The Glorious Cause, page 29
The opposition in Charleston acted largely in ignorance of events in Philadelphia and New York. Boston was located closer to these two cities and initially took its cue from them. But even with the example of Philadelphia before it, Boston was slow to move against tea. The reason is clear—obsessive feuding through most of 1773 with Governor Thomas Hutchinson over his letters to England. Adams and his followers also bore down hard on royal payment of salaries to superior court judges. The Tea Act did not escape all local notice, for the Boston Evening Post summarized it in late August. Still, well into October, Adams single-mindedly pursued Thomas Hutchinson in the newspapers, as though anything that happened within Boston must be more important than anything that took place outside it. Adams was out of touch and so was the committee of correspondence, which in late September cited the denial of the East India Company’s “sacred charter rights” as the most recent example of Parliamentary tyranny.6
Three weeks later Edes and Gill awakened to what was troubling New Yorkers and Philadelphians and began filling the columns of the Gazette with attacks on the Tea Act and the local consignees. Those worthies—Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson, sons of the governor, Richard Clarke, Edward Winslow, and Benjamin Faneuil—did not suffer in silence but hit back through the Boston Evening Post. Richard Clarke writing as “Z” in late October pointed at the inconsistency in protesting the tax on tea after paying it for two years and while still paying duties on sugar, molasses, and wine “from which more than three-fourths of the American revenue has and always will arise.”7
Unsuccessful in cowing the consignees through the press, Adams resolved to do it through the crowd. On November 2 handbills were posted announcing a meeting at noon the next day at Liberty Tree, where the consignees were to appear and deliver their resignations. Convening this meeting was the North End Caucus, Sons of Liberty in another guise, a group which also took a prominent part in the Boston committee of correspondence. The consignees were not members and did not attend the meeting at Liberty Tree. The caucus thereupon decided to visit the consignees and led by William Molineux and accompanied by a mob found them at Clarke’s warehouse, where a small-scale riot, damaging to the building but not to its occupants, ensued.8
Thereafter Adams and company stepped up the pressure, first through the town meeting which on November 5 adopted the resolutions passed in Philadelphia in October and called for the consignees to give up their commissions. The committee of correspondence took care of unofficial action—an attack ten days later on Clarke’s house, for example—but neither body could extract resignations from the consignees. By late November both sides were frozen into their positions: the consignees holding their commissions and awaiting tea and instructions from the East India Company; Adams, the Boston committee, and those of nearby towns determined that the tea should not be unloaded.9
The arrival on November 28 of the Dartmouth, the first of the ships carrying tea, opened the last stage of the crisis. After entering at the customshouse the ship had twenty days to pay the duties on its cargo; should it not pay it was liable to seizure, which meant that its cargo would be seized and stored. Francis Rotch, a young merchant who owned the Dartmouth, wanted her unloaded. There was other cargo besides the tea aboard and, after having it unloaded and ridding his ship of the tea, Rotch had a cargo of whale oil to put aboard. The consignees wanted to land the tea, store it, and await the instructions of the East India Company. Should the tea be returned to England, they must stand the loss, for the law provided that no tea could be re-imported into the country. Governor Thomas Hutchinson also wanted the tea put ashore—if for no other reason than to frustrate his old enemies. Whatever happened, the law must be observed, which meant that since the ship had entered at Customs the duties must be paid. For the time being, all he or anyone else could do was to wait for the twenty days to expire, on December 16.10
Adams and the local committees did not wait idly. A large mass meeting was held at the Old South on November 29 and again the next day. Neither meeting was a legal town meeting; each numbered 5000 people and included many from the surrounding countryside. These gatherings put the radicals’ case simply—the tea must be sent back to England. Resolutions incorporating this demand were sent to the consignees, who in the way of other “enemies of the people” had fled to Castle William in the harbor. Their spines stiffened by the governor, the consignees refused, though they knew they had no chance of unloading their tea, for Adams and friends had forced the Dartmouth to tie up at Griffin’s Wharf and had put a guard aboard.
Temporarily thwarted, the Boston committee of correspondence appealed to New England for support, and echoes of local resolutions began coming in. The committee then met with committees from nearby towns; by this time the deadline for payment of duties was three days hence. When the decision was made to destroy the tea if it were not cleared for return to England is not clear. On December 14 another great mass meeting instructed Rotch to request clearance for the return voyage and sent ten men to accompany him as he made the rounds at customs. The next day the collector, Richard Harrison, son of Joseph and one of the victims of the Liberty riot in 1768, refused clearance, and on the day following, December 16, Governor Hutchinson declined to issue a pass for sailing by the Castle. The ship had not been cleared by Customs, the governor observed in turning Rotch down; but if Rotch wanted naval protection the governor would request it for him from Admiral Montagu. Thinking of his ship and cargo, Rotch decided he did not want protection.
By the time Rotch reported his failure to the meeting in the Old South, it was nearly six in the evening—and nearly dark. There he found a gathering that knew it could wait no longer. After satisfying itself that Rotch would not return the tea and that he might attempt to unload it should the public authorities require him to do so, the meeting heard Sam Adams announce that there was nothing more they could do to save their country. There was, of course, and Adams’s words signaled what should be done. War whoops greeted his announcement as the crowd flooded out of the meetinghouse, pouring along the waterfront and backing up on Griffin’s Wharf where Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver lay, the last two recent arrivals and, like the first, with tea aboard. About fifty men “dressed in the Indian manner,” faces darkened and bodies wrapped in blankets, broke off from the crowd and set to work, brewing tea in Boston harbor. The men performed their mission with dispatch, hoisting the casks of tea on deck, smashing them open, and dumping the tea over the side. The water around the ships was soon covered, and before morning some of the tea had floated as far as Dorchester Neck. The ships themselves were not damaged. A newspaper reported a week later that a padlock belonging to a captain was broken, apparently by mistake, for another was soon sent to him. In all 90,000 pounds of East India Company tea, valued at £10,000, was destroyed, a small price, these men would have said, to pay for liberty.11
Who did the actual work of jettisoning the tea cannot be known. The crowd may have included a fairly broad spectrum of Boston’s population and probably farmers from nearby villages. For the resistance to the Tea Act drew on the “people” in a way nonimportation had not. Merchants had contributed much of the leadership in nonimportation even though lawyers and other professionals had forced the pace. Destruction of property left men from all these groups uneasy, but they had seen the matter through. They were called the “rabble” by Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the American Colonies, who, far removed in England, could not imagine the mood—a fear of tyranny—that compelled otherwise sober citizens into an act of rebellion.12
II
An official report of the Tea Party from Thomas Hutchinson reached England on January 27, 1774. By that day the news was at least a week old, for a ship carrying the story had arrived on the 19th; and on January 25 the Polly with the tea intended for Philadelphia sailed into Gravesend. Soon a number of witnesses arrived to be interrogated by the government, Francis Rotch, owner of the Dartmouth, among them. 13
As further information seeped in about resistance to the Tea Act, the conviction grew that something had to be done about the colonies or they would become totally independent. The common way of putting this theme was to argue that if the supremacy of Crown and Parliament were not asserted it would be lost, as though—to use the language the king’s ministers favored—the father must discipline the rebellious child or abandon him forever. Such pronouncements were made in an atmosphere already darkened by recent events—the publication in Boston of Hutchinson’s letters to Whately, the petition from the Massachusetts House requesting the removal of Hutchinson and Lt. Governor Andrew Oliver, and the autumn disorders throughout America.
The ferocity of feeling toward America was exposed before any proposals for action could be made. The exposure occurred in the cockpit of the Privy Council two days after official news of the Tea party arrived. The occasion was a hearing on the petition from Massachusetts asking that Hutchinson and Oliver be removed from office. As agent for the Massachusetts legislature Benjamin Franklin was ordered to appear. At the hearing he discovered that the ministry had decided to discredit him and relieve itself of accumulated frustration over American defiance of its authority. To do its work the ministry chose Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general, skillful in the use of invective and without scruples in its employment. For over an hour Franklin stood in silence in a room packed with the rulers of Britain while Wedderburn reviled him. The petition was barely mentioned; Franklin’s character, supposedly lost in depravity, was lashed as Wedderburn rehearsed for the committee the story of Franklin’s part in obtaining Thomas Hutchinson’s letters. At the end Franklin, impassive in his old-fashioned full-bottomed wig and his suit of figured Manchester velvet, left the chamber knowing that more than the petition had been lost.14
If self-restraint was lacking in Wedderburn and in the ministers who allowed him to go on unrebuked, so also were the good faith and respect which might have permitted the government to examine American grievances seriously. But the shock and revulsion felt at the destruction of the tea was too great for a detached review of differences over policy and, more importantly, the nature of the constitution itself. Even staunch friends of the colonies refused to defend the Tea Party. There was no way it could be justified, Rockingham insisted; and Chatham said simply that it was “criminal.” After a talk with General Gage, who was in England on leave, the king recommended that force be used to bring the colonies into proper dependence. North caught the mood exactly a few weeks later when he declared that “we are not entering into a dispute between internal and external taxes, not between taxes laid for the purpose of revenues and taxes laid for the regulation of trade, not between representation and taxation, or legislation and taxation; but we are now to dispute whether we have, or have not any authority in that country.”15
This description of American affairs admitted of no compromise. On the day of Franklin’s ordeal in the cockpit, the cabinet decided that action must be taken to reduce the colonies to a state of dependence or, as some imagined, to restore the sway Parliament had once enjoyed in America. The cabinet which backed this policy had not changed much since North had taken over from Grafton. North still led as chancellor of the Exchequer and first lord of the Treasury. He was, however, no stronger within himself than before. A fine helmsman in calm waters, he lacked the grip for heavy weather. Nor did he have the anger or the intensity to force through measures to smash American self-government. But neither did he have the will to stop those who wanted hard reprisals, for North too believed in Parliamentary supremacy, a belief which in this case disarmed him. North’s step-brother, Dartmouth, had become American secretary in 1772. Like North he was a moderate in colonial matters, but he too believed in the supremacy of parliament and felt no disposition to slow its exercise. Three sterner spirits in the cabinet demanded measures which would leave no one in doubt as to where sovereignty lay. They were Suffolk, Secretary of the Northern Department, an old Grenvillite and a man of considerable ability; Gower, president of the Council, and Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, both Bedfordites. Of the two, Sandwich may have had more personal force; he was a conventional politician but a superbly capable minister. Rockford and Baron Apsley did not count for much in the cabinet, but both supported coercive action against the colonies.
With this alignment the decision to take action came easily. Still, a month passed before the ministerial wheels began turning. During this time Dartmouth explored the possibility of limiting the government’s response to punishment of the leaders of the Tea Party. He first obtained a ruling from Attorney General Thurlow and Solicitor General Wedderburn that the Bostonians had committed treason and then awaited evidence that would justify bringing them to trial. After a month of taking depositions from witnesses and deliberating on the question, Thurlow and Wedderburn replied—to the irritation of Dartmouth and the king—that the evidence was not strong enough to warrant prosecution of the ringleaders in Boston.16
While the law officers were considering the case, the cabinet had decided to close the port of Boston and to move the provincial government to a less explosive site. Although the legal experts agreed that the port could be shut up by executive action, the government decided to avoid asserting the prerogative in colonial affairs and to ask Parliament to do the job. Parliament was more than willing: North announced the government’s plans on March 14, and four days later presented the Boston Port bill to Commons. The bill proposed that Boston be closed to all ocean-borne trade except for certain coastal vessels which would be permitted under tight supervision to enter with food and fuel. The port would remain closed until the king decided to reopen it, and he was not authorized to act until the East India Company had been fully compensated by the town for the destruction of the tea.17
The debate on the bill was not the most distinguished ever heard in the Commons. North explained that the purposes of the bill were to punish Boston, get the East India Company’s money back, and secure the port for business undisturbed by riots and mobs. No one seems to have opposed these pieties, though Dowdeswell said that the government was recommending action without hearing Boston’s side. Most members apparently thought that they had heard quite enough from Boston, and even the old friends of the colonies praised the bill, Isaac Barre, for example, saying of “I like it, adopt, and embrace it cheerfully for its moderation.”18
Moderate or not, the bill moved through the Commons at an immoderate speed. The House did not even bother to divide at the second reading and immediately afterward brushed aside Rose Fuller’s amendment that Boston be fined rather than shut up. On March 25 the bill received its third reading and was sent on to the Lords, where it was quickly approved. By the end of the month the king had given his assent—and Boston by law was to be closed to all commerce as of June 15.
The Boston Port Act was the first of five acts the Americans called the Intolerable Acts. Parliament passed the others in the three months following passage of the Boston Port Act. The next two—the Massachusetts Regulatory Act (commonly called the Massachusetts Government Act) and the Impartial Administration of Justice Act—occasioned greater opposition and livelier debate, but both passed with large majorities. The Massachusetts Government Act embodied proposals which had been made at various times before by officials who had long insisted that Parliament must establish its supremacy in America. And if to do so involved altering a royal charter, an act for which no precedent existed, too bad for precedents and charters. In simple terms, the Act converted the Massachusetts government into a royal affair: the House would continue as an elective body but the Council from August on would be nominated by the Crown; the governor would appoint and remove, if he wished, most civil officials; towns would no longer meet except with royal permission; and sheriffs—not freeholders—would select juries. Obviously this Act considerably reduced local control in Massachusetts; a related statute, the Impartial Administration of Justice Act, further cut down colonial power by providing that any royal official accused of a capital crime in the colony might be sent to England or another colony for trial.19
During the debate on these bills Rose Fuller proposed the repeal of the Townshend duty on tea. The motion was neither irrelevant nor out of order, but presented on the assumption that the new coercive policies in America had no chance if the duty remained. Once the tax was removed the Americans might swallow their medicine. Fuller moved repeal on April 19, and Burke immediately gave his support in a speech on American taxation. The speech is memorable for its wit and its brilliant reconstruction of the government’s dismal efforts to bring order into colonial affairs without the advantage of a coherent policy. The government’s way, Burke said, was “meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted.” But the speech also revealed once again the limits on sympathy for the colonials’ version of the constitution. To be sure, Burke urged that the duty on tea should be lifted, but on grounds of expediency not of constitutional right. The Declaratory Act had stated what Parliament might do—”bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever”—and from that line not even the friends of America deviated.
The king signed the two bills on May 20. Two weeks later he gave his assent to still another quartering bill, the latest attempt to force civil authorities in America to provide housing and provisions for troops. The Quartering Act of 1765 had required the authorities to furnish barracks; the next year an amended statute allowed billeting of troops in inns, taverns, and vacant buildings. This one permitted the quartering of troops with private families. It passed the Commons without a division early in May and went through the Lords easily, though Chatham spoke against it.20
All four statutes were meant to be punitive and were also calculated to reduce the colonies to a proper subordination. The Quebec Act which became law late in June had neither of these purposes, but because of its timing and its provisions, it was regarded as one of the Intolerable Acts, as part of Parliament’s response to the Boston Tea Party.
