Unrecorded Upstate New York Carriers Address

[Carrier's Address]: [New York]:

Carrier Boy's Address To the Patrons of the St. Lawrence Mercury [caption title].

[Potsdam, NY]: January 1, 1850. Broadside, 20 x 12 inches, printed in four columns. Old folds, minor toning and creasing, curved portion of bottom margin trimmed not affecting text. Overall very good. Item #13002

An unrecorded carrier's address from a short-lived upstate New York newspaper that is, in itself, rare. The St. Lawrence Mercury was one of a few newspapers vying for readership in Potsdam, New York following the dissolution of The Potsdam Gazette. The Mercury only ran from 1847 to 1850, apparently losing out to the St. Lawrence Republican as the primary source of news in the Potsdam area at the midpoint of the 19th century. As such, only scant holdings of the Mercury itself remain, in a handful of New York libraries and at AAS, and we could locate no copies of this carrier's address anywhere.

The address itself is a long and rather epic attempt for a New Year's Day carrier's poem. It is comprised of 600 lines of text (150 lines in each of four columns), printed in a small but highly readable font, comprised of 300 two-line rhyming couplets. The content is mainly centered on the nature of God, but contemporary topics naturally arise. For example, in the second column: "Thou art to us the harbinger of good; Clear indications of the love of God, Whose Word, in thee, our ravished eyes behold, Richer than California's mines of gold." Other subjects include astronomy, temperance, the telegraph, and the future of "this Republic in the coming day, When half a century more has passed away." Regarding the latter subject, the poem touches on the subject of American expansion, noting that the country began the 19th century as thirteen states but are "now up to thirty states" and may end up with "thirty more." This passage makes perfect sense in the wake of the Mexican-American War, when the United States achieved Manifest Destiny.

Price: $1,750