The Night of the Mohawks
The East India Company ∙The Tea Act of 1773 ∙ American Indignation ∙ Coffee: The American Stimulant∙ New York and Pennsylvania Take the Lead∙ Boston Plays Catch-Up∙ An Implacable Game of Tug-of-War ∙ Guerrilla Theater ∙ An Epocha in History
The British East India Company
Samuel Adams' fear over rebellious fervor 'sputtering out' after the Boston Massacre was off-set by the proposed violation of English rights to trial by a jury of one’s peers after the burning of the H.M.S. Gaspee and was further allayed by the discovery and publication of the Hutchinson letters. Nevertheless, these incidents could’ve gone the way of the Boston Massacre, passing into fond memory of more riotous times, if Parliament continued its policy of allowing the colonies to ‘drift’ into apathy. Adams received a greater boost towards the end of 1773 when Parliament blundered yet again. The actions taken in the publication of the Tea Act unified the American colonies like never before and even swooned moderates to the patriot cause. The Tea Act revolved around a simple goal: bailing out the financially-distressed East India Company.
The East India Company (their coat-of-arms pictured here) was chartered by Parliament for the explicit aim of subjugating and exploiting the affluent and antique states of the Indian subcontinent, and it won a monopoly on tea and other Indian products by doing precisely what they set out to do: by bribes, forced diplomacy, and sword and musket, they brought the Indian states to heel. To paint this expedition in modern terms, historian Page Smith gives us a telling analogy: ‘It was rather as though Congress had given General Motors a charter empowering it to take over the continent of Africa by whatever means it found necessary, and to run it quite without supervision or restraint for the benefit of G.M.’s stockholders.’ The East India Company turned the flourishing Indian states into a British trading hub, and they accomplished this feat by barbaric means. The 19th century British historian William Lecky describes the underhanded machinations of the Company’s agents: ‘They defied, displaced, or intimidated all native functionaries who attempted to resist them. They refused to permit any other traders to sell the goods in which they dealt. They even descended upon villages, and forced the inhabitants, by flogging or confinement, to purchase their goods at exorbitant prices, or to sell what they desired to purchase, at prices far below the market value… Monopolizing the trade in some of the first necessaries of life, to the utter ruin of thousands of native traders, and selling those necessaries at famine prices to a half-starving population, they reduced those who came under their influence to a wretchedness they had never known before.’ In spite of their victory on the Indian subcontinent, the Company mired in dire straits: a Parliamentarian committee investigating the Company’s records from 1757 to 1766 discovered that the Company had drained Bengal’s treasury, by means of forced grants and bribes, of more than 5,900,000 pounds. These astronomical figures didn’t include the money used to build up the private fortunes of the Company’s functionaries (Lord Clive, whose ‘rapine’ in India was decried by George III, had returned from the subcontinent with a massive fortune and a colossal collection of jewels that he’d all but stolen from native princes); nor did these numbers include the Company’s crushing revenues (which it used to feed and pay its private army comprised mostly of native ‘turncoat’ troops) or the yearly dividends distributed to ten percent of its stockholders. If the Company had been led by capable men, it could have flourished; but because its leaders were more interested in lining their nest-eggs than in running a thriving company, by 1773 the East India Company doddered on the edge of bankruptcy. Its stock had dropped from 280 to 160 pounds a share and continued to nose-dive.
The British government stepped in to prop up the Company. The ‘official’ reason for lending a helping hand was ostensibly from a seat of goodwill, being that the Company was chartered by Parliament; but a more practical reason was that both Lord North and the Earl of Sandwich – among other high-rolling Parliamentarians – had stock in the company and were reasonably troubled about the bottom dropping out. If the Company sank, their investments would blow apart and their purses would be irretrievably damaged. To avert such a calamity, Lord North came up with an idea: assist the Company in the sales of one of the commodities it had stockpiled. Seventeen million pounds of Indian tea lay in British warehouses, and no one seemed keen to buy it. This absurd surplus had come about because the Company, due to mercantilist laws, was forced to charge high prices for its tea in the colonies; the remaining Townsend duty on tea and the last two boycotts of British goods – tea among them – had only exacerbated the costs. Though the colonists were back to drinking tea, the damage had been done. North hoped that by remitting the duty on tea, and then shipping the surplus tea to the colonies for sale with only Townsend’s three-pence duty to be paid, the colonists would, out of self-interest, purchase the tea. Americans drank a lot of tea – on average about six million pounds each year – and because the changes would make British tea cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea, the idea was that penny-hoarding colonists would begin drinking British tea in droves. This would bleed the Company’s surplus and help the Company recoup some of its losses, putting it on sturdier footing. North further decided that when the Company’s tea arrived in the colonies, it would be passed over to official consignees for market. These consignees would be crown-friendly merchants; their commissions would enrich them as a reward for their ‘good behavior’ in not following the fancies of the patriot crowds. This meant, of course, that patriot merchants would be alienated, but North didn’t seem to think this a great a risk.
Benjamin Franklin, following the debates over the proposed Tea Act in the House of Commons months before his humiliation in the Privy Council, could see where this was headed. He wrote patriot leader Thomas Cushing in Boston, saying, ‘It was thought at the beginning of the session that the American duty on tea would be taken off. But now the wise scheme is to take off so much duty here as will make tea cheaper in America than foreigners can supply us, and to confine the duty [in America] to keep up the exercise of the right [to tax].’ He wrote that the ministry had no idea that the colonists could act ‘from any other principle but that of interest’ and believed that the reduced price for tea would be ‘sufficient to overcome all the patriotism in Americans.’ Franklin knew that the Tea Act wouldn’t be swallowed easy across the Atlantic. He couldn’t have been more right: indeed, many historians believe that had the Tea Act never been passed, revolutionary fervor would’ve eventually sputtered out. As it were, Parliament seemed blissfully unaware of the minefield into which they plunged when they passed the Tea Act on 10 May 1773.
The Tea Act
Most colonists had resumed drinking British tea with little fanfare after the repeal of most of the Townsend duties[1]. While many preferred smuggled Dutch tea, as it was cheaper, most Americans didn’t cry out against British tea – but the Tea Act threw a wrench in the gears, and patriot propaganda decried British tea as the devil’s drink. Within a year of the Tea Act’s passing in Parliament, patriots from Maine to Georgia opposed British tea and condemned those who drank it as traitors to their country. The Tea Act’s stipulations became common knowledge in September when colonial newspapers had it printed; it wasn’t long before newspapers became sounding boards against the Tea Act and Parliamentary overreach. Colonists saw the legislation as yet another attempt to bring them to heel; they believed that if they were to submit to the Act by purchasing British tea to prop up the East India Company, they’d be conceding Parliament’s right to tax. Drinking British tea, then, would be, in effect, to participate in their own enslavement. Newspapers, printing presses, and pulpits trumpeted this warning throughout the colonies, and patriots north and south rallied for a colonies-wide resistance to the Tea Act and a rebirth of nonimportation. The fact that Lord North hadn’t foreseen this just goes to show the depths to which Parliament was out-of-touch with the colonies. As Smith notes, ‘Each action on the part of the British ministry seemed to the colonists to give further substance to their charge that the British government did not understand the nature of their protests and, most important and most wounding of all, did not take them seriously. The colonists’ suspicions were correct: the British ministers could never get it through their heads that the colonists were not simply contentious troublemakers, greedy merchants, cloddish farmers, presumptuous bumpkins, and insolent planters who prated about liberty but were interested primarily in feathering their own nests.’ Trading vessels were loaded with tea and dispatched across the Atlantic, bound for the four principal American ports: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.
Propagandists spun tea from a favorite pastime to a symbol of parliamentary arrogance and an outdated emblem of a loathed aristocracy. Tea became the defining hallmark of a ‘decadent European culture,’ a staple of the English elite. Patriot leaders denounced tea as being a breeding ground for fleas, revealed that tea was packed into chests by stomping barefoot Chinese, and physicians seemed to have stumbled upon heretofore unknown literature that unveiled the horrifying health consequences of tea consumption: it weakened ‘the tone of the stomach, and therefore of the whole system, inducing tremors and spasmodic affections’ (and if that weren’t enough, it’s psychological effects were damning, rendering their manly drinkers ‘weak, effeminate and valetudinarian for life’). Substitutions for British tea included sassafras and sage, but these just didn’t do the trick. The only other drink that could compare to the caffeine kick of dark tea was coffee, and in the wake of the Tea Act coffee became insanely popular: between 1770 and the 1790s, coffee consumption in America skyrocketed more than sevenfold. In the words of historian Ray Raphael, ‘Americans started brewing beans instead of leaves during the Revolution and never looked back.’ Those who refused to adopt to the changing climate faced persecution: when Isaac Jones of Weston, Massachusetts was caught selling British tea at his tavern, thirty patriots masked in war paint ransacked his watering hole, shattering windows and breaking cutlery, and then demanded he apologize for his treasonous crime.
Colonial newspapers condemned ‘the accursed, dutied STUFF.’ One essayist warned that if you drank British tea, ‘the devil will immediatelyenter into you, and you will instantly become a traitor to your country.’ Forward-thinking patriots even gathered loyalist support for their ‘war on tea’ by turning the microscope from Parliamentary overreach to the evils of the East India Company; regardless of how one felt about Parliament’s rights in the colonies, only the most unthinking and barbaric colonist could support the underhanded and even diabolical measures of the Company: ‘It is shocking to humanity,’ a New Yorker wrote, ‘to relate the relentless barbarity, practiced by the servants of [the East India Company], on the helpless Asiatics; a barbarity scarce equaled even by the most brutal savages, or Cortez, the Mexican conqueror.’ The Company had ‘monopolized the absolute necessaries of life’ in India so that ‘thousands perished by this black, sordid and cruel avarice.’ Propagandists enjoyed extra ammunition when it became clear that North had instructed royal governors to choose tea consignees of loyalist persuasion: if Parliament favored their sycophants over everyone else when it came to the sale of tea, what would stop them from providing such favors to merchants trading wine, spices, and other products that came to the colonies? To stand behind Parliament’s right to tax the colonies was one thing, but it was quite another to be so unfeeling as to betray one’s brethren in supporting such blatant crown favoritism.
Patriot propaganda against the Tea Act swept up and down the Atlantic seaboard; the rhetoric, vitriol, and emotions felt by the people were unparalleled – thus it’s surprising that Boston, the ‘seedbed of revolution,’ was rather late in joining the party. The Tea Act’s unveiling came at the same time as the tumultuous clamor caused by Hutchinson’s stolen letters, and the Massachusetts patriots had their hands full striving against the royal salaries being afforded to the province’s judges. Though they were irked by the Tea Act, they failed to comprehend its wider significance and its reception in the other colonies. By the time Boston got on board – and they did so with relish, becoming once more the focal point of unrest – Pennsylvania and New York had already set the stage for colonial resistance. Philadelphian patriots led by John Dickinson called a mass meeting on 16 October to address the Tea Act, and they passed resolutions declaring that since ‘the duty imposed by Parliament upon tea landed in America is a tax on the Americans, or levying contributions on them without their consent… it is the duty of every American to oppose this attempt.’ Furthermore, any colonists who ‘in any wise aid or abet in unloading or receiving or vending the tea’ were branded ‘enemies to their country.’ A committee was appointed to call upon the tea consignees to resign, and most of the consignees – who were wealthy Quaker merchants – agreed in November to resign their commissions. The merchants no doubt feared persecution if they refused, given the threats of rough treatment coupled with an ominous committee self-styling itself ‘The Committee for Tarring and Feathering.’ This committee existed to ‘discipline’ anyone who ferried tea up the Delaware River into the city. Their first ‘victim’ was the not-yet-arrived Captain Ayres whose vessel, the Polly, was en-route with a cargo of East India tea. A broadside plastered throughout Philadelphia informed Ayres that his ‘diabolical service’ would land him in ‘hot water.’ The broadside asked him if he’d like a halter ‘round his neck’ and ‘ten gallons of liquid tar decanted on your plate – with the feathers of a dozen wild geese laid over that to enliven your appearance?’ The broadside politely suggested that Ayres ‘fly to the place whence you came – fly without hesitation – without the formality of a protest – and above all, let us advise you to fly without the wild geese feathers.’ When Ayres reached the mouth of the Delaware River in late December, he received word of the pamphlet and showed himself a sensible man: he lifted anchor, turned around, and set sail for England with his cargo untouched. When later cargoes arrived, the tea was unloaded but left to rot untouched in warehouses.
In New York the Sons of Liberty called similar meetings, and the city’s tea consignees resigned their commissions in a state of rabid fear: loyalists feared that the patriots would raise ‘a considerable mob against us.’ An embittered and disillusioned Tory spat that merchant patriots were ‘the outcasts of society’ who got their way ‘by putting individuals in fear of their lives.’ The tactic of fear-mongering worked, and fiery handbills pasted around the city flamed these fears by promising swift retribution against anyone who unloaded East India company tea from incoming trade ships. New York’s Governor Tryon – the very same who’d put down the Regulators at Alamance years earlier – insisted that when the tea arrived in December, it would be unloaded and stored at the Battery. His governing council were little more than lapdogs, and he had a man-of-war stationed off Sandy Hook to enforce his will. The tea would be coming in a vessel named the Nancy, and it was due to arrive in December. Both sides – patriots and Tories and Governor Tryon particularly – held their breaths to see how it would play out.
In the port city of Charleston, South Carolina, the tea was actually unloaded. Patriot resistance was offset by bickering among artisans, merchants, and planters; their infighting played into the royal governor’s hand, and their dissent prevented them from taking any concerted action. The infighting primarily focused on the rivalry between merchants who smuggled Dutch tea and merchants who imported British tea: if there was to be an embargo against British tea, illegal smugglers would see increased profits in the sale of foreign tea whereas legal importers would languish without an income. These importers insisted that if an embargo on tea were to happen, it needed to be across the board: they weren’t willing to slip into abject poverty while their law-breaking rivals wined and dined as the Rich and Famous. Though the tea consignees expressed willingness to resign, Charleston failed to hammer out a plan for dealing with the tea when it arrived; thus, when it arrived on 2 December, the royal governor seized the tea twenty days later for nonpayment of duty and stored it in a warehouse. When the War of Independence began against Great Britain, the tea was sold at public auction and all proceeds forwarded to the South Carolina war chest (in a delightful twist of irony, the loathed East India Tea became a financial boom for the South Carolina war effort).
Up and down the Atlantic coast, tea consignees in major ports resigned their commissions, usually out of genuine fear for their lives. One Tory merchant lamented that the consignees were under extreme pressure from ‘the insults of many rascally mobs convened in the dark, high-charged with liquor to do every act of violence their mad brain could event.’ The consignees in Boston, however, would be tougher nuts to crack – and though Boston was late to the game, the implacable tug-of-war between Hutchinson’s loyalists and the Bostonian patriots would build into a crescendo whose climax has echoed down the halls of time.
An Implacable Game of Tug-of-War
Governor Hutchinson treated Boston's tea commissions as party favors to be doled out to his favorites: his sons Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson, the wealthy loyalist merchant Richard Clarke (father-in-law of both Thomas Hutchinson Jr. and the famous Boston painter John Singleton Copley, who had a beautiful house on Beacon Hill), Edward Winslow (of the privileged Winslow family), and Benjamin Faneuil. Such blatant nepotism, though a staple of life in the 18th century, was no less irritating to those on the outside looking in. When the Boston Gazette printed editorials damning the Tea Act and calling its consignees to resign, Richard Clarke attacked his detractors in the Boston Evening Post: writing as ‘Z’ in late October, he mocked the inconsistency in protesting the tax on tea after paying it for two years and while continuing to pay duties on sugar, molasses, and wine.
When the tea consignees proved unwilling to back down in the wake of scorching editorials – for they were used to patriot ire, had the backing of the Massachusetts governor, and were made of hardier stuff than the consignees of other cities (for one had to be of tough stock to be a Tory in Boston) –Samuel Adams galvanized the mob. On 2 November handbills announced a noon meeting the next day at the Liberty Tree, at which the consignees were to appear and give their resignations; when the meeting convened on 3 November, the consignees didn’t appear – though no one expected they would – and the North End Caucus – Sons of Liberty the lot of them – decided to go to them. The four- to five-hundred strong mob, led by William Molineux and Dr. Joseph Warren, marched to the store of Richard Clarke &Sons and found not only Clarke but the other consignees gathered there. They let Molineux and Warren inside to discuss their grievances, and the patriot leaders told them the people were ‘greatly affronted’ that they hadn’t resigned their commissions. Clarke responded that the people outside the storefront didn’t constitute a Committee of the People since there were ‘townspeople present in this room who know nothing of any such committee.’ Molineux unfurled a letter asking the consignees to return the tea to England when it arrived; an exasperated Clarke exclaimed, ‘I shall have nothing to do with you!’ The other merchants echoed him. Molineux declared the merchants, each and every one, to be enemies of their country and subject to the peoples’ displeasure. Molineux and Warren bid them farewell and returned to the street. The consignees crowded the store windows and watched as the patriot leaders addressed the mob; the mob, upon hearing that the consignees had refused to acquiesce to their demands, began chanting, ‘Out with them! Out with them!’ The patriot leaders managed to settle the rabble – the last thing they wanted was wanton violence – and the crowd began to head back towards the Liberty Tree. The consignees breathed a sigh of relief, but it stuck in their throats: some boys and young menat the tail-end of the crowdsplintered from the group and zeroed back in on the store. The merchants steeled themselves as the ruffians threw themselves against the storefront, forcing open the door and removing it from its hinges. The merchants tried fending them off with sticks and clubs and managed at the very last moment to escape out the back door. Molineux and Warren hoofed it back to the store to get the rowdy patriots under control before they destroyed the place.
The next day a town hall meeting adopted the resolutions passed by Philadelphia weeks earlier. The town hall declared that the three-pence per pound tea duty was an unconstitutional tax and that ‘a virtuous and steady opposition to the ministerial plan of governing America is absolutely necessary to preserve even the shadow of liberty and is a duty to which every freeman in America owes to his country, to himself and to his posterity.’ They then called again for the consignees to resign their commissions, but, of course, the consignees ignored them. Nearly a week later, on 11 November, the Evening Post ran an editorial opposing the landing of tea on the Boston wharfs: ‘The duty is absolutely to be paid in America for the purpose of raising a revenue to support improper officers in America… Are the Americans such blockheads as to care whether it be a red hot poker or a hot red poker which they are to swallow, provided Lord North forces them to swallow one of the two… Surely, the people will unanimously agree to send the Tea to the place from whence it came or to a worse place.’ Four days latera mob assaulted Clarke’s house. Clarke and the other consignees sought sanctuary at Castle William in the harbor and awaited instructions from the East India Company. The leading patriots, the Boston committee, and the committees of nearby towns resolved that the tea shouldn’t be unloaded; Hutchinson, leading loyalists, and the consignees vowed they would do their due diligence in obeying the crown. An immovable tug-of-war ensued.
On 28 November Captain Hall of the Dartmouth sailed into Boston harbor. His was the first of four tea ships destined for the port town. As the Dartmouth came into harbor, Hutchinson ordered Admiral Montagu to block the harbor exit to prevent the Dartmouth from returning to England. The warship’s port guns were to fire if the ship attempted to leave before unloading its cargo. When the Dartmouth docked at Griffin’s Wharf, near the foot of Pearl Street, an armed guard of patriots rushed to the dock to put the ship under siege and to prevent the unloading of the tea; a night-watch of twenty-five men were assigned guard duty so long as the Dartmouth lay in port. The lack of redcoats in the city meant that Hutchinson could not prevail upon the threat of force to whisk the guard away; the Dartmouth was, in essence, cut-off from royal help. After entering the customs house, the ship’s owner, Francis Rotch, had twenty days to pay the duties on its cargo; if he failed to pay, the cargo could be seized and stored. Rotch wanted the ship unloaded, for he had a cargo of whale oil to load and dispatch. The consignees in Castle William wanted the tea to land so that it could be stored until they received instructions from the Company; if the tea were returned to England untouched, as the patriots wanted, then the consignees would be held liable for the loss. Governor Hutchinson, too, demanded that the tea be brought ashore – but with the armed guard posted at Griffin’s Wharf, he could do nothing but wring his hands (he didn’t dare call out the redcoats of the 64th Regiment garrisoning Castle William). Nevertheless, he would abide by the law: if the three-pence duty wasn’t paid within twenty days, he would have the tea seized. The countdown was on: if the duty wasn’t paid by midnight on the 16th of December, then the 17th might prove a bloody day indeed.
The same day the Dartmouth docked, a broadside rippled through Boston and the nearby hinterland: ‘Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! The worst of plagues, the detested TEA… is now arrived in this harbour. The hour of destruction, or manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself and posterity is now called upon to meet at Faneuil Hall at nine o’clock THIS DAY… to make a united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration.’ The broadside worked, and upwards of five thousand people gathered at Faneuil Hall; because the Hall couldn’t hold all of them, the meeting moved to the Old South Church. The church was packed shoulder-to-shoulder as the Boston committee met with the four committees of Cambridge, Brookline, Roxbury, and Dorchester. They resolved that the tea should ‘never be landed in this province, or one farthing of duty’ be paid. The consignees were once more called to resign. A visitor from Philadelphia, listening to the back-and-forth speeches in the cramped church, recalled that some speeches ‘tended in a very different direction from that of others; for while some advised to moderation, and by all means to be abstaining from violence, a few talked in a style that was very virulent and inflammatory.’ The committees drafted a letter to be dispatched to other Massachusetts towns: ‘Brethren, we are reduced to this dilemma: either to sit down quiet under this and every other burden that our enemies shall see fit to lay upon us, or to rise up and resist this and every plan laid for our destruction, as becomes wise free men. In this extremity we earnestly request your advice.’ The response to the letter was overwhelming; as the late historian John Fiske writes, ‘From Petersham and Lenox perched on their lofty hilltops, from the valleys of the Connecticut and the Merrimack, from Chatham on the bleak peninsula of Cape Cod, there came but one message – to give up life and all that makes life dear, rather than submit like slaves to this great wrong.’ When news of Massachusetts’ resolve reached Philadelphia, church bells tolled and people rejoiced in the streets. The Philadelphians sent a letter to Boston, encouraging them to stand fast: ‘Our only fear is that you may shrink. May God give you virtue enough to save the liberties of your country.’
Another meeting at the Old South Church was convened the next day; it, too, numbered around five thousand people, and the committee of Charles Town joined in the deliberations. The Sheriff of Suffolk County read a proclamation from Hutchinson ordering the unlawful gathering to disperse, but he was catcalled and booed and sent scurrying on his way. A vote went forward on whether to abide by Hutchinson’s orders, and it was unanimously decided to keep forging on. The Dartmouth’s owner, Francis Rotch, and its pilot, Captain Hall, appeared before the committees; they agreed that they would send the tea back to England, and the owners of the other trading ships en route with tea agreed that they, too, wouldn’t unload their cargoes or pay the Townsend duty. The attention again turned to the consignees, ordering them to resign; again they refused, though they knew they had no way to unload the tea, as they were cooped up in Castle William whilst the Dartmouth was besieged by an armed patriot guard.
Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, wrote to Mercy Otis Warren, ‘The tea, that baneful weed, is arrived. Great and I hope effectual opposition has been made to the landing of it… The proceedings of our citizens have been united, spirited and firm. The flame is kindled and like lightning it catches from soul to soul. Great will be the devastation if not timely quenched or allayed by some more lenient measures.’ But lenient measures would not be forthcoming: Governor Hutchinson wrote to Lord Dartmouth, ‘The people of Boston and all the neighboring towns are raised to the highest degree of enthusiasm in opposition to the duty on tea. If our advices are to be depended upon, the spirit is not much lower in several other colonies… At and near Boston the people seem regardless of all consequences… To enforce the Act appears beyond all comparison more difficult than I ever imagined.’ While other colonial governors had bowed to colonial pressure, Hutchinson felt no compulsion to do so: he was already hated by nearly everyone under his jurisdiction (most Tories had fled Boston due to years of unrest), and Hutchinson aimed to be a beacon of light in the colonies – while the other governors may have caved in to anti-crown sentiment, Hutchinson would stand his ground. In doing so he would show king and Parliament that he was the right man for the job, the last crown-appointed authority who wouldn’t bend so easily to popular will. He thus set himself up on an inevitable crash course with the patriots: just as he refused to back down, they knew they couldn’t afford to give an inch. Philadelphia and New York had managed to expel the dreaded tea; how embarrassing would it be if Boston wasn’t able to keep up? Boston had no choice but to go on the offensive against the tea, and Hutchinson knew he couldn’t stop them: they had control of Griffin’s wharf and had posted guards on the ships; if he called on the redcoats at Castle William to disperse them, a bad situation would be made infinitely worse. Perhaps Hutchinson counted on the patriots doing something unbelievably rash so that Parliament would finally find reason to finally take punitive measures – an ‘abridgement of liberty’ – against the cantankerous sore that Boston had become.
Rotch ordered Captain Hall to return to England with the tea, but it soon became apparent that Admiral Montagu’s warships were blocking the exit. As word of Rotch’s predicament spread through the town, another meeting was called: on 13 December, three days until the tea could lawfully be seized for nonpayment of duties, the Boston committee met again with the committees of nearby towns to debate the right course of action. One patriot shouted, to cheers and hurrahs, ‘I wonder how well tea mixes with saltwater!’ Rotch did what he could to open the sea-lane out of the harbor: he made rounds at customs to no avail, and Richard Harrison – the son of Joseph Harrison, who’d been attacked during the Liberty riot in 1768 – refused clearance. Rotch turned to Governor Hutchinson, begging him to relent and issue him a pass for sailing by Castle William. Hutchinson refused. On the evening of 16 December, Rotch appeared at the Old South Church around six in the evening. Upwards of seven thousand people had gathered in the church, filling the pews and the balconies and flooding out onto the street. Rotch lamented that he’d gotten nowhere with the customs officials or the governor. Samuel Adams, standing behind the pulpit, gave a beleaguered sigh and announced, ‘There is nothing more we can do to save our country.’
At that pronouncement, war whoops went up outside the church.
Peoples’ eyes darted to the windows, and many were shocked to see native Americans in war paint dashing past the windows and down Milk Street to Griffin’s Wharf. They gave hoots and hollers, and cries rose from the throng:
‘Boston harbor a teapot tonight!’
‘Hurrah for Griffin’s Wharf!’
‘The Mohawks are coming!’
The 'Mohawks,' of course, weren't native Americans at all but young patriot firebrands. A Boston blacksmith remembered that these young men painted black with coal dust, dressed in heavy blankets, and carrying hatchets – which they called ‘tomahawks’ – were ‘apprentices and journeymen… living with Tory masters.’ The ‘Mohawks’ numbered around one hundred fifty men, and as they marched towards Griffin’s Wharf, the crowd from the Old South Church fell in behind them. By this time the Dartmouth wasn’t alone: anchored alongside her were the Eleanor and Beaver, both of which also carried tea (the fourth tea ship, the William, had gone aground off Cape Cod; patriots ‘salvaged’ its tea and sold it at high profit). Upon reaching Griffin’s Wharf, the ‘Mohawks’ broke into three companies of about fifty men each, one company for each vessel. They loaded into longboats and rowed out to the anchored ships. George Hewes, who’d become an up-and-coming patriot after participating in multiple riots and having been on the ‘front lines’ of the Boston Massacre, was appointed a boatswain; he recounted how upon rowing up to their target, he demanded the keys to the hatches and a dozen candles from the vessel’s captain. The captain obliged. Hewes tells us, ‘We were then ordered to open the hatches and take out all the chests of tea and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute orders, first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water.’ In a period of three hours, 342 casks of tea were destroyed; this equaled about 35,000 pounds of tea valued around 18,000 English pounds. The water around the ships became coated in a sheen of tea leaves; by morning the harbor’s current would carry the tea as far as Dorchester Neck where it lie upon the shore in eloquent rows. The ‘Mohawks’ swept the decks clean – no easy task, since the tea leaves floating atop the water had risen so high that the harbor’s waves kept pushing them back on-deck – and the party leaders asked the mates of each ship to confirm that nothing other than tea chests had been smashed. This was the case except for a padlock that was accidentally damaged on one ship; a replacement was promised and later secured. As the ‘Mohawks’ began boarding their longboats to return ashore, one man was seen stuffing tea leaves into his coat lining; his companions chased him off the ship, and to make sure no one else could be accused of theft, each and every ‘Mohawk’ shook out their shoes before climbing back onto the wharf.
This wasn’t a riot: it was a calculated measure taken with dignity and respect.
Hewes remembered, ‘There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequences for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.’ As the ‘Mohawks’ marched from the docks in Indian file to the tune of a fife, Admiral Montagu – who’d been dining with a loyalist friend – threw open the upper-story window of his friend’s house and called out to them, ‘Well, boys, you’ve had a fine, pleasant evening for your Indian caper, haven’t you? But mind, you have got to pay the fiddler yet.’
‘Never mind, Squire!’ one of them yelled back, ‘just come down here, if you please, and we’ll settle the bill in two minutes!’
Guerilla Theater
'The Boston Tea Party was what we today would call guerrilla theater,' writes the historian Page Smith, ‘a striking and dramatic enactment of an ideological position, an episode, as John Adams at once discerned, that would capture the popular imagination as few acts in history have. Measured against the dangerous and sporadic violence occasioned by the Stamp Act, or against the uncontrolled violence of the rioters on the night of the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party showed more clearly than volumes of exposition how far the patriot cause had come from its tumultuous beginnings some eight years before. By now the patriot leaders had established firm control. There were no rioters among the carefully drilled Mohawks who dumped the tea in Boston Harbor; they were rather a corps of irregulars who might, on the next occasion, carry loaded muskets. But if they did so it would be in response to orders, not to the volatile passions of a mob.’
Though New York hosted its own ‘tea party,’ John Adams knew that royal ire would fall on Boston. He pondered in his diary, ‘What measures will the ministry take in consequences of this? Will they resent it? Will they dare to resent it? Will they punish us? How? By quartering troops upon us? By annulling our charter? By laying on more duties? By restraining our trade? By sacrifice of individuals, or how?’ Nevertheless, Adams believed the tea party was ‘absolutely and indispensably [necessary]… There was no other alternative but to destroy [the tea] or let it be landed. To let it be landed would be giving up the principle of taxation by Parliamentary authority, against which the continent have struggled for ten years, it was losing all our labor for ten years and subjecting ourselves and our posterity forever to Egyptian taskmasters – to burdens, indignities, to ignominy, reproach and contempt, to desolation and oppression, to poverty and solitude.’
The ripple effect of the Boston Tea Party cannot be underestimated. The late historian William Gordon writes, ‘Had the tea been landed, the union of the colonies in opposing the ministerial scheme would have dissolved; and it would have been extremely difficult ever after to have restored it.’ Smith echoes Gordon’s assessment:
If [Governor Hutchinson] had done what the other royal governors did – stood aside and let the ships’ owners, captains, and consignees thrash out the issue of landing and selling the tea with the colonists themselves – it is clear that theDartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver would have been, like Captain Ayres of the Polly, headed back across the ocean for England. Faced with such widespread resistance to importing the tea, North would have had no choice but to capitulate once more. Parliament would hardly have supported the dispatch of regiments of British soldiers to North America to try to force the colonists to drink tea… But the Boston Tea Party was an action that the British government could not leave unpunished, and the actions of Thomas Hutchinson in blockading the port and insisting that the tea be landed, as surely as the actions of any individual have occasioned great historical events, brought on the Tea Party and its manifold consequences.
End Notes
[1] Colonial tea was brewed bold and heavily-caffeinated, serving the same function as coffee does for most Americans today. Colonists favored black Bohea tea over lighter teas such as Souchoung and Hyson; these lighter teas accounted for only ten percent of American imports.
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