An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  *2 Ironically enough, by this time the East India Company no longer needed to export the stuff to America at all, because its future had been secured by its deal with the government embodied in the Regulating Act. But the tea scheme went ahead all the same.

  Chapter Ten

  THE BOSTON TEA PARTY: CLIMAX

  Nothing but severity will do now.

  —LIEUTENANT COLONEL ALEXANDER LESLIE, WRITING FROM BOSTON, TEN DAYS BEFORE THE TEA PARTY1

  It was a crime, pure and simple, carried out with the threat of bloodshed. That was how the British officers in Boston saw the Tea Party. Even before the first chest of Bohea fell into the harbor, they began to call for retribution of the harshest kind. General Gage was away on leave in England, but his opposite number in the Royal Navy witnessed every disloyal move the Americans made.

  On November 17, 1773, a sloop came in from England, the Hayley, owned by John Hancock, carrying word that the tea ships were approaching. Although they would not arrive for another two weeks, already Admiral Montagu expected a violent insurgency. From his flagship, HMS Captain, moored near the Long Wharf, he could plainly see the waterfront mob in ferment.

  His contacts in the town had passed the word to Montagu that plans were being laid to attack the fleet and the tea ships, with rafts set ablaze and pushed into the harbor. “I ordered a strict watch to be kept, night and day,” the admiral wrote in his journal on the evening of the eighteenth. With the Gaspée affair still fresh in his memory, he could take no chances. His officers prepared grappling hooks, placed in the bows of longboats, to tow away the burning rafts if the need arose. The fleet’s small force of Royal Marines stood to arms, their pouches filled with cartridges.

  From an American point of view, the Boston Tea Party is usually seen as a peaceful incident: defiant or even disorderly, but nothing remotely resembling an act of war. It took a very different shape in the eyes of the admiral and his opposite number in the army, the officer in command at Castle William. What the British saw was another Gaspée raid, undertaken with the same contempt for life, property, and the rule of law. The blame lay entirely, they believed, with what Montagu called the “evil disposed,” the radicals led by John Hancock and Samuel Adams, the only men from Boston they named in their letters home. And neither the redcoats nor the navy could lift a finger to stop them.2

  On board the Captain, an elderly ship of the line, the admiral could run out sixty-four guns, but in the circumstances his artillery was useless. Even a direct request from Governor Hutchinson would not have permitted the navy to open fire on a port full of civilians under British rule, an action for which there would have been no precedent. For its part the army lay confined to its squalid barracks on the island in the harbor. Since the wells at Castle William had run dry, their water had to come from the town, leaving them at Boston’s mercy. At the fort the British had ten companies of soldiers, from the Sixty-Fourth Regiment of Foot, but all of them were under strength. Low on gunpowder—the nearest arsenal was in New York—the redcoats numbered little more than three hundred. It seems that their morale was weak, as well it might be, given the state of the sheds in which they lived. Six privates had deserted since July.

  Castle William fell under the command of yet another Scotsman, a lieutenant colonel aged forty-two, a keen golfer by the name of Alexander Leslie, a scion of a military dynasty in Fifeshire that had always supported the Crown against the Jacobites. After the war an old comrade remembered Leslie as a popular officer, correct and polite, but a soldier of only moderate abilities. Ten days before the Tea Party, the Bostonians had already goaded him almost beyond endurance. His half brother, the Earl of Leven, had recently sent him a set of clubs; and when the lieutenant colonel sent a letter of thanks on December 6, he filled it with a tirade against the town’s unruly citizens and his own political masters.

  “The East India Company’s tea has made a fine dust,” he wrote. “The people are in actual rebellion, and where it will end none can say.” In Whitehall, the politicians had acted feebly, the weakest being Lord Dartmouth, who, said Leslie, had “not enough of the devil to manage the ungrateful Americans.” Things had been allowed to drift until, like children spared the rod, the colonists had been spoiled: treat them leniently, and they would always ask for more. The time was long overdue for the use of force. All the lieutenant colonel needed was an invitation from Governor Hutchinson, and he would happily restore order at the point of the bayonet.3

  Drawn up during the siege of Boston in 1775, with north at the right-hand side and Castle William at the bottom, this British military map shows the town as it was in the early stages of the revolution. The Long Wharf is clearly visible poking out into the harbor, while to its left are the mudflats and Griffin’s Wharf, just above the two fathom mark, where the Tea Party took place. Detail, from the British National Archives, Kew

  That request would never come. Instead, the army and the navy had to stand by while the Bostonians did as they pleased. When they reached America, the tea ships sailed into the most outrageous episode of treason since the ’45, and one that left, like the Gaspée incident, a legacy of bitterness and resentment in the British officer corps. The Tea Party persuaded them to seek military answers to political questions; and within another eighteen months, this would lead to the disastrous march to Lexington and Concord.

  THE MOHAWKS PREPARE

  As so often, it had all begun with an item in the press. During the summer, the American papers carried a few lines about the Tea Act, with sketchy reports about the company’s plans for its tea, but nothing substantial until the end of September. On the twenty-ninth, the Pennsylvania Journal printed a letter from Samuel Wharton, a merchant from the colony based in London, where he had been involved with Franklin in the scheme for settling the Ohio country. In the summer, Wharton had been at India House for the decisive meeting about the sending of the tea. His letter in the Journal gave the gist of the scheme: six hundred chests to come to the Delaware, and the same to the Hudson River and to Boston, for auction on the company’s behalf. Within the week, the news reached New York. At first, doubts arose about the terms on which the tea was traveling. Would it carry the loathsome threepenny tax, or had it been abolished as Americans had hoped? Soon enough, it emerged that the duty remained in place, and within days the first protests began.4

  On October 6, a paper called The Alarm appeared on the streets of Manhattan. As usual it was anonymous, but New York had a large contingent of Liberty Boys, led by an immigrant Scotsman, Alexander McDougall, known to his friends as the Wilkes of America. Working in partnership with his friend Isaac Sears—both men had been fierce opponents of the

  Stamp Act—McDougall might have been The Alarm’s principal author, or at any rate its publisher. However, the speed with which it appeared and the nature of its contents support another hypothesis: that it was at least partially written in London, perhaps by Arthur Lee. The author seems to have read the exposés of the East India Company published by the House of Commons. Crime and extortion in Bengal and fraud and corruption in England: such were the company’s stock-in-trade, said the writer, soon to be exported to America with the tea, whose arrival would be fatal to the cause of freedom. By cornering the market and driving other traders to the wall, the company would create a monopoly and then extend it from tea to other goods as well. Worse still, if Americans bought the tea and paid the tax, they would sacrifice the doctrine of no taxation without consent. Other taxes would follow until Lord North had the colonies at his feet.

  The Alarm ran for three issues, striking a chord not only in New York but also in Philadelphia. Both towns had thriving communities of smugglers who stood to lose heavily if the company’s tea flooded their markets. But while this helped arouse resistance to the scheme, the smuggling fraternity could not dictate the course of events. On October 16, as many as seven hundred people came to a town meeting in Philadelphia to pass ten resolutions against the Tea Act, branding anyone who handled the tea “an En
emy to his Country.” Doubtless the gathering included many men who dealt in contraband, but they cannot have formed the majority of an assembly so large. The sense of patriotic outrage was authentic, and all the more deeply felt because of the way the tea scheme had been organized.

  By now the East India Company had appointed local merchants to act as its consignees in each American port. They swiftly became targets of derision, easily portrayed as villains in league with avaricious financiers and the tyrannical Lord North. In New York, for example, the consignee Abraham Lott doubled as the colony’s tax collector; a colleague, Henry White, sat on the council that advised Governor Tryon; and a third man, Frederick Pigou, a Londoner, came from an Anglo-Dutch stockbroking family. His father spent nearly thirty years as a supercargo in China, and in 1773 he sat on the company’s board. Pigou’s partner Benjamin Booth had run a dry goods store in New York for years, but he was English too.5

  In Philadelphia some of the four consignees were equally easy to depict as tools of the British establishment. One firm, James & Drinker, owed its contract to Pigou’s influence. Another consignee was Gilbert Barkley, who was en route to the town from England, on the tea ship Polly, after lobbying hard for a role in the tea scheme. That left Jonathan Browne, of whom little is known, and Samuel Wharton’s brothers Isaac and Thomas. Merchants of Quaker stock, the Whartons had sound American credentials—Franklin counted them as friends—but this only left them all the more open to intimidation.

  Here and in Manhattan, resistance to the tea took the form of dogged campaigns—in the press, at public meetings, and on the streets—to compel the consignees to step down. In both towns threats of violence were made, especially in New York, where, despite or because of the presence of the army, the atmosphere was particularly volatile. During the Stamp Act riots, New York had come the closest of any seaport in America to a firefight with the redcoats. As recently as 1770, British soldiers had clashed in the streets with the Liberty Boys in the bloody incident known as the Battle of Golden Hill. And so on November 5, Guy Fawkes’s Day, when a crowd made an effigy of one of the consignees and hanged it from a gibbet, he and his colleagues were in genuine fear for their lives.

  In Pennsylvania and New York these tactics achieved complete success. By the end of November, all the consignees had either resigned or quietly gone to ground. In New York on November 27, we find the first mention of patriots arrayed as Indians like their counterparts on Martha’s Vineyard in 1772. Another anonymous handbill appeared, coming from a party who called themselves “the Mohawks.” Under the noses of the British military, they warned that anyone who tried to land or store the tea would receive “an unwelcome visit.” On the same day in Philadelphia, which had no garrison of redcoats, another menacing handbill hit the streets issuing dire threats against the master of the Polly. “What think you, captain, of a Halter around your neck?” the handbill inquired. “Then gallons of liquid tar decanted on your pate—with the feathers of a dozen live geese?” Soon the Whartons and their colleagues decided that discretion was the better part of valor. They stood down. In both New York and Pennsylvania, nobody could say what might happen when at last the tea cargoes arrived, but one thing was perfectly clear. Although Governor Tryon hoped to bring his ashore at the Battery under armed guard, the British plan had already failed in its essentials. No orderly public sales could take place.

  But as always, Massachusetts was another story. In that emotional province, so full of idealism and resentment, it would never be possible to end the affair simply by bullying the consignees until they stepped aside. William Palmer had done his work far too well by having the governor’s own sons named as recipients of the tea. It became a matter of honor and family money for Thomas Hutchinson that the tea must enter harbor regardless of the risk. But even if the East India Company had selected different consignees in Boston, the outcome would probably have been identical.

  Months before the tea ships left the Thames, the politics of Massachusetts had already entered a deadlock that could be broken in only two ways: either by Hutchinson’s removal or by a revolutionary act, even if it was unplanned and spontaneous. The situation in the province had become an angrier version of the standoff in South Carolina, where the wheels of government had already ground to a halt. The same thing was happening here as well but far more dangerously. Under the terms of the Massachusetts charter, each arm of the government—the assembly, the law courts, and the executive—had to work together, or the system could not function. By the summer of 1773, it was close to breaking down entirely.

  Because of the Boston pamphlet, his inflammatory speech, and the publication of his letters to Thomas Whately, Hutchinson had lost what personal authority he possessed. The same was true of the judges, their position undermined by the British decision to pay their salaries from the tea tax. By now both chambers of the General Court—the Governor’s Council and the House of Representatives—had risen in what was, in effect, a coup against the royal authorities: that was certainly how it seemed to Lord North. And while Hutchinson’s prestige evaporated, his antagonist John Hancock gained in popularity, emerging as a kind of alternative governor, ready to assume the role de facto when the appropriate moment arrived. By autumn, the members of the House of Representatives knew that George III had rejected their petition against the judges’ salaries; and they also knew that when Parliament sat again in 1774, their complaints were unlikely to be listened to.

  They had reached a stalemate; and early in October, apparently before he heard of the tea ships, Samuel Adams said as much in a brilliant piece of political analysis. It was contained in two private letters to a member of his network, Joseph Hawley, another old agitator against the Stamp Act, based deep in rural Massachusetts at the town of Northampton.6

  According to Adams, two problems lay uppermost in the mind of Lord North: the impending general election in Great Britain, and the likelihood of war with France. From his friends the Lees, Adams also knew that the Wilkesites were making solid progress in the capital. Thanks to hard work at the grass roots, John Wilkes stood an excellent chance of at last becoming lord mayor of London. The Wilkesites could also hope to make gains in the parliamentary poll; but from this, Adams drew the opposite conclusion to Benjamin Franklin’s. Although Adams still held some odd views about the British constitution’s finer points—he never really understood the relationship between the Crown and Parliament—he did not fall into Franklin’s trap of underestimating the prime minister. Adams believed that the politics of Great Britain made it all the less likely that the cabinet would address American grievances. Instead, Lord North would shelve any colonial reforms until the war with France and the election were both over and done.

  The British, Adams wrote, would simply offer “cakes and sugar plums” in an effort to “sooth America into a state of quietness, if they can do it, without conceding to our rights.” It was all the more essential to stand firm until one day the king and his ministers saw the light: when, perhaps, they found themselves losing another confrontation with the French. Five years before Louis XVI came to America’s aid, Adams already knew that the fate of freedom in the colonies might hinge on the French navy. In the meantime, they had to remain united and resist any compromise. So Adams argued, and the files of his Committee of Correspondence make it plain that many towns in Massachusetts agreed. In a mood of deep intransigence, they heard the news that the tea was on its way and that McDougall, Sears, and their other friends in New York intended to turn it back.

  As historians have often pointed out, Boston was slow off the mark in joining the campaign against the tea, but the delay amounted only to a week or two, and probably arose merely because incoming ships had hit rough weather. By itself it tells us little. When the town learned the names of its consignees on October 18, a furor began there as well. The choice could not have been worse. Besides the younger Hutchinsons, the consignees included their kinsman Richard Clarke. Another importer of legal tea, Clarke had given his daughter
in marriage to Thomas Hutchinson Jr. The other two were Benjamin Faneuil, brother of the builder of the hall, and Joshua Winslow, from an old Mayflower family: famous names and conspicuously pro-British. During the war both men would support the Crown.

  Within three days, Adams’s committee had written to the other colonies, denouncing the Tea Act’s iniquities. Two days after that, on the twenty-third, at the Green Dragon Tavern, the members of the political caucus from the North End met and pledged to stop the sale of the tea, if necessary with “their lives and fortunes.” Among them were Joseph Warren and Paul Revere, and of course Samuel Adams, but also two less familiar characters, William Molineux and Thomas Young. Seven weeks later, all except Revere would play prominent roles in the town meetings that led to the destruction of the tea. Only Molineux came from a mercantile background; and although he might have been a smuggler, the evidence remains inconclusive.*1 For Molineux and his friends, politics had come to be a mission to which they were passionately committed: it was neither a game nor a front for contraband. Perhaps the most radical was Young, another admirer of John Wilkes, with whom he exchanged letters. And since Young was apparently the first Bostonian to propose in public that the tea should be destroyed, his case may be the most interesting.7