Complete issue of The Boston Gazette and Country Journal from Monday, March 6, 1775, four pages, 10 x 15.5, printed by Edes & Gill of Boston, with the paper's masthead bearing the motto, “Containing the freshest Advices, Foreign and Domestic,” and an engraved vignette created by Paul Revere that shows a seated Britannia with Liberty cap on staff, freeing a bird from a cage. This impressive American Revolutionary newspaper contains a lengthy open letter “To the Inhabitants of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay” from “Novanglus” (New England), the pen name of future American President John Adams, who used the Boston Gazette to reply to essays published by Loyalist lawyer Daniel Leonard, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Massachusettensis.’
Adams’s letter, in part: “Our rhetorical magician in his paper of January the 9th continues to wheedle: You want nothing but ‘to know the true state of facts, to rectify whatever is amiss.’ He becomes an advocate for the poor of Boston! is for making great allowance for the whigs. ‘The whigs are too valuable a part of the community to lose. He would not draw down the vengeance of Great Britain. He shall become an advocate for the leading whigs,’ etc. It is in vain for us to inquire after the sincerity or consistency of all this…After a long discourse, which has nothing in it but what has been answered already, he comes to a great subject indeed, the British constitution, and undertakes to prove that ‘the authority of parliament extends to the colonies’…
We are then detained with a long account of the three simple forms of government and are told that ‘the British constitution, consisting of king, lords, and commons, is formed upon the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, in due proportion; that it includes the principal excellences and excludes the principal defects of the other kinds of government—the most perfect system that the wisdom of ages has produced, and Englishmen glory in being subject to and protected by it’…
The question should be whether we are a part of the kingdom of Great Britain. This is the only language known in English laws. We are not then a part of the British kingdom, realm, or state; and therefore the supreme power of the kingdom, realm, or state is not, upon these principles, the supreme power of us. That 'supreme power over America is vested in the estates in parliament' is an affront to us, for there is not an acre of American land represented there; there are no American estates in parliament.” In fine condition, with small tears along the hinge.
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