American Tempest (20 page)

Some English goods continued to flow to a handful of Loyalist importers who refused to join the boycott, but Hancock, Adams, and other Patriot leaders rallied consumers to support it. Ordinary citizens curtailed purchases of British-made hats, gloves, lace, clocks, glue, furniture, mustards and cheeses—and tea. Although men seldom drank it, tea had acquired widespread popularity among women after winning the royal family's imprimatur. “They all drink tea in America—as they drink wine in the south of France,” one French observer concluded. Indeed, every home of substance had a silver, silver plate, or china tea service, complete with a tea pot, sugar and creamer, tongs, and tea “dishes,” which were, in fact, small bowls with no handles. Americans drank only chocolate and coffee from cups with handles.
²¹
Although the requisite china tea service graced his parlor, John Hancock preferred Madeira wine, and Sam Adams, who abstained from alcoholic beverages for religious reasons, didn't like it. Ebenezer Mackintosh and his waterfront thugs swilled only ale and rum and refused even to taste tea. But the drinking of tea had become a quasi-religious ritual for Britain's aristocrats along with those Americans—especially the ladies—who aped the mother country's nobility. So it was inevitable that tea acquired a symbolic value that far exceeded its economic importance. Not every cargo ship carried English lace or glue, but most ships sailing into Boston harbor carried some East India Company tea—until the boycott.

Even some of Boston's grandest dames, however, joined the boycott and abandoned English tea. Encouraged by such lyrical appeals as
A Lady's Adieu to her Tea-Table
, many tea boycotters turned—quite courageously at times—to substitutes such as raspberry bush leaves (“a detestable drink, which the Americans had the heroism to find good”) and labradore, or hyperion tea, an insipid concoction the American Indians had derived from the red root bush that grew in New England swamps.

A Lady's Adieu to her Tea-Table

To support the anti-tea-drinking movement, almost every shopkeeper and craftsman began carrying tea substitutes in an effort to encourage their use. Even the printers Edes and Gill began selling labradore tea, and some Bostonians began cultivating Chinese tea bushes (without much success) in their kitchen gardens.

In addition to poetic appeals to the average citizen's love of liberty, Adams and his propagandists spread rumors that tea had baneful effects on the health of its imbibers. Consumption of tea, insisted “A Countryman” in the
Boston Gazette
, “had produced such strange disorders as . . . tremblings, apoplexies, consumptions, and I don't know what all.”
²³

Although all Americans made a pretense of avoiding tea, too many ladies loved the leaf too much to give it up, and East India Company tea sales held relatively steady in the face of anti-tea pronouncements in the press. For the moment, at least, the tea-drinking habit had become too in-grained in American culture to break easily. Apart from its social value, tea offered many health benefits. Unlike fresh water or milk, tea was safe, tasty, and settled the stomach. Although some merchants refused to stock East India Company tea, at least nine Loyalist merchants in Boston alone ignored the boycott and continued business as usual with their British suppliers, who simply labeled tea chests as containing textiles to conceal their contents. After two years, from 1768 to 1770, the nonconsumption charade had reduced East India Company tea exports by only 30,000 pounds, from 870,000 to 840,000 pounds, or about 3.5 percent.

The major houses of Richard Clarke & Sons and Thomas & Elisha Hutchinson (the sons of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson) were quite bold in offering East India Company tea for sale to Boston's tea drinkers. Using the same argument as merchants who defied the authority of Parliament, they declared the Boston Town Meeting to be without authority to interfere in the conduct of their business. Like all American merchants—and, indeed, most Americans generally—they did not like others telling them how to run their lives.

“It always seemed strange to me,” wrote Theophilus Lillie, one of the Loyalist merchants resisting the boycott, to the Boston
News-Letter
,

Knowing they had become the last sources of English tea, Clarke, the Hutchinsons, and other Loyalist merchants ignored mob threats and filled their warehouses to capacity with English tea and other English goods. Determined to obey the law of the land, they paid whatever duties were
required and simply raised prices to compensate, knowing that consumers would have no choice but to pay the higher prices if they wanted English merchandise. The Hutchinsons alone imported fifty thousand pounds of English tea in 1769—much of it carried by John Hancock's ships.

“My sons tell me they have sold their tea to advantage,” Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson confided, “though with the utmost difficulty. . . . Be side the danger to their persons there was a design to destroy the tea. . . . It was one of the sellers of the Dutch tea who made the greatest clamor.”
²⁵

An American correspondent wrote to a Liverpool, England, newspaper calling the tea boycott “really a joke. . . . As to our people's quitting the use of tea . . . it would be full as reasonable to imagine they will cease to drink New England rum or cider. . . . I don't believe there are ten chests of tea less consumed in this province in a year than there were before the act took place.”
²⁶

Peter Oliver—by then a superior court judge—agreed, saying it was

The irony of Hutchinson's English tea arriving on Hancock's ships was not lost on John Mein, a Scottish printer who founded the
Boston Chronicle
with a partner and produced what had been a nonpartisan weekly, then semiweekly. In early summer 1769, he discovered that in the first five months after January 1, when the nonimportation agreement was in effect, twenty-one ships had arrived in Boston from Britain, bearing 162 trunks, 270 bales, 182 cases, 233 boxes, 1,116 casks, 139 chests, 72 hampers, and
other containers of goods bound for 190 signers of the nonimportation agreement. The list did not include containers from at least four other vessels lost at sea. On August 21, 1769, the
Chronicle
began printing Customs House lists—fifty-five in all—with the names of every merchant importing British goods in violation of the nonimportation agreement they had endorsed. John Hancock owned four of the ships and their contents. Mein then printed four thousand copies of the lists and sent them to newspapers and influential people across the colonies and in England.

“John Hancock, one of the foremost of the Patriots of Boston,” wrote the
Newport Mercury
on September 4, 1769, “would perhaps shine more conspicuously . . . if he did not keep a number of vessels running to London and back, full freighted, getting rich by receiving freight on goods made contraband by the colonies.”
²⁸

Focusing on Hancock as the boycott organizer, the newspaper published a manifest from one of Hancock's ships, which showed he had imported a handsome new carriage for himself and expensive table linen—fraudulently listed as canvas—for his aunt. The newspaper pointed out that the boycott did not prevent merchants from importing goods duty-free if they stated that they had no intention of reselling them. They could thus continue importing unlimited quantities of goods listed for their personal use or belonging to others. Newspapers throughout the colonies reprinted the
Chronicle
stories, with Boston merchants, including Hancock, portrayed as liars and charlatans. For the first time, Loyalist newspapers went on the offensive, assailing Hancock in New Hampshire, New port, and New York.

Although Hancock denied having violated the nonimportation agreement, the
Chronicle
articles undermined merchant support for non-importation, and Hancock had to call Boston merchants together to sign an amended nonimportation agreement not to bring in any dutied goods on their vessels, regardless of who owned the goods. He then packed his things and set off for New York and Philadelphia to shore up support in those towns. In Philadelphia, he convinced John Dickinson, the author of the
Farmer's Letters
, to stand by him, and together they managed to restore some merchant support for nonimportation, but the articles substantially weakened the agreement.

The royalist
Chronicle
persisted in its attacks, calling Hancock

Two days later, a mob marched to the
Chronicle
office to lynch its two editors. Each editor carried guns and warded off his attackers before fleeing to the main Redcoat guardhouse, opposite Town House. As the crowd swelled to almost two thousand, the commanding officer sent word to his commander, Colonel Dalrymple, who in turn notified Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson. As Dalrymple awaited word from Hutchinson, a part of the mob went off toward Mein's house and, by coincidence, crossed paths with George Gailer, a crewman from Hancock's
Liberty
whom mob leaders accused of being an informer for the Customs House and for Mein's subsequent articles. The mob pounced, threw him into the ever-present tumbrel, stripped him naked, and slathered a thick coat of hot tar over his entire body, “then feathered and in this condition carried through the principal streets of the town in the cart followed by a great concourse of people.”
³⁰
Peter Oliver reported,

With the fateful tumbrel following behind, the mob found its way to Mein's house, where it leveled a volley of stones at the windows. When one of Mein's apprentices fired a musket shot in retaliation, the mob broke
down the door, and as the boy fled through the rear of the house, they searched the house for Mein, destroying most of his papers and books before leaving with some weapons they found and retracing their steps toward the guard house where Mein had taken shelter. On the way, they passed the Customs House, where the young Private Thomas Burgess stood guard and loaded his musket. The mob swarmed over him before he could fire.

“They closed me up and struck at and abused me most grossly.” After stripping the boy naked, they “threatened to hoist me in the cart and use me as they did the man they had tarred and feathered.” Wiser voices cautioned against harming one of the King's Own, however, and they returned the soldier's clothes and released him.