American Tempest (27 page)

In the end, both Americans and British would all pay for the tea dumped on Boston Harbor with the blood of thousands of their countrymen.

F
rom the isolation of Castle William, the angry Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson lamented over the Boston Tea Party, calling it “the boldest stroke that had been struck against British rule in America.” A royalist pamphleteer agreed:

Just who participated in the Tea Party and who witnessed it from shore remains one of the tantalizing mysteries in American history (see
Appendix B
). Whoever they were, most kept their names secret for many years thereafter—largely because they realized that even after the United States had become independent, they remained liable for destruction of private property and faced civil as well as criminal charges and damages.

The skills of the original Tea Party Patriots point to craftsmen, whereas the discipline they displayed and the quickness and ease with which they boarded and moved about the ships indicate participation by members of
Hancock's Corps of Cadets, who had stood watch the previous nights. The
Massachusetts Spy
reported that John Hancock “was the first man that went aboard the vessel, to destroy the tea,” but most historians discount the possibility that a man as wealthy and recognizable, not to mention as cautious, as Hancock would have risked arrest, trial, and imprisonment in England along with a huge lawsuit. Moreover, Hancock's huge, gilt-trimmed coach and liveried servants never stood far from their master, and he seldom moved about without them. He was also beginning to suffer attacks of gout, an extremely painful disease that would probably not have allowed him to bound aboard and about a cargo ship.

As the Tea Party entered the legends of American history, descriptions—most of them contradictory—continued surfacing for years. Governor Hutchinson, who was out of town at the time, claimed that most of the crowd at the Old South Meeting House had marched to the wharves and watched while the “Mohawks” dumped the tea. The
Dartmouth
log of December 16 claims the crowd numbered only about one thousand, including men “dressed and whooping like Indians.”
²
One Boston merchant said the meeting at Old South did not end until “the candles were lit” and that those who boarded the tea ships were “cloathed in blankets with the head muffled, and copper colored countenances, being each armed with a hatchet or axe, and pair of pistols . . . before nine o'clock . . . every chest . . . was knocked to pieces and flung over the sides.”
³

Tens of thousands later claimed they were at the meeting at Old South and participated in or witnessed the Tea Party. All four ships would have sunk under the weight of such a crowd. In 1835, more than sixty years later, one such “witness” produced a list of fifty-eight participants, whose number included silversmith Paul Revere, merchant William Molyneux, and the leatherworker/shoemaker and mob leader Mackintosh. A subsequent list of fifty-five more names were culled from interviews with Bostonians who claimed they had participated in or witnessed the Tea Party or were members of the immediate families of participants (see
Appendix B
for both lists). The majority were skilled craftsmen—including eight carpenter/house builders, four coopers, three leatherworkers, and eight other craftsmen in a variety of trades, including Paul Revere, the silversmith. The list showed fourteen merchants having participated in the Tea Party, but only two shop-keepers
—one a bookseller, the other a butcher. The list also includes six civil servants and midlevel politicians as having boarded the tea ships, along with five farmers, two physicians, one printer/newspaper publisher, one engineer, one schoolteacher, and one clergyman. Only about half the names on the list—thirty-five—are known to have served later in the Revolutionary War. As for Mackintosh's “chickens,” only six men with various ties to the water-front might possibly have qualified as one of Mackintosh's toughs. Clearly, the majority of Tea Party Patriots emerged from a moderate segment of Boston society—literate, skilled, often well educated, and nonviolent. Typical of many, Thomas Melvill—a grandfather of author Herman Melville—was a young businessman with a bachelor's degree and master's degree from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), who joined the Tea Party motivated by sheer idealism and the belief that taxes filled the pockets of corrupt politicians while generating few benefits for ordinary citizens.

One witness claimed to have recognized Hancock “not only by his ruffles” but “by his figure and gait . . . his features . . . and by his voice, also, for he exchanged . . . an Indian grunt. . . .”
⁴
Years later, a teamster claimed he “loaded at John Hancock's warehouse and was about to leave town when Mr. Hancock requested me to be on Long Wharf at 2 o'clock
P.M.
[the very time Hancock and the others sat in Old South!] and informed me what was to be done. I went accordingly [and] joined the band. . . . We mounted the ships and made tea in a trice. This done, I took my team and went home, as an honest man should.”
⁵
Still another unlikely witness cited Dr. Joseph Warren and Paul Revere as participants, and a popular street ballad about the Tea Party opened with the words,

Another verse included the lines

On December 17, the day after the Tea Party, Revere began his legendary ride to Philadelphia, spreading news of the Tea Party everywhere, believing—as did Boston Patriots—that the Tea Party would unite Americans. Some colonists did indeed stop drinking tea, and bands of Tea Party Patriots began forming in other cities. As they had done with stamp agents in the 1760s, tax protesters in major cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston forced East India Company tea agents to resign.
⁷
New York Governor William Tryon warned the British Board of Trade that it would require “the protection of the point of the bayonet and muzzle of the cannon” to land tea in New York.
⁸
A newspaper reported that “a vast number of the inhabitants, including most of the principal lawyers, merchants, landowners, masters of ships and mechanics” had joined the “Sons of Liberty of New York” and pledged to turn back tea ships. Outside Philadelphia, a crowd of eight thousand tax protesters greeted the ship
Polly
, carrying 697 chests of tea as it prepared to sail up the Delaware on Christmas Day. It put about and sailed out to sea.

In all his breathless rides and many descriptions of the Tea Party, Paul Revere never said he participated in dumping tea into Boston Harbor, and, indeed, there is not a shred of evidence to show who did or did not participate. The sheriff arrested a barber named Eckley, but released him for lack of evidence. John Adams, who had been in court in Plymouth for a week and rode back into Boston the morning after the Tea Party, said he did not know any Tea Party participants. As he rode into town, he saw splintered tea chests and huge clots of tea leaves covering the water as far as his eyes could see. They washed ashore along a fifty-mile stretch of coastline as well as on the offshore islands.

“This,” he entered in his diary when he reached his home, “is the most magnificent movement of all.

Three days later, on December 21, John Hancock wrote to his London agent:

Hancock shipped all his stocks of tea back to England at his own expense.

The
London Chronicle
published a long, grisly account of the Boston Tea Party and a portrait of a city in open rebellion against the crown. The report infuriated the king, his cabinet, Parliament, and most Londoners, who called it vandalism. England's attorney general formally charged Boston's most outspoken political leaders—John Hancock and Samuel Adams, among others—with “the Crime of High Treason” and “High Misdemeanors” and ordered them brought to justice in England, where British law dictated hanging by the neck and “while you are still living your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out . . . your head then cut off, and your bodies divided each into four quarters.”
¹¹

Not many American leaders in the South rallied to the defense of Boston's Tea Party Patriots. Far from uniting colonists, the Tea Party had alienated many property owners, who held private property to be sacrosanct and did not tolerate its destruction or violation. George Washington concluded that Bostonians were mad, and like other Virginians and most Britons, he condemned the Boston Tea Party as vandalism and wanton destruction of private property—an unholy disregard for property rights. After the repeal of the Townshend Acts, Virginians saw no reason to persist in boycotting their British countrymen, and they resumed drinking tea, consuming eighty thousand pounds of tea in 1773, with plans to drink even more in 1774. In Charleston, South Carolina, importers of East India
Company tea protested against local boycotts that discriminated against them while allowing other merchants to smuggle cheap Dutch tea at will.

Although winter snows and bitter cold dampened Boston's enthusiasm for street protests, Sam Adams kept anti-British passions burning with fiery newspaper articles—all signed with pseudonyms. One article asserted that Chinese peasants packed East India Company tea into chests in Canton by stomping on it with dirty, bare, disease-infected feet. Consumers by the thousands discarded whatever tea they had in their homes, while students at the College of New Jersey ran amok, destroying all the tea they could find in the college commissary. By the end of the eighteenth century, coffee would supplant tea as America's most popular hot beverage, in part because of nonimportation agreements but also because of Adams's relentless propaganda equating tea with disease and tea duties with runaway British taxation.

The new year brought a resumption of disorders, with Boston Patriots tarring and feathering two customs commissioners. One of the mobs broke down the door of Commissioner John Malcolm's house. Although he repelled the first attackers with his sword as he backed up the stairway, the mob overwhelmed him as he reached the second floor landing. They then tied him up and lowered him through a window into the tumbrel, where “they stripped him, tarred and feathered and haltered him,” according to Chief Justice Peter Oliver. After rolling Malcolm to the Liberty Tree, they hung him from a branch “and whipped him with great barbarity in the presence of thousands—and some of them members of the General Court.”
¹²
They beat him with sticks and clubs until he shrieked, at the behest of his torturers, that he deserved to die and
thanked
the mob for their
mercy
in beating instead of killing him. As he lapsed into unconsciousness, onlookers grew bored and drifted away; the remnants of the mob dropped Malcolm back into the cart, rolled him back to his house, and dumped his limp body by the door. Amazingly, he survived.