An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  There was a dash for the exit. Two or three hundred people had already left before Hancock, Adams, and Young could call the meeting to order once again. Thomas Young gave a speech, consisting of jokes and badinage about “the ill-effects of tea on the constitution.” He drew to a close, the applause died down, and the Old South emptied swiftly. It was less than half a mile to the wharf and the ships. Off went the crowd down Milk Street and Hutchinson Street, turning left at Belcher’s Lane to reach the waterfront. The rain had stopped, the night was clear, and in the distance they could hear the sound of splitting wood.

  With thousands of spectators gazing down on what they did, the raiders at the wharf apparently numbered between 100 and 150. At least that many men were needed to shift such a large consignment of tea. Armed with clubs and sticks and cutlasses, while others with firearms stood guard on the shore, they divided into three teams, one assigned to each ship. They swarmed aboard, some in their Indian costumes, and brushed aside the customs officers, warning them to leave or face a beating. Only one skipper was aboard his ship, Hezekiah Coffin on the Beaver, and the next day he gave a sworn statement describing the scene.

  Forty men had filled his deck, broken open the hatches, and dropped down into the hold. They set up a hoist and hauled the tea chests aloft with blocks and tackle. Each one had come unopened from China, with those of Bohea weighing at least 335 pounds. The finer teas came in smaller boxes, but even those weighed 70 or 80 pounds each. It would take nearly three hours of hard labor to empty each ship, smashing holes in every chest and dumping the leaves into Boston Harbor. The tide was low and the water was shallow, but even so the tea spread outward in long plumes, drifting away to the south. Out from the shore came a few men in rowing boats, perhaps intending to scoop it up and take it home. They were swiftly warned off by the squad with muskets on the wharf.

  By nine o’clock the deed was done. It was another Gaspée raid, without the gunshots and the violence, but inspired by similar motives and ideas and with the same enemy in sight. Far from being just a protest against an irksome tax, the Tea Party meant rejection of British rule in its entirety. That was what Hancock and Quincy and Young had said, by the very clearest implication.

  The Tea Party also resembled the Gaspée affair in another way. In Rhode Island eighteen months earlier, John Brown had led not an unruly crowd but an alliance of shipowners, sea captains, artisans, and students, with the blessing of Judge Hopkins and the leaders of the province. At Griffin’s Wharf, we find another wide coalition among the men who took part. Again, they could never be called a mob, any more than we can use that term to describe the crew who burned the Gaspée.

  The first list of the Tea Party raiders did not appear until the 1830s. Even then it was incomplete, with fewer than sixty names. Nonetheless, the data it contains show us a movement with roots as broad as they were deep.15

  The job needed muscle. So among those who took part we find young working men, in their twenties, living in the poorer parts of Boston but not from the worst slums of the far North End. At least five worked in construction as carpenters, or masons. Another was a blacksmith. Seven came from the shipyards or the ropewalks, with careers as shipwrights or makers of oars, barrels, and rigging. During the Revolutionary War, at least five of the raiders served as artificers, building forts or repairing cannon.

  But alongside the laborers, we also find Paul Revere, from the luxury trades, another side of Boston represented at the wharf. While he worked in silver, four of his comrades that night did other kinds of skilled manual work, building or painting coaches, dressing leather, or making upholstery. Others earned their living in commerce: William Molineux, for one. There was an insurance broker, an importer of lemons, and a young merchant, Thomas Melvill, whose grandson would write Moby-Dick. No lawyers appear on the list and no clergymen, though John Adams and Samuel Cooper gave the Tea Party their enthusiastic support. Apparently, only one old college boy took part: Melvill had been to Princeton. Even so, their backgrounds were diverse.

  The same was true of their leadership. For lack of entirely firm evidence, historians have often hesitated to name Samuel Adams, Hancock, and Young as the Tea Party’s organizers. But their actions and every word they uttered—especially those of Dr. Young—point to that conclusion. And yet these three men were also a coalition of a kind. There was Adams, the old campaigner, from a dynasty of Boston politicians; Hancock, rich but frustrated, his business in decline, while his ambition grew; and finally Young, the volatile outsider, a heretic driven by philosophy and by a conviction that injustice was inscribed within the very fabric of the empire. Each radical came from different roots and a different milieu, and each one had his own different motives for resistance to the British.

  By sending the tea, Lord North had given them a cause against which they could unite, with most of Massachusetts falling in alongside them. In the form of the Boston pamphlet, the movement already had a manifesto to which it could turn for an expression of its beliefs. A popular front, embracing farmers, artisans, lawyers, preachers, and professors’ wives, it was not a movement that Lord North could comprehend.

  THE TEA PARTY’S ORIGINS

  However theatrical it might appear, and however accidental or contingent the events that led to it may seem, the Tea Party came about neither by chance nor simply as a plot by smugglers to protect their trade. Its roots can be found in deep flaws within the system that the British had brought into being. From the time of the Gaspée raid, the empire had begun to crack apart, along hidden lines of weakness that North and his colleagues only dimly recognized.

  The British Empire in America had no plan, and it had no center of command. It had no guiding vision, and it had no high ideals. From a British point of view, the American colonies existed to serve one purpose alone, which was crudely economic. For that very reason the old regime could not endure. More than eighty years ago, this point was forcefully made by the British historian Sir Lewis Namier, whose analysis of the American Revolution’s origins still remains one of the most useful.*3

  By birth a member of the Polish landed gentry, Namier belonged to that brilliant generation of central European Jews who settled in England in the first half of the twentieth century and immensely enriched Great Britain’s cultural life. In the light of his background—he spent his boyhood in Austrian Galicia, where he acquired a deep dislike of the Habsburg monarchy—Namier achieved some especially penetrating insights into the fall of empires. Although in detail his arguments were subtle and complex, he clearly identified the defects in the British system in North America that led to its collapse.

  By the 1770s, Great Britain had long since come to view itself as a thoroughly commercial country. Even people who owed their rank to the ownership of land agreed that business was the lifeblood of the nation. “Every country and every age has dominant terms, which seem to obsess men’s thoughts,” Namier wrote. “Those of eighteenth century England were property, contract, trade and profits.” Indeed the British took this as a badge of pride. Their achievements in commerce marked them out as a free and liberal race very different from the French, whom they regarded as merely lackeys of Versailles.16

  Genius though he was, Namier never developed his ideas into a full-length account of the crisis in America and the Revolutionary War; but the logic of his argument ran as follows. While the British ideology of commerce had its merits—it helped to produce a relatively open, flexible society—it also had its grave defects. Their devotion to trade often descended into a narrow materialism that impaired the vision of the nation’s leaders. As a result, the British came to see their overseas dominions as no more than a means for making profits for the mother country. On those rare occasions when Parliament discussed colonial affairs, the speakers would say just that, rarely feeling the need to embellish their case for empire with moral rhetoric of any kind.

  This was true even of a man as friendly to America as Edmund Burke, whose finest speeches on the subject dwelled chiefly
on the benefits of peaceful commerce beneath the British flag, which he saw as the imperial system’s raison d’être. Of course Burke had grave doubts about the East India Company, that entity so vile, which cruelly exploited the people of the Ganges: but the king and his ministers agreed with him. All of them shared his deep misgivings about the company’s regime in India. Even so, they dared not think of abandoning it to the French. Like the West Indies and Virginia, the nation’s possessions in Bengal were simply far too profitable to surrender. Together they formed a system of global trade that could not be allowed to slip away from Britain’s grasp.

  It would be facile to suggest that the British were wrong to wish to make money. But some kinds of profits are better than others, less destructive, less venal, and more permanent. The problem was simply this: while the British were determined, for commercial reasons, to keep their empire, they did not really understand the way it had come to work. By the early 1770s, the system as a whole had become too large, too diverse, and too volatile for the British to administer. This was obviously true in India, but the point applies to America as well. Ironically enough, most sections of its economy were actually thriving, like that of the West Indies, as the trade in sugar, molasses, tobacco, rice, indigo, fish, and grain continued to expand. But too much of this arose from a boom in credit that could not be sustained: the same boom that caused the East India Company’s brush with disaster.

  Starting with the banking crash, one crisis erupted after another with no logic that Lord North and the cabinet could discern. How could they end the epidemic of smuggling in the colonies or in the British Isles? In fact the prevalence of smuggling was simply another side effect of a speculative empire, and of a fiscal system that relied too heavily on the taxation of commodities that lent themselves to illegal traffic. But the only solution they offered was the Royal Navy and officers like Lieutenant Dudingston. And what could the British do when the tea trade collapsed and the company came so close to ruin? Ship the stuff to America, of course, and hope that it would sell. The Treasury did not anticipate the effects the tea might have upon arrival.

  That was how the tea came to be sent. It was a short-term expedient, intended to prop up the company, undercut the smugglers, and reassert the doctrine that Britain had the right to levy taxes in America. It did not occur to North and his colleagues that while for them tea was just an object of trade, in the colonies it would acquire a new meaning. In Boston, tea became a symbol against which men and women would mobilize on that chilly evening in December; and this Lord North could never understand.

  In fact the British scarcely saw the colonies at all as anything more than a bundle of economic resources or a destination for convicts. Often the American people themselves remained almost invisible, mere accessories dotted about in a landscape where, in British eyes, the objects in the foreground were fields of tobacco, sacks of rice, and barrels of molasses. Even writers of genius like Edward Gibbon never thought of crossing the Atlantic. Neither did Burke or David Hume, James Boswell or Adam Smith, despite the relative ease of the voyage—a ticket to New York and back cost only £20—and their own wide interests.

  “In America there is little to be observed except natural curiosities,” wrote Samuel Johnson in 1762. In his opinion, the western continent had nobody worth talking to. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin was an exception, but he had removed the necessity of going there by coming to England himself. And if the colonies appeared to be bereft of civilization, their politics struck the British as provincial, misguided, and dishonest. To North and his colleagues, American demands for liberty seemed to be nothing more than a fraud, a masquerade behind which the colonists were intent on tax evasion.

  In many different places—in Charleston, in Virginia, and most of all in Boston—the British encountered new societies with their own agenda. An empire built on maritime trade required customers and clients, but as the century went on, the Americans who played those roles developed their own distinctive ambitions, as they were bound to do; and they also developed their own reinterpretation of political principles and ideas first acquired from Great Britain and then modified to suit colonial circumstances. If British statesmen had visited the colonies, they might gradually have come to accept that these Americans’ aspirations were valid. But they might also have come away even more appalled by what they found: a political culture that, by the 1770s, had evolved until it was radically different from their own.

  Besides their obsession with trade, another fetish enjoyed the devotion of Britain’s elite. They were utterly loyal to a political system built on the ownership of property. A gentleman’s rank and status depended on his assets, and in England the best, most prestigious asset of all was real estate. When merchants strove to succeed, they did so in the hope of acquiring land and becoming the equals of men above them who already owned many acres. The national obsessions with commerce and with landed property were merely two sides of the same coin, but they threw up another barrier between Britain and America.

  It was very rare for Lord North to set out his own political philosophy. He had no need, since everybody knew precisely what it was. But when occasionally he did so, he staunchly upheld a system in which English landowners occupied the commanding heights of power, not only in the British Isles, but also, by virtue of Parliament’s sovereignty, in the dominions overseas. In 1785, when the House of Commons debated some modest proposals by William Pitt the Younger for parliamentary reform, North stood up to defend the old arrangements. According to him, the country gentlemen should always form the majority in the nation’s legislature. The British constitution, he believed, was “the work of infinite wisdom—the most beautiful fabric that, perhaps, had existed from the beginning of time.” It rested, he proclaimed, on the landed gentry, whom he called “the best and most respectable objects of the confidence of the people.”17

  Holding views such as these, Lord North could hardly fail to antagonize Americans for whom this kind of thinking was already antiquated and absurd. From North’s perspective, a planter from Virginia might just qualify as the equal of an English landlord. But even there he had his doubts, and the artisans and laborers of Massachusetts did not count at all. In November and December 1773, when the people of Boston threw open their meetings to everyone, including the landless and the unemployed, they not only broke the law. They violated every principle of government to which North and his colleagues adhered.

  When the news of the Tea Party reached Whitehall, it came as an appalling surprise to the governing elite. Unable to see New England as it was, instead the British cabinet beheld a mirage, in which the mobs of Boston or Rhode Island stood for forces of sin and disorder. They were nothing but criminals led by fanatics, or so they seemed to be from London. The cabinet reacted in two equally misguided ways. First it opted for punishment. Then it tried to put in place in Massachusetts a new regime based on empty and abstract ideas having to do with sovereignty and the will of Parliament. The British government’s obsession with the rule of law would lead it into a war it had never expected to fight.

  * * *

  *1 So is the evidence that John Hancock smuggled tea. Governor Hutchinson said that he did, a claim often repeated, but documentation is lacking. Certainly his uncle Thomas dealt in illegal Dutch tea, and John Hancock smuggled wine in the 1760s. But his surviving business papers from the 1770s show no trace of smuggling of any kind. On the contrary, a document preserved in London shows that in the spring of 1773 one of Hancock’s ships carried thirty chests of legal, duty-paid tea from the Thames to Boston.

  *2 The General Court had not yet voted to resist the Tea Act, but there was little doubt about the stance both chambers would take if the opportunity arose.

  *3 It can be found in the opening chapter of Namier’s England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930).

  Part Three

  DOWN THE SLOPE

  Chapter Eleven

  THE CABINET IN WINTER

  It was yesterday reported
… that at one of the North American sea coast towns, the inhabitants had sunk near 500 packages of tea.

  —The Morning Chronicle, JANUARY 21, 17741

  London in January: ice in the river, weeks of frost and then of heavy rain, but a city looking forward to the pleasures of the season. Back they came from the country, the landed gentry and the lords, for the theater and the gaming and a session of Parliament expected to be brief and tranquil. The French were quiet, at last the markets were stable, and the royal family gave everyone cause to rejoice. Queen Charlotte was about to reach the age of thirty, and although she had been born in May, the official celebrations would take place on Tuesday, January 18. Because she was with child and near her term, the occasion was especially superb. Guns fired at noon to salute her, and in the evening there were displays of fireworks. At St. James’s Palace, with her husband at her side, she held a levee to receive the praise of doting bishops, peers, and politicians. After that they went to her birthday ball, where minuets were danced by young ladies making their debut at court, each with a ticket from the Lord Chamberlain.

  On the nineteenth a ship came in from New England. After four stormy weeks on the ocean, the Hayley arrived at Dover filled with barrels of tar sent over by John Hancock which, perhaps as some kind of omen, had leaked all over the hold. The day after she dropped anchor, the price of the East India Company’s stock suddenly began to fall, as traders with inside knowledge rushed to sell. The following day the press had the gist of what had taken place in Boston. By the weekend they had the whole story, complete with the Mohawks, the meetings at the Old South, and even the number of tea chests tossed into the harbor. They also knew that a similar fate was likely to befall any tea that reached Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia, whose resolutions against it they printed at length.