An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  Like his close friend Joseph Warren, Young practiced as a physician, but he made his name in Massachusetts not as a doctor but as a philosopher, expounding avant-garde views about theology: atheistic, it was said. In Boston, where he lived close to poverty, his enemies called him “a flaming zealot” or “a bawling New England man,” but his origins lay far away, not in a town, but in rural New York, where high rents and the hunger for land had led to popular uprisings long before the Tea Party. The son of Irish immigrants but raised in the Hudson valley, Young became a fierce critic of privilege, counting Ethan Allen among his closest acquaintances. They even co-wrote a book, Reason the Only Oracle of Man, attacking orthodox religion, and Young lent his support to Allen’s campaign against New York’s attempt to annex the valley of Vermont.

  Here was an intellectual in politics, the Robespierre of Boston; but unlike the Frenchman Thomas Young had a common touch. Of all the radical leaders of 1773, with the exception of Revere, Young enjoyed the closest ties to the working people of the North End, whom he would come to see as the stormy petrels of the revolution. An activist like Young did not oppose the tea from narrow self-interest. Whatever might be true elsewhere, in Boston resistance to the tea arose from principle or from ideology, call it what you will. In the background, of course, there lay an economic grievance, a sense of frustration at the town’s relative decline that could not be halted inside the empire; and certainly no one wished to pay more than they needed for a cup of tea. But even more than the raid on the Gaspée, the Tea Party would be driven by ideas.

  When he burned the sloop, John Brown had simply taken to its logical conclusion the Rhode Island theory of local independence developed by Stephen Hopkins. In Boston, the ideas behind the Tea Party mostly came from the pamphlet of 1772, but they had equally lethal consequences for loyalty to Great Britain. It was this that made the popular campaign against the tea so fatal for the British: an ideological content whose appeal the authorities could not grasp.

  While a smuggler would retreat when the risks of protest outweighed the financial reward he hoped to make, an intellectual like Young would never stand down at all. And within weeks of the news that the tea ships were heading for Boston, we find a similar mood of principled defiance in corners of Massachusetts very different from the waterfront. At Harvard College on November 10, a professor’s wife writes to a friend, mocking the governor as “the First Personage,” afraid to stir out of his house without an armed guard. Hardly a firebrand, Hannah Winthrop tells Mercy Otis Warren about the commotion in New York. She calls the threepenny duty “the unconstitutional revenue,” and she uses language similar to Adams’s. She describes the consignees as “pusillanimous sons of avarice and ambition” and looks forward to their defeat.8

  If a faculty spouse at Harvard was saying such things, the British had already lost the battle for hearts and minds without even realizing that it was taking place. With barely a source of information other than Thomas Hutchinson, the British had no means for gauging the depth of feeling in the colony. They did not know how wide the radical movement was or what close ties the patriots in Boston had with rural activists as far from the scene as Joseph Hawley and Ethan Allen. When the reports of the Tea Party finally reached Whitehall, all the ministers beheld was felony, driven by a rising tide of insolence and hatred. That was the dark side of Boston’s campaign against the tea; and soon it made itself brutally visible.

  THE FIRST CONFRONTATION

  By the end of October, some observers already feared that when the tea arrived, a mob would board the ships and either burn their cargo or throw it into the water. On the evening of November 2, another meeting at the Green Dragon called for the consignees to step down. The following day the first riot took place.9

  At the southern end of Boston, there stood a great elm tree, as ancient as the colony itself. According to some, the elm was already mature when the first Puritan settlers came ashore in 1630; others said that it dated from 1646; but either way, the Liberty Tree served as a proud symbol of the town’s integrity. From its branches the people would hang mocking effigies of popes and British politicians, and here they met to jeer at the Stamp Act. As the church bells struck eleven on the morning of November 3, a crowd at least five hundred strong began to gather beneath a flag tied to the elm. A rabble, said Hutchinson, including “boys and negroes,” but it was a rabble with leaders: John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and William Molineux.

  Thirty-six hours earlier, under cover of darkness, the consignees had received a summons to come to the tree at noon—“Fail not upon your Peril,” they were told—to resign their commissions to receive the tea. That morning, placards posted up around the town had urged every man in Boston to attend the meeting to witness their humiliation. Ominously, the bills were signed “OC”—for Oliver Cromwell—an allusion to Puritan rebels from the past.

  For an hour, the crowd waited until the appointed time. But twelve o’clock came and went, and the consignees failed to appear. Another half hour passed, and then the meeting voted to pursue the guilty men. From the Liberty Tree it was little more than fifteen minutes’ walk to King Street, where the consignees had gone to ground in the warehouse occupied by Richard Clarke. It seems that Adams and Hancock had other duties to perform, because Molineux led the procession. A learned man as well as a merchant—he frequently quoted the Greek and Roman classics—Molineux cast himself in the role of Brutus, the republican tyrannicide, defending liberty and virtue against unjust authority.

  Actually, the authorities were absent: the streets already belonged to the people. Boston had no professional police force, and the town’s selectmen—the elected committee that managed its affairs—were mostly allies of Samuel Adams. There was a militia, known as the Corps of Cadets, but who was its colonel? None other than John Hancock. Meanwhile, the army remained at Castle William, unable to move without a request for help from the governor, which Hutchinson could not make for fear of a repetition of the massacre of 1770. Only one brave magistrate dared to intervene, and he came from out of town. Mr. Hatch from Dorchester, a justice of the peace, chanced to be in Boston that day and saw what happened at one o’clock, when the crowd reached King Street. He sent a deposition back to England, where the lawyers pored over it, searching for evidence of treason.

  Leading a small delegation, including Joseph Warren, Molineux climbed the steps to Clarke’s office. “The people are greatly affronted,” he told the consignees, and asked them to sign a paper agreeing to send the tea straight back to England. When Clarke refused, Molineux gave him a warning: “they must feel the full weight of the resentment of the people, or words to that import,” a witness recalled. Like Brutus after Caesar’s assassination, Molineux added a theatrical rider. “I have done my duty, and I am afraid of no man,” he said as he retreated down the stairs. For a moment or two, that seemed to be the end of the affair. Molineux said something, and the crowd moved off up the street. They stopped, moved on, and stopped twice again, and then suddenly Molineux lost control of the demonstration.

  Back in a rush they came, with clubs in their hands, while Clarke issued frantic orders to lock the doors. Mr. Hatch stepped forward. At the top of his voice he ordered the crowd to disperse. In reply he received a whack on the arm. Twenty young men burst into the warehouse and made for the glass door that barred their way to the office upstairs. With sticks of their own, Clarke’s men fought their way back to safety. For ninety minutes the crowd laid siege to the consignees, smashing the glass, yelling, and beating on the ceiling. At last, some kind of truce was patched together, and Clarke, the Hutchinson boys, Faneuil, and Winslow were allowed to leave, but only after threading a noisy cordon of protesters.

  In effect, the rule of law had been suspended, with the authorities rendered powerless. Just around the corner in the town house, the governor tried to rally his council to take action against the mob. Led by Hancock’s fellow worshipper at Brattle Square, James Bowdoin, the council was supposed to form the executive
branch of the colony’s government, but since it was elected by the House of Representatives, in practice Hutchinson had already lost his fragile grip on its loyalty. So few of its members turned up that the governor could not assemble the quorum he required. When at last a full council convened the following morning, including Hancock, of course, they all agreed that a riot had occurred, and that evidence should be gathered and the culprits prosecuted. But who would take the witness statements or make the arrests? Nothing could be done, and the situation deteriorated still further as the government of Massachusetts more or less ceased to function. On November 5, at Faneuil Hall, the voters of Boston gathered for a town meeting, convened by the selectmen. They began by adopting the ten resolutions from Philadelphia. Then they chose a committee, led by Hancock and including Adams and Warren, to demand the resignation of the consignees. Gradually, the patriots were closing a net around them and the governor, forcing them into a corner where only two options would be left to Thomas Hutchinson: either abject surrender, or a desperate resort to military force. Meanwhile the radical papers, the Gazette and the Massachusetts Spy, ran a stream of stories about the unrest in New York and Pennsylvania, and the threat of more violence hung in the air.

  So the consignees played for time. At this point, no one knew precisely how many tea ships were coming or when they might arrive. So they wrote Hancock’s committee an evasive letter, pointing out that they had not yet received official word of their appointment by the East India Company. Technically, this was correct—the paperwork was coming with the tea—but their opponents would not be fobbed off so lightly. On the sixth the town meeting assembled again and dismissed the letter as an insult. An uneasy calm descended on Boston and lasted eleven days until the Hayley tied up in the harbor on the seventeenth. As well as more detail about the tea ships, she carried Richard Clarke’s son Jonathan, fresh from London. And that night, as the selectmen hurriedly arranged another town meeting, the people took direct action a second time.

  The Clarkes lived in School Street, one of the town’s most affluent neighborhoods, a few doors away from King’s Chapel. As the family gathered to celebrate Jonathan’s arrival, they heard the familiar sound of horns, whistles, and shouts. After failing to track down Thomas Hutchinson Jr., a crowd of about 150 had come in search of the Clarkes, hoping to catch them unawares. Richard Clarke managed to bolt the door, but while the women fled upstairs, the crowd began to break it down. A shout was heard—“You rascals! Be gone, or I’ll blow your brains out!”—and a pistol shot rang out from one of the Clarkes.

  For a moment, the crowd backed off. But when they realized that no one had been hit, they returned to the door and the windows, smashing the glass and shattering the frames. They laid siege to the house for an hour or two, until at last another truce was agreed. The following morning another town meeting appointed a new committee to tell the consignees to resign. They refused again, but this time they supplied an explanation. Their agents in London had signed undertakings on their behalf—“penal engagements of a commercial nature”—that prevented them from sending the tea back to London.

  This was probably untrue. Their opposite numbers in New York and Philadelphia said nothing of the sort. In principle, the consignees were liable to pay the cost of shipping the tea and the threepenny tax, which—because it was an import duty and not an excise—fell due for collection within 20 days of its entry to Boston Harbor, even if it remained unsold. But in fact it seems that neither the East India Company nor the Treasury ever pursued the consignees for the money they were owed. When at last the dust settled in 1774, the company demanded compensation from the government, not from its agents in America. So the response from the consignees seems to have been just a ploy, as well it might be. From HMS Captain the admiral could already see that Boston was beyond redemption. It was at this point that he armed his marines and equipped his boats with grappling hooks. As for the governor, he felt entirely isolated. Three times his council met between the nineteenth and the twenty-seventh, but each time it refused to come to his aid. Since they opposed the landing of the tea, Bowdoin and his colleagues would not intervene to protect the stuff when it came ashore.

  “I am in a helpless state,” Hutchinson wrote to Governor Tryon on the twenty-first. From this moment forward, his letters become almost painful to read. Filled with excuses, regret, and recrimination, they show us a lonely man, adrift amid the wreckage of a sinking empire. Proud, obstinate, but also courageous in his own way, Hutchinson looked for a means to resolve the crisis, but as each day went by his position became more hopeless.

  A political compromise seemed impossible. At first, the governor had assumed that the disorders would resemble the riots against the Stamp Act eight years earlier. There would be trouble, but it would blow over when the better sort of people—wealthy men like Hancock—decided that the Boston mob had gone too far. But as Hutchinson’s own council deserted him, and as it became ever more obvious that Samuel Adams had captured Hancock for the rebel cause, so the governor’s mood switched from complacency to alarm. By the end of November, he was obliged to consider the military option, only to rule it out. Under English law, the governor had not only a right but a duty to call in the army to protect life and property; but he would have to do so on his own authority. Other laws would punish Thomas Hutchinson if Lieutenant Colonel Leslie committed atrocities for which the governor could be held responsible. Nor could he take the risk of a civil war in which his sons would be the first casualties.

  And there were other things that preyed on his mind. As the governor knew, his letters to William Palmer had helped instigate the scheme to send the tea. Although nobody could blame him for the plan eventually concocted by Palmer and the Treasury, at best his role in the affair would be deeply embarrassing if its full extent were made public. It was an error of judgment Hutchinson tried to keep quiet, and with some success, since historians rarely allude to the subject. The governor also knew that soon he would be in England himself. Whitehall had agreed to give him leave of absence for a trip to London, where he was bound to face probing questions about his stewardship of Massachusetts. Desperate not to make more mistakes, or to appear weak or disloyal, Hutchinson fell into a kind of seizure, unable to advance or to withdraw.

  In this tortured frame of mind the governor waited for the tea. If he were lucky, the first ships would dock in New York, where the army was far stronger and Tryon could forcibly land their cargoes. That might break the colonial will to resist. But if the tea ships reached Boston first, Hutchinson would have to take the lead. In an emergency he could flee to Castle William and rely on the navy to protect the tea from destruction. Other than that he felt there was nothing he could do.

  At last, on November 27, the waiting came to an end. That evening the first tea ship, the Dartmouth, entered the outer reaches of Boston Harbor, carrying eighty chests of Bohea, twenty of Singlo, and another fourteen of varieties more refined and costly. It was Saturday night, too late for a pilot, but early the following morning she passed Castle William and made her way to a mooring close to HMS Captain. By noon on Sunday the town was in ferment again. The selectmen met, and so did Adams’s Committee of Correspondence, to discuss their plan of action. Once inside the harbor, the Dartmouth and its cargo fell under the jurisdiction of the customs officers and a clock began to tick toward a deadline on December 17. At that moment, if the import duty remained unpaid, the customs service and the Royal Navy would be obliged to seize the ship, confiscate the cargo, and sell the tea themselves.

  For everything that follows, we face on a grander scale the same problem of conflicting sources that arose with the Gaspée incident. Because they knew they were breaking the law, only a few of the raiders who dumped the tea in the harbor ever revealed their names. Neither Samuel Adams nor John Hancock left memoirs, and by the end of 1777 Thomas Young, William Molineux, and Joseph Warren had all passed away, long before the time for writing reminiscences. The British collected sworn depositions from
every witness they could find, which were probably reliable as far as they went but omitted many essential details. Hutchinson wrote copiously about the affair, but mainly in the hope of showing that Samuel Adams planned the Tea Party many weeks in advance. This may well be true—conceivably, Arthur Lee in London might have given Adams the idea—but for lack of evidence no historian can make that charge stick in front of a jury, any more than the British or the governor could at the time.

  Although George III would retain control of Canada and the British West Indies, the rest of his colonial system in America was starting to disintegrate. As the economist Adam Smith would point out in 1776, the old empire on the mainland had always been a kind of illusion, too expensive to rule and sustainable only by the consent of those whom it claimed to govern. As the deadline approached, Boston called the empire’s bluff.

  A STATE OF NATURE

  On Monday, November 29, another great public meeting took place. It began at Faneuil Hall, but when several thousand people arrived to take part, not only from Boston, but from other towns nearby, they had to adjourn to a larger venue. The only space large enough was the Old South Meeting House. And there, for two whole days, they held what amounted to a preliminary convention for the rebellion that would follow.10

  This was no ordinary town meeting. In fact, it was not really a town meeting at all, because anyone could attend, and not merely those adult males who held the right to vote. From a British point of view, the assembly was unlawful, because it deviated from procedures laid down in the colony’s legal code. Like the Gaspée raid, it broke new ground in the history of the empire. Eleven years earlier, in 1762, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had described the general will of the people as the only legitimate source of authority. When he wrote The Social Contract, it was hard to see exactly what Rousseau meant, for lack of concrete examples in Europe at the time. But over these two days in late November the Bostonians gave a vivid demonstration of what he had in mind. They displayed the general will in action, which means that they rejected any authority but their own.11