Conceived in Liberty (190 page)

Many Massachusetts towns leaped to the support of the Tea Party. Many were sufficiently radicalized by the occasion to deny Parliament’s rights to legislate for and to tax the colonies, and to pay for the salaries of colonial officials. These included the towns of Hadley, Braintree, Sheffield, Andover, and Worcester. On the other hand, a few towns were frightened by the radical deed and dissolved their committees of correspondence.

The rebels had an easier time of it in the other colonies. With no Hutchinson or British fleet to hinder them, and with the inspiring example of the Boston Tea Party before them, the consignees and tea ships put up little resistance to popular pressure. The first public meeting of protest in the colonies against the Tea Act took place in Philadelphia on October 16. The citizens of Philadelphia adopted a comprehensive set of resolutions that served as a model for Boston and the other colonies. The Tea Act and tea duty were denounced, and a committee was appointed to demand resignation of the consignees. The consignees, including Thomas Wharton, saw the way the wind blew and soon resigned. A second public meeting warned against the landing of the tea.

The tea ship sailed up the Delaware on December 25. The vessel was stopped four miles from Philadelphia, thus avoiding the Boston problem of the customs duty. The captain was deeply impressed with the intense feeling of the public against landing the tea. Two days later, a huge public meeting of eight thousand assembled in the town and demanded that the captain sail immediately for England. The meeting also voiced its resounding approval of the Boston Tea Party, doing so over the opposition of its more conservative resolutions committee. The captain of the tea ship agreed to bow to the public will and promptly returned to England. Philadelphia had repulsed the tea threat.

In New York, the story blended many of the same elements of the Philadelphia and Boston episodes. In preparation for the tea ship, an “Association of the Sons of Liberty” was drawn up on November 29, which association called for a boycott against any enemies to its country. Enemies were those
who might aid in introducing the British tea into the country or who might buy or sell the tea after it had landed. A boycott was also called against those who had failed to boycott the transgressors. The association was signed by the leading lawyers, merchants and merchant shipmasters, landowners, and mechanics of New York. A committee of the newly formed Sons then pressured the three New York consignees to resign, aided by a public threat of violence issued by the radical “Mohawks,” a direct-action group formed by the Sons of Liberty. Under this pressure and realizing that mass opinion was solidly against them, the consignees resigned their posts on December 1. The Sons then held a mass meeting of two thousand on December 17, headed by the veteran radical leader, the merchant John Lamb. The meeting denounced the landing of any tea and decided to appoint a committee of correspondence to write to other colonies. Harbor pilots were warned against guiding any tea ships into port. The meeting derisively spurned the mayor’s suggestion that the British tea be stored at the local fort.

In reaction to this meeting, the conservative Isaac Low launched a movement to renounce the use of force in opposing the landing of the tea, but this movement was swept aside by popular enthusiasm upon receipt of the news of the Boston Tea Party. When a tea ship arrived off New York the following April, the captain, heeding the counsel of the committee of correspondence, promised not to enter the port and sailed away. A few days later, however, another sea captain was planning to sneak eighteen chests of tea into New York. The angry citizens, on discovering the ruse, emulated the Bostonians by boarding the ship and dumping the tea into the sea. The treacherous captain promptly fled to another vessel and sailed back to England.

The final port to be sent the tea was Charleston. There the radicals were in more difficult straits than elsewhere, since Charleston had not been an important center of the tea trade and the merchants were not as directly threatened. The tea ship
London
arrived on December 2, precipitating a mass meeting the following day. The meeting, headed by Christopher Gadsden, succeeded in persuading the tea consignees to resign their commissions. It further agreed to circulate among the merchants of Charleston a petition pledging the nonimportation of British tea. Gadsden and the others found, however, that while the planters and artisans (soon to form a “John Wilkes Club”) were eager to pledge a boycott of merchants importing dutiable tea, the merchants themselves were reluctant to join the ranks. A showdown meeting of merchants, planters, and mechanics was held on December 17, each of the three groups having privately caucused in preparation for the critical meeting. The radicals passed a resolution for nonimportation of dutied teas, but the conservative merchants managed to weaken the resolve by including
all
teas in the interdict—including smuggled Dutch teas—and allowing six months for consumption of their current stocks of dutiable British tea.

While the struggles continued over a boycott, the tea ships remained in the
harbor; the twenty-day period for payment of duty would soon expire, after which nonpaying ships were subject to seizure. Would the people of Charleston follow the Bostonians in a bold tea party? On the contrary, the merchants’ opposition discouraged the radicals, and the customs officials seized and landed the tea on December 22 without any opposition. Nothing happened thereafter, however; the easygoing government officials made no attempt to sell the tea and it remained safely in the government warehouse until the outbreak of the Revolution.

Thus, in every one of the four colonies, determined action by the resisting Americans prevented any of the East Indian tea from reaching its consignees. Once again the rebellious Americans had been successful in forcibly thwarting British designs. Moreover, tea parties continued during 1774, and the Americans soon radicalized their opposition to include the tea tax and therefore all dutied tea, even that of private merchants. A group of Boston “Mohawks” destroyed a cargo of tea in March, and tea cargoes were burned during the year at Charleston, Greenwich, Annapolis, and in New Jersey. Indeed, so fiercely did the Americans concentrate upon tea that
all tea,
even smuggled tea, soon became boycotted and shunned for fear that the tea
might
be English. Tea, which had been a staple drink throughout America, soon vanished from the colonies. As early as January 30, the Boston tea dealers agreed to suspend the sale of all tea, and the movement soon spread to other towns and provinces.

News of the Boston Tea Party and the other resistance to East India tea hit the British like a thunderclap. Since the repeal of the Townshend duties over three years earlier, news of the American colonies had dropped out of the British press, and while Massachusetts had continued to be a slight irritant, it was generally assumed that everything was tranquil in the colonies. Hence, no one in Britain had an inkling of the furor that the Tea Act would cause.

Suddenly America erupted again, and now the British saw that the colonial problems had never been really quieted. They also began to see something more: that generally only the “extreme” poles are logical or viable, and that in-between states are logically self-contradictory and unstable mixtures that impel persistently toward one pole or the other. And so the British began to realize that continued drift and repeated near conflicts with Americans were unworkable, and that Great Britain must finally choose—either to pursue appeasement and go back to the salutary neglect and colonial quasi-independence of the pre–Seven Years’ War era, or to take the hard line and crush the colonists and impose absolute British rule. The choice was appeasement and peaceful co-existence on the one hand, or maximum force for total victory on the other. In keeping with its nature, of course, the Tory imperialist ruling clique opted unhesitatingly for coercion and the mailed fist.

When the news of the crisis came to London, Benjamin Franklin was amid an unhappy imbroglio. While trying as agent for Massachusetts to present a Massachusetts petition for removal of Hutchinson and Oliver, the news of Franklin’s responsibility for unearthing the Hutchinson-Oliver letters and sending them to Boston came to light. Reaction to Franklin’s underhanded methods was widespread and understandably bitter, especially because of
Franklin’s presumed Tory leanings. When news of the Tea Party arrived shortly thereafter, it was not difficult for the British to leap to the absurd conclusion that the whole affair was a diabolical plot conceived by the sinister, subversive devil Dr. Franklin. Franklin became the general scapegoat and whipping boy, was quickly dismissed from his lucrative royal post as deputy postmaster general of America, and was roundly denounced as a “viper... festering the bosom” of the English government, an “old dotard” who had schemed to make himself dictator of an independent Massachusetts. As John Adams later wrote, in reaction to the continuing hold of this myth on the minds of the British, “The history of our revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that
Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington.”

To compound the irony, Franklin, at the same time, was sending his stern Tory disapproval of the Tea Party to the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence. Franklin denounced the extremism of destroying what he chose to call “private property”—a designation that surely stretched the concept of “private” to the breaking point. Franklin also vainly demanded that Massachusetts repair the damages and pay compensation to the company.

Within the cabinet, the ministry prepared to crush the rebellious Americans. The Bedfordites, the Grenvillites, the King’s Friends, and King George himself howled for revenge and suppression. Only Lord North himself and the Whiggish Lord Dartmouth, half brother of North and secretary of state for the colonies (who had replaced Hillsborough a year and a half earlier), pleaded for confining the mailed fist to rebellious Boston. They largely won the day. But this old policy of isolating and smashing the leading center of resistance could no longer work; the American colonists were too united from years of struggle and from the growth of such revolutionary institutions as a network of local committees of correspondence.

The Crown called Parliament into session in early March 1774 and presented a series of four Coercive Acts designed to bring Britain’s might to bear upon Boston. First came the Boston Port Act, which brutally closed the port of Boston to all commerce until the town granted compensation for the lost tea to the East India Company, and paid the forgone duties to the Crown. The act also transferred the royal customhouse from Boston to Salem for the duration of the act. No ships were to load or unload at Boston except for military stores and whatever food or fuel might be cleared by the customs authorities.

Opposition in Great Britain was revitalized: the Chathamites and the bulk of the Whigs had condemned the Tea Party, but they could not sanction coercion of the colonies. One of the few British supporters of the Tea Party had been the Wilkite radical MP, Alderman Bull, who urged clearing Boston of British soldiers—“brutes that have too long been suffered to live there.” The plan supposedly to isolate and then coerce Boston into submission had
stemmed from Lord Dartmouth and his undersecretary, John Pownall. Chatham, in opposition, urged a demand for reparation before coercion; but the most effective opposition came from the Whigs: Edmund Burke, William Dowdeswell, the West Indian merchant Rose Fuller, and young Charles James Fox. But the opposition was in vain. With even Colonel Barré and General Conway speaking in favor of the bill, the Boston port bill was quickly passed on March 30, was approved by the king the following day, and became effective on June 1.
*
Great Britain added to the injury of the people of Massachusetts by the seeming kindness of removing Hutchinson—but replaced him as governor and captain-general by General Thomas Gage, who was sent to Boston to announce the stormy tidings and to put the bill into effect. Gage was also to transfer the seat of Massachusetts government from Boston to Salem.

The Boston Port Act was soon followed in early April by the Massachusetts Government Act. North and Dartmouth had hoped to end their coercive measures with the presumably temporary rap on the knuckles of the Port Act. They now allowed themselves to be pressured into approving this second and drastically permanent act of suppression—a task made easy by the growing mental instability of Lord North. Following the counsel and guidance of former Massachusetts governor Francis Bernard, the Tories were about to see their old dream of destroying the preciously guarded Massachusetts charter come true. The Massachusetts Government Act changed the Massachusetts Council to a body appointed by the king, each councillor continuing in office at the king’s pleasure. The Massachusetts governor was now given exclusive power to appoint and dismiss all executive and inferior judicial officers, including justices of the peace and sheriffs. Superior court judges were to be nominated by the governor for appointment by the king. Juries would now be chosen by the sheriff instead of democratically elected by the people of the towns. Finally, to crush the local radical centers of colonial resistance, the act barred town meetings from being held or an agenda acted upon except by express permission of the governor. The only minor victory for moderation was Dartmouth’s deletion of an original proposal to bring the tea rioters to trial in Great Britain.

This savage act had been staunchly opposed by some of the leading Whigs and liberals: Sir George Savile, Colonel Barré, who had reluctantly supported the Port Act, Charles James Fox, General Conway, and Edmund Burke. Notwithstanding, it passed by a large majority, was approved on May 20, and became effective on July 1 and August 1 (different provisions taking effect on the two dates).

This was as far as North and Dartmouth wanted to go. But meanwhile, severe pressure for still further measures descended upon them from the rest of the cabinet, led by the Grenvillite lord privy seal, the Earl of Suffolk, and the Earl of Sandwich, a Bedfordite. Sandwich and Suffolk pushed through the Administration of Justice Act, introduced in mid-April. This act provided exemption from any high crimes committed in Massachusetts by royal officials in the course of their duties. Any royal official committing a capital crime in the course of collecting revenue or suppressing a riot would now have his trial transferred from the local courts to Great Britain, provided that the governor and Council decided that the official could not receive a fair trial in Massachusetts. This exemption act passed overwhelmingly, despite the opposition of Colonel Barré and others, and the king signed it on May 20.