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Philadelphia: Benjamin Towne, August 31, 1776.

Price: $3,500.00

About the item

Vol. II, Num. 252. 4pp. 4to. Unbound. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, vol.2, pp. 931-933.

Item #369649

This issue includes very early reporting on the news of George Washington's retreat at the Battle of Long Island: "This day's post brings us the agreeable intelligence of General Washington having effects a safe retreat for our army out of Lond-Island, in spite of the great numbers in that commanded by Howe. They have brough every thing off with them, except some very large cannon, which they spiked up, and a few out senteries. In the skirmishes, which have been for these several days past, the enemy have lost upwards of a thousand, and we not much more than five hundred ... The manner in which our retreat was performed reflects the highest credit upon our commander in cheif and the officers in general..."

After the British evacuation of Boston in March 1776, the theatre of war in the north shifted to New York. On Aug. 22, 1776, the largest British Armada in history arrived at the entrance to New York Harbor and disembarked troops on the present-day southern Brooklyn shore. The British Army marched north through Flatbush to the Brooklyn highlands ("The Woody Heights") near present-day Prospect Park, where an engagement with the Americans took place on Aug. 27 – the first major battle following the Declaration of Independence. Washington's retreat from Long Island to Manhattan the following day in which 9000 troops safely crossed the river was miraculous, seen by modern military historians as one of his greatest accomplishments. The Battle of Long Island, which a resounding British victory, also that showed there would be no quick end to the war.

Printer Benjamin Towne came to America from Great Britain in 1769, working initially for the weekly newspaper the Pennsylvania Chronicle. On January 24, 1775 he established and printed the first issue of his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Evening Post. The Post was the city's first evening paper as well as its first tri-weekly, with only weekly newspapers issued in Philadelphia to that point. Given its evening publication, frequency and location in Philadelphia in the formative years leading to independence and the American Revolution, the Evening Post would hold the distinction of being the first to print many important resolves of the Continental Congress – most notably being a first-page printing of the Declaration of Independence on July 6, 1776 – as well as other important works such as Thomas Paine's American Crisis, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Pennsylvania Constitution and more. Towne would continue to publish his newspaper during the Revolution, staying in Philadelphia during the British occupation and being branded as a traitor as a result, although returning to the patriot cause after the British left the city. On May 30, 1783, Towne would turn the Pennsylvania Evening Post into the first daily newspaper in the United States, though it would be short-lived, with the final issue published on October 26 1784.