On this day 250 years ago, the first issue of the Virginia Gazette or, Norfolk Intelligencer was published in Norfolk, Virginia. The front page article was a letter on the “Liberties of America and the danger which threatens them” but was a long-winded legal argument that both condemned “the conduct of the Bostonians in destroying the India Company’s Tea,” and declared that “the Boston port-bill is the highest act of despotism that [t]his or any former age can produce,” before running out of space and forcing the reader to wait until the next issue to see if the author reached any conclusion. But page 3 contains a hard-hitting letter by “A YOUNG BROTHER” that pulled no punches in its attack on the British Government:
This dreadful extent of power is claimed by the British Parliament on whom we have not the least check, and whose natural prejudices will ever induce them to oppress us,—they are not of our appointment, they do not hope for our votes, or fear the loss of them at future elections, they have no natural affection for us, they don’t feel for us, they never expect to see us, and therefore do not court our smiles, or dread meeting our angry countenances.—When they vote away our money, the dont at the same time give that of their own and their best friends with it, but on the contrary they ease themselves and their friends of the whole burden they lay on us, and therefore will always have strong inducements to make our burdens as heavy as possible, that they may lighten their own. Indeed in every view of this Act, it appears replete with horror, ruin and woe: to all America, it matters not where it begins to operate, no colony on the continent is exempt from its dreadful principle, nor can any one that has a seaport avoid its execution.—But however ghostly, grinning and death-like, this awful threatening power lowers over us, I doubt not there are means left to America to avoid its effects and virtue enough to induce every individual to throw aside every little consideration, and unite with unmoveable firmness in the important business of self preservation. We have reason to think this is the last effort of the power that would oppress us; if it takes place, we are undone, undone, with our posterity. If we oppose and avoid it, we may still continue to enjoy our liberties, and posterity will look back to this alarming period, and will admire and boast the virtue of their ancestors that saved them from slavery and ruin.
On This Day In The Revolution 