Justin Pope. “A Slave at the Press: Peter Fleet and Reports of Slave Unrest in the Boston Evening-Post, 1735–1758.” Slavery & Abolition, 42, no. 4 (2021): 691-709, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2021.1973257
The rediscovery of Peter Fleet’s will at the Massachusetts Historical Society provides an opportunity to examine the legacy of early America’s first Black newspaperman. Fleet provided a previously unrecognized connection between printed news and the enslaved community of Boston. As the enslaved typesetter of the Boston Evening-Post, he composed more stories of slave unrest than any newspaper in New England during his time at the press. Fleet’s labour in the print shop placed him at the center of communication of rumours of rebellion and freedom in the early British Atlantic. Fleet’s will may be the earliest known record of probate created by a Black slave in the English-speaking world, but his manuscript gains greater significance as evidence of Fleet’s long struggle to assert control over his life and labour at one of early Boston’s most influential newspapers.
Justin Pope. “Inventing an Indian Slave Conspiracy on Nantucket, 1738.” Early American Studies 15, no. 3 (2017): 505–38, DOI: https://www.jstor.org/stable/90011102
In 1738 British colonists on Nantucket accused their Wampanoag neighbors of plotting to rise in violent rebellion. The colonists quickly discovered the rumor was false, but their retraction did not stop newspaper printers in Boston from creating a sensational story of Indian conspiracy that quickly spread throughout the British Empire, circling the Atlantic from New England to London. In the earliest version of the report, the Boston printer Thomas Draper relied on conventions from his previous stories of slave conspiracy to invent a sensational account of an imminent Indian uprising. Most printers copied his first account of the conspiracy. Examining the Nantucket Indian conspiracy of 1738 illuminates the process by which early American printers altered and even manufactured stories of conspiracy on the basis of conventions established over years of reporting slave unrest. Historians have long relied on newspaper accounts for evidence of subaltern rebellion in the Atlantic world. This case study challenges scholars to reevaluate the process by which printers created news of conspiracy during a formative period in the history of the early American press.