“ At an adjourned meeting held
august 10, 1774, the following report was read, accepted and a copy ordered to
be sent to the delegates in congress from the province of Massachusetts -----
To the inhabitants of the Town of Newbury Port in Town meeting assembled nu adjournment
from the 3rd day of this present month, august:
This quote from the book, first
an introduction by the author, followed by the introduction to the report in
which it introduces, can be found on page 533 in The History of Newburyport.
The document was basically a message to the congress of Massachusetts that they
were going to cut off all trade for an amount of time not specified. Confusing
to me was the reason for this. The unknown author claims that it was to “obtain
more speedy and effectual relief”. Their motive behind this plan I guess was
the speed and organization of the trading process of Newburyport when compared
to similar sized towns. Later in the report, Newburyport’s importance in
general trade is explained with the author describing their importance with the
trading between Great Britain, French West Indian Islands, along with the distilleries
and shipbuilders of the local area. Somehow, I couldn’t grasp why, the document
ties in with the town’s involvement in the revolutionary war. Several times I tried
to read around it to see how it fit in but I just couldn’t grasp it because
everything around it is like documents similar to this one with a brief
introduction in the beginning by the author of the book.
There are countless examples of
old excerpts similar to this throughout this book. Many of which contain very
interesting information about how the town was either developed or stabilized. Reading
these documents is extremely difficult as it seems that every author of them
has no literary skills higher than that of a present day fourth grader. From
run on sentences to subject/predicate agreement (or non-agreement) these old
documents are hard to obtain any information from. However, with careful
reading and willingness to learn these documents can be very useful in
depicting an accurate view on what things were like back then. The constant use
of them in this novel is one of the things that keep me reading.
John-Luc,
ReplyDeleteNow that I think of it, and reading this post, I think you should have been having regular meetings with town historians during this quarter. That would have helped you to understand the documents better and perhaps learn a bit more about the language and style of the time. Could you, perhaps, go to the Newburyport Historical Society as part of the ten hours of your project? I think that would be great for you, and maybe you could even speak about your project with someone who works or volunteers there.