Featured Collections: The Apollo, or Chestertown Spy, Digital Clippings from 1793
The Apollo, or Chestertown Spy is the only known newspaper published in the 1700s on the upper Eastern Shore of Maryland. Just 61 issues survive, all dated between March and December 1793.
The pages of the Apollo, or Chestertown Spy offer a fascinating glimpse into the community’s open divisions over slavery during the era of the Early Republic. Advertisements offering rewards for the recapture of escapees from enslavement are printed literally side-by-side with announcements of upcoming meetings of the Chestertown Abolition Society. Listings of enslaved laborers for sale appear in the same issue as an antislavery poem.
Thus, the newspapers are vivid artifacts of a very specific time and place. For the first decade or two after the Revolution, as they wrestled with defining the meaning and limits of liberty, white and Black Americans — even within slaveholding regions of the country — publicly debated slavery and abolition with an openness that would have been impossible just a little earlier or later. Thomas Jefferson’s words about universal equality were quoted on the title page of the Chestertown Abolition Society’s bylaws, published in 1791. By the eve of the Civil War, however, a little over half a century later, even distributing or circulating antislavery writings — let alone printing them — would be a crime throughout Maryland, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
The Apollo, or Chestertown Spy began publication in March 1793 and appeared twice weekly (Tuesdays and Fridays) in a four-page broadside format. Short items of local, national, and international news appeared alongside advertisements, public announcements, essays, and poetry. Chesapeake Heartland researchers have identified several dozen individual items directly related to African Americans. After the short-lived publication ended, it would be more than 30 years before another newspaper was established in Kent County.
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Mass., holds the only known surviving copies of the Apollo, or Chestertown Spy. Since its founding in 1812, AAS has assembled the world’s largest and most accessible collection — over 4 million items — of books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, children's literature, music, and graphic arts material printed before the 20th century in what is now the United States. As an institutional partner of Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project, AAS digitized its holdings of the Apollo, or Chestertown Spy and granted permission to include all African American-related items as “clippings” in the Digital Archive.
