A review of the secondary literature on the Burr-Hamilton duel does indeed reveal some inconsistency on whether the duel was illegal. Perhaps the inconsistency is partly the result of conflicting personal and political judgments contemporary to the event: Burr and Hamilton were leaders of opposing political factions.

The duel was fought on the early morning of July 11, 1804. Burr and Hamilton, and their seconds, had rowed out separately from New York City across the Hudson River to a narrow spot just below the Palisades at Weehawken, New Jersey. It was a secluded grassy ledge, only about six feet wide and thirty feet long above the river, with no footpath or road leading to it. Cedar trees growing on the ledge partially obscured it from across the river.

It was a place where duelists from New York City could go to settle their affairs in secret as dueling per se was not illegal in New Jersey. Duels took place at the Weehawken spot from about 1799 to 1837, when the last determined pair of duelists were interrupted in their preparations by a police constable, who put them in jail to await the action of the grand jury.

Hamilton’s 18-year-old son Philip had been killed in a duel there on January 10, 1802, just two years previously. After that, Hamilton had successfully helped pass a New York law making it illegal to send or accept a challenge to a duel. Those convicted were liable to lose the right to vote and were barred from holding public office for 20 years, but no duelist had yet been prosecuted. Public sentiment supporting the duty to uphold one’s honor if it had been questioned was still strong and could not easily be ignored, even by those who questioned the practice of dueling.

The participants in a duel—including the principals and their seconds—also typically arranged things in order to make it difficult to convict them. For example, they ensured that none of the participants actually saw the guns as they were being transported to the dueling ground, they kept silent about their purpose, and they had the seconds turn their backs while the shots were exchanged. This would allow them to later deny having heard or seen specific things, decreasing the chance that they might be held as accessories to a crime.

After the duel, Burr and Hamilton were each transported back across the river by their seconds, Burr having mortally wounded Hamilton, who died at his physician’s home the following day.

In New York City, a coroner’s jury of inquest was called on the 13th of July, the day after Hamilton’s death. Although Hamilton was shot in New Jersey, he died in New York, and therefore, Burr (his enemies said) could be prosecuted in New York. The jury sat intermittently until August 2, and considered, among other evidence, the contents of the letters that Hamilton and Burr had exchanged before the duel. These letters suggested to some on the jury that Burr had in fact enticed or even forced Hamilton into the duel, pushing the affair over the line from one of settling honor to one of deliberate murder which was a capital offense.

The coroner’s jury returned a verdict that Burr had murdered Hamilton, and that Burr’s seconds were accessories to the murder. New York then indicted Burr not only for the misdemeanor of “challenging to a duel,” but also for the felony of murder.

In November, Burr was also indicted for murder—which is to say, not for dueling—by a grand jury in Bergen County, New Jersey, because the duel had taken place there.

After the duel, Burr was apparently surprised at the public outrage over the affair. Fearing imminent arrest, he fled to New Jersey, then to Philadelphia, and then to Georgia.

He wrote to his daughter Theodosia: "There is a contention of a singular nature between the two States of New York and New Jersey. The subject in dispute is, which shall have the honor of hanging the Vice-President. You shall have due notice of time and place. Whenever it may be, you may rely on a great concourse of company, much gayety, and many rare sights."

He was still the Vice President, however, and he determined to go back to Washington to act as President of the Senate during its upcoming session and preside over the debate and vote concerning the impeachment of Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase. The impeachment proceedings were part of a partisan struggle between Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists, and Burr might be expected to influence the outcome if he were allowed to preside over the Senate. A large group of Congressmen signed a letter to New Jersey Governor Joseph Bloomfield describing the Hamilton-Burr affair as a fair duel and asking him to urge the Bergen County prosecutor to enter a nolle prosequi in the case of the indictment, in other words, to drop the case. This is what eventually happened.

The murder charge in New York was eventually dropped as well, but Burr was convicted of the misdemeanor dueling charge, which meant that he could neither vote, practice law, nor occupy a public office for 20 years.

Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.

The charter of the Second Bank of the United States, granted in 1816, expired in 1836 (President Jackson vetoed Congress' effort to recharter the bank), after which banking and the issuing of bank notes was not done by a central bank, but devolved upon thousands of state-chartered banks with minimal federal regulation. State laws were often so lax that almost anyone could issue bank notes.

Nevertheless, the state of Pennsylvania did renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, with Nicholas Biddle as its president, which issued bank notes under the name of the institution, but which was then only a state-chartered bank, even though the old bank's stock holders (except the U.S. government) voted to transfer the assets and liabilities of the old bank to the new one. The directors of the new bank decided not only to reissue the old bank notes, but also not to close the books of the old bank, but to continue them into the life of the new bank (it continued until 1841), which made it quite difficult later to disentangle the affairs of the defunct bank from those of the new one. One of the consequences was that the new Pennsylvania bank honored the notes issued by the old Bank of the United States. Because of that, other banks and individuals could also honor the old notes because the new bank would redeem them.

Reproductions of 1840 bank notes of the Second Bank of the United States, issued in Philadelphia by the state-chartered bank—the "Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania"—have lately been printed as "souvenirs" but are essentially worthless to numismatic collectors.

The original 1816 charter of the Second Bank of the United States limited the circulation of notes by the bank to $35 million, and required that no notes be issued in denominations less than $5. In practice, the bank never had more than $25 million in notes circulating, and most of the time much less, averaging for one period about $15 million.

In October 1836 (the Second Bank of the United States closed its doors in March of that year), its records showed that about $12 million notes were still in circulation, down from $24 million one year earlier (Cattrell, pps. 427, 512), with the average circulation for 1836 reckoned to have been about $21 million. The mixture of bill denominations in this total was not recorded, so it seems impossible to be certain of how many bills this represented.

In colonial America, there were not really any “teenagers” as we know them. Of course, children passed through the decade that we know as the “teens,” but that stage of their lives was not the carefree, exploratory period that today’s youth experience. Children grew into adulthood more quickly than they do today, and by the time a child entered their teen years, they were already on a path toward their life’s occupation. Although a youth’s path to adulthood depended on their family’s socio-economic status, regardless of wealth, young men usually learned their trade through some form of apprenticeship.

Children from poor families were often bound out to servitude at a young age, earning their keep while learning a trade. In the seventeenth century, 80% of the Chesapeake’s immigrants were indentured servants. Many of these servants were over the age of 20, but a significant number were young men and women still in their teens. In return for their passage to the Chesapeake, these servants agreed to work for a period of time, usually between four and seven years, without pay. During their service, masters provided food, clothing and shelter, and at the end of their term, servants received “freedom dues,” usually three barrels of corn and a suit of clothes. Many of these youths were orphans, but some were from indigent families who could not care for their children, and therefore sent them off to find their own fortunes. But a young person did not have to travel across the Atlantic to enter into servitude. At the age of 12, Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed to his brother, James, a Philadelphia printer. In his autobiography, Franklin recalled that his brother was “passionate” and often beat him. “Thinking my apprenticeship very tedious,” Franklin stated, he “was continually wishing for some opportunity of shortening it.” At the age of 17, Franklin ran away from his brother’s household.

Children of wealthier families also took on considerable responsibility at a young age. Children from families of middling means often learned how to read and write, especially if they lived in urban areas. By the time they were in their mid-teens, sons were at work in the family farm or business, learning the trade that they would probably practice the rest of their lives. In the wealthiest families adolescent boys were often sent to boarding school, and then when they were around 15 years of age, they entered institutions such as Harvard, William and Mary, or Yale. After finishing their formal education, many took apprenticeships as clerks in merchant offices or law offices, or they returned home to follow their fathers’ profession.

Only young men were allowed to pursue higher education. Although there were a few opportunities for girls to receive a more extensive formal education in the colonial period, most families kept their daughters at home to learn how to run a household and to be a dutiful mate for her future husband. There were rare exceptions to this convention, however. In 1738, when Eliza Lucas was 15, her father moved her and her mother from Antigua, West Indies, to a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina. Her father’s travels with the army and her mother’s ill health forced Eliza to manage the family business. In a letter to a woman friend, Eliza Lucas described her duties: “I have the business of 3 plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue of other sorts than you can imagine.” But, she assured her friend that “I think myself happy that I can be useful to so good a father, and by rising very early I find I can go through much business.” Lucas assumed an unusual burden as a young woman, but eventually she followed a somewhat conventional path – she married a planter and had children, yet she continued to hold considerable responsibility in the management of her husband’s plantations.

Contemporary Americans often picture the War for Independence as a straightforward struggle between American patriots and the British crown over the political independence of the colonies. The reality is far more complex: the colonists did not represent a homogeneous bloc, and in some senses the conflict resembled a civil war over political sovereignty in the colonies. Like all civil wars, it extracted a toll on the civilian population, many of whom who found themselves displaced and their lives disrupted by the military and political struggle being played out in North America.

Not every inhabitant of the colonies in 1776 supported the Declaration of Independence and the political break from the English crown. It is impossible to know precisely how many supporters the Patriot forces enjoyed (especially when announcing one’s allegiance was a potentially risky move), but modern historians estimate that, at most, the Patriots enjoyed a bare majority of popular support—that is, no more than half the residents of the colonies supported the cause of independence. Between one-sixth and one-fifth of the residents of the colonies remained loyal to the British crown; the remainder of the population did their best to avoid an open declaration of their sympathies, since “fence-sitting” was often the safest political and practical course.

Fully fifteen to twenty percent of the residents of the North American colonies retained their allegiance to the crown during the conflict. These loyalists presented some serious challenges to the Patriot forces mounting the War for Independence, already strained by the demands of fighting the world’s most powerful military with scarce resources and an embryonic government. Loyalists threatened to provide information or material support to British forces, and the stakes involved in the struggle—in the eyes of the Crown, after all, the Patriots advocating treason in their push for independence—led the Patriots to deal with Loyalist elements harshly at points in the struggle. Desperate to deter loyalists from overtly supporting British forces, Patriots imposed loyalty oaths on colonists suspected of British sympathies. Other Loyalists had their land confiscated; by war’s end, the hostilities had forced some 60,000 Loyalists to leave their homes in the thirteen colonies and relocate to England or to other parts of the empire.

The 1994 PBS film Mary Silliman’s War does an excellent job of demonstrating many of the tensions the War for Independence created in local communities, and the ways in which civilians caught between two warring armies attempted to continue their lives against a backdrop of conflict and civil war. The film is based on the true story of Mary Silliman, whose husband Selleck actively prosecuted Loyalists for treason as the state’s attorney for Connecticut. After winning a death sentence for two Fairfield men, their relatives kidnap Selleck and threaten to hang him if the convicted Loyalists ascend to the gallows. In charting Mary’s efforts to secure her husband’s release, the film vividly portrays the often insoluble dilemmas faced by civilians during what remained (until the 1970s) America’s longest war.

Maybe, but in a roundabout way.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that this question is apparently not something that has elicited a lot of serious historical research up to now ("Where do I find historical evidence for a simple game played by children that requires no equipment?" and "Will I hurt my chances for tenure if I spend much time researching such a seemingly trivial subject?"), so I will have to go out on a limb here with my own theory, which is based only on circumstantial evidence. Because this is just my theory, I am going to have to explain how I arrived at it.

First, a confession: Although I began playing rock-paper-scissors when I was a child, I had never heard it called "Rochambeau" until you sent in your question. Asking around, however, I discovered that some of my colleagues, raised in various places around the country, had vaguely heard of "Rochambeau," but with some of them I was not able to figure out if they had definitely called the game of rock-paper-scissors "Rochambeau" when they were younger, or whether they had merely watched a certain South Park episode in which Eric Cartman challenged another child to play "Rochambeau," but which he explained as consisting in a kind of duel carried out by kicking each other (Google "Rochambeau" and "South Park" to find a link to the clip, but I hereby give you a "language warning" for this).

Nevertheless, more Googling makes it clear that "Rochambeau," used for rock-paper-scissors, has an older and wider provenance. Mathematicians and evolutionary biologists, for example, who have recently become interested in "multivariant" selection systems over the past 20 years or so, have written about rock-paper-scissors and have typically cited the game as "rock-paper-scissors" and then added "Rochambeau" or "Roshambo" in parentheses after it. So that carries the word back at least a couple of decades.

As an illustration of the severe limits on using Wikipedia for research, the English-language Wikipedia entry on rock-paper-scissors (or rock-scissors-paper, etc.) says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in French. But the French-language Wikipedia entry on the game lists the Francophone countries' names for it as: pierre-feuille-ciseaux, papier-caillou-ciseaux, roche-papier-ciseaux, pierre-papier-ciseaux, and feuille-caillou-ciseaux. It then says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in the United States. I wondered whether "Rochambeau" might be an English-language corruption of a French triplet beginning with "roche" (rock), but I have nothing else to offer in this speculative vein, so this is not part of my theory.

Next up was to consider the alleged connection with the Comte de Rochambeau, the French general who was a hero of the American Revolution.

Over the past decade, rock-paper-scissors has become a quasi-formally organized sport with international tournaments. Two American brothers, Douglas and Graham Walker, organized the World RPS Society, with tournaments, a website, t-shirts, and posters, and they have also published a light-hearted guide to playing "professional" rock-paper-scissors, which includes a brief and half-serious history of the game. Their Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide (2004) offers one theory about how the game became "synonymous with" the Comte de Rochambeau:

"It is widely believed that an ill-advised throw of Scissors (or Ciseaux) resulted in his being uprooted from his ancestral home to become the marshal of the French forces during the American Revolution. His arrival is widely credited with the introduction of RPS to the United States."

But this is all unlikely. Rochambeau (and Lafayette and other French military officers) were quite eager to come to America to fight with the Americans, and had to resist others' efforts to keep them in France so that their military experience would not be missed there.

Another mention of the supposed historical connection with Rochambeau is in physicist Len Fisher's Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life (2008):

"George Washington is reputed to have played it with Cornwallis and the Comte de Rochambeau to decide who would be the last to leave Cornwallis's tent after the signing of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. (The story goes that Rochambeau won, which is why the game is still called Ro-Sham-Bo in some quarters.)"

But Washington, Rochambeau, and Cornwallis did not negotiate surrender terms together in a tent; nor did they even meet together on that occasion. Cornwallis sent Washington a message under a flag of truce, proposing a cessation of hostilities so that officers appointed by each side could meet and "settle terms of the posts at York and Gloucester." After speaking with his own staff and with Rochambeau and his officers, Washington responded in writing that he wished to see Cornwallis' proposed terms of surrender before he could agree to the talks. Cornwallis sent back another written message to Washington, listing his terms. Washington then decided that he could not accept the terms as written, but that they were enough to begin negotiations, so he agreed to the ceasefire and to send representatives to the Moore house on the York River behind the Americans' lines, where Cornwallis had proposed the meeting take place.

The officers who met for negotiations the following day included Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens, a native South Carolinian, who had previously been Washington's aide-de-camp, and (for Rochambeau) Colonels Louis Marie Antoine vicomte de Noailles (Lafayette's brother-in-law), and Guillaume Jacques Constant Liberge de Granchain. They met with British Lieutenant-Colonel Duridas and Major Ross, one of whom was Cornwallis' aide-de-camp. Negotiations lasted eight hours that day. They were extremely detailed about terms, including even the requirement for the British troops to march out with their colors masked and with their fifers not playing any British or German tunes. A final agreement was reached only during the second session, the following day, on October 19, when the same negotiators returned, having consulted with their superiors. They then brought back the Articles of Capitulation for their commanders to study and to sign "in the trenches." Cornwallis signed for the British side. Generals Washington and Rochambeau, and Admiral de Grasse, gathered elsewhere, signed for the opposing side.

That afternoon, the British forces marched out from where they had been besieged. Cornwallis was not among them. He pleaded illness, and left the formal surrender to Brigadier General Charles O'Hara, who rode up to the allied officers and asked which one was Rochambeau. He was immediately told to surrender to Washington, but when he stopped in front of Washington and offered him Cornwallis' sword, Washington refused, for reasons of military protocol, to receive a sword from the opposing side's subordinate commander. Washington directed him to surrender the sword to his second in command, General Benjamin Lincoln, which he did, and turned and rode away.

None of the details of the surrender or the ceremony itself seem like they would have been left to a game of chance.

I conclude, therefore, that the stories that try to link the game with Rochambeau himself, are likely recent and apocryphal, made up in an ad hoc fashion to give flesh to why the game was called "Rochambeau."

Now we get to the nub of this matter: I did a rather tedious search in online databases of books, periodicals, and newspapers published in America from the 17th- through 19th-century and found absolutely no mention of "Rochambeau" used as the name of a game, or, for that matter, of any mention of Rochambeau playing rock-paper-scissors, or even any mention of the game of rock-paper-scissors itself being played in America at all until well into the 20th century. I certainly do not believe that my search has been exhaustive (many old newspapers are not online, for example), and there was plenty that was written that was never published, but if the game was being played by children of European descent "from time immemorial," it seems odd (but not conclusive) that I have been able to find no one mentioning it in anything published in America for the first several centuries of European presence here, even though the game, by its very nature, is not something on which writers would necessarily have thought to expend much ink, if they deigned to notice it at all.

The absence of any mention of the game does not mean, by the way, that American children did not have hand games for deciding winners or selecting alternatives—"Odds and evens," for example, has a long history in Anglo-American culture (James Boswell mentions it in his Life of Samuel Johnson).

In addition, there is evidence (by way of a conspicuous absence of another order) of American ignorance of the game as late as the turn of the 20th century: Stewart Culin, Director of the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, published Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan in 1895. In it, he described various East Asian hand games, among which was the Japanese game of Janken (or Jankenpon). This was precisely what became our game of rock-paper-scissors, and is most likely its ultimate source, either via Europe or across the Pacific (perhaps through Japanese immigrants to the West Coast). Culin, however, grinds right through his description of it, placing it among his descriptions of the other East Asian hand games to which it is closely related, without ever talking about any game in his own culture, that is, without mentioning anything like, "this is identical to our game of rock-paper-scissors." This too suggests that in fact the game had not yet become a part of American culture by that time.

The first homegrown mention of the game rock-paper-scissors I found is in a compilation of children’s games, Handbook for Recreation Leaders, put together by Ella Gardner, the Government's "play expert" and "recreation specialist" with the Children's Bureau in Washington and first published by the Government Printing Office in 1935. In the 1930s, the Children's Bureau helped organize or participated in many national and international gatherings of child care specialists. Gardner herself was a kind of traveling outreach specialist on the subject of recreation activities.

In the Handbook, the game of rock-paper-scissors is called, precisely, "Rochambeau." Gardner appears to have been fond of team games, so to adapt rock-paper-scissors, her Handbook has the players of each of two teams decide among themselves whether their team will present rock, paper, or scissors. Then, with the two teams facing each other, the captains of each team raise their fisted arms and bring them down in partial steps, each at the same time, saying "Ro," then "cham," and then, on "beau," revealing their sign. The Handbook presents the game along with another, called "Fox, Hunter, Gun," in which foxes defeat hunters, hunters defeat guns, and guns defeat foxes. The signals of that game included simultaneous cries and arm gestures that impersonate the characters.

Soon after the government made the book available to educators, recreation planners, community groups, clubs, and parents around the country, more descriptions of the game began to appear in books, magazines, and newspapers. Bernard Sterling Mason's Social Games for Recreation, for example, published the following year, describes "rock scissors paper." And letters to the children's sections of domestic newspapers began explaining and recommending the game in the late 1930s.

There was an upsurge in the number of mentions of the game after World War II. It was initiated with articles in the Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper, written by army reporters stationed in Japan during the U.S. occupation of the country. The reporters appear to have been unfamiliar with the game from their own childhoods, calling it a kind of "odds and evens." From about that time, the game began being mentioned regularly in books, magazines, and newspapers. Clearly, by then it had become embedded in American culture. Judging by the "documentary" evidence, then, it looks like the game found its way to popularity in America through the combined efforts of Ella Gardner of the Children's Bureau and, later, G.I.s returning from Japan.

The author of the Children's Bureau handbook, Ella Gardner, was a Washington, D.C. native. The Children's Bureau had been in the Department of Labor, but with the Bureau's large expansion under the New Deal, and especially the Social Security Act of 1935, would soon end up with the Social Security Administration (and later with HEW and its successor, HHS).

At the time the book was published, the Children's Bureau was in the Widner building in Washington, D.C., on Connecticut Avenue. But the government was in the midst of a huge expansion, and was buying and leasing buildings all over downtown, and moving agencies from one place to another. The new Social Security Administration would quickly be moved into an apartment building that had been commandeered by the Government about a block away from the Children's Bureau. This building was the Rochambeau Apartments, at the corner of 17th and K Streets. The building had that name because it faced Lafayette Square, which has a large bronze statue of the Comte de Rochambeau.

The Rochambeau statue had been erected in 1902 and, in 1931, had been the focus of a large celebration of the sesquicentennial of the victory at Yorktown. If the Children's Bureau staff were looking for a ready place to try out games with a group of children, Lafayette Square would have been ideal. And if they were looking for a three-syllable word to hang on the game of rock-paper-scissors, "Rochambeau" would certainly have been near at hand.

But why bother with making up a new name for the game? Well, it was a Japanese game and English-speaking children might have been leery of a name as unfamiliar as "Jankenpon." Diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States were growing quite cool by the mid-1930s, so perhaps the Children's Bureau reduced the "foreign" feeling of the name "Jankenpon" by attaching a foreign name to it that was nevertheless indubitably a "patriotic" one: "Rochambeau."

The upshot is that the name "Rochambeau" does appear to link the game to the French General, but it is likely his statue, not the gentleman himself, that is responsible for the link.

So that is my theory, and I am sticking to it. At least for now. It seems more reasonable than supposing Washington, Cornwallis, and Rochambeau were playing hand games together during the British surrender. However, my theory is based almost entirely on a long chain of guesses and circumstantial evidence. If or when someone runs across some early mention of "Rochambeau" applied to the game, the entire limb I have climbed out on will be sawed off. But for now, that is the best I can come up with.

Although merchants were not selling certain "unpatriotic" items (such as tea or, perhaps, portraits of King George), generally, if they could find goods to sell, they were free to advertise for buyers.

Local civic authorities sometimes bought up available stocks of weapons, ammunition, food, and other supplies that could be sent to the armies. They bought from private suppliers, who then had less to sell to the public, and this caused shortages. The colonies, by design, had been heavily dependent on Britain for their manufactured goods, and the war disrupted the supply, although some of these goods were smuggled in or imported from other countries that were not inclined to ally themselves with Britain.

The disruption in imports led some merchants to price gouging, and some localities set up committees to fix prices. An April 1776 issue of the Philadelphia newspaper, The Pennsylvania Magazine, announced that the city's committee had set prices on loaves of white bread, for example, depending on their weight, and had determined that the scarcity of some goods in the market was artificial, and so had fixed the prices of rum, molasses, coffee, cocoa, chocolate, pepper, and loaf sugar.

Newspapers of the time carried advertising. Printing technology was simpler then. The ads were arranged in columns, much like the classifieds in today's papers. Only very rarely were tiny images of ships, houses, horses, or people included.

Merchants advertised goods they had in stock, such as book titles, apothecary preparations, or ship stores, and individuals advertised items they had for sale, such as land, houses, businesses, ships, and livestock. Shopkeepers advertised when they moved their places of business.

Innkeepers advertised the virtues of their taverns. Owners of coach lines advertised for travelers and mail delivery. Book publishers of hymnbooks and almanacs advertised for pre-publication subscribers. Individuals also "advertised" lost items and found items, including runaway slaves, indentured servants, horses, and pocket books. Victims of crimes advertised rewards for the capture of the criminals who had wronged them, as in this example, from The Pennsylvania Gazette:

WHEREAS I, the subscriber, between nine and ten o'clock, in the night of the 22d of October last, was attacked by ill-designing persons, between Andrew Smith's tavern and Matthias Holebach's, with clubs, who knocked me down, and beat me in an unmerciful manner, until they thought I was dead, and robbed me (as is supposed) of my pocket-book, in which were Forty-Seven Dollars in Continental currency, besides some small bills; I do therefore offer the reward of Six Dollars to any person who shall find the said pocket-book and money, provided it was lost at the time. I was defending myself, before I was overpowered by the villains, but if they have robbed me of it, I hereby promise the reward of FIFTY DOLLARS for apprehending the thief or thieves, so as they be thereof convicted, and the pocket-book and money delivered to me. CASPER WEAVER.

The persons of slaves and the time of indentured servants were sold by means of newspaper ads. Employers advertised for employees and apprentices, and people seeking more convenient housing placed ads. Civic authorities and organizations placed notices that announced their activities. Notices of probate also appeared, as they do in today's newspapers. Other public notices, required then as they are today for the legal disavowal of debts, sometimes suggested tangled threads of intrigue, as in a pair of ads that appeared together in The Pennsylvania Gazette not long after the end of the war:

WHEREAS MERIAM, the wife of me the Subscriber, has left my bed, and has at several times run me in debt without my leave: This is therefore to forbid all persons trusting her upon my account, for I am determined not to pay any debt that she shall contract (without my leave) from the date hereof. HEZEKIAH GIBBS, jun.

WHEREAS the subscriber is appointed Guardian to HEZEKIAH GIBBS, jun., he therefore desires all persons indebted to said GIBBS to make payment, and all to whom he is indebted to bring in their accounts in order for settlement; and hereby cautions all persons from trusting the said GIBBS in future, as debts of his contracting, from the date hereof, will not be paid by the subscriber. And whereas said GIBBS has lately advertised MERIAM his wife, and used her very ill without the least cause, this is therefore to request the publick would not form an opinion of her from his assertions, as they are entirely groundless. EPHRAIM FAIRBANKS.

Ads like these allow a glimpse of life that is not entirely unfamiliar to readers of the personals columns in today's newspapers.