American Tempest (2 page)

Massachusetts Chief Justice Peter Oliver puzzled over the tempest swirling around him: “For a colony which had been nursed in its infancy with the most tender care and attention, which has been indulged with every gratification that the most forward child could wish for . . . to plunge into an unnatural rebellion . . . must strike some with a degree of astonishment. By adverting to the historic page, we shall find no previous revolt . . . but what originated from severe oppressions.”
²

The cause of the ruckus was indeed astonishing: a three-penny-
per-pound
tax on British tea, which was nothing more than a “social beverage” largely consumed by idle women as “a sign of politeness and hospitality . . . a mark of civility and welcome.” But men seldom drank it, and it ranked below ale or rum among the beverages that Americans consumed most. Indeed, only about one-third of the population drank as many as two cups a day, and the tax had no effect on consumption. Eminently affordable by almost every American, tea had first appeared in America as an all-purpose elixir for “headaches, giddiness, and heaviness . . . colds, drop-sies, and scurvies—and it expelleth infection . . . prevents and cures agues, surfeits and fevers.”
³

Although the largest, wealthiest merchant groups routinely paid whatever duties the government demanded and absorbed the tiny extra costs, second-tier and third-tier merchants on the edge of failure evaded duties and tried to gain a competitive edge by buying low-cost, smuggled Dutch tea that they could sell at prices well below those of dutied English teas. The British government, however, badly needed to collect those duties. It had accumulated debts of more than £1 million in the French and Indian War in the north and west, and Parliament was determined to step up tax enforcement to force Americans to assume more of the costs of their own defense.

Boston's mid-level merchants objected and, as Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson put it, “From so small a spark, a great fire seems to have been kindled.”
⁴
The dissenting merchants responded to the increased taxes by organizing waterfront workers into a raging mob that surged through the streets, taking control of the town and its government.
The mob brooked no dissent, burning homes of the most outspoken opponents and sending the dreaded tumbrel, “in imitation of the Inquisition coach,” to the doors of citizens who dared voice support for the established government. The squeaking wooden tipcart arrived at dawn, its drivers breaking down doors and dragging shrieking victims from their beds for transport to the “Liberty Tree.” A jeering mob awaited to strip them, swab them in scalding tar, and dress them in chicken feathers before hanging them by the waist from a branch to be scorned, beaten, and humiliated.
⁵

“The tarring and feathering and riots reigned uncontrolled,” Chief Justice Peter Oliver recalled. “The liberty of the press was restrained by the very men who had been halloowing for liberty. . . . Those printers who were inclined to support government were threatened.”
⁶
After the mob burned down the home of a merchant who had paid the required duties on imported tea, a churchman at the conflagration assured the merchant's frightened neighbors “that it was all right, it being in a good cause.”
⁷

Oliver explained that “all this struggle and uproar arose from the selfish designs of the merchants.” He called them “mock patriots who disguised their private views by mouthing it for liberty . . . [but] who will sacrifice everything for money.”
⁸

The struggle and uproar climaxed on Thursday, December 16, 1773, with the legendary “Boston Tea Party,” when an estimated six to seven dozen men, many amateurishly disguised as Indians—who were then a symbol of freedom—dumped at least £10,000 of tea (about $1 million today) into Boston harbor. Whatever the motives of its perpetrators, they unleashed social, political, and economic forces they would never again be able to control.

The Boston Tea Party provoked a reign of terror in Boston and other American cities, with Americans inflicting unimaginable barbarities on each other. Mobs dumped tea and burned tea ships in New York; Philadelphia; Charleston, South Carolina; and elsewhere—and Boston staged a second tea party a few months after the first one. The turmoil stripped tens of thousands of Americans of their dignity, homes, properties, and birthrights—all in the name of liberty and independence. Nearly 100,000 Americans left the land of their forefathers forever in what was history's
largest exodus of Americans
from America
, and untold thousands who refused to leave their native land fled westward into the dangerous wilderness to start life anew under new identities.

Even in the face of such horrors, John Adams saw a grander picture, calling the Boston Tea Party nothing short of “magnificent” and insisting it displayed “a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity. . . . This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an epocha [sic] in History.”
⁹

Ironically, few, if any, Americans today—even those who call themselves Tea Party Patriots—know the true and entire story of the original Tea Party and the Patriots who staged it. Their names are long forgotten; no monument lists them or describes what they did and why. Before the original Tea Party Patriots disembarked, they swore never to reveal each other's names, although British authorities accused John Hancock, Sam Adams, James Otis—and even fat little John Adams—of dumping some of the tea. Although the names of Tea Party Patriots are of some interest, what John Adams called the “important consequences” of the Tea Party had far more impact on American history—socially, politically, and economically. One social consequence, for example, was a shortage of tea that helped transform Americans into a nation of coffee drinkers. However, the political and economic consequences went far beyond culinary tastes and also affected the minds, hearts, souls, and lives of almost every American then and now. These included, among others, a declaration of independence, a bloody revolution, and the modern world's first experiment in self-government.

What a party! What a teapot! And what a tempest!

T
housands had pushed into the Old South Meeting House, “turning the House of God into a den of thieves,” according to Massachusetts Chief Justice Peter Oliver. “Thus assembled, they whiled away the time hissing and clapping, cursing and swearing until it grew near darkness and then the signal was given to act their deeds of darkness.”
¹

A burst of blood-curdling war whoops from without silenced the huge congregation for a moment.

“Rally, Mohawks!” came a cry from the rear—and again the terrifying war whoops from beyond. From the pulpit, moderator Samuel Adams called out, “This meeting can do no more to save the country.”
²
And the doors of the church burst open, spilling congregants onto the stony parvis in the icy moonlit air.

“Boston harbor a tea-pot tonight!” someone shouted.

“Hurrah for Griffin's Wharf!” answered another.

“The Mohawks are come!” a third voice called.
³

Fifty or more men stood huddled in the shadows of the buildings opposite the church—blankets draped over their heads and shoulders, their faces smeared with lamp-black. Poised as Indians, they wore tomahawks, knives, or pistols in their belts and carried an axe or hatchet in their hands. Together, they represented the first—the original—Tea Party Patriots and
would redound through history as a collective symbol against government taxation without the consent of the taxed.

As the throng burst from the church, the Mohawks signaled to them to follow in silence along Milk Street, then a sharp right toward the waterfront, flowing like molten lava—steadily, relentlessly—until it reached Fort Hill. Other “Indians” stepped into the line of march, “one after another, as if by accident, so as not to excite suspicion.”

Three ships lay tied to the pier as the procession approached Griffin's Wharf. Armed guards protected the entrance, but stood away as the Indians approached. The crowd of followers halted on a rise above the wharf to watch the Indians as they boarded the ships. Like a swarm of locusts, the Indians spread across the decks, with some attaching blocks and tackles to lift chests from the holds. Chest after chest rose from the darkness of the ship's bowels onto the decks, where axes and hatchets split their seams so expertly that spectators barely heard a sound. “We resembled devils from the bottomless pit rather than men,” recalled Joshua Wyeth, a sixteen-year-old blacksmith at the Tea Party. “Many of [us] were apprentices and journeymen, not a few, as was the case with myself, living with Tory masters.

A reporter from the
Massachusetts Gazette
was also on the scene:

The Tea Party left government officials irate, with Chief Justice Peter Oliver condemning it as a “villainous act.” Tea Party leaders, he said, had “assembled the rabble . . . to perpetrate the most atrocious acts of treason and rebellion.”
⁶

One of the brilliant minds of his native Boston, Justice Oliver pointed out that few, if any, of the men who dumped the tea into Boston harbor that night could even explain their irrational behavior. None consumed as much tea as he did ale, rum, or whiskey; few had any objections to others consuming tea, including their wives; and most bore no malice toward the East India Company, which owned the tea. Moderators at the church who inspired the assault on the tea ships at Griffin's Wharf had railed against taxation, yet the tax on tea was negligible—a mere three-pence
per pound
, or slightly more than
one-tenth of one penny
for a nine-pence cup of a beverage consumed largely by women as “a sign of politeness and hospitality . . . a mark of civility and welcome.” On the surface, the Tea Party seemed a senseless, wanton act of vandalism—beyond the ludicrous, drawing the disbelief of most Americans, the ill will of many others, and the wrath of government.

“Had they been prudent enough to have poured it into fresh water instead of salt water,” Oliver sneered, “they and their wives and their children and their little ones might have regaled upon it at free cost for a twelve month. But now the fish had the whole regale to themselves. Whether it suited the constitution of a fish is not said, but it is said that some of the inhabitants of Boston would not eat of fish caught in the harbor, because they had drank of the East India Company tea.”

To Samuel Adams and other organizers of the Tea Party, however, the tea had become a symbol of property, and the tax on it represented nothing
less than confiscation of that property from its rightful owners or purchasers. In fact, the Tea Tax, small as it was, marked the fourth time in forty years that Parliament had tried to tax Americans without their consent. They began with the Molasses Act of 1733, then added the Grenville acts in 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, and, finally, the Townshend Acts of 1767, which included the notorious Tea Tax that would irritate Americans for more than eight years and provoke the Boston Massacre in 1770, the Boston Tea Party in 1773, and the American Revolution in 1775.