Margaret Draper

(birth date unknown - 1807)

Occupation: Publisher

Class: Middling Sort

Political Views: Staunch Loyalist (2)

Clearance: No Admittance

You inherit a publishing business and Loyalist newspaper from your husband and prove yourself to be a shrewd businesswoman and steadfast Loyalist.
 * You are the manager of a publishing business and a Loyalist newspaper, the Massachusetts Gazette.
 * Not afraid to run the newspaper on your own, you fire your husband’s assistant because he holds revolutionary ideas.
 * However, you continue to publish almanacs containing Patriot views, purely to make money.
 * You are determined to stay in business even during the Siege. Your newspaper is the only one that stays in print in Boston at that time.
 * You flee Boston for England in 1776.

Social Network
Richard Draper (Husband)

John Howe (Assistant)

Extra Information

 * Draper's newspaper was the first paper “ever issued in America” and the only paper that continued to be published in Boston during the Siege[1]


 * After Draper dismissed her husband's assistant for his patriotic views, she worked with John Howe, a loyalist


 * Howe was witness and reporter at the Battle of Bunkerhill, and also helped a doctor amputate a leg of a soldier at the battle


 * The day after the battle Howe proposed to his future wife [2]
 * In March 1776 Draper left Boston for Halifax, then sailed to England “to seek and receive a pension from the crown” [3]
 * With the Evacuation, Howe also left Boston for Canada and would remain in Halifax for the rest of his life with his family

[1] Stark, James Henry. The loyalists of Massachusetts and the other side of the American Revolution'''. '''Salem: Salem Press, 1910.

[2] Phyllis Ruth Blakeley and John N. Grant. Eleven exiles: Accounts of Loyalists of the American Revolution. (Toronto: Dundurn Press Ltd., 1982): 27. [3] Ibid, 30.