were sent to bring one of the villains before a Magistrate, and after a short skirmish, where two of the Constable's Party were mortally wounded, took the Rest Prisoners, whom he discharged, after ordering them 50 lashes each."

Finally moved to assert authority, Charleston sent Provost Marshall Roger Pinckney and Gabriel Powell, colonel of the PeeDee militia, along with twenty-five men to Marr’s Bluff. The magistrate and constable came along with supporters and brought the total to sixty. Powell met with Gibson for more than an hour on Sunday August 14, and Gibson agreed to give himself up the next morning. At the appointed hour he sent a letter saying he’d changed his mind. Powell and Pinckney had been warned that Gibson could command “a large body of Regulators,” so they were relieved when the magistrate of neighboring Cheraw, Claudius Pegues, offered to bring reinforcements.

Pegues and his militia, however, were active Regulators. With Gibson’s supporters they overpowered the Charlestonians and harangued them about the lack of backcountry courts, lack of representation in the Assembly, and the injustice of being taxed without representation. Pinckney and Powell returned to the low country without Gibson.

Gibson was a prominent landowner and slave-holder in the PeeDee region. He was also of mixed race, and his supporters, according to a witness, were “People of different Colors (viz) Whites, Blacks, and Mulattos.”

A few years ago, a large mural in the Florence County Judicial Center memorialized the incident.

Distrust between neighbors stirred up by the Regulators underpinned fierce fighting between loyalists and rebels during the Revolutionary War. Ragtag militias and guerrilla fighters ultimately weakened Cornwallis and drove his army out of the state to lose at Yorktown. Historians estimate that South Carolina fighters accounted for one third of the American casualties in the Revolutionary War.

Cook published his map in 1773, dense with surnames on every settlement, with the notable exception of the baronies.

A few years later Pine Tree Hill’s name changed to Camden.

The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution is a highly biased but colorfully detailed description of backcountry people by Charles Woodmason, an Anglican preacher trying to save their souls.

The South Carolina Assembly passed an act establishing backcountry circuit courts in April of 1768 only to have London shoot it down because it qualified judges on the basis of merit rather than the pleasure of the king. The Assembly fixed that error, and the act was made law in 1769, to be implemented in1772.

PBS Frontline wrote about the afterlife of Gideon Gibson: Blurred racial lines

Lord William Campbell also trusted Kirkland to deliver messages orally. He wrote General Thomas Gage from his floating court in Charleston Harbor. Kirkland was “a man of great influence with” the backcountry loyalists, he wrote: “He has acquainted me with the particulars of the plan he means to communicate to your Excellency; and if the execution is not delayed too long, he may be useful in this and neighboring provinces.”

Neither Kirkland nor the letters he carried reached their destinations. The Betsey, laden with provisions for the army occupying Boston, was captured off the coast of Massachusetts, December 17, 1775, by captain John Manley on the Continental schooner Lee.

Manley imprisoned the crew of the Betsey and its Tory passengers and freed its American rebel prisoners. Its oats, Indian corn, and Irish potatoes went to fortify American troops. But the most valuable prize was the packet of letters from the royal governors of Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern District, and Kirkland. Five addressed generals of the British army in America. They revealed the writers’ contempt for the rebels, the plans they had to defeat them, and the weakness of the defenses of St. Augustine and Virginia.

The letters did reach the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where they were subjected to a tug of war between the South Carolina delegates and everyone else. South Carolina lost, but its delegates came home with attested copies that the Timothy Printing Office published.

The print shop was far from idle after the last copy of the South-Carolina Gazette appeared in December. In addition to the Extract of Letters, &c., Published by Order of Congress, it printed the 137-page Extracts of the Journals of the Provincial Congress. Both publications circulated widely, so they must have entailed large print runs. In June of 1777 Peter Timothy, obviously proud of his work, mailed a set of the Journals to Benjamin Franklin in France.

The Provincial Congress acknowledged the value of the Timothy shop. In December it added £200 to the £2,000 annual salary allowed in July—it was paying him not to print the newspaper. The South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, run by Timothy’s former apprentice, had been supporting the American cause since the Stamp Act crisis. Timothy was more valuable as state printer, secretary, correspondent, and source of intelligence than as a newspaperman.

Three letters in the Extracts begged Gage not to deprive Florida of any more troops—as it was rumored he would do. The Florida governor wrote, “Should we be attacked it will be impossible to save the town or barracks.” A British major there wrote that the Virginia governor had detained troops destined for Florida, leaving him with only forty healthy men “at a season when the men are falling sick every day.”

Dunmore of Virginia recommended an attack on his region, touting its abundance of crops: “a winter Campaign would reduce, without the smallest doubt the whole of this southern Continent to a perfect state of obedience.”

Nobody read those letters in time to do anything about them. At best they would have had to wait for Timothy’s Extract of Letters, &c. in early February 1776.

The loyalist John Moultrie was a brother of rebel Colonel William Moultrie, who led the assault on Fort Johnson and designed the half-moon flag of South Carolina. South Carolina’s Revolutionary War pitted brother against brother, just as the Civil War did eighty-four years later.

Kirkland and Campbell introduced in previous post “Savages ought to blush”

The Hannah painting by John F. Leavitt. The Navy Art Gallery. G. Washington: “At the Continental expence I have fitted out Six pr the Inclosed list, two of which are upon the Cruize, directed by the Congress—the rest ply about Capes Cod & Ann—as yet to very little purpose.” The six vessels were the schooners Lee, Harrison, Lynch, Franklin, and Warren, and the brigantine Washington. George Washington to John Hancock, October 5, 1775. Philander D. Chase, ed. The Papers of George Washington, vol. 2, September –December 1775 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), 100.

Gage was recalled to England October 11 and replaced with William Howe.

Tug of war in Congress: Diary of Richard Smith in the Continental Congress, 1775-1776 Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jan., 1896), pp. 288-310 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1833654

Timothy’s letter to Franklin 1777

Extracts of Letters, &c. is in the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Columbia.

The South-Carolina Gazette was an organ of the revolutionary state—and the unified colonies— when it returned from hiatus on September 7, 1775. Edicts, announcements and resolutions covered the front page, all signed by Peter Timothy as secretary for the General Committee, the Council of Safety, or the Provincial Congress. It printed in full the Articles of Association agreed by the Continental Congress. With a four-page supplement, it was twice its usual size. While Peter worked all summer as correspondent and minutes-taker for the revolutionary bodies, someone back at the shop was busy setting type.

On September 14, while the printer was putting the next issue to bed, a hundred and fifty rebel soldiers under orders of Colonel William Moultrie rowed and waded to James Island and captured Fort Johnson, later raising over it Moultrie’s “Liberty” flag, a white crescent on a blue ground. They found the fort empty of all but five men, and its armaments dismantled. Warned by a spy, the British had retreated to warships in the harbor.

Seeing the writing on the wall, the governor, Lord William Campbell, who arrived in June to a less than royal welcome, dismissed the irrelevant Commons House of Assembly on September 15 and fled to the Tamar, one of the two warships sitting in Rebellion Road, the harbor channel.

On an inside page of the October 3 issue, the Gazette printed, by order of the General Committee, copies of letters flying back and forth between the floating governor and Henry Laurens, committee chairman. Laurens urged the governor to return to Charleston, lest his absence “excite Jealousies of some premeditated Design against them.” In reply, Sir William sniffed: “The Presumption of such an Address from a body assembled by no Legal authority & whom I must consider as in actual and open Rebellion against their Sovereign can only be equalled by the Outrages which oblig’d me to take Refuge on board the King’s Ship in the Harbour.”

That issue also printed a copy of the Treaty of Ninety Six, signed September 16 after a series of skirmishes between rebels and loyalists in the backcountry following the Fort Charlotte unintended weapons swap. The loyalists agreed not to help the British army, and the rebels agreed not to force people to sign on to the American Cause. The treaty was violated before the ink was dry—by both sides.

In November the rebel militia based at Ninety Six prepared for an expected assault by a loyalist militia. They connected a barn and outbuildings using fence rails and hay bales to make a fort. Using swivel guns, they held back a large loyalist force for three days. The siege ended in a truce after other rebels attacked the loyalists’ rear. The rebels suffered one casualty and the loyalists at least one. It was the first bloodshed of the war in South Carolina.

Back in the low country, things were tense on Rebellion Road. Warship and town exchanged another set of letters, printed in the November 7 Gazette by order of the Council of Safety. The first addressed the captain of the Tamar, Edward Thornbrough, demanding the return of a runaway. There was no runaway on board, the captain replied. He then demanded that “his Majesty’s agents” be allowed to supply the two warships or “I am determined from this Day not to suffer any Vessel to enter into, or depart from Charles-Town, that it is in my Power to prevent.”

Townspeople had been selling provisions—so many sides of beef, eggs, chickens, produce—to the warships, but some had been harassing the British crew tasked with getting provisions from shore. They did it for general principles, but also because they suspected the British of encouraging and harboring runaways. General disorder in town, combined with shouts of “Liberty,” had inspired an unprecedented number of enslaved people to free themselves. The Gazette always had runaway notices, but in the fall of 1775, runaways took up several columns each issue, listed as inmates of the workhouses of Charleston and Camden. Anyone not claimed by an “owner” would be sold at auction. (Forget any idea of getting free.)

Thornbrough wrote that he was holding the letter bearer’s boat hostage in return for release of Gunner Walker, one of the five men left on Fort Johnson. “Savages ought to blush at the Return the King’s Servants have received for their Humanity to one of the most infamous, and most ungrateful of Villains, in whose Service this poor Man has suffered.” Walker was treated savagely in August after he disparaged the Americans.

William Henry Drayton, newly elected president of the Provincial Congress, replied that Thornbrough should have known “for obvious reasons” that Walker had been free for weeks, working for the Royal Navy. The Gazette printed an affidavit that told the tale: A few weeks previously, John Wanton, captain of a vessel blown off course trying to sail from Newport to Nantucket, found his smaller ship “under the stern of the Tamar” outside of Charleston. He was taken aboard the Cherokee to meet Lord William, who told him that Gunner Walker would take command of his vessel and deliver it to St. Augustine “to be condemned,” presumably along with captain and crew. It also carried a letter to the governor of British East Florida asking that “a military Force might be sent against the good People of this Colony.” The Gazette printed that letter, too. Enroute to St. Augustine, Wanton and crew overpowered Walker and the armed guard and reclaimed the ship, turned it back north, and dropped Walker in Savannah, according to Wanton’s affidavit.

The next week the Gazette reported that Thornbrough’s threat to block the harbor “rendered it indispensably necessary to lay Difficulties in the Way of approach of such, for our Preservation: It was resolved to obstruct the Passage through the Channel of Hog-Island Creek, being one Approach to this Town from Rebellion Road.” On Saturday afternoon, the rebel schooner, Defense, “mounted with Two Nine-Pounders, Six Six-Pounders and Four Four-Pounders,” manned by seventy rebel seaman and marines, dragged four hulks to within gunshot of the Tamar and Cherokee, and sunk three under heavy fire. Returning fire, they managed to sink the fourth as the tide changed.

According to the Gazette, townspeople turned out to watch the fireworks: “The Inhabitants of the Town were in general, Spectators of the latter Part of the Cannonade. The Drums beat to Arms, and the Militia in a Body assembled under their Officers, with such Alertness and so properly armed, as gave the highest Confidence to the Public, that they might be relied on in any Extremity.” The Defense suffered minor damage, and no one was wounded.

The November 28 issue of the Gazette, as if to justify after the fact, published a report datelined Cambridge, October 28, that cannon fire from British ships had destroyed more than two hundred buildings in the port of Falmouth, and that the same fate awaited “all places in reach of cannon.” It listed the New England towns undergoing increased fortification and added, “We hope our southern brethren are also preparing defenses, as no mercy is to be expected from our savage enemies.”

In early January 1776 the Tamar departed Charleston harbor. William Campbell returned a few months later, commanding the King’s ship Bristol, from which he participated in the attack on Sullivan’s Island. He died in 1778 of wounds received in that battle.

The December 11, 1775, issue was the last of the South-Carolina Gazette. In 1777 the Timothys launched the Gazette of the State of South Carolina.

“Rebels” instead of “patriots,” in fairness to the loyalists, who also considered themselves patriots.

Fort Charlotte attack and credit for much more goes to South Carolina Becomes a State, by Terry W. Lipscomb, publication of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1976 and 1988, SCDAH

The Liberty flag, 19th century painting of the battle of Sullivan’s Island, 1776, Library of Congress.

National Park Service has a virtual tour of the Ninety Six Historic Site

Island Ford trading path, Ninety Six Historical Site, photo by Acroterion

Torture of Gunner Walker described in previous post: “Unity Forged and Forced”

Falmouth is now Portland, Maine

Departure of Lord William: Naval Documents of the American Revolution

South-Carolina Gazette 1775 images: DDS Center for Research Libraries

“The designs of your Enemies are openly avowed” and were carried out “near Boston,” cried the Gazette. ““Let us resolve upon LIBERTY or DEATH and let us stand or fall together … the Risque may be great, but the Cause is Glorious.”

The second page of the May 29 Gazette printed a letter from London saying that Parliament intended to arm enslaved men, “the Roman Catholics, the Indians and Canadians; and [use] all the wicked means on earth to subdue the colonies.” That struck terror in the hearts of the white minority, but it was false.

The May 29 Gazette was the last for three months. The newspaper suffered as Peter Timothy went to work for several busy committees, but the Provincial Congress granted him a salary £1000, which more than compensated him for lost advertising revenue. As chairman of the Committee of Observation and Intelligence Timothy kept the names of the men who supported the Association formed by the Continental Congress. He was secretary to the General Committee, the revolutionary governing body, the Council of Safety, its department of defense, and the Secret Committee, whose main remit seems to have been stealing the King’s powder.

Coercion went hand in hand with propaganda. The General Committee required all white men to “certify” their support. Not everyone in Charleston was on board. The action “near Boston” helped with recruitment, but the Committee itself was wavering. In early May it postponed discussing a proposal to get all Inhabitants to sign an “association of defense.” The Council of Safety itself was divided between radicals who pushed for rapid militarization and moderates who feared war. Again, action near Boston helped. News in July that the British regulars “got a drubbing” at Bunker Hill moved things along, at least in Charleston.

The backcountry was another story. Settlers associated the royal government with protection from Indians and resented the arrogance of the revolutionaries. July 23 the Council of Safety sent William Henry Drayton and the Reverend William Tennent to preach the patriot gospel from Cheraw to Camden to Saxe-Gotha to Ninety Six and beyond.

In his many capacities and as brother in arms, Timothy wrote to Drayton what were essentially committee and council minutes, as well as news that would have made it into the Gazette.

On midnight August 13 he wrote “Business has gone on very slowly in the General Committee,” followed by a list of inconclusive actions, postponements, and matters taken into consideration. But Timothy had good news: The patriots captured 11,900 pounds of powder from an armed brigantine in St. Augustine, increasing the rebels’ stash to 21,000 pounds, five thousand of which was destined for Philadelphia to support the siege of Boston.

In other news, the gunner at Fort Johnson, which was still in British hands, had “a decent Tarring & Feathering for some insolent speech he had made.” The man was carted through the streets and before the doors of loyalists and British agents: “there was scarce a non-subscriber who did not tremble,” Timothy wrote. A mob of hundreds stripped the gunner before applying hot tar. He suffered two broken ribs in the attack and lost an eye. He was thrown into the river and nearly drowned before a passing boat rescued him. In his letter, Timothy merely mentioned that the loyalist printer, Wells, “had his Shop closed shut.”  

He told Drayton that he “wish’d for you” when he read to the committee a resolution from the Second Continental Congress to purchase and arm ships. The reading “pleased us so well.” It was surely in the wee hours when Timothy closed: “’Tis difficult to keep up my Spirits.”

Three weeks later he wrote again under pressure, this time from hunger. “Altho’ my stomach bids me go, I can’t help staying in the Council Room” to report more successful acquisitions of powder being escorted to patriot hands “by artillery and grenadier Militia.”

Also, “yesterday the Com^ee of Observation stopp’d McLauren’s wagons” pending evidence that vendor and recipient “subscribed to the association” or else have their goods confiscated. The men scrambled and complied.

Timothy expected to spend the week preparing for elections to the next Provincial Congress. The moderate merchants had angled to get a quota of fifteen representatives, but had “at last condescended to be content with 10.”

“In regard to War and Peace,” he wrote, “I can only tell you that the Plebians are still for War—but the noblesse perfectly pacific—not like your chimerical Quixotical anti-pacificals, high admirals, & Associates.”

Arming of slaves, etc., false: Charleston Time Machine

Income from ads was about £1500 annually, in currency, estimates by Robert M. Weir, “Newspaper press in the Southern Colonies,” The Press & the American Revolution, Bailyn and Hench, 1980, 111-114. Salary: Memoirs of the Revolution, Drayton and Drayton, 1821, 265.

Bunker Hill art: Percy Moran, 1862-1935, Library of Congress

Details of treatment of gunner: Patriots, Pistols, and Petticoats, Walter J. Fraser, Jr., 68

Letters from Timothy to Drayton are in “Correspondence of Hon. Arthur Middleton (Continued).” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 27, no. 3 (1926): 128-30, 131-2. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27569697.

About the same time two other parties rowed from Gadsden’s wharf to the powder houses on Hobcaw and the Neck. They stole one hundred twenty-five pounds of powder from one and five hundred from the other.

For months Charleston had been in a state of anxious anticipation, waiting for Parliament’s reaction to American demands and resolutions, sent to London at the end of 1774. Parliament met in February. Would grievances be redressed or ignored or worse? News came monthly on packet boats, carrying rumors.

The South-Carolina Gazette reported March 13, 1775, that the Eagle landed, with “no certain accounts,” except that the debate in Parliament appeared “in favour of a question unfavourable to us … we have no reason to look for relief, but in our own virtue, firmness and unanimity.”  

A few days later, a Charleston merchant returned from England with furniture and two thoroughbred horses he had bought for personal use. According to the South-Carolina Gazette of March 27, thirty-three members of the General Committee ruled they could land, despite the nonimportation agreement signed in Philadelphia. The next morning, “a great Number of the Inhabitants appeared extremely uneasy,” fearing that the committee’s action signaled “an inclination to depart from the Association.” Peter Timothy reported, “their Zeal for the Reputation for their Country threw them into great Agitation.” That agitation extended to threatening to kill the horses.

Friday morning the protesters presented a petition signed by 256 people. Because only “a small Majority” carried the decision, the petition asked for it to be reconsidered in a “full committee” in order to “quiet the Minds of the People.” “Many Persons who have the liberty of America at Heart, think it is an Infringement of the Association entered into by the General Congress.”

On Monday, a sixty-nine member committee voted to reverse the decision, 35 to 34. Despite the narrowness of the victory, one participant wrote in his Memoirs: “This is the first instance of a point of importance and controversy being carried against those by whose opinions the people had been long governed.”

The significance of the vote was not lost on Lt. Gov. William Bull either. Had the Inhabitants lost, the merchants “would have considered it a Recession of the Non-Importation Article and immediately sent to England for goods as usual. The example would probably have been followed by New York and the other Colonies.”

A month later, April 14, the packet Swallow landed with news confirming the rebels’ worst fears—that Parliament called for new troops and warships to enforce and extend the Coercive Acts. At the General Committee meeting April 20 to consider its response, Timothy, secretary to the committee, reported that merchants at a London tavern opened a subscription “for the relief of the Americans and in less than half an hour 15,000 Sterling was subscribed and that other subscriptions were also opened for the same purpose.” During the committee meeting “three gentlemen” broke off and intercepted the royal mail from a second packet, looking for Lord Dartmouth’s letter to the governor. What they found infuriated them. Dartmouth wrote: “there neither can be nor will be any relaxation of those measures … indispensably necessary for the reducing the colonies to a state of due Obedience to the Constitutional Authority of the Parliament.”

The next night, members of the secret committee raided the stores of weaponry and ammunition in the State House attic and the two powder houses, to deprive the British troops of access and squirrel it away for defense. Unknown to the South Carolina rebels, two days earlier Massachusetts patriots had also mobilized, in their case to move heavy artillery they had been spiriting out of Boston. They clashed with British soldiers in Lexington and Concord, with fatal results.

Nineteen days later, on May 8, word of the American casualties in the north reached South Carolina via a newspaper account carried by the brigantine Industry from Salem. In June, the Provincial Congress voted to raise a militia of 1500 men, allocate £1 million to defense, and appoint a Council of Safety with unlimited power.

The measures passed with a “slim majority.”

The General Committee was made up of all members of the Provincial Congress and could meet and make binding decisions as long as there was a quorum of twenty-one.

Memoirs of William Henry Drayton, as compiled by his son John, based on his father’s journal.

Bull’s quote comes from South Carolina Public Records XXXV, cited by Richard Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty, 67.

Dr. Nic Butler, historian for the Charleston County Library, sorted through conflicting sources and provides greater color and detail on the events of April 1775: Charleston Time Machine

“Slim majority”: Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 222

Peter Timothy had every intention of tamping down any reactionary sentiment in Charleston. In the September 26, 1774, South-Carolina Gazette he reprinted a letter published in the Boston Gazette that accused “a Southern Colony” of “a Scheme” to “frustrate any Attempts that might be made to suspend our Trade with Great-Britain.” The letter was signed “Candidus,” a Samuel Adams pseudonym. Talk of a “Scheme” likely came from Timothy himself or Christopher Gadsden, both regular Adams correspondents and fellow radicals.

The October 3 Gazette printed the order forbidding discussion of the Boston blockade in Massachusetts town meetings, along with nonimportation resolutions from other colonies.

October 10 it reported that Pennsylvania newspapers had reached Charleston with news of “Nineteen most noble and manly resolves” made September 9 in Massachusetts town meetings. “The people are greatly and justly alarmed by” the manning of fortifications blocking the land route to Boston, cutting off supplies and provisions, and “seizing the Powder lodged at the Magazine.” “Nothing less than the immediate restoration of the town’s entrance and an end to all Insults and Alarms can restore a State of Tranquility.”  The news of the Suffolk Resolves flew from Boston to Philadelphia by horseback and then sailed to Charleston.

In late August 1774, delegates to the first Continental Congress began arriving in Philadelphia from twelve colonies. Their goal was to use trade boycotts to pressure an end to military occupation of Boston and to demand the right of self-government.

By the end of September, after mostly convivial debate, the Congress had agreed to stop importing British goods. But when it came to nonexportation, the debate descended into shouting and chaos. Four out of the five South Carolina delegates dug in and refused to stop selling rice and indigo to Britain, which was the colonists’ best way to cause economic pain to the Mother Country. Then the discussion of exempting rice and indigo “well nigh caused a division in Congress” so severe that “it occasioned a cessation from business for several days, in order to give our [delegates] time to collect themselves.” After the exemption failed to pass, on October 20, four South Carolina delegates walked out.

Getting South Carolina on board was critical to the success of the Congress. South Carolina exported more goods to Britain—largely rice and indigo—than the northern colonies combined. That gave it the upper hand, but also meant it had the most to lose.

The exports of the northern colonies were “trifling” in comparison, said John Rutledge, one of the hold-outs. For example, Philadelphia sold less than seven percent of its exports to England while South Carolina exported eighty percent. “If we must bear burdens in the cause of America, they ought to be as equally laid as possible,” he argued.

South Carolina was in danger of being excluded from the Association of the colonies, but its delegates returned and the Congress caved. It amended the Articles of the Association in favor of ending all trade with Britain “except Rice to Europe.” Nearly all rice shipped to English ports was reshipped to markets in Europe and Ireland, enabling the Crown to capture duties and mark up. Bypassing the English ports advantaged the American rice merchants and hurt Britain’s economy. Indigo exporters were out of luck.

“Yesterday our worthy delegates were brought back to us,” the Gazette reported November 21. That night they presented the “Extracts of the Proceedings of the Congress” to the General Committee. The short notice gave the impression that nothing but joy and approbations, wining and dining, greeted the delegates and the Proceedings. But that was far from the case, as became evident when the newly created Provincial Congress met in Charleston on January 11, 1775.

The exception for rice was met with an uproar: “The whole interior of the Province considered their interest as sacrificed to the emolument of the Rice Planters.” The midlands and backcountry cultivated and processed indigo, most of which went to England. Rice was a product of the wealthy low-country, home to the five men who attended the Continental Congress. A motion was made and seconded to ask the delegates to the second Continental Congress, scheduled for May, to “use their utmost endeavors” to “expunge” the exception for rice.

Gadsden, who had voted for total nonexportation, argued that it was “for the common good, as well as our own honor.” The rice exemption had been “illy received by the other Colonies, who had thence become jealous of the Rice Colonies.”

Supporters of the rice exemption suggested rice planters should compensate the indigo planters. That was “impracticable,” argued those who favored striking the exemption, asking why indigo planters should get preference over “the Hemp Grower, the Lumber cutter, the Corn Planter, the Maker of Pork and Butter.” The exception for rice was an “odious distinction” that “cruelly convulsed the Colony,” and they urged their countrymen to do better: “Northern brethren” deserved greater sacrifice, “for, if blood were to be spilt in the American cause, theirs would be first shed, while ours would be running only in the usual channels.”

A committee appointed to come up with a “plan of compensation” labored until midnight only to produce a proposal the Provincial Congress rejected the next day.

Debate resumed “without cessation, until dark . . . to the point of falling into downright uproar and confusion.” In the end, the delegates voted by candlelight against deleting the four words: “except rice to Europe.” The vote was 87 to 75.

On January 2, 1775, the South-Carolina Gazette reported that “the richest Ship that ever went over this bar” sailed for London, carrying 538 tierces of rice and 784 casks of indigo. Exports in 1775, from January to September, totaled nearly £600,000, exceeding that of all previous years.

"Unloading the Rice Barges” 19th century woodcut by Edward King, found in Charleston Time-Machine, Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Lowcountry Rice (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

Gage’s proclamation, thanks to Streets of Salem

The rider to Philadelphia was Paul Revere, Massachusetts Historical Society

Georgia, which needed Britain’s troops to protect it from hostile natives and Spanish Florida, declined to send delegates.

South Carolina exports: David Duncan Wallace, South Carolina: A Short History 1520-1948, UNC Press 1951, 257.

For the General Committee, see blog post “A Matter of Triumph to Our Enemies”

Peter Timothy, Secretary to the Provincial Congress, kept minutes of the meeting. Most of the information in this account comes from a footnote to the proceedings, submitted by William Henry Drayton. The proceedings are available in Peter Force’s American Archives Fourth Series Vol. 1

“Northern brethren” etc., Drayton’s footnote attributes these arguments to Gadsden, Rawlins Lowndes, and Reverend William Tennent

1775 exports: Leila Sellers, Charleston Business on the Eve of the Revolution, p. 230. She credits David MacPherson, Annuls of Commerce III p. 585 (1805)

The General Meeting in July 1774 lasted three days and was “the LARGEST BODY of the most respectable Inhabitants that had ever been seen together upon any public Occasion here, or perhaps any where in America,” reported the South-Carolina Gazette. People came from nearly every district and parish, including the backcountry. They came to shape the colony’s response to the Boston Port Act.

News of the Port Act reached Charleston at the end of May in a circular letter from Philadelphia. In a June 3 Gazette supplement, the text of the Act appeared in black borders. It decreed: “it shall not be lawful for any person or persons whatsoever, to lade or put, or cause to be laden and put, off or from any quay, wharf, or other place, within the said town of Boston, or in or upon any part of the shore of the bay.” The act brought commerce to halt a town of thousands, depleting stores in weeks. The plan was to starve Boston in submission, to force it to pay for the tea.

A “Letter to the Freemen of America” cried: “New-York, Philadelphia, and Charles-Town, cannot expect to escape the fate of Boston. We have done nearly the same injury to the property of the East-India Company. When the spirits of our brethren in Boston are subdued, our rivers and shores will probably be crowded with men of war and our rivers lined with Tide-waiters. … Every stroke aimed at them is levelled against the vitals of all America. Success has hitherto crowned our attempts to save our country. Virtue— unanimity— and perseverance are INVINCIBLE.”

In the regular June 6 issue, Peter Timothy, as he had done before, reported violent weather in conjunction with offensive acts of Parliament:

Last Wednesday, JUNE the 1st, the memorable Day on which the Blockade of the Town of Boston was to commence, the very Elements, at Distance, were in such Commotion, that all the Vessels lying at the Wharves were torn from them in an Instant, several of them much damaged, four Schooners were overset, and it was scarce possible to see across even the narrowest Street in Town. A great deal of Damage was also done in the Country, where Abundance of growing Corn, many Fences, and some slight houses were thrown down.

A report on the King’s birthday celebration the same week contrasted official events with the people’s response:

“ … Bells were rang—Colours displayed—Guns at the Forts fired—the militia were reviewed— …. But there was not a single House illuminated at Night, nor any other Demonstration of Joy; the People lamenting that so good a Prince should be beset by a Ministry who seem to have studied to alienate rather than preserve the Affections of his most loyal Subjects.”

The June 13 Gazette called for the General Meeting “to consider the papers, letters, and resolutions” of the northern colonies “and such steps as are necessary to be pursued, in union with the inhabitants of all our Sister Colonies on this Continent”—to enact a non-trade agreement to force repeal of the Port Act. On the front page of the June 20 issue, thirteen merchants advertised that they would send “as expeditiously as possible” donations “for the relief of our distressed brethren in Boston.” June 27 “A Carolinian” wrote that “CAROLINA and NEW-ENGLAND are happy in being connected, and in stretching their arms to each other.”

The same issue expressed pride that “of the Twentynine Gentlemen who dared to subscribe their Names to the Petitions presented to both Houses of Parliament against the Boston Port Bill, there are no less than eleven Natives of this Province.”

The main achievement of the July 6-8 meeting was electing a slate of delegates in sympathy with the Sister Colonies. But getting there was a struggle. Planters and merchants wanted to delay action until the September Continental Congress, the merchants because delay was good for business, the planters because the rice crop was waist high and they had no intention of letting it rot in the field. But the mechanics—the Sons of Liberty and their allies—called for an immediate non-trade agreement. As “A Carolinian” wrote: “Have the spirit to shut up your own harbours, as to British commerce, and suck of the breasts of your own abundance.”

The proponents of delay argued that their “Sister Colonies” could not be trusted not to back out of an agreement preemptively as they did in 1770.

The factions argued over what it meant to pledge “to assist … and support the People of Boston, by all lawful Ways in their Power; and … leave no justifiable Means untried to procure a Repeal of those Acts, … and also of all others affecting the constitutional Rights and Liberties of America in general.”

To the mechanics the answer was simple: a blockade for a blockade, included nonexportation. But the merchants succeeded in killing a non-trade agreement, after painting a picture of misery should it pass.

The next dispute was over what to instruct the delegates. The merchants wanted to restrict instructions; they wanted no interference with trade. Some planters were open to a nonexportation, but wanted delegates to lobby for delay until the rice shipped. The mechanics wanted the delegates to use their own judgement of what it meant to use all “justifiable means.”  The vote was close, but the mechanics won.

Power then fell to the faction that controlled the delegates. The Chamber of Commerce, which had met July 5 to discuss how to manipulate the meeting, nominated three and schemed to get their clerks—and anyone else obligated to them—to vote for their ticket. The mechanics got wind of the plan and ran through the streets gathering supporters to the polls. The mechanics’ ticket won: Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Lynch, and Edward Rutledge.

The final resolution of the General Meeting was to form a Committee of Ninety-Nine, a quasi-government body, of sixty-nine planters, including backcountry representatives, plus fifteen merchants and fifteen mechanics—giving the mechanics representation equal to that of their “betters.” Peter Timothy was elected Secretary to the Committee.

Meanwhile 200 barrels of South Carolina rice made it to Boston. Samuel Adams thanked Gadsden in a July 18 letter. On July 27, Adams wrote to Timothy, alerting him that a shipment of “forty or fifty dozen Hoes and Axes” was headed his way. Each tool was signed by its maker. The craftsmen were “Men of Approved Skill and fidelity in their Business and will warrant their Work.”

Sister Colonies could not be trusted: see post “A Matter of Triumph to our Enemies”

Delegates to Congress: Rutledge had defended Thomas Powell, see post “The washpot and the footstool”. Lynch and Gadsden had both been delegates to the Stamp Act Congress. The remaining two delegates were uncontested, Arthur Middleton and Stamp Act delegate John Rutledge, the elder brother of Edward.

Rice to Boston: 3-4 barrels fit on a broad-wheeled ox cart [Lila Sellers, Charleston on the Eve of Revolution, 151], so it would have taken about 50 cartloads to get this rice on a ship to Marblehead, the open port nearest to Boston

Hoes and axes: Widespread employment of enslaved workers in skilled trades in South Carolina had driven white craftsmen north “where no social stigma was attached to labor” [Sellers, 103]. In a 1787 letter Henry Laurens enquired about sending tools to Philadelphia to be repaired.

“The able doctor, or America swallowing …”: from Royal American Magazine, in The John Carter Brown Library Americana Collection.

Ox wagon: Gregory David Harington, Wikimedia Commons

Little came of South Carolina’s nonimportation pledge to favor local manufactures. Indeed, after the repeal of the Townshend Acts in 1770, imports from England quadrupled, and the pages of the South-Carolina Gazette and its rivals filled with advertisements for British goods.

So the mechanics and their allies almost welcomed news that Parliament put a duty on East India tea. It put new fuel behind the resistance to trade with Britain.

“The day is at hand when you may expect a ship to arrive here, with TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY CHESTS of TEA,”  announced a letter addressed to “My Friends and Countrymen” in the November 29, 1773, Gazette. Paying the three-pence tax would establish “a precedent for subjugating you to future impositions equally unjust and impolitic— and to render assemblies of your representatives totally useless.” The letter, signed Junius Brutus, called for a meeting of “every man … who is a settled inhabitant of this province” to determine “which shall be found necessary to avert the enormous evil, which hangs by a single thread, ready to burst upon your heads.”

Peter Timothy, with apparent zeal, embraced the hot rhetoric that lit the Revolutionary fuse. He may have been Junius Brutus.

A few days later, handbills announced a “General meeting of all inhabitants” for December 3 in the Grand Hall of the Exchange Building. December 6 the Gazette described the meeting in depth, and reported that it reached an agreement to demand that the East India agents refuse the cargo, and participants called for a general no-trade agreement. The same issue mentioned that few days later the merchants formed a Chamber of Commerce to oppose any effort to restrict trade.

At another general meeting on December 17, the planters threw their weight behind the mechanics to overcome the resistance of the merchants. After five hours of heated debate, they decreed that the East India tea aboard the London, at anchor in the harbor for more than two weeks, “ought not to be landed, received, or vended in the Province.”

As the Gazette reported in the December 20 issue, “the great Stumbling Block was, that many Gentlemen in Trade had not desisted from importing Teas Subject to the odious Duty, from the Time it had been imposed, to the very Day of the Importation by the East India Company. All therefore that could be done, was, to shew the most public Disapprobation to the Reception of such Teas, either from the said Company, or our own Merchants.”

But by dragging their feet, the merchants had a victory of sorts. At daybreak on December 22, under the eye of the customs officer, laborers moved 270 chests of tea, each weighing more than 250 pounds, from the London to the cellar of the Exchange. Their value exceeded $1,350,000 in 2023 dollars.

Meanwhile, the Timothy Printing House was running out of paper. Ads in the December issues were printed sideways in the margin. (Apparently a much-anticipated local paper-making operation had failed to materialize.) Readers had to wait a month for the next Gazette, which appeared January 17 with the news that a week before Charleston’s tea was impounded a gang of “Mohawks” had dumped 340 chests into Boston Harbor, worth about $1.7 million.

The January 24 Gazette reported that a General Meeting had nominated fifteen men to “be diligently watchful” and “Use every Means in their Power” to gather “all the Inhabitants of the Town” should there be any attempt to remove the tea stashed under the Exchange.

It also published an extract from the New-York Journal that scolded South Carolina for “sacrificing the grand and important interest of all America to private pique and domestic contention.”

At another General Meeting March 17, the Inhabitants resolved not to buy, sell, or import tea until the Tea-Act was repealed—and to boycott anyone who failed to comply. They appointed a five-person Committee of Observation to enforce the agreement.

In June the committee failed its first test. Another shipment of tea arrived and was impounded under the Exchange before anyone could intervene. But the committee was on the job July 18 and demanded that the captain of a third tea ship either destroy his cargo or take it back to London. In defiance, he allowed his consignment to be stored under the Exchange. Apparently “public Disapprobation” wasn’t much of a deterrent.

Someone was on the watchtower November 1, though, when Captain Samuel Ball anchored the Britannia in the Cooper River with a load of royal appointees and seven chests of East India tea. When called before the committee, Ball produced a testament notarized before he sailed from London that the “mischievous drug” was on board over his objections. The two merchants consigned to sell the tea were called before the committee, and according to the Gazette, “severely declared that they were ready and willing to do any Thing which the Committee should be of the Opinion would most effectually contribute to preserve the Peace and Quiet of the Community.”

The consignees then boarded the ship and “with their own hands … stove the Chests … and emptied their Contents into the River.” The Gazette praised the “Oblation to Neptune.” The same day the Britannia’s tea was dumped, a vessel loaded with 669 pounds of tea was ordered “re-shipped for the Port from whence they were brought, with a Caution to the Shipper to venture no more this Way.”

The report of Captain Ball’s odious cargo and its fate appeared in a Gazette dated November 21, which rounded up three weeks of news.

It described an elevated stage eight feet high and fifteen feet long with effigies of Lord North, Governor Hutchinson, the devil and the pope, all with moveable heads, which mechanics and laborers built for the November 5 Guy Fawkes celebration. The devil carried a large lantern in the shape of a tea canister. “The Pope and the Devil were observed frequently to bow, in the most respectful and complaisant manner, to sundry individuals, as if in grateful acknowledgement of their past Services.”

The previous day “Young Gentlemen of the Schools” had gone door to door soliciting tea left in houses and stores. What they collected was “placed between the Devil and Lord NORTH [and] set on Fire, and brought on our Enemies in Effigy that Ruin which they had designed to bring on us in Reality.”

Charleston’s impounded tea stayed in the cellar until 1776, when the nearly formed General Assembly of the State of South Carolina ordered it sold and put the proceeds to the war effort.

Charleston’s Chamber of Commerce was the second in America. The first was in New York. Charleston Chamber of Commerce, 1917 annual report, quoted by Hannah Mooney in the South Carolina Historical Society blog, December 7, 2022.

Value of the tea was extrapolated from the valuation of the Boston tea: https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/boston-tea-party-damage

Selling the impounded tea: Rogers, George C. “The Charleston Tea Party: The Significance of December 3, 1773.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 75, no. 3 (1974): p. 158. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27567256.

Other good accounts include “Charleston’s Forgotten Tea Party,” by Marguerite Steedman, The Georgia Review, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1967) pp. 244-259; The Charleston Tea Party, by John R. Young, Evening Post Books, 2022; “Charleston: The Tea Party That Wasn’t?”, by James R. Fichter, Carologue, the South Carolina Historical Society quarterly, Spring 2024.

Bottle of tea leaves belongs to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which cautions that there is no way to authenticate it, although it’s been around for 250 years labeled as found on the shore December 17, 1773.

Wilkes had been in the ministry’s crosshairs since 1763 for publishing an essay criticizing George III. He was a hero of the free press, and the more trouble he got into the more press he got. He was a household name, the darling of democratic activists on both sides of the Atlantic.

The South-Carolina Gazette’s coverage of his speeches and trials and the rallies and riots of his supporters helped inspire Charleston’s resistance to the Stamp Act. The Gazette introduced Wilkes on July 4, 1763 in a round-up of London news: “John Wilkes, Esq; member of parliament of Aylsbury, is said to have been committed to the Tower, and the Printer of a paper called the North-Briton to Newgate, on account of the writing, printing and publishing of some particular member of that paper … .”

The Gazette went on to print thousands of words about Wilkes in every issue in July and August that year, sometimes taking up a full page or more of the four-page newspaper. On July 23 it published in full the essay from North-Briton #45 that landed Wilkes in the Tower. In it, Wilkes charged that the Treaty of Paris had sold out Britain. To criticize the king was sedition, but Wilkes argued in court that he had directed his ire at the ministers, not King George. Clearly the effect was to make a dupe of His Majesty:

“Every friend of his country must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures and to the most unjustifiable, public declarations, from a throne ever renowned for truth, honour, and unsullied virtue.”

On July 30 the Gazette printed 4,600 words about Wilkes, leading with Article 29 of the Magna Carta, in Latin, followed by the English:

“The body of a free man is not to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way ruined, nor is the king to go against him or send forcibly against him, except by judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”

The day-by-day record followed: the issue of the general warrant, the search and arrest, the pleas of the lawyers, the responses of the court, the travels back and forth between Tower and court, and the speech Wilkes made when he was released.

In the August 6 Gazette, readers learned that a brisk business in London had been made selling copies of the Magna Carta printed by Wilkes, one hawker having sold out of 500 copies. When accused of having loud, disreputable followers, Wilkes had responded: "It is not the clamours of a rabble, my lord, but the voice of liberty, which must and shall be heard.” Close coverage continued the next two years, and in1765, Wilkes news complemented reports of resistance to the Stamp Act, in which protests throughout the colonies incorporated the number 45, which stood for solidarity with Wilkes and for democracy and constitutional rights.

On October 3, 1768, the Gazette described a meeting at Liberty Tree:

“the tree was decorated with 45 lights, and 45 sky-rockets were fired. About 8 o’clock, the whole company, preceded by 45 of their number, carrying as many lights, marched in regular procession to town, down King-street and Broad-street, to Mr. Robert Dillon’s tavern; where the 45 lights being placed upon the table, with 45 bowls of punch, 45 bottles of wine, and 92 glasses, they spent a few hours in a new round of toasts, among which, scarce a celebrated patriot of Britain or America was omitted.”

The same thing was happening in all the North American ports: the reverence for the number 45 (Wilkes) and the number 92 (the Massachusetts non-rescinders).  Those numbers unified the colonies in a way that slogans struggled to match, and they were spread by newspapers, letters, and word of mouth. But mainly by newspapers. But also by merch:

News that South Carolina was sending money to Wilkes reached London in January of 1770. On February 2, the government’s attorney general declared the grant illegal, and in April the London Board of Trade instructed Lt. Gov. William Bull to kill any tax bill that included money for Wilkes.

Before word of “the Instruction” reached Charleston, the front page of the Gazette, on April 12, 1770, chronicled messages flying between the Commons House and the upper house, the Council, made up of royal appointees:

>On Friday the 6^th, the Council warned the Commons that it would clear no tax bill that included reimbursing the treasurer for the money sent to Wilkes.

>Saturday the Commons called the Council’s message “most injurious to the Honor of the House” and returned it for “calm and serious Re-consideration.” The upper house sent it back the same day, ordering “that you see our Sentiments; to which we are determined firmly to adhere.”

>Monday the Commons appointed a committee to recommend next steps.

>Tuesday the committee produced ten Resolutions. Among them: “To grant Money, for the Support of the just and constitutional Rights and Liberties of the People of Great-Britain and America, cannot be construed to be disrespectful or affrontive to His Majesty, the great Patron of the Liberty and Rights of all his subjects.”

>On Wednesday the full Commons endorsed the Resolutions, and Bull dissolved the assembly.

On July 5 Charleston raised a statue to democratic hero William Pitt, and the Gazette described another lavish celebration incorporating 45 of this and 92 of that. Of the 45 toasts, the thirty-second was to “Firmness and perseverance in our Resolutions, not to flinch a single Inch.”

The Commons dug in its heels, as did the ministry, and South Carolina functioned without a tax bill, ultimately in 1773 devising a workaround to fund defense of the southern border by issuing debt, which became traded as currency.

Charleston’s patriots had been accused of slavishly following the radicals of the north since the Stamp Act crisis. In a letter to London in 1765 Bull wrote that the Gazette had infected the “minds of men” with “principles … propagated from Boston and Rhode Island.”  So when the Gazette reported the news of the £1,500 Wilkes grant on December 8, 1769, Peter Timothy boasted, “In the Instance it cannot be said we have followed the Example of the Northern Colonies.”

In fact, South Carolina far exceeded the efforts of its northern brethren. Boston sent good wishes to Wilkes. Maryland sent 45 hogsheads of tobacco, worth £500. Virginia pledged the same, but not a leaf was sent.

The cufflink and more merch: https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2019/07/a-wilkes-cufflink-from-brunswick-town.html

The number 92 was for the 92 members of the Massachusetts assembly who refused to rescind its circular letter urging the colonies to work together in opposition to the Townshend duties. The Boston Gazette published a story about Charleston Libery Tree meeting copied from the South-Carolina Gazette. All newspapers shared content. https://www.masshist.org/database/466

Charleston Time Machine for Liberty Tree. https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/remembering-charlestons-liberty-tree-part-1

The most comprehensive account of the Wilkes crisis: Greene, Jack P. “Bridge to Revolution: The Wilkes Fund Controversy in South Carolina, 1769- 1775.” The Journal of Southern History 29, no. 1 (1963): 19–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/2205100.

All about John Wilkes https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-scandalous-case-of-the-north-briton-number-45/

Laurens opened his window to a crowd of unruly men clamoring for stamps to destroy. When he assured them he had no stamps, they demanded proof. He offered to duel any man who accused him of lying “but it was base in such a multitude to attack a single Man.” That had no effect. So he called to the window his pregnant wife Eleanor, “shrieking and wringing her hands” and accused the men of “cruelty to a poor Sick Woman far done with Child.”

The previous Sunday Charleston had awakened to the sight of British officials hanging in effigy in the town square. Sunday night hundreds of demonstrators—two thousand according to the South-Carolina Gazette—burned the effigies, held a funeral for a coffin labeled “Liberty”, and nearly trashed the house of the stamp distributor. The Laurens house, in the new development of Ansonborough, was about a mile east of the stamp agent’s.

Fearing the mob would break down the door, Henry opened it to a “brace of Cutlasses across my breast [and] the salutation & Lights, Lights, & Search.” As he bickered and bantered with the men over the course of more than an hour, he recognized some “under their thickest disguise of Soot, Sailors habits, slouch hats, &Ca. & to their great surprize called no less than nine of them by name.” One man grabbed him by the shoulders and said “every Body would Love me if I did not hold way with one Governor Grant. This … exhibited to me the Cloven foot of a certain malicious Villain acting behind the Curtain who could be reached only by suspicion.” The mob did no searching and eventually left the household in peace.

All this Laurens recounted in a letter written five days later to Joseph Brown, his Providence friend and trafficking partner. In it he explained his failure to leave Charleston on Friday as expected. Because the “unlucky circumstance” on Wednesday night “has so affected Mrs. Laurens's bodily health as well as her Spirits that my presence & attention at home are become absolutely necessary.”

The letter to Brown has been available in Henry’s papers for more than two centuries. And for two hundred years scholars debated the identity of the Villain behind the Curtain. Some argued that it must have been Christopher Gadsden, the firebrand merchant who led Charleston’s resistance. In 1760-63 Gadsden went head-to-head with Laurens, mostly in the South-Carolina Gazette, over James Grant’s conduct of the Cherokee War as commander of a British expeditionary force. Others thought it was Peter Timothy, who had amplified Gadsden’s complaints against Grant and added plenty of his own in the Gazette. By the time of the stamp act crisis, Gadsden and Timothy were widely known as partners in resisting British over-reach. In 1765 each had claim to the cloven foot.

The debate was settled sometime after 1999. That spring an American billionaire having dinner at Ballindalloch Castle in Scotland was informed by his hosts, descendants of James Grant, that they had discovered a trove of Grant’s papers in the tower and wondered what to do with them. With their blessing, their guest informed the Library of Congress, which then shepherded the papers to Scotland’s national archives for microfilming and on to the University of Pennsylvania and the Library of Congress. In 2015 Susan Schwartz, a doctorial candidate, published an article in the Florida Historical Quarterly quoting a letter from Laurens in the Ballindalloch stash that described the attack on his house. In it, Laurens wrote that he suspected Timothy “of putting Grant's ‘name into the mouths of those Anti-Parliamentarians’." Laurens also accused "that Rascall Timothy,” who was also Deputy Postmaster, of interfering with Grant’s mail.

The October 31 issue of the South-Carolina Gazette thoroughly documented the stamp-act protests of the previous two weeks. It also reported that rumors had circulated that stamps had been hidden at the home of an “Ansonborough man,” and that on the night of October 23 a peaceful group of men had gone “thither to be satisfied of this report; but finding none, they returned quietly without insult to anyone.”

The Cherokee War was known elsewhere as the French and Indian War or the Seven Years War.

Eleanor Delamere Ball Laurens gave birth to twelve children and died a few weeks after giving birth to her thirteenth. She was thirty-nine. Only four of her children lived to adulthood, a mortality rate in line with that time and place—a baby born in 18^th century South Carolina had a 25% chance of seeing age 20. She died in 1770, spared seeing her son John killed in the Revolutionary War.

Henry Laurens continued to be loyal to the King until he was personally inconvenienced by a corrupt British official. He switched sides, did time as president of the Continental Congress, helped craft the Articles of Confederation, was captured by the British when returning from Europe to drum up allies, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. After a year he was exchanged for Cornwallis.

The discovery of the letters in Scotland: https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0304/papers.html; the castle: https://www.ballindallochcastle.co.uk/

Schwartz, Susan. “James Grant, British East Florida, and the Impending Imperial Crisis, 1764-1771.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 93, no. 3 (2015): 327–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43487693. p. 352

Detailed description of the Ansonborough house is in Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay, a daughter of Henry and Eleanor: https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.memoirsoflifeofm02rams/?sp=10. Excerpted in this blog dedicated to John Laurens: https://john-laurens.tumblr.com/post/161571173868/do-we-have-any-pictures-or-any-hints-of-what

The Gazette had been pushing nonimportation since the Townshend Act passed in 1767. It published weekly the names of violators, their excuses, and their apologies. Its ads promoted the sale of American-made goods. The Timothy Printing Office kept the list of people who had signed the agreement and printed fliers naming those who did not.

The March 29, 1770, Gazette was typical. To demonstrate the folly of depending on British imports, an article noted that Charleston’s efforts to install street lights had been thwarted by the duty on glass, while “in Philadelphia, they have them of their own Glass” made in Pennsylvania. A paper manufacturer seeking to set up operations in South Carolina was “being met with encouragement.”

Were it not for nonimportation resolutions “it is computed that the British Merchant would have drawn from us this Year, no less a Sum than TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS STERLING, for the [purchase] of Slaves ALONE.”

Should duties be repealed, “Importers and Shippers would be inevitably ruined; as our Resolutions restrain us from PURCHASING any such Goods, till we shall be restored to our former Freedom; and as the Inhabitants throughout the Province … will certainly continue to adhere most strictly to the Letter of the said Resolutions.”

The next issue of the Gazette surely shocked Charleston. On its front page the lion and the unicorn seal was blacked out and black borders framed the two-page, tightly detailed report of the March 5 “massacre” by British troops in Boston. It named the dead and described their wounds.

“The dead are Mr. Samuel Gray, killed on the spot, the ball entering his head, and beating off a large portion of his skull.

“A mulatto man, named Crispus Attucks, who was born in Framingham, but lately belonged to New-Providence and was here in order to go for North-Carolina, also killed instantly; two balls entering his breast, one of them in special goring the right lobe of the lungs, and a great part of the liver most horribly.

“Mr. James Caldwell, mate of Capt. Morton's vessel, in like manner killed by two entering his back.

“Mr. Samuel Maverick, a promising youth of seventeen years of age, son of the widow Maverick, and an apprentice to Mr. Greenwood, ivory-turner, mortally wounded, a ball went through his belly, and was cut out at his back: he died the next morning.”

The Gazette was the only southern newspaper to use mourning borders around the story of the Boston massacre.

April 19, the Gazette published a call to arms, a set of revolutionary axioms suitable for framing: “Liberty in Retail, is but another Term for Slavery. While these Acts continue in force, we are chained down by our Resolutions: such is our present Situation, in which we glory. The Day of Trial is but approaching: Unanimity is absolutely Necessary: and we are positive: nothing but an Exertion of a purist Virtue in the prosecution of one generally adopted Plan can possibly revive our expiring Constitution.”

South Carolina’s General Committee, charged with enforcing nonimportation, tried to stem the tide of defection. Through its chairman, John Neufville, it addressed letters to the Sons of Liberty in North Carolina and sent a packet to Samuel Adams including letters for Connecticut and New Hampshire. The letters urged each to “persevere to the last”. “Should any of our Sister-Colonies take Advantage of the Repeal of these trifling Duties, we think it had been infinitely better to have submitted quietly to the Yoke than to have discovered the deepest knowledge of our Constitution and a most ardent desire of preserving it.”

Neufville dated his letter April 25. Through the summer, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty waited for a response. None came.

Then, on September 22, seemingly in an outburst of frustration, Timothy scratched out two paragraphs to Adams as the ship to Boston weighed anchor. The first paragraph was a picture of hurt:

“There is nothing creates so great Astonishment here that our Committee’s Letters to yours remaining to this Hour unanswered: The Receipt of them has not even been acknowledged, tho they were addressed by recommendation to you (for your careful Delivery): This is a Matter of Triumph to our Enemies; and even members of the Committee draw unfavorable inferences from this extra ordinary--”

He could not finish the sentence. “Do, my good Sir, enable me to resolve this Mystery.” The people of Charleston “adhere most strictly to every Resolution we enter into, as Georgia and Rhode Island fail: But we are surprised that the Northern Colonies have not declined to trade with the former.”

Virginia and North Carolina had followed New York’s lead, and Pennsylvania dropped out in September. Massachusetts and South Carolina were the last hold-outs. South Carolina felt abandoned and ignored.

Adams wrote back on November 21, excusing himself for being “incessantly employd” in the General Assembly, and he explained that he forwarded the two letters to other colonies. But another was “for the Trade, with whom I am not connected, but as an Auxiliary in their Nonimportation Agreement.” He delivered it to the chairman of the merchants “and it was read with great Approbation, in a large Meeting of the Body of the People.” Adams had believed the merchants and sister colonies would have replied, since it was addressed to them.

Nevertheless, “I desire you would make my Compliments and Apology to Mr. Neufville.” Neufville was one of the few Charleston merchants who backed nonimportation against the British-aligned merchants who tried to block it. In contrast, Boston’s merchants helped drive its boycott, which may explain why Neufville addressed them as Sons of Liberty.

To Timothy, Adams confessed that he was feeling defeated. “The Nonimportation Agreement since the Defection of New York is entirely at an end. From the Beginning I have been apprehensive it would fall short of our Wishes.” Boston merchants held to the pact “to their very great private loss” but had in fact “receded” when word of the Townshend repeal reached town—Neufville’s letter had not swayed them.

“I am very sorry the Agreement was ever entered into, as it was ineffectual,” Adams wrote. Then he rallied: “Let us then ever forget that there has been such a futile Combination, & awaken our Attention to our first grand object: [the] Colonies … are united in constitutional Principles… their Dependence is not upon Merchants or any particular Class… nor a resolution barely to withhold Commerce with a nation that would subject them to despotic Power.”

Adams closed with this:

“Our young men seem of late very ambitious of making themselves masters of the art MILITARY.”

All three letters are from the New York Public Library Digital Collections digital collection

Young Revolutionary reenactors: https://home.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?pg=1064612&id=32d88d62-1dd8-b71c-0790-43a2d5938b9d&gid=32CF6086-1DD8-B71C-076771F96D50E588

The South-Carolina Gazette of June 7, 1770, dated two days after the death of the printers’ ten-year-old son, was dramatically different from those that came before and after. It was a double issue, eight pages. Type was in two columns instead of three, and the pages after the front were numbered from 102 to 108. The header on page107 gave the date as April 7, 1770, as if the typesetter wanted to go back in time.

Ads and local notices filled the front page. News from London and Europe filled 102 to 105. The sixth page and part of the seventh described the storm whose greatest fury hit Charleston between two and four that morning. It was “the most violent Storm of Wind and Rain here, that ever was known in this most remarkably calm Season of the Year.” Wharves were trashed, boats “dashed to pieces,” a bridge “wholly destroyed.” People were totally unprepared. “We have Reason to be thankful that no Lives were lost.”

Who in the Timothy Printing Office set those lines of type, thinking of the dead child?

On the top of the second column of page 107 was a letter to “Mr. Timothy, --Sir,” introducing a poem “occasioned by the unexpected Account of your hopeful Son’s Death.” The writer cited “[T]he importance of the Connection” he had with the boy “and my tender Regard for him” as the reason for composing the lines. “If you do not think fit to publish it, [it] shall remain with you as an Instance of my Friendship for you, and my Affection for the deceased Youth.” It was signed “Philom.”, a common pseudonym.

Who set those lines in type? Whose hand picked the block for the wrong month on that page?

The poem followed. Through twelve stanzas of alternating rhyme the poem cried out at the cruelty of Death: “Even Babes descend the dreary Grave/At his relentless stern Command.” Then four addressed Nature, “Why doth she cloud serenest Day/And thus her loveliest Works deform?” Four more redeemed Nature: “Thus the green Foliage must decay/To live again with fresher Hue.”

Finally:

 My Muse the Parents thus bespeaks

And bids them learn this sacred Truth:

“The Soul that’s disengaged from Clay

“Thro’ Realms of purest Bliss shall soar,

“On Angel’s Wings shall glide away

“And taste of Joys unknown before.”

Who set those lines in type and never noticed the wrong month at the top of the page? Who ran those sheets through the printer, up to four per minute? Who hung them to dry and collated them? Who delivered them through the wreckage of the storm?

Were subscribers surprised to see the double issue? The pages numbered 102-108?

It’s possible the press broke and an old one was dragged out of a back room and put to work. An experienced compositor could set about 12,000 characters a day, about two and a half pages of a typical Gazette. Maybe the first four pages were set before the boy died. Maybe the page numbers were relics of an old job and the workers were either too rushed or too heart-sick to care.

How long did it take to gather, compose, and print the storm news? Did someone write the account directly on to the composing stick? How many hands were available?

Enslaved workers helped the Timothys in the house and the shop. One was likely a literate and experienced pressman. The printers’ children were trained to journeyman level by the age of ten or twelve, including the girls. Betsey, 24, and Frances Claudia, 18, were married—both probably lived nearby and rushed to be with their parents and lend a hand. The printer of the rival paper, seen earlier in this blog as the Villainous Apprentice, may have helped, or lent equipment. The Timothys were well-known in Charleston, and the house and shop probably filled with mourners at the boy’s death, the day before the storm hit.

The Timothys and their helpers, enslaved and free, scrambled to produce that double issue. They got the newspaper out on time. Then they grieved.

Two weeks later the next South-Carolina Gazette came out, looking like its old self, with three columns of type on each of four pages.

The poem for the child, Peter Timothy, who died on June 5, 1770, is not available anywhere except in the June 7, 1770 issue of the South-Carolina Gazette, printed by his father and mother and who knows how many other hands. It follows below.

Let not the Muse indignant frown

On these Elegiac humble Lays;

When DEATH is so triumphant grown,

And steals from Youth its choicest Days:

At whose irrevocable Call,

The Gay, the Young, the Rich obey;

The brightest Buds of Genius fall,

And all its Blossoms soon decay  :

Nor Youth nor Innocence can save

From his inexorable Hand ;

E’en Babes descend the dreary Grave

At his relentless stern Command.

The Flow’r is nipped e’re it is blown,

The Blossom blast with the Frost;

The Youth is crush’d before he’s grown,

And all his Parent’s Hopes are crost,

Great NATURE (whose mysterious Pow’r

Mixture of Good and Ill has join’d)

Now sends a mild enliv’ning Show’r,

And now a Deluge frights Mankind

Why doth she thus her Pow’r display,

And why thus frowns the rapid Storm?

Why doth she cloud serenest Day,

And thus her loveliest Works deform?

Tho’ o’er our Heads loud Thunders roll,

Fierce Hurricanes and Tempests blow.

Red lightnings flash from Pole to Pole

And trouble Seas tempestuous flow:

Tho’ blazing Streaks of liquid fire,

From Aetna’s flaming womb are hurl’d,

Volcanos, Earthquakes, all conspire,

To strike with Awe a guilty World:

Yet NATURE aims at one grand End.

And ne’er her own Designs withstood,

All Things to gen’ral Order tend,

All lead to universal Good.

Thus the green Foliage must decay,

To live again with fresher Hue;

The fragrant Flow’rs that fade away,

By vernal Warmth their Bloom renew.

And when the Rose forsakes the Cheeks,

When breathless lies the pallid Youth;

My Muse the Parents thus bespeaks

And bids them learn this sacred Truth.

“The Soul that’s disengaged from Clay,

“Thro’ Realms of purest Bliss shall soar,

“On Angel’s Wings shall glide away,

“And taste of Joys unknown before.”

“Philom.” could have been one of a few poets writing in Charleston at the time. A good guess is George Milligen, a physician-poet who was a member of the same civic societies as Peter Timothy. Milligen wrote an elegy for the death of his own young son in 1767. Kibler, James E. “George Milligen, Colonial Carolina Elegist.” Early American Literature 27, no. 2 (1992): 101–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25056892.

Characters per day is from Gary Gregory, founder and proprietor of The Printing Office of Edes & Gill, in a presentation given at History Camp Boston, March 16, 2019. https://bostongazette.org/

The villainous Apprentice, July 22, 2023, The Radical Printer.

First-line search using the A.I. versions of Google and Microsoft led to “The Performing Arts in Colonial American Newspapers, 1690-1783,” where the first line is filed under “lyric, elegy” and Charleston, 1770.06.07. https://www.cdss.org/elibrary/PacanNew/Index/LYRIC.htm.

The “Join, or Die” message printed in the May 9, 1754, issue of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette made it to the South-Carolina Gazette in the August 22 issue. But the segmented snake itself did not.

Detailed woodcuts appeared in every issue of the South-Carolina Gazette: different styles of houses (urban, country, with and without outbuildings), a wide variety of sailing ships (side views, frontal views, in harbor, under full sail), horses (standing, rearing, running), and people, largely runaways or for sale (men, women, and children, in grass skirts, wearing odd headdresses, wearing English clothes, carrying weapons or tools…). So the capacity to render the snake was there, either in house or from another Charleston artisan.

But the printer used a series of eight short lines to represent the broken snake, each labeled with the initials of a colony (Massachusetts included in “N.E.” for New England).

Franklin’s segmented snake is considered the first political cartoon in America, and it is likely he deserves the credit, although at the time he had hired David Hall to run the Gazette while he immersed himself in politics, specifically the need for the colonies to unite to fight the French and their Indian allies. He was a major force behind calling the Albany Congress to discuss unification, but it failed to endorse his plan.

Peter Timothy would have seen the “Join, or Die” slogan and snake well before the August 22 publication of his typographical one. A ship from Philadelphia carrying the newspaper could have reached Charleston in a few weeks.

The Pennsylvania Gazette published the cartoon May 9 with a five-hundred-word report on the loss of a fort to the French on the western frontier and an editorial comment attributed to Franklin, blaming the loss on “the present disunited State of the British Colonies.”

In the South-Carolina Gazette, the slogan and typeset snake followed an article copied from the July 19 Virginia Gazette that reproduced verbatim the report of Col. George Washington on the capitulation of Fort Necessity, another humiliating loss to French and Indian forces. Then the Virginia paper editorialized: “had the companies from New York been as expeditious as Capt. Mackay’s South Carolina, our camp would have been secure from the insults of the French. … Surely this will … inforce a late ingenious emblem well worthy of their attention and consideration.”

Timothy added, “The Emblem here mentioned was a Figure of a snake (exhibited in the Pennsylvania Gazette and Northern News-Papers) divided into 8 Pieces represented by the Lines underneath,

With the Words under the Pieces, “JOIN, or DIE.”

That issue had only three images, all on the front page and long in use previously. But that issue itself was six pages long, instead of the usual four, and so dense that the printer set type vertically, crammed into a makeshift third column on each of the pages. That fix continued until January 9, when the newspaper went to a true three-column format.

Maybe the print shop simply had not had the bandwidth in August to commission or create a new image.

The cramped page:

Franklin’s unification plan for the colonies would have been under the British government, not as an independent nation.

Capt. James Mackay was a British officer leading an independent company of South Carolinians.

J. L. Bell alerted me to Peter Timothy’s typographical snake. Here’s his article in Age of Revolutions: https://ageofrevolutions.com/2021/07/05/join-or-die-why-did-it-have-to-be-snakes/. Read more of his fine work in https://boston1775.blogspot.com/

In July of 1769 a coalition of mechanics, planters, and merchants agreed to a series of nonimportation resolutions to protest the Townshend duties, after a year of meetings and debate reported extensively in Peter Timothy’s South-Carolina Gazette. Drayton was one of the hold outs.

The letter he fired off to “Mr. Timothy” appeared in the August 3 Gazette and touched off “a long and disgraceful newspaper war” that probably made the Gazette a hot commodity.

Drayton opened by addressing himself in the third person:

Determined to possess his own sentiments and to subject them to no vain Demagogue, he will make use of that freedom, which is the characteristick of a British subject, to censure what he disapproves, a liberty which he finds is now very generally made use of by all ranks of people here, and to which he thinks himself as much intitled as any one person among them.

He then vowed “to expose a Patriot to public view, and shew either the wickedness of his heart or the weakness of his head.” Without naming him, Drayton directed his insults at Christopher Gadsden, the merchant who led the effort for nonimportation. He accused Gadsden of being both “Popish” and Cromwellian, who “endeavors to enslave his fellow subjects, while he avowed that he only contended for the preservation of their liberties.” After many paragraphs extending the Cromwell comparison, Drayton declared that Gadsden was both a “traitor and a madman” who should “be lodged in a brick building, behind a certain white house, near the old barracks, and there maintained, at least during the ensuing change and full of the moon, at the public expence.”

The twenty-seven-year-old son of a rich and arrogant man, Drayton had been educated in London, where he acquired a taste for luxury and gambling. He was deeply in debt. It infuriated him to read that the Timothy print shop was keeping a list of those who signed the nonimportation agreement and that the signers were “determined to lay out their Money with them only.”

Gadsden responded in the August 10 Gazette. Twenty years older than Drayton, seasoned in politics, business, and war, he characterized the younger man as a sniveling brat, genderless no less:

WHAT pity it is that the Mamma of that pretty Child … had not now and then whipt it for lying; or what sad man hath imposed upon it, to make it his dirty instrument to "promulge" to the world his own malicious insinuations about a person in this town that every body knows have not the least degree of truth to support them: If this last be the case, as I would hope it may from the harmless cast of the poor thing, I then must say, fie upon that naughty person, fie upon him, to delude so hopeful an innocent into such paw tricks, as must make all good people not love it.

He went on to defend nonimportation (and himself) and warn “Master Billy” of the consequences of “fibbing.”

Letters supporting nonimportation filled the Gazette September 7 and 14, which triggered another letter from Drayton. This time he associated the supporters with the lower orders, the mechanics, who were Gadsden’s bloc and wedge. In the September 21 Gazette Drayton wrote:

I see no Reason why I should allow my Opinion to be controlled by Men who never were in a Way to study or to advise upon any Points, but Rules how to cut up a Beast in the Market to the best Advantage, to cobble an old Shoe in the neatest Manner, or to build a necessary House.

Nature never intended that such Men should be profound Politicians, or able Statesmen; and unless a Man makes a proper Use of his Reading, he is but upon a Level with those who never did read. From which Reasoning I conclude, that in Point of Knowlege, all the Members of the Committee are upon a Level with each other—A learned Body of Statesmen truly! Will a Man in his right Senses be directed by an illiterate Person in the Prosecution of a Law-Suit or, when a Ship is in a Storm … who but a Fool, would put the Helm into the Hand of a Landsman?

A letter signed by the General Committee, the group policing nonimportation, appeared the next week. In more than four thousand words the author took apart Drayton’s two letters piece by piece and then defended the mechanics.

"Have not the Mechanicks, whom you have treated so ungenerously, a Right to be consulted about their Property as well as you? Have not Men a Right to come into such Agreements and bind one another up? What Point of the Constitution denies this Right?”

In the October 5 Gazette the Mechanicks spoke for themselves, in a letter displaying the Timothy sarcasm and a newsman’s syntax:

[T]he MECHANICKS little expected that [Drayton] would have stooped so low as to confer any of his favours on them, who, in his opinion, are every way so much his inferiors. But as he has deigned to bestow some compliments on them, in point of good manners, they ought not to fail paying their respects to him, in their own plain and homely language, for it cannot be expected they should know how to convey their thoughts in the polite and courtly manner of such a well-bred gentleman.

It disparaged the source of Drayton’s wealth: “Every man is not so lucky as to have a fortune ready provided to his hand, either by his own or his wife’s parents.” Without that:

 He might probably earn a scanty pittance … serving some Mechanic as a labourer, or he might drive a cart or dray about the streets of Charles-Town; but surely, he could neither pretend to build a house to shelter himself from the weather, nor soal his own shoes as they ought to be done; though we will not deny that he might contrive to help himself to a slice of a dead ox, when sharp set.

One of the mechanics had an apartment in a “brick building” where Drayton in “the present unsound state of his mind” might be lodged rent free

and be furnished with straw and other necessaries suited to people in his deplorable circumstances; but he must be debarred of pen, ink, and paper (dangerous implements in unskilful hands) lest they should aggravate his disorder: However, he will be allowed to amuse himself with making and wearing civic crowns of straw, for having saved his fellow-subjects from destruction.

Drayton responded in the October 12 Gazette by correcting the grammar in his opponents’ letters and decrying their use of “language of the stalls.” But he wasn’t done with the lower orders:

The industrious Mechanick, I always considered as a useful and necessary part of society… But, FRIENDS! every man to his trade: When a man acts in his own sphere, he is useful in the community, but when he stept out of it, and sets up for a STATESMAN! believe me, he is in a fair way to expose himself to ridicule, and his family to distress, by neglecting his private business. Such men are often converted into cats paws, and made to serve a turn.

The October 26 Gazette devoted more than five thousand words to support nonimportation and another two thousand to Drayton, who asserted that his language was “a mild and gentle retort, for repeated and violent attacks upon me.” Then he unleashed more hyperbole: “Oh! my countrymen! suffer not an arbitrary power, to get footing in this state: Rome was not built in one day, neither was the forging of her chains the work of a day!”

The arguments for and against nonimportation continued for the next two months, but without contribution from Drayton, whose infant son had died shortly after the “Rome” letter. Around the same time his wife, who had watched Billy squander much of their fortune on gambling, secured a court order for him to relinquish £20,000 of her dowry.

On December 5, Drayton petitioned the Commons House for relief from the damage nonimportation had done to his bottom line. The legislators ignored him, so he turned to Timothy, who printed the petition on the front page of the Gazette on December 14, with a disclaimer ensuring the public that its content did not reflect the views of the printer.

In the December 28 Gazette Drayton reappeared to call out the hypocrisy of a legislature that would deny him relief at the same time it was sending £1,500 to London for to pay the tavern bills of John Wilkes. The printer followed with a correction: the money was “for the Support of the JUST and CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS of the People of that Kingdom and America.” The petition was Drayton’s parting shot. Tucked into a round-up of news about the economic impact of nonimportation was this sentence: “the Ship in which William-Henry Drayton, Esq., embarks for England, now ready to clear out, has on board near 140,000 lb of Indigo.”

Drayton returned a year and a half later with his finances repaired and an appointment to the royal council. Billy eventually joined the cause after clashing with other appointees and growing close to revolutionaries of his class.

“Long and disgraceful newspaper war”, Daniel J. McDonough, Henry Laurens and Christopher Gadsden: The Parallel Lives of two America Patriots.

Mechanics were all those who lived by the work of their hands, from cobblers to printers to painters and musicians.

Drayton’s finances: Keith Krawczynski, William Henry Drayton, Louisiana State University Press, 2001, page 37.

140,000 pounds of indigo represented about one quarter the average annual output of South Carolina 1771-1775, or about £30,000, roughly $700,000 today. R.C. Nash, “South Carolina Indigo, European Textiles, and the British Atlantic Economy in the Eighteenth Century.” The Economic History Review 63, no. 2 (2010): 362–92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27771617, p. 378, and on-line calculators.

Drayton as Founding Father: https://www.nps.gov/people/william-henry-drayton.htm

During the pre-Revolutionary period Gadsden used the South-Carolina Gazette to argue with his political opponents, and Peter Timothy got provocative copy that reflected his own biases. The two were associated so closely that for more than a century historians debated which was the “villain behind the curtain” Henry Laurens suspected was behind the attack on his house during the Stamp Act crisis.

Their relationship started when both were teenagers, Gadsden an orphan with a fortune and a fierce drive to build on it and Timothy a fatherless boy whose name was on the Gazette as printer. Peter was educated at his parents’ knee, fluent in English, Dutch, and French, literate in Greek and Latin, steeped in Enlightenment ideas, and by necessity a voracious reader—backwards and upside down.

At the age of seven Gadsden was sent to London to be educated and make contacts, and at sixteen he apprenticed in Philadelphia with one of the leading merchants of international trade. That was in 1740, the year fourteen-year-old Peter Timothy appeared in the Gazette as “the printer” having been arrested for publishing an anti-slavery tract.

Gadsden surely knew of Timothy. The South-Carolina Gazette would have been well-thumbed in the offices of merchants of trans-Atlantic trade, as it printed each week the names of arriving and departing ships, their captains, cargo, and destinations.

The fall of 1741 Gadsden returned to Charleston to settle the estate of his father and stepmother, most of which went to him. The next February, when he was barely eighteen, he advertised in the Gazette that he was selling: “Good Flour, ship bread, soap and candles, also some of Matlock’s best double Beer at reasonable Rate for present Pay” from a store on Shute’s Wharf.

Gadsden returned to Philadelphia to finish his apprenticeship, and in 1745 sailed to England to visit relatives. He hitched a ride on the Aldborough, a 21-gun British man-of-war assigned to protect Charleston from privateers. En route, the purser died, and the captain appointed Gadsden in his place. The pay was zero, the responsibilities onerous, and potential prize money significant. Gadsden was twenty-one. “Clerk of the purse” was basically a desk job, however, making Gadsden well-placed to be the Gazette’s correspondent.

That April the Aldborough arrived in Charleston with a French warship it captured in the Bay of Biscay, including “its cargo of 270 Hogsheads of white and brown Sugars,” the Gazette reported. Three weeks later it left in pursuit of privateers, but returned after another week empty handed. They “staid off the bar of St. Augustine 3 days but the weather being so foggy they could not see into that Harbor.”

On May 6, the Gazette reported that the governor received “with great Ceremony and Civility” the “Emperor of the Cherokee Indians” and the “King of the Catawbas” and “many of their principal Warriors and head men,” who wanted to “renew their ancient Friendship with this Government.” The guests toured Fort Johnson and were “sent aboard his Majesty’s Ship Aldborough.”

On May 13, the Gazette printed a drawing of a ship with the notice that “will be paid to the Captors, the Shares of the Prize-Money due them from the French Schooner called the Les Deux Amis, lately taken by the said Ship Aldborough.”

Two weeks later the Aldborough and its enriched purser departed in a convoy protecting “the richest English ship (with gold and silver, &c) that has sailed from America.” They were escorting the Rose, which, after a six-hour battle, had captured a French ship off Cuba. Gentleman’s Magazine estimated the value of the cargo at £200,000, about $40 million today.

The Aldborough peeled off at some point and was next seen “chased into Frederica by two enemy ships,” according to the June 15 Gazette. By August it was back in Charleston sheltering from hurricane season while “3 or perhaps more Privateers are now cruizing our coasts.”

The Gazette in this period bristled with tales of battles at sea, and in April of 1746 the Aldborough and its companion the Tarta pink, in a convoy with merchant ships, captured the Spanish privateer Don Julian De La Vega. The Gazette described the action:

“The famous Don Julian De La Vega, who three Days before sail'd from St. Augustine in a large Privateer Brigt. mounted with 16 guns, besides 16 Swivels, and 140 Men, …  about 10 o'Clock [at] Night, came crowding down upon the Tartar, taking it to be a Merchant-man; the Approach of which [the captain] calmly received, But soon convinc'd him of his Mistake by a Broadside, and [the Aldborough] quickly joined, on hearing of the Action. The Don employed the guns like a Man of Spirit, and had about 8 or 9 Men kill'd before he struck [sail]; And this Evening we had the Pleasure to see the Prize brought in here.

“The Aldborough, having had her Masts wounded in the Action, is returning into Port.”

Gadsden had apparently been making good use of his time in port. On July 28 the Gazette announced his marriage to Jane Godfrey, “an agreeable young Lady, of distinguishable Merit, with a good Fortune.” The newly-enriched newly-wed sailed for Cape Breton on the Aldborough about two weeks later.

In December the Gazette reported its return, with “a large sloop full of “mahogony plank and lignum vitae” bound for London it had recaptured from a privateer.

That January Timothy, who had married Ann Donovan the previous December, took over the Gazette from his mother and launched his tenure with a series of sarcastic take-downs aimed at Governor James Glen.

The Aldborough was back at anchor in Charleston by June, waiting for a new main mast and rudder, lost in yet another sea battle. That September, the Gadsdens welcomed their first child, and Christopher resigned his post on the warship to focus on putting his wealth to work. The Timothys’ first, Elizabeth Ann, had been born the previous December.

"The Christmas Treasure of 1744," Charleston Time Machine, December 18, 2020. https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/christmas-treasure-1744

"Hispanic Prisoners in Charleston during La Guerra del Asiento," Charleston Time Machine, October 7, 2022. https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/hispanic-prisoners-charleston-during-la-guerra-del-asiento#_edn13

Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution, Stanly E. Godbold and Robert H. Woody, University of Tennessee Press, 1982

“The Ills from ill plac’d Pow’r, kept up by Vice

Do far surpass a Plague of Frogs and Lice.”

But the muzzling of the press backfired. The heavy hand of the governor apparently kept the Gazette from reporting that South Carolina had curtailed trade with the Cherokees in response to rumors of attacks on settlers. Since newspapers were an important means of communication between colonies, no word of South Carolina’s tensions with the Cherokees reached Williamsburg, so Lewis Burwell, president of Virginia’s royal council, entertained a Cherokee delegation seeking new trading partners. The Virginia Gazette quoted the Cherokees’ reproach of Glen in its August 16, 1751, issue: [italics in original]

We are instructed to inform you, that four Years ago we waited upon the Governor of South-Carolina, to endeavor to prevail on him to encourage a Trade between the Subjects of that Colony and the Cherokees, and to supply us with Ammunition and other Necessaries, which he promised to do but has not perform'd. This was the principal Cause of our coming here, and the Experience we have had of the Path to Carolina being very difficult and incommodious for carrying on a Trade there, an additional Reason. Moreover, the Governor of Carolina has furnished the Creek Indians, our Enemies, with Ammunition and Necessaries, and given them very distinguishing Tokens of Kindness.

Timothy sent the Virginia Gazette to Glen and asked for a statement to print in response. On October 3, 1751, the South-Carolina Gazette instead published the following:

There has lately happened a skirmish with some Indians, not many miles from this metropolis; of which we have not yet had any particular accounts given us.

The governor continued to be beset on all sides. The London Board of Trade chided him for allowing the assembly to grab power. The assembly tried to wrestle away more, and the South-Carolina Gazette responded by printing the assembly’s proclamations that were at odds with the governor’s, along with sarcastic digs and lengthy essays on tyrants.

In March 1753 “French Indians” attacked a settlement at Four Hole Swamp, near the Orangeburg road, about fifty miles from Charleston, killing a man and raping a woman. The governor, urged by London, had been trying to bring about alliances of Indian nations to fortify western and southern borders against incursions from Indians coming from the Mississippi and Ohio River valley who had been aligned with the French. The assembly had resisted, believing that warring among tribes was integral to Indian culture and that Glen’s tactics would spark a regional conflict embroiling the colonists.

The assembly responded to the Four Hole Swamp attacks by offering £100 for killing or capturing a “Northern Indian.” But Glen had been trying to facilitate a meeting between representatives of the Six Nations and the Catawba. He issued a proclamation offering £100 only for capturing or killing the Indians directly responsible for the attack.

The assembly ordered Timothy to print its proclamation offering the bounty for any Northern Indian. It appeared in the April 11, 1753, issue of the Gazette. Glen sent that paper to the Board of Trade to demonstrate what he was up against.

Meanwhile, the Timothy Printing Office had concerns of its own.

“Tis almost an age since I’ve had a letter from you,” Timothy wrote to Benjamin Franklin on June 8, 1755. He had received a shipment of paper, asked for another, and begged for an accounting of what he owed. But he had received no personal message from Franklin for a long time. “The Study of the Electrical Arcana and Public Affairs” were likely keeping him busy, Timothy wrote, but perhaps he “may now and then find the leisure to write 2 or 3 Lines.”

He went on to demonstrate that Franklin was not the only man embroiled in public affairs:

“Our Governor sets out next Wednesday to meet some Indians Half-Way from their Country. The wretched Management of Indian Affairs by that Gentleman has occasioned the imposing Silence on the Press, under various Pretences.”

A report of the meeting appeared in the Gazette on July 31, probably because Glen had written it. In more than two-thousand words, it portrayed the governor as a benevolent overlord and skilled backwoods negotiator.

The leader of the Cherokees, Connecorte, had asked to meet the governor to form an alliance. Glen left Charleston on June 16 to travel two hundred miles, halfway to Chotte, the “mother” town of the Cherokees. The parties met for “six or seven days” and exchanged gifts. The Cherokee leaders asked the “English king” to “send them arms and ammunition to defend against his and their enemies.” They referred to Glen as “elder brother” and the “Great English King” as “father”. The October issue of a London magazine printed a dispatch from “Charles Town in America” with wording identical to what appeared in the Gazette.

Timothy closed his letter by conveying “mine and Mrs. T’s Compliments” and reporting the birth of his “6^th Child and only Son.” That was Lewis William, born May 17.

As it turned out, within a few months after Timothy wrote the letter, Glen was gone. The Board of Trade recalled him to London. On June 1, 1756, William Henry Lyttleton arrived to take his place.

South-Carolina Gazette, April 29, 1751 and May 6, 1751

Four Hole Swamp attack: Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina 1752-4 (sn, 1752), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/iau.31858045012774. xix

Assembly’s bounty: Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina 1752-4, 203

When Timothy was writing, Franklin was scrambling to provision Braddock’s expedition against the French. September 1754-February 1755 he was attending the Albany Convention to plan for colonial unity. https://archives.upenn.edu/exhibits/penn-people/biography/benjamin-franklin/

The two versions of Glen’s report were identical except for minor changes in capitalization and spelling, The Gentleman’s Magazine, published in London, October 1755, 470–72.

Spellings of the Cherokee names vary widely in the record. Cunne Shote’s portrait was made when he visited London in 1762.

Then he entreated his debtors to pay up:

As the Expense of new furnishings and fitting out the Printing Office in such a commodious Manner, will amount to a very considerable Sum of Money; so all Persons, who are in arrears, and are willing to encourage so entertaining an amusement to assist him as much as in them lies, in defraying said Expense as speedily as possible.

In the same issue, his mother, Elizabeth Timothy, announced that she planned to leave the province “in a few months” and wanted to collect what was owed on her husband Lewis’s estate “(now near eight years)”. Her two youngest children were thirteen and ten, so her threat to leave may have been a bluff. She was still on King Street, the former site of the print shop, selling Pamela, the 1740 novel that launched a craze for novels; the Psalms and Hymns of Isaac Watts, standard in nonconformists churches; Cato’s essays, all literate men and women read them; Reflections on Courtship and Marriage, a pamphlet by Benjamin Franklin; and blank forms and writing materials, “all very cheap”.

Peter’s investment in a new press and type may have been necessary—or a rash debt he took on to make a fresh start. Regardless, the shop did not last long on the Bay. By July it had moved to Broad Street, “where all sorts of Printing Business will be done in the best Manner, on neat new Type, Advertisements taken in (☞but not without the Money).”

Not only that,

“At the same House, a few Shop-Goods are to be sold very reasonable, for ready Money only, by A. TIMOTHY.”

Peter and Anne Donovan married in 1745, annd in July of 1747 they had a six-month old daughter and Anne was a few months pregnant. She gave birth three more times before the end of 1751.

The struggle to make ends meet continued. For two years the Timothys tried to collect sixteen shillings for printing a polemic against cruel creditors. The essay, in the form of a letter signed “Philanthropos,” covered the entire front page and one third of a column on the second page of the newspaper. The author had agreed to pay “upon the Hour,” when he submitted the manuscript in 1746. In the first issue of 1748 Timothy demanded payment by the first of the next month or, “the said Letter will be nailed up in the Printing office for public inspection, not doubting but that (howforever disguised the Hand is) I shall thereby find out my Debtor.”

When Elizabeth ran the shop, from 1739 to 1746, it generated enough income to pay off Benjamin Franklin. The ledger she handed over with the shop, however, included the debt of Philanthropos and likely more than a few others. But ownership of the Timothy Printing House came with a newspaper monopoly covering fifty sites in South Carolina and twenty-five from Brunswick in North Carolina to Mobile south and west. In addition, the Gazette sailed to London on merchant ships and on packet boats to all ports in British North America. That broadcast power was particularly irksome to Governor Glen.

In the February 8, 1748, Gazette, Timothy begged “all persons indebted for Printing” to pay by March 25 in order to satisfy creditors “who begin to be very eager for their Money, and have been too much Reasonable so, from the little Regard that has been given former Advertisements on this Occasion.” He repeated the plea in March.

The Timothys’ difficulties were common among the working middle class. Every issue of the Gazette included a handful of notices demanding payment on debts of all sort, particularly for the settlement of estates, reflecting the high mortality rate.

Also in common with many other Charlestonians, Peter was ambitious. In April, he and sixteen other men started the Charles Town Library Society with the goal of elevating literacy in the colony. He was one of only two middling members. The other was a peruke maker. Peter’s involvement came naturally—Lewis had been first librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia when Peter was six or seven. Being active in civic and social life gave printers (and peruke makers) good contacts for business—and for insider information.

By June of 1750, the print shop had moved again, to Tradd Street, at the corner of King, a few hundred feet from the Timothy family compound, where it remained for fifteen years.

Timothy did not let up on the governor. On January 25, 1748, the Gazette printed a speech in which Glen claimed “there is not an Enemy Indian within a Thousand Miles of Charles-Town” and that he had crafted “a perfect good Understanding with all the Nations around us.” But, on March 28, the newspaper reported that Indians had kidnapped English traders at a distance from Charleston “somewhat less than a Thousand Miles.”

In the next issue the printer claimed someone had threatened to “cut off [his] ears” as retaliation for contradicting the governor, so he apologized for writing “somewhat less than a Thousand” and corrected that to “one or two hundred miles.”

Deerskin was the colony’s third-largest export, behind rice and indigo, but its share had been declining in the 1740s as backcountry settlers pushed into indigenous land. South Carolina’s interactions with “all the Nations” were often fraught with conflict over trading rights, compensation, and encroachment of settlers.

On July 25, 1748, the Gazette printed an anonymous letter that began by quoting a message from Glen to the Assembly lambasting “OBSCURE Indian-Traders and PACK-HORSE MEN [who] frequently impose upon the government by lying Letters and false Reports.” The governor was determined to find who was responsible and “have the Authors and Promoters brought to condign Punishment.”

The letter asserted that Glen had no standing to make such accusations because he had prorogued the Assembly before the committee on Indian affairs could present its report:

“[A] Slur seems to be cast … upon the Authors of Intelligence, [and] upon both Houses of Assembly, as if they had spent a great Part of their Time about Things which were supported only by obscure, illiterate, ignorant … Persons ….”

The names of eight men followed who had testified under oath to reports of attacks on traders and settlements in the backcountry and twenty who had submitted signed letters to the committee, only one with a mark instead of signature, that from the governor’s translator.

The Assembly stood by the press.

In 1750 Glen got in trouble for self-dealing in providing gifts to a Choctaw faction, trying to convince them to help fight the French on the frontier. The shop printed pamphlets criticizing the governor, who then tried and failed to get a grand jury to indict Timothy. Timothy pretended to be chagrined. On October 15, 1751, he wrote in the Gazette:

“I have lately received a visit from my Father’s Ghost in which he gave me some wholesome Advice, and urged me much not to talk of—Attempts on Liberty, &c, on Libels, &c, on indictments, &c—but the whole Conversation I may some other Time relate to the Public.”

In November of 1751 Timothy was elected to the Commons House of Assembly, representing the new parish of St. Peter’s, likely on the strength of owning property in Purrysburg that Lewis bought in the 1730s. Peter was elected cashier, but whatever responsibilities came with that did not include the power to pay himself. When he petitioned to be paid for printing laws and proclamations and for subscriptions to the Gazette, the Assembly approved the expediture for printing, but not for the subscriptions. And made him wait six months for payment.

Meanwhile the Timothys diversified by selling Betton True British Oil, Seneka Rattle-Snake Root, silkworms and seed, in addition to “sealing-wax, indemnifying and common deeds, mortgages, bills of sale, bills of lading, powers of attorney, apprentices and servants indentures, copies of writs, summons and executions for the militia, justices warrants and executions for small debts, and other blanks.”

See pevious post, “A privilege we enjoy” for Timothy’s first slap at Glen

Newspaper monopoly ended in 1758. The list of places where subscriptions could be taken was published in the August 25, 1764, Gazette.

For source of books in Charleston and members of the Library Society: James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers, University of South Carolina Press, 2002.

For exports: Leila Sellers, Charleston Business on the Eve of the American Revolution, UNC Enduring Editions (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 169.

“silkwords and seeds”; Calhoun, Jeanne A., Martha A. Zierden, and Elizabeth A. Paysinger. “The Geographic Spread of Charleston’s Mercantile Community, 1732-1767.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 86, no. 3 (1985): 182–220. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27567906. p. 193

“Betton True English Oil” (a cure for many things!): South-Carolina Gazette, June 1751.

“You would have pitied me 1753-54” tells of the time Peter called in debts because he planned to leave the province, and then he didn’t.