With the days racing toward a confrontation on December 17, the Eleanor arrived at the harbor. The patriots ordered the second ship to join the Dartmouth at Griffin’s Wharf so that they needn’t keep a separate watch. Five days later, the brig Beaver approached port, but smallpox had broken out during the voyage, and the ship was moored at an outlying island for scrubbing and fumigating. An announcement came from New York that the local tea agents had refused all responsibility for any tea sent there, and a letter from Philadelphia said its agents had resigned outright. The letter also jeered at those Boston merchants who had violated nonimportation agreements in the past and asked whether they could be trusted in the current crisis.
On December 11, Samuel Adams summoned Francis Rotch before a town committee to ask why he had not honored his pledge to return the tea to England. Rotch claimed that it was impossible to get a pass. Samuel Adams advised him to try anyway. “The ship must go,” said Adams. “The people of Boston and the neighboring towns absolutely require and expect it.” Adams himself and the two doctors, Warren and Church, would be among a committee of ten who would accompany Rotch to the Custom House. They would be on hand merely to witness his request, Adams said.
Making his plea to the customs collector four days later, Francis Rotch saw the presence of the patriots differently. They were compelling him, he told Joseph Harrison, to demand a clearance for the Dartmouth with the tea still on board. The collector was unmoved. Rotch could have the pass only after his tea was unloaded. That was December 15. Rotch had two days before His Majesty’s warships, the Active and the King Fisher, would resolve his dilemma for him.
—
The patriots didn’t need handbills to draw a crowd on the morning of Thursday, December 16. Boston’s male population, along with two thousand onlookers from neighboring towns, were either jammed into the Old South or ignoring a cold rain and standing in the street, straining to hear at the windows. The patriots had learned that the fourth ship, the William, had been destroyed when it ran aground on Cape Cod, but that its cargo had been saved. The Beaver had been fumigated and had entered the port. There were now three tea ships at Griffin’s Wharf.
Rotch was told he must make one last appeal. He must go to the governor and ask Hutchinson for a pass out of Boston Harbor. Hutchinson was seven miles away at his country house in Milton. To allow Rotch ample time for the trip, the meeting adjourned until 3 P.M.
Hutchinson was braced for a showdown. He had written to Lord Dartmouth a day or two earlier that this was surely the time to put down Boston’s anarchy. The governor had researched legal precedents and found that provincial law prevented him from issuing a pass to a ship that had not been cleared by customs. Hutchinson believed that he had always upheld the law, even against the mob. Now he had the security not only of the law, but also of harbor guns from the king’s Navy. The only compromise he offered Rotch was that Admiral Montagu could tow the Dartmouth to Castle William. There, like the stamped paper of eight years ago, the tea could be stored until a more tranquil time.
Rotch protested that the mob would then turn its rage on him. He refused.
At that, Hutchinson made his denial official. To issue a pass would be to abet a violation of the Acts of Trade. Francis Rotch was left to ride back to Boston and report his failure to the Meeting.
The town had met again at three. When Rotch didn’t appear, the leaders used the free time to invite speakers from neighboring towns to report on the way their communities were giving up tea altogether. That testimony provoked a resolution that any drinking of tea was pernicious, and towns were advised to appoint committees of inspectors to prevent its use.
After two hours of speeches, the crowd was restless and calling to dissolve the meeting. But in the Long Room over the Edes and Gill printing office, Samuel Adams had plotted his response to the governor’s certain refusal. He had consulted with Hancock, Molineux, Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Benjamin Church and a few dozen other patriots. The Meeting was persuaded to agree to an hour’s extension.
The Old South was lighted with candles when Francis Rotch returned to Boston shortly before the new deadline. He told his audience that the governor had denied his pass. A cry went up, “A mob! A mob!” But the louder cries for order prevailed. Two more questions were put to Rotch: Would he order his ship back to England with its cargo of tea? No, said Rotch, that would ruin him. Would he unload the tea? Yes, but only if the authorities insisted upon it and if he had no other way to protect himself.
Samuel Adams rose from his chair and said, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.”
That was the signal. First came a war whoop from the gallery. Then suddenly forty or fifty men who had been lurking at the church door burst inside. They were dressed as Indians and were sounding their own war call. The Old South exploded. Three blocks away, families could hear the shouts—“The Mohawks are come!” “Hurrah for Griffin’s Wharf!” And, from those men who knew the plan, “Boston harbor a teapot tonight!”
The meeting broke up with Hancock calling above the tumult, “Let every man do what is right in his own eyes.”
James Brewer, who made shipping gear, had volunteered his house near the wharf as a gathering place. As his friends arrived, his wife blackened their faces with burnt cork and sent them along to the pier. Paul Revere’s Masonic Lodge usually met at the Green Dragon tavern, but the evening meeting had been canceled for lack of members, and Revere himself was headed for the harbor. The rebels disguised as Mohawks at the Old South had spent all afternoon in Benjamin Edes’ parlor, painting their faces and guarding the door. Even Edes’ son, Peter, was confined to another room, where he made quantities of rum punch for them. As they waited for night, the Mohawks consumed several bowls.
George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes, a shoemaker in his early thirties, went to a blacksmith’s shop on Boylston’s Wharf to daub grime on his face. Hewes was among the tradesmen John Hancock invited each year for a glass of Madeira on New Year’s Day. Standing with James Caldwell near the Custom House the night of the Massacre, Hewes had caught Caldwell in his arms when he was felled. From the day Hewes first turned up at the Liberty Tree as a young shoemaker, people had made the same joke: Ah, they said, here is a man staking his awl for the good cause. Tonight Hewes was ready to do it again.
When he had darkened his face, Hewes went to a friend’s house and borrowed a blanket. This was not the first night that colonists had smeared their faces. Nine years earlier, a crew rescuing a ship impounded in Rhode Island had taken that precaution. But this time the patriot leaders hoped to pass themselves off as Mohawks from Narragansett. They wrapped themselves in blankets, swathed their heads and carried a hatchet or an ax along with their pistols. They spoke in low grunts they thought approximated an Indian dialect. Only some of the group appeared in full disguise. Others did the best they could and, as the crowd grew, still more flocked to the pier with no disguise at all.
Walking together from a house on the wharf, two patriots passed a British officer who thought they were Indians and reached for his sword. One of the Mohawks drew a pistol, pointed it at the officer’s chest and said, “The path is wide enough for us all.”
After a steady drizzle throughout the day, the night had turned clear, and the moon shone brightly over the wharf. Leaders divided the volunteers into three ranks, each with about fifty men and a commander and a boatswain. George Hewes was so short that he had nailed another heel on his boot to persuade the army to accept him during the French and Indian War, and he was so frail that he had almost died from his smallpox inoculation. But, for this night’s proceedings, he had one indispensable talent: he was renowned for the power of his whistle. Since talking was discouraged, Hewes was named boatswain to whistle orders for Captain Lendall Pitts. His cadre was made up of apprentices, carpenters, blacksmiths and bricklayers, all dressed in their oldest clothes and some sporting red woolen caps.
Low tide was just ending and the water had started to rise when the boa
rding parties jumped on the decks of the Dartmouth and the Eleanor. The Beaver was at anchor off the wharf, and it was hauled alongside on a rope by the third group. On all three boats, the work went forward in the way that Captain Pitts was directing his group.
After Pitts led his men aboard, he sent an aide with a polite message to the cabin of the first mate. Pitts asked for a few lights and the keys to the hold so that his men would damage the ship as little as possible. The patriots were pleased and relieved to hear that the mate was reacting like a gentleman. He surrendered the keys at once and sent his cabin boy for a bunch of candles. From the wharf, sailors were helping the Mohawks attach block and tackle to the chests of tea and hoist them from the hold. The silence was so total that the first blows of the hatchets on the chests could be heard far into Boston.
Some of the younger men wanted to follow the example of the Gaspee and set the ships on fire. They were dissuaded because a fire could spread to the town. Only the tea was to be destroyed. The Mohawks were in a jubilant spirit as they broke open each chest, shoveled the tea over the ship’s rail into the water and threw the chest after it. One young man murmured, “What a cup of tea we’re making for the fishes.”
At anchor a few hundred yards away, the British naval squadron watched the steady and methodical destruction. Lamps and torches added to the moonlight and made Griffin’s Wharf as bright as it had been at noon. On Atkinson Street at the foot of the wharf, the British commander, Admiral Montagu, surveyed the scene from a Tory’s house. The Mohawks didn’t know that the admiral had no orders to stop them. Reviewing his options, Montagu decided that opening fire would kill a number of bystanders. In fact, the crowd on the wharf had become so dense that onlookers were getting underfoot whenever the Mohawk leaders tried to pass between the ships. But the patriots thought retaliation could come at any moment, and the men were axing and shoveling furiously. Tea was piling so high on top of the water that some of it was falling back onto the deck and had to be shoveled out all over again. The younger men were thinking that they had never worked harder in their lives.
As George Hewes shoveled, he noticed the odd behavior of a man named Charles O’Conner. O’Conner had made an incision in his coat’s lining and was filling it with tea. When O’Conner saw Hewes reporting him to Captain Pitts, he made a run for the wharf. The other men sent up the cry “East Indian!” and Hewes grabbed him by the skirts of his coat and pulled him back on deck.
As they scuffled, O’Conner cursed him and said he would complain to the governor.
Hewes showed him a fist. “You had better make your will first!”
A band of men stripped O’Conner of his coat and kicked at him as he fled for the wharf.
By nine o’clock, the last of three hundred and forty-two chests of tea had been emptied into the harbor. The work had taken less than three hours. Hewes’s scuffle with O’Conner had alerted the Mohawk leaders, who didn’t want anyone to profit from the raid or be identified by telltale signs of tea. They directed each man to take off his shoes and shake them out over the railing. Then they ordered that the decks be swept clean of wood scraps and other debris and called up the first mate of each ship to testify that nothing but the chests had been damaged. As the Mohawks swarmed ashore, Captain Pitts was appointed their commander in chief. He formed them into ranks and marched them into town with their axes and tomahawks on their shoulders. A fifer played at their side. Everyone felt exhilarated, exhausted and content.
As they passed the house on Atkinson Street, Admiral Montagu threw open the window and hailed them. “Well, boys, you have had a fine, pleasant evening for your Indian caper, haven’t you? But mind, you have got to pay the fiddler yet!”
Lendall Pitts shouted back, “Oh, never mind! Never mind, Squire! Just come out here, if you please, and we’ll settle the bill in two minutes.”
The men roared. The fifer piped a derisive tootle. Montagu slammed the window shut.
With the return home came an inevitable letdown. George Hewes burst in upon his wife, Sally, and regaled her with the whole adventure. “Well, George,” she said when he had finished, “did you bring me home a lot of it?” Hewes was reminded again that his wife was more a tea-drinker than she was a Whig.
A young Boston woman named Betsy Palmer had just become a mother, and she was rocking her baby when she heard her gate open. She thought it was her husband returning from his club, and she opened the door to the parlor. There stood three Indians.
Mrs. Palmer screamed and started to faint until one of the Indians stepped forward and said in her husband’s voice, “Don’t be frightened, Betsy, it is I. We have only been making a little saltwater tea.”
—
After the tea was dumped, Henry Purkitt and Edward Dolbin, two eighteen-year-old apprentices, had hurried back to Essex Street and their cots at the house of Samuel Peck, a barrelmaker. At 1 A.M. they heard Peck stealing in. The next morning they saw smudges of red paint behind his ears and were sure he had been one of their chieftains.
Samuel Sprague had smeared his face with soot from a chimney and boarded a ship, where he had recognized his master, a stonemason. At the shop the next day, neither man said anything about what they had done. The young Mohawks apprenticed to Tories had to be even more guarded. Robert Sessions, who worked for a lumber merchant, had been spotted at the scene, and the next day he slipped out of town. Ebenezer Mackintosh had come into Boston for the excitement, but he still knew too much, and patriot leaders persuaded him to travel north. In time, he became a shoemaker for a village in the Green Mountains.
Since the Mohawk chieftains had communicated only with grunts and gestures, there was intense speculation about who they had been. When George Hewes saw a flash of ruffles beneath one of the cloaks, he was convinced that the man was John Hancock. Hewes was also sure that Samuel Adams was on the scene. But in both cases he was mistaken. Hancock may have owned an undisclosed part interest in one of the ships, and Samuel Adams tended to think that his most valuable service was not on the front lines.
The next day, Boston’s harbor looked less like a teapot and more like a vast dank beach. Shaped into dunes, the tea lay upon the water and clogged the sea lanes. Sailors had to row out to churn the sodden heaps and push them farther out to sea. As far away as Dorchester, tea was found spread like hay in long lines where the wind had carried it. But while the town was clearing away the traces, the patriots were eager to share news of their escapade with the other colonies. After only a few hours’ sleep, Paul Revere volunteered to saddle his mare and carry a letter first to New York, then to Philadelphia. He set out on Friday morning, reached New York the next Tuesday evening and then sat up all night talking with his hosts. The message Revere carried was decidedly rosy. “We are in perfect jubilee,” it began. “Not a Tory in the whole community can find the least fault with the proceedings.” Revere took a ferry to New Jersey at dawn and rode to Trenton for another boat across the Delaware River to Pennsylvania. He had averaged sixty-three miles a day by the time he returned home with heartening news. The Sons of Liberty in both cities vowed to stand with Boston, whatever the consequences. Revere also reported that New York’s merchants had been afraid that the tea headed to them would also be destroyed and had made a pact with the local Sons of Liberty to send it back to England. At that news, bells rang out all over Boston.
The account that Paul Revere carried south had been correct. Boston’s Tories did admit that the whole affair had been conducted as correctly as a crime could be. Anonymous Mohawks even sent a lock the next day to one of the ship captains as a replacement for one they had broken. It was also true that the more moderate Whigs seemed to endorse the dumping. John Adams, who had denounced the Boston mob so eloquently, wrote in his diary, “There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last effort of the patriots that I greatly admire.”
At the Green Dragon the Masons sang,
“Rally, Mohawks! Bring out your axes
And tell King George, we’ll pay n
o taxes.”
But throughout the other colonies, the Tories and the undecided colonists were astonished and outraged. Trying to mollify them, the patriots were describing the event as a party, even though at least ten thousand pounds sterling in private property had been destroyed. First had come the harrowing phrase “the Boston Massacre.” Now there was the cozy “Boston Tea Party.” Whatever the label, Thomas Hutchinson saw it as one more riot. He had been sure that Hancock and the other merchants would never put themselves in the position of having to pay for the tea. Because that was what they surely must do.
In London, news of the destruction was received incredulously. Lord Dartmouth hadn’t even been informed that the East India Company had shipped the tea. Now its dumping appalled even America’s oldest friends. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, was certain the destruction had been criminal. He saw it as “no real kindness to the Americans to adopt their passions and wild pretensions.” Benjamin Franklin termed it an act of violent injustice and recommended that the town of Boston immediately reimburse the shipowners.
By the time Franklin’s advice reached Samuel Adams, South Carolina was reporting that its tea agents had resigned and the tea was rotting in cellars. From Philadelphia, Adams heard that a throng of five thousand people had persuaded the town’s agents to resign. Events had moved more quickly than Franklin could have foreseen, and when his call for restitution reached Boston, Samuel Adams was curt.
“Franklin may be a good philosopher,” Adams said, “but he is a bungling politician.”
—
In London that winter, Benjamin Franklin was being assailed in ways that tested his philosophy. Attempting to act as a mediator, he was antagonizing both London and America. When he had agreed to serve as agent for the Massachusetts House as well as for Pennsylvania, his assistant, Arthur Lee, had assured Samuel Adams that Franklin was a mere hireling of the British Ministry. On the other side, Lord Hillsborough had become convinced that Franklin was abetting the colonies in their treason and refused to see him. When Dartmouth became minister, Thomas Hutchinson tried to turn him against Franklin as well.
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