The Essex Gazette, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Crouch
(corner of Washington and Essex Streets, building no longer standing)

Slavery was a very real presence in Salem during the eighteenth century. Some Salem merchants owned or traded in enslaved people, although it was not as prevalent a practice as in Boston, and “runaway slave” advertisements appeared regularly in the Essex Gazette, Salem’s leading newspaper from 1768 to 1775. But through this publication, Salemites were also introduced to America’s first published African American poet, Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-84), whose very skill and success flew in the face of racial bigotry. Phillis had been kidnapped from Africa as a child of about seven and brought to Boston in 1761, where she was purchased by the Wheatley family to serve as a lady’s maid. Her mistress, Susannah Wheatley, quickly realized that Phillis was a child prodigy, and the young girl was taught to read and write. Before long, Susannah arranged to have Phillis’s poetry published in Boston newspapers including “elegiac” poems to honor important people who had recently died. When the famous evangelical preacher of the Great Awakening, Reverend George Whitefield, passed away in nearby Newburyport in 1770, one of his eulogists was Phillis Wheatley, and the Essex Gazette, calling her “the extraordinary Poetical Genius Negro Servant,” printed and advertised special sale copies of her Elegiac Poem, on the Death of That Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Rev’d Mr. George Whitefield.⁸⁰ In 1774, after the publication of her widely acclaimed book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis wrote a stinging letter to her friend the Native American Reverend Samson Occum. In her letter, she condemned Christian ministers for not speaking out against slavery. With her permission, Reverend Occum published the letter in the Newport, Rhode Island, newspaper, and several other papers republished Phillis’s work, including the Essex Gazette. In March of 1774, Salemites could read that “in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance… God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him Honor upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite.”⁸¹

The Essex Gazette ceased publication in 1775, and Salem was without a newspaper for several years. Learning of this state of affairs, according to historian James Duncan Phillips, Mary Crouch “arrived with bag, baggage and printing press from Charlestown, South Carolina,” to start the Salem Gazette and General Advertiser. The paper only lasted a few months, until October of 1781. The following week, Samuel Hall began printing the Salem Gazette. It lasted for four years.⁸²

Notes
80. Essex Gazette, Sept. 21, 1773.

81. Ibid., March 29, 1774.

82. James Duncan Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century (Boston, 1937), 347.