On Sunday, November 28, the first of the three East India Company ships, the Dartmouth, sailed into Boston Harbor. News of its arrival spread quickly, prompting both the Boston town meeting and the Boston Committee of Correspondence to take the unusual step of meeting on the Sabbath. By the next morning, Sam Adams and the collection of merchants, artisans and shopkeepers comprising the Sons of Liberty had plastered the town with posters warning their fellow citizens that “The Hour of Destruction or of Manly Opposition to the Machinations of Tyranny Stares you in the Face!” On that same day, Boston’s citizens gathered once again. They initially met at Faneuil Hall, but when the crowd of more than 2,500 overwhelmed the space available, they moved the meeting to the Old South Meeting House, where more than 5,000 of Boston’s approximately 18,000 residents—nearly every adult male in the city—gathered to do everything possible to see to it that the tea be sent back to England and that the taxes on the tea remain unpaid.18
With the arrival of two additional East India Company ships, the Beaver and the Eleanor, during the next two weeks, the stakes were raised higher. Governor Hutchinson, who had become the most detested symbol of British authority in Boston, was determined to prevent Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty from defying British authority yet again. Intent on forcing the colony into complying with the Tea Act, he arranged to have the East India Company tea consigned to and then sold by the only residents of Boston willing to do so—members of his own family. But he had not yet figured out a way to get the tea unloaded from the East India Company ships, for the Boston patriots put out the word that anyone cooperating with the East India Company in unloading their cargo would suffer the fate of “wretches unworthy to live and will be made the first victims of our just Resentment.”19 Everyone knew that the critical moment would fall sometime before midnight on December 16, for that would be the last day that the ships could lie in the harbor without paying the customs duty. At that point, Hutchinson faced the choice either of making some sort of move to unload the tea or of having the East India ships return to England with their full cargo still on board. And so it was that the three small groups of “Mohawk Indians” gathered on Griffin’s Wharf that fateful night.
Sam Adams’s younger cousin John was merely one of the witnesses and not a participant, but he was powerfully impressed by what he saw. Writing in his diary immediately after the event, John commented, approvingly, that “This destruction of the tea is an event so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid & inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it an Epocha in History.” And though he had on previous occasions made known his disapproval of mob violence, he declared that those involved in the Boston Tea Party had demonstrated “a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity . . . that I greatly admire.”20
The other American port cities that were potential recipients of the East India Company tea—New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina—soon joined their Boston brethren in refusing to accept the company’s shipments. Although their resistance was not accompanied by either the drama or the systematic destruction of the tea that occurred in Boston, in each of those cities a determined citizenry prevented the East India Company ships from unloading their tea, forcing them to turn around and head back to England with their undelivered cargo.21
The financial loss suffered by the East India Company by the destruction of the tea in Boston was not insignificant—the East India Company estimated the loss at £9,659, which would be the equivalent of more than £1,000,000 today. But more important than the financial loss was the open defiance shown by the Bostonians. The Boston Tea Party would prove to be the final straw for royal officials both in America and London. Governor Hutchinson, who had suffered a steady stream of indignities at the hands of Boston radicals from the time of the demolition of his home in the summer of 1765 onward, was determined to punish the culprits. To fail to do so, he reasoned, would be to allow all property rights to be trampled by “a lawless and highly criminal assembly.”22
News of the events in Boston did not reach London until late January, and, not surprisingly, the king, his ministers and the members of Parliament were not pleased. As one member of Parliament declared: “The town of Boston ought to be knocked about the ears and destroyed.” Perhaps not everyone wished to go that far, but there was solid consensus in Parliament and among the king’s ministers that some sort of dramatic action against Boston’s “criminal fanatics” was necessary if England was going to be able to maintain even a semblance of authority over her colonies.23
The British Respond, and Benjamin Franklin Pays the Price
The most immediate victim of the British ministry’s outrage over the Boston Tea Party was a man who, in his capacity as colonial agent to Parliament for the colonies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, had attempted to walk a fine line between defense of colonial rights and amicable relations with key British officials. On January 29, two days after official word of the Tea Party had reached England, Benjamin Franklin was summoned into an anteroom in the Privy Council chamber, nicknamed the “cockpit,” the place for cock-fighting. As Franklin entered he saw it was packed with nearly every important member of British officialdom—Lord Dartmouth and Lord Hillsborough, who had already formed a bitter animus toward the much-heralded American scientist and diplomat; Lord North, the chief architect of an increasingly punitive policy toward the Americans; and even the Archbishop of Canterbury. There were a few friendly faces—the Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke and Franklin’s longtime friend and fellow scientist Joseph Priestley—but looking at the cast of assembled characters, Franklin could have had no doubt that he had not been summoned for polite conversation.
Franklin was led to a long table at the center of the room, where he faced the members of the Privy Council. Ostensibly there to hear a petition from Massachusetts residents asking for the removal of Governor Hutchinson from office, the Privy Councilors had in fact gathered to indict Franklin for having illegally received, transmitted and connived in the publication of letters from Governor Hutchinson and other royal officials in Massachusetts. Lord Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general, took the role of Franklin’s designated inquisitor. In a controlled tirade that lasted for well over an hour and that Franklin later likened to “bull-baiting,” Wedderburn delivered to the esteemed doctor a public and humiliating dressing-down. He accused Franklin of being the “mover and prime conductor” of a conspiracy against the royal government in Massachusetts; he labeled the American a common thief, who had “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men.” Pounding on the table, Wedderburn claimed that Franklin, far from being a servant of the colonial governments of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, was instead behaving like “the minister of a foreign independent state,” all with the intent of moving forward “the idea of a Great American Republic.” As Wedderburn continued his verbal assault, the crowd of British courtiers packed into the cockpit cheered the solicitor general and mocked Franklin. The American, dressed in a simple velvet suit, kept his emotions firmly under control. As one of those present observed, “the Doctor . . . stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed as to afford a placid tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear.”24
Although Franklin had probably crossed an ethical line in disseminating some of Governor Hutchinson’s private letters, Wedderburn was wholly off the mark in accusing him of fomenting rebellion against the king. Franklin, at least at that moment, was emphatically not an advocate of American independence. Indeed, when he learned of the Boston Tea Party, he deplored the “violent injustice” of the event, arguing that the Bostonians should make voluntary restitution for the value of the tea. But Wedderburn’s attack, carried out in full view of the highest officials in England, would mark the beginning of Franklin’s transformation from conciliator to revolutionary.
After
Wedderburn had finished his tirade, he called on Franklin to testify, but, according to the official record of the hearing, “Dr. Franklin being present remained silent, but declared by his counsel that he did not choose to be examined.” In what was a foregone conclusion, the Privy Council rejected the Massachusetts petition for the removal of Governor Hutchinson, but Wedderburn and his fellow Privy Councilors had won a pyrrhic victory. However much they may have enjoyed Franklin’s public humiliation, their behavior would strain the affections of the one man in America capable of bringing about a reconciliation between Great Britain and her colonies. Franklin was a man of carefully cultivated self-control and humility, but he was also a man of intense pride. He would never forget or forgive those British officials who had watched his public humiliation so smugly. From that moment forward, Benjamin Franklin would become an ardent defender of American, not British imperial, interests.25
The Coercive Acts
On the same day that Lord Wedderburn publicly humiliated Dr. Franklin, the king’s chief ministers, led by Lord Frederick North, chancellor of the exchequer and first lord of the treasury, began discussions on how to respond to the Boston Tea Party. All of the members of the ministry were convinced that they must respond decisively if the British government was going to “secure the Dependance of the Colonies on the Mother Country.” North realized that the dispute was no longer one over taxes but over “whether we have, or have not any authority in that country.” But the British imperial bureaucracy was a slow-moving beast, and it was more than a month before the ministry decided on a course of action. Although by that time the British had learned of resistance to the East India Company in other American port towns, they remained fixated on the “New England fanatics” in Boston. Consequently, on March 14 North recommended to Parliament the enactment of the first of a series of bills aimed at reducing the Bostonians to a state of submission. The Boston Port Bill proposed that no ships engaged in either foreign or coastal trade be allowed to enter the port—an order to remain in effect until the Bostonians made full restitution to the East India Company for the value of the tea they had destroyed. Lord North was convinced that if he could bring Boston to heel, others inclined to follow that town’s example would soon fall into line; in defending the Boston Port Bill, he emphasized that the measure was in fact a moderate one, for it penalized Boston and Boston alone. Moreover, he reasoned, other colonies might well be tempted to take advantage of the Boston port closure in order to increase the volume of trade in their own ports, thus further marginalizing the Boston resistance. The bill moved swiftly through Parliament, and by the end of March the king had endorsed it as well.
Between the end of March and the end of June Parliament passed other acts aimed at punishing not only Boston, but the entire colony of Massachusetts. That legislation came to be known derisively in America as the Coercive Acts. It included a bill, the Massachusetts Government Act, which vastly strengthened the power of the Massachusetts royal governor to appoint and remove most civil officials, prohibited the calling of town meetings without permission from the Crown and significantly reduced popular influence over the selection of juries. Another act, the Impartial Administration of Justice Act, stipulated that any royal official accused of a crime in Massachusetts might demand to be tried in England rather than before hostile juries in Massachusetts. In a further move signaling just how intent the king and Parliament were to enforce their version of the rule of law in Massachusetts, the king replaced the beleaguered outgoing governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who had made it clear that he was ready not only to give up the governorship but also to leave North America altogether. The decision to replace Hutchinson with General Thomas Gage, the commander of the British army in North America, seemed to mean to many in the colony that the king was intent on converting their government into a military dictatorship.
The British Parliament also passed a bill that required Massachusetts residents to provide housing and provisions for British troops in their own homes. Considering the fact that many of the same men behind the Boston Tea Party had been conducting informal guerrilla warfare against British soldiers for the past several years, taunting and threatening them, pelting them with rocks and snowballs, the Quartering Act was not merely provocative but also perfectly calculated to stir up a powerful reaction on the streets of Boston.26
Action and reaction: That had been the dynamic of events shaping relations between royal officials in London and the American colonists since Parliament passed the Sugar Act in 1764. But the Coercive Acts, enacted in reaction to the bold actions of Sam Adams and his radical followers in Boston that night of December 16, raised the conflict to an entirely new level. Anyone with eyes to see could have predicted that the Americans would not meekly acquiesce to the Coercive Acts. It remained to be seen what form the American response would take.
TWO
THE QUEST FOR A UNIFIED AMERICAN RESISTANCE
FROM 1764 TO early 1774, as the British tightened the reins of imperial rule, the political leaders of the American colonies were for the most part determined to resist. They also agreed that the Tea Act, giving the English East India Company a monopoly on all tea sold in the colonies, was yet another dangerous step in the destruction of America’s liberties. Indeed, the success of Boston’s radicals in thwarting implementation of the Tea Act had emboldened citizens in New York, Philadelphia and Charleston to band together to turn back the East India Company ships in their towns. But in those cities, successful resistance to the Tea Act had occurred without resort to the destruction of property. Why, many asked, had it been necessary for the Bostonians to go to such extraordinary lengths?
Indeed, in nearly all of the earlier acts of resistance in America, most colonies managed to successfully obstruct British policy without the drama and disorder occurring in Boston. In the resistance to the Stamp Act in Boston, the mob had sometimes seemed to have taken over control of the town. In Virginia, opponents of the Stamp Act followed a very different path. Soon after Virginia’s provincial assembly, the House of Burgesses, passed resolutions declaring the Stamp Act unconstitutional, political leaders in that colony gathered to confront the British officials charged with enforcing the act with a determined, but also genteel, demeanor. As a frustrated royal Governor Francis Faquier described the encounter, a “mob” approached Hugh Mercer, the man selected by British royal officials to implement the Stamp Tax in the colony, on the town green in Williamsburg and advised him of the error of his ways. But the mob, Faquier marveled, was unlike any he had ever seen, for “it was chiefly if not altogether Composed of Gentlemen of Property in the Colony, some of them at the head of their respective Counties, and the Merchants of the Country.” Mercer, when confronted by individuals whom he considered his peers, indeed, his friends, promptly resigned his commission, whereupon the members of the “mob” gave him a round of huzzahs and repaired to the nearest tavern to drink toasts to his good health and to American liberty.1 Genteel Virginians and fanatical Bostonians! Whatever outrage the colonists may have felt about Parliament’s passage of the Coercive Acts, many Americans nevertheless could not hide their resentment that it was the radical behavior of the Bostonians that had put all of the colonies in the position in which they now found themselves. Pennsylvania’s Joseph Galloway, for example, pointed to the “riotous conduct of the New Englanders” as the cause of Parliament’s punitive actions; if the “republican mobs” and “lawless Presbyterians” of Boston had not run amok, the American colonies, Galloway lamented, might not have found themselves in their present predicament.2
It is hardly surprising therefore that in the late spring of 1774, Sam Adams and the Boston Committee of Correspondence called for all of the colonies to embrace a “Solemn League and Covenant.” That very phrase reflected the Puritan values that lay at the foundation of the initiative, but, in practical terms, it amounted to a proposal for a total boycott of British trade, closing American ports to all English ships and refusing to purchase any English goods. T
he proposal met with a cool reception in some quarters. Although many colonists were prepared to unite in expressions of sympathy for Boston, whose port was now blockaded by a fleet of ships from the British Royal Navy and five regiments from the British Royal Army, they were not so eager to jeopardize their own economic well-being by closing their ports to the ships of their principal trading partner.3
New York Responds
Boston needed New York and Philadelphia. If any attempt at a thoroughgoing boycott of British goods was to be successful, those seaport towns, which lagged behind Boston in their commitment to common action in resisting British policies, would have to sign on. If they did not, not only would the overall effect of the boycott be drastically diminished, but it would also be possible for British goods entering those ports to be shipped overland to other colonies, effectively negating any effect of a boycott. And so, even before he had officially proposed his Solemn League and Covenant in Boston, Adams wrote to two of the most militant members of the New York Committee of Correspondence, Isaac Sears and Alexander McDougall, asking if they could help mobilize the merchants of their town to go along with his plan for a colony-wide boycott of British goods. At that time, the New York committee consisted of a mixture of radicals like Sears and McDougall and some of the more conservative merchants who had resisted past attempts at imposing a boycott on British trade. When the New York Committee of Correspondence met on May 16, 1774, to craft a response to the Coercive Acts, many of the most prominent merchants still wanted to moderate the confrontation with Great Britain. Fearing that the New York committee was too much under the sway of radicals like Sears and McDougall, the more conservative New Yorkers arranged for the fifteen-person committee of radicals to be expanded into a Committee of Fifty-one. Although Sears and McDougall were included on this new, enlarged committee, most of its members were inclined toward moderation, not confrontation.4
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 5
