An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  Amid all the detail, it is all too easy to lose sight of that essential point. Long before the tea ships dropped anchor, the colonial system had already reached a dead end in Massachusetts. In order to break the impasse, the British would have had to appoint a new, visionary governor, capable of shaping some new political settlement; but this was inconceivable. And so, as we watch the meetings unfold, we find that while the fate of the tea ships came first on the agenda, the debate soon extended to other, more fundamental questions about Boston’s place within the empire.

  The meeting swiftly decided that the tea could not come ashore. It was up to the owners to take the cargo home to England. But this was far more easily said than done. The ship belonged to a whaling family called Rotch, Quakers from Nantucket and rivals of John Hancock in the oil trade, who took little interest in politics. That afternoon their representative in Boston, Francis Rotch, came to the meeting with the Dartmouth’s skipper, James Hall, and told the gathering that they were asking the impossible.

  Captain Hall pointed out that he could not leave harbor without a permit from the governor, which Hutchinson could not give. Once the ship was officially logged as an arrival—which it had been—the tax became due, and somebody had to pay it or the vessel would be impounded. At this, Samuel Adams took the floor. The people had spoken, he said—“they had now the Power”—and Rotch would simply have to tell the truth: that a mob had forced his hand and left him no option but to send the Dartmouth back out to sea.

  When Adams finished, a vote was taken, and the meeting appointed a watch of twenty-five men to board the Dartmouth each evening and prevent the tea from being unloaded in the dark. At that point the session might have ended, except for the arrival of John Hancock, fresh from another uneasy standoff with Hutchinson. The fate of Hall’s cargo was one thing, but more was at stake: nothing less than the fate of the colony and all the liberties it held so dear. That morning, Hancock had sat among the Governor’s Council, as again it refused to help land the tea in safety. Soon afterward, he learned that Hutchinson planned to call in the town’s magistrates to order any rioters to disperse, as a prelude perhaps to bringing in the army.

  Using the language of Shakespeare—his words echoed lines from Coriolanus—Hancock denounced the governor as nothing better than “a tool of power and enemy of his country.” He called on the people to pass a vote of censure, which they did. The Dartmouth had still to be dealt with—the consignees had yet to be heard from, with the artist John Singleton Copley acting as a go-between—but as the sessions went on, that day and the next, they ceased to be merely concerned with James Hall and his ship. This is perfectly clear from the language used by Hancock, by Adams, and most of all by Thomas Young. Ever since the middle of 1772 and the news about the judges’ salaries, Boston had been drawing closer to a point of no return; and whatever happened to the tea, that moment had arrived.

  In the Boston pamphlet the town had already denied Parliament’s claim to sovereignty, with the support not only of both chambers of the General Court but also, the Bostonians believed, of as many as fifty other towns in the province.*2 With so much radical momentum behind them, the people of Boston could not retreat. On the contrary, on November 30 the meeting went further and committed an act of rebellion. Later, the British government paid especially close attention to reports of its proceedings, which the Crown’s lawyers saw as clear evidence of treachery.

  Tuesday morning’s session began with the reading of a letter from the consignees. It was out of their power, they said, to refuse to take the tea, but since they had already fled to Castle William to take shelter with Lieutenant Colonel Leslie, it did not really matter what answer they gave. Only the governor could decide the fate of the tea and whether it should stay or leave. Although the law required the collection of the tea duty, Hutchinson might have taken it upon himself to allow the Dartmouth to leave with the tax still unpaid, on the grounds that this was the only way to avoid bloodshed. It seems unlikely that he would have faced any official censure if he had done so—the British would have blamed the Boston mob—but in any event the governor had already decided to stand firm. While the people were mulling over the letter from the consignees, a sheriff entered the Old South, sent by Hutchinson to break up the gathering on the grounds of its legality. He was hissed and booed, and the meeting voted unanimously to throw him out. His arrival provoked a twenty-minute speech from Samuel Adams, who rose to the occasion as few other people would have dared to do.

  Like Hancock, Adams has aroused endless debate about his motives and his tactics. Was he a man of principle, speaking for a broad consensus, or merely a scheming rabble-rouser, devious and manipulative? The latter view is simply naive. Of course his tactics were sometimes underhand: he was a politician, and by the standards of eighteenth-century public life his Machiavellian cunning was scarcely unusual. On November 30, Samuel Adams said nothing new—he merely repeated the doctrines of the Boston pamphlet—but he displayed to the full two talents that a successful politician had to possess. First, a sense of timing: Adams saw that this was the moment that he had to seize, or spend his life regretting it. And second, he knew how to take abstract ideas about democracy and convert them into a call for action that everyone could understand.

  In what an eyewitness called “the most abusive, virulent and vilifying manner,” Adams attacked the governor directly. In the message carried by the sheriff, Hutchinson called himself His Majesty’s representative, so Adams took that as an excuse for mockery. The governor was tall and thin—a “shadow of a man,” said Adams, “scarce able to support his withered carcase or his hoary head! Is he a representation of majesty?” And then he went on to reiterate the pamphlet’s ideas. The people were supreme, and in extremity they could ignore the law. “A free and sensible people,” he said, “when they felt themselves injured always had a right to meet together to consult for their own safety.”

  When Adams finished, amid an ovation from the floor, it fell to Thomas Young to bring the meeting to a climax. At some point during those two days—exactly when, we cannot say, or what precise words he used—Young called for the tea to be destroyed. In London the following January, four witnesses testified to that, and a note taken by a member of the audience confirms it. But when he rose to follow Adams, Young spoke not about tea but about principles, citing as his authority the greatest legal scholar of the period, the English judge William Blackstone. When the government would not listen, the people had no alternative, said Young: they were in “a state of nature,” where, according to Blackstone, they had no other option but to disobey. For Thomas Young, the meeting at the Old South resembled the gathering of the barons at Runnymede, with the people of Boston poised to draw up their own Magna Carta, like their forebears in protest against Plantagenet tyranny.

  After that, what else was left to say? That afternoon a merchant, John Rowe, made what he seems to have intended as a joke, suggesting that the tea could be destroyed. Part owner of another of the tea ships, the Eleanor, whose arrival was expected imminently, Rowe was apparently trying to defuse the situation with some good-natured banter. One man recalled that Rowe asked “whether a little salt water would not do it good, or make as good tea as fresh,” and again the meeting shouted its applause. Then Copley the painter arrived from Castle William to give the final response from the consignees. The most they would offer was a pledge to warehouse the tea onshore. They could not send it back across the ocean. At that, the meeting finally passed the resolution that the British authorities regarded as outright rebellion. The Tea Act, they said, was “accursed and unrighteous,” and they voted to stop the cargoes coming ashore “at the risks of their lives and fortunes.”

  The town’s most radical element had prevailed. As a way to prevent any second thoughts, the meeting voted to send the resolution to every other colony. Then John Hancock gave a closing address. A man with a great deal to lose, he knew how far they had traveled in the space of two days. “My fellow countrymen, w
e have now put our hands to the plough,” said Boston’s wealthiest citizen. “And woe be to him that shrinks or looks back.”

  THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEA

  For the next two weeks the town fell quiet, but the lull was wary and uncertain. Both sides waited nervously for news from New York and Philadelphia, where more tea ships were thought to be due at any moment. Men began to arm themselves, clearing the shops of firearms and ammunition. Out at Salem, the Essex Gazette ran a story suggesting that Boston intended to fight—it was “hazarding a brush,” the writer said—if the army or the navy intervened. Meanwhile, at Hutchinson’s request the British sealed the entrance to the harbor to prevent the Dartmouth from leaving without official clearance.

  Besides his flagship, too large and unwieldy to operate close inshore, Admiral Montagu had a frigate with twenty-eight guns, the Active, and a lightly armed sloop called the Kingfisher. He sent them to patrol the channels into the port, while from Castle William the army kept watch with its cannons and its small supply of gunpowder. But when Hutchinson insisted that no redcoat be seen with his weapons on the streets of Boston, Lieutenant Colonel Leslie refused to comply. Expecting his men to go ashore unarmed was out of the question. Indeed, almost every morning Leslie came to town himself to test the atmosphere and buy a leg of ham with which to feed his guests.

  Samuel Adams was simply biding his time, Leslie believed, until the other colonies gave a clear signal that they would also bar the tea from landing. If they did not, he wrote in a postscript to his earlier letter home, the movement would die away. But even as he tried to keep spirits high over dinner at the fort, Leslie acknowledged that the situation had become alarming. “They never were so unguarded before,” he added, not even at the time of the Stamp Act.12

  By now Captain Hall had brought the Dartmouth right up to the waterfront, mooring her at Griffin’s Wharf, located at the southern end of Boston beneath a low eminence called Fort Hill. Every night, with muskets and fixed bayonets, a posse from the town watched over the vessel, with John Hancock making at least one personal tour of inspection. On December 2, the Eleanor entered the harbor and tied up alongside, with 114 chests identical to Hall’s. Five days later the Beaver sailed in with another 112, but she also carried smallpox and had to wait a week in quarantine, before joining her sister ships at Griffin’s Wharf on the fifteenth.

  Meanwhile, Hutchinson still wrote compulsively, as though the mere flow of words could resolve the crisis. In the two weeks before the Tea Party, he composed no fewer than seventeen long letters, most of them addressed to men in England, each one filled with excuses, anxiety, and indiscretion. “I am at a loss where it will end,” he confessed to William Palmer on the ninth. In this, the most candid letter of all—“I desire no copies may be made,” he told his friend—the governor admitted his crucial mistake. For years, the people of Boston had bought legal, duty-paid tea as well as the smuggled variety; and because of that, he had expected only token resistance when the Tea Act and its implications became known.

  Even now Hutchinson failed to predict what would happen. “There certainly is danger of some violent explosion,” he wrote on the fourteenth, but he expected something wild, a sudden, incendiary riot by a mob, and not the smooth operation that eventually occurred. Two days earlier more rumors had reached the governor that the people were threatening to burn a tea ship. But until almost the last moment, he preferred to plan for another outcome. The owners of the ships, he believed, would try to take them out to sea without a permit, in which case HMS Active would detain them. For Hutchinson, this would have been the best result. No one could accuse him of disloyalty; and when it heard the news, the British cabinet would have to end the unrest in New England with the rigorous measures that had been postponed too long.

  All the time the deadline drew closer. The next move had to come from Francis Rotch, because his ship, the Dartmouth, was the first to which it would apply. On the fourteenth, another mass meeting assembled at the Old South, with Rotch compelled to attend. Faced with the loss of his ship and her cargo, whether she stayed at the wharf or was seized by the navy, at last he gave in. Reluctantly, Rotch agreed to ask for the permit he needed. It took two days for him to find all the relevant customs officers, but their hands were tied by the same laws and regulations that required the payment of the tax. They refused: until they received the duties, they could not permit the ships to leave. Only Governor Hutchinson could waive the rules and issue the pass the Dartmouth required.

  And so we come to the morning of Thursday, December 16. By now less than twenty-four hours remained before the first cargo of tea was due to be impounded. Out at Castle William, keeping in touch with the shore via a relay of couriers, the redcoats were waiting, ready to fire a warning shot if the tea ships tried to leave. Leslie was quietly confident, believing that Samuel Adams had overreached himself. “They have run themselves aground & find they have gone lengths they can’t support,” he wrote to headquarters in New York.13

  All that week the weather had been cold, damp, and dull, with heavy clouds hanging over the coast. It was raining at ten o’clock as the crowds began to gather at the Old South for the last time. Two thousand people attended the meeting, said John Rowe, while other sources say five thousand, arriving not only from Boston but from towns up to twenty-five miles inland. Even with all its seats and partitions folded away, the Old South would have struggled to hold so many, but the exact number is beside the point. For what was taking place, Adams and the North End Caucus needed a broad coalition against the British, and now they knew it stood behind them.14

  Here again, Hutchinson had been mistaken, believing that while Adams and his colleagues had tried to raise the rest of the province, their calls for action had gone unheeded. In fact, in the twelve months since the Boston pamphlet, the Committee of Correspondence had won the backing of four-fifths of the towns in nearby Essex County, including Marblehead and Salem. To the west, in Middlesex County, the figure was still higher. And by the sixteenth, the town of Boston also knew that in New York and Philadelphia the tea consignees had been compelled to stand down.

  The morning session had only one item to discuss. Told that Francis Rotch had failed to obtain his pass, they sent him on one last errand. He would have to ride ten miles to the governor’s country house at Milton. If Hutchinson would grant the permit, the tea could go to sea again. But if he refused? “Let us take our axes and chisels and split the boxes,” somebody cried out from the gallery, “and throw their contents into the harbour.” We know that someone shouted such a thing, but amid all the competing testimony it is impossible to know precisely when it was said, or by whom, and whether or not he was speaking about a plan that had been laid in advance.

  Soon after it began, the meeting adjourned, to reconvene at three o’clock that afternoon. In the meantime, Francis Rotch set out for Milton, a round-trip of close to six hours. He found Thomas Hutchinson, who made one last suggestion. The Dartmouth could leave without a pass and then hand itself over to Admiral Montagu for safety until the uproar died down and the tea could be safely unloaded. This idea left the young man in despair. Not only would Rotch lose his ship, confiscated by the navy. He would also become a marked man in Boston. His own life would be in danger, as well as those of Captain Hall and any sailor rash enough to help him. Rotch said no, and the governor sent him away without the pass. Back he rode through the wet, reaching the Old South just as darkness was falling.

  Inside the people were excited and impatient. For nearly three hours they had waited, while Adams and Young kept up the flow of oratory. At one point, a young lawyer leaped to his feet to give a fiery warning of what lay in store. This was Josiah Quincy Jr., closely related to Hancock by marriage, brilliant but erratic, sometimes a moderate, sometimes a hothead, but never a man lost for words. Like his kinsman, he used the language of extremity. The crisis was upon them, and it was one they could not resolve, he cried, merely with “shouts and hosannas.” They should pause and thi
nk carefully before they took steps that would incur the wrath of England and bring on “the most trying and terrific struggle this country has ever seen.”

  His intentions remain unclear. Perhaps Quincy hoped to calm the people down, or perhaps he was trying to arouse them to some new peak of emotion. Again the truth remains elusive, and perhaps even Quincy himself did not know what he was seeking to achieve. For a while, it looked as though the meeting might disperse, as Rotch failed to return. Were they bored and tired and eager to go home? Or were they restless because the tea was so close and begging for destruction?

  Even an eyewitness might have found it hard to assess their mood, but then suddenly no room was left for doubt. Shortly before six o’clock, a commotion began near the door. The noise in the hall became deafeningly loud. At last Francis Rotch had come in from the street. When the shouting died away, he told them what the governor had said. No pass could be issued, and so the tea must stay at Griffin’s Wharf. Only one man could follow that. Samuel Adams stepped forward. They had done all they could, he said, for the salvation of America, and they could do no more. Rotch should go home to rest, free from blame. Amid applause, the meeting voted its agreement, and while they did so, the party was already beginning.

  As Rotch was speaking, part of the crowd near the exit had begun to slip away into the night. When Adams had finished, the meeting paused for an interval that may have been as long as fifteen minutes. Then suddenly yells and whistles were heard from outside, and the war cries of Indian braves, audible three blocks away. Inside the hall, the same yells rang out. In the porch a band of young men appeared, about twenty strong, their faces blackened with burned cork and soot, with feathers on their heads and blankets slung around their shoulders.