American Tempest (29 page)

All England seemed to applaud the ministry's decisions, with a merchant in Bristol saying that the “clamor” in Britain against the Tea Party “is high and general,” while another cited Boston—and Sam Adams in particular—as generators of all the discontent in America. “They are not only the worst subjects,” he wrote of Bostonians, “but the most immoral men of any I have had to deal with.” He called Bostonians “treacherous and seditious”—as bad “as Sodom itself was for a vice which ought not be named.”
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The widespread anger provoked threats against Americans living in London, with Benjamin Franklin warning of “a great wrath” and Arthur Lee, Virginia's agent in London, warning that “active Americans here” might be in danger of assault. Some British newspapers published demands by irate readers that large bodies of troops be sent to keep colonists “in due subjection,” while a more thoughtful reader suggested responding to the American boycott of British tea with a British boycott of American tobacco.

Although other American towns had held their own tea parties, the British government decided to make an example of Boston as the earliest and most outspoken antagonist of British colonial rule. “I think the town of Boston has deserved the animadversion of every part of this country,” Lord North declared. Dismissing the charge that innocents would suffer as much as the guilty, North said the failure of the innocents to rein in the guilty made them equally guilty. “If they deny authority in one instance, it goes to all; we must control them or submit to them.”
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When the government presented what it called the Boston Port Bill to Parliament, it found little opposition. Even Colonel Isaac Barré, who had fought with the American militia in the French and Indian War, agreed to punishing Boston and voted for the bill. Edmund Burke, another long-time champion of the colonists, also favored punishing the Tea Party Patriots but called it “devilish” to punish innocents in Boston for their failure to prevent the Tea Party.

“It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest,” he declared. “I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people. . . . I really think that for wise men this is not judicious, for sober men not decent, for minds tinctured with humanity not mild and merciful.”
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Burke's caution was of no avail. On March 25, the House of Commons passed the Boston Port Bill by a majority of five to one; three days later the House of Lords followed suit, and George III signed it into law on March 31, with the all-but-unanimous consent of the British people. Rather than uniting law-abiding Americans behind British rule, however, the Boston Port Bill united them against the Mother Country as never before. Parliament had changed direction. It was no longer enforcing tax collection; it was asserting unchecked, arbitrary authority over dissenting citizens, and Americans refused to submit.

Under the Port Bill, the British navy would shut Boston Harbor on June 1 until the city repaid both the East India Company for its Tea Party losses and the British government for the duties it would have collected on the tea. Except for military supplies and essential food and fuel, the law banned loading and unloading of all ships until “peace and obedience to the laws shall be . . . restored in the said town of Boston, that the trade of Great Britain may safely be carried on there and his Majesty's customs duly collected.”
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To ensure enforcement, the king replaced Governor Thomas Hutchinson with General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of British forces in North America, with orders “to repel force and violence by every means within his reach.”
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He responded by ordering four regiments of Redcoats in England and Ireland to sail to Boston immediately. To avoid humiliating Hutchinson, whom Sam Adams called “that damned arch traitor,”
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the king granted Hutchinson temporary leave in England, with the
understanding that he would return as governor after General Gage and the army succeeded in restoring peace.

“Tired with abuse,” Hutchinson noted sadly, “I obtained leave to go to England. . . . I have the satisfaction of being assured that my conduct has been approved by my Sovereign. I wished for the approbation of my country also, but in the present state of this province they are not compatible.”
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On May 13, Gage arrived at Castle William with instructions to move the General Court from Boston to Salem and prosecute Hancock, Adams, and the rest of the Patriot leaders for treason. Chief Justice Peter Oliver warned Gage that “the times are not favorable for prosecutions,” and rather than provoke more riots, Gage deferred action. Four days later Gage sailed from Castle William to Boston to assume his office—just as a town meeting was about to meet to protest the Port Bill. Hancock ordered the Corps of Cadets to escort the new governor to Town House for his induction into office and from there to Province House, where, in a stunning act of public insolence, Hancock failed to order the cadets to salute the governor as he passed between their lines to his official residence.

The Town Meeting then acted on Hancock's Massacre Day proposal and invited other colonies to join a “Solemn League and Covenant” to end all business dealings with Britain and stop consumption of British imports after October 1. Paul Revere rode out again to distribute the request to other cities and carry Sam Adams's masterpiece of propaganda warning that the Boston Port Bill, “though made immediately upon us, is doubtless designed for every other colony. . . . Now therefore is the time, when all should be united in opposition to this violation of the liberties of all. . . . It is not the rights of Boston only, but of all America which are now struck at. Not the merchants only but the farmer, and every order of men who inhabit this noble continent.”
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To the shock of Boston's Patriots, however, Revere's ride produced little unity—or sympathy for Boston's plight. While most New Yorkers and Philadelphians shrugged their shoulders in disinterest, Virginians debated the wording of a resolution to support the innocent people of Boston without condoning the Tea Party or provoking Parliament into closing Virginia's ports. George Washington was as indecisive as his colleagues, believing, on the one hand, that Americans should “never be taxed without their own
consent” and that “the cause of Boston . . . [is] the cause of America.” On the other hand, he strongly disapproved of the Boston mob's “conduct in destroying the tea” and disavowed all schemes to suspend all trade with Britain, which, he said, would only bankrupt planters and destroy Virginia's economy. He condemned the Bostonians who had destroyed private property and found it only just that they compensate the East India Company for damages.
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Even the legalized quartering of British troops in taverns and empty buildings seemed reasonable enough to Washington and the rest of Virginia's planter-aristocracy as a necessary evil for maintaining law and order in rebellious Boston. As America's richest, most heavily populated, and largest state geographically, Virginia had much to lose from British taxes, but it had even more to lose from anarchy, with its consequent breakdown of public order and protections for life and property.

Ten days after Gage's arrival, more than one hundred Loyalists signed a farewell to Hutchinson, deploring the losses to the East India Company and pledging “to bear our share of those damages” in exchange for repeal of the Port Bill.
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Far from demonstrating any bitterness when he reached London, Hutchinson immediately set to work to repair the torn fabric of his beloved country by effecting a reconciliation between Bostonians and the crown. With supreme confidence, he began his quest at the palace. “The King received me in his closet and conversed near two hours with unusual freedom and confidence,” Hutchinson exulted in a letter to his son Thomas back in Boston. “He surprised me that he was so intimately acquainted with the affairs of America.” Although Parliament had “gone too far here to recede,” he told his son, “there is all the disposition that can be wished, as well in the King . . . as in his ministers to afford the most speedy relief, and to comply with every reasonable request, and to forbear from any acts for taxation, provided the authority of Parliament be not denied or counteracted.”
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Despite the evident pleasures of visiting the king and other exalted British personages, the Massachusetts governor longed for his native land. “Don't forget the cranberries,” he ended his letter to his son, “at least six or eight bushels . . . get the largest and fairest and when they are come to their color and not too ripe.” And he signed his letter, “Your affectionate father.”
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Hutchinson also reported his conversation with the king to General Gage:

“I do assure you,” Hutchinson concluded, “the greatest pleasure it gives me is from the prospect it affords of enabling me to serve my poor unhappy country, and in the long conference I had with the King, I made it my chief object to . . . obtain relief for the town of Boston on the easiest terms.”
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Within a week of Gage's arrival in Boston, the intent of the Port Bill had become clear to all Bostonians, if not to Virginians and the rest of America. The British navy planned to divert all Boston-bound food supplies to Salem, where British troops would limit deliveries into Boston and starve the city into submission. Even a few members of Parliament who had voted for the bill expressed dismay.

“Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not,” Edmund Burke pleaded in Parliament. “Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you began; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found.”
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Thomas Hutchinson agreed, calling the Boston Port Bill “extravagant,” and expressing sympathies for the people of Boston, he pledged to continue his “constant endeavors among persons in high places in England to intercede for the purposes of relaxing or mitigating those distresses.”
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The rest of the House of Commons ignored Burke, however, and went on to pass more acts to club Americans into submission. One of these annulled the Massachusetts Charter and colonial self-government and gave
the king or royal governor sole power to appoint or remove colonial executive officers, judges, and law enforcement officers. To silence radicals, Parliament also banned town meetings without the consent of the governor and his approval of every item on the agenda. Virginians who had sanctimoniously approved the initial Coercive Act to punish Boston's Tea Party Patriots now had second thoughts. If Parliament could revoke the Massachusetts Charter, they realized it could revoke the Virginia Charter as well.

Bostonians in distress. This cartoon depicts Bostonians suffering the effects of confinement and limited food supplies in Boston following the enactment of Britain's Boston Port Bill banning all ship traffic in Boston Harbor.
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When word arrived of the new outbreak of tea parties in America, Parliament reacted with outrage, passing still another Coercive Act—the Quebec Act, which ended self-government in Canada and extended Canadian
boundaries to the Ohio River. In transferring the territory north of the Ohio River to Canada, the Quebec Act stripped Virginia and many of its wealthiest and most prominent citizens—George Washington, Patrick Henry, the legendary Lee family, and many others—of hundreds of thousands of acres and millions of pounds of investments in lands north of the Ohio River extending to the Great Lakes. Parliament had extended the punishment of Bostonians beyond the borders of Massachusetts to other colonies. The Quebec Act proved a colossal political error that now pushed Britain's largest, wealthiest, and most heavily populated American colony into the Patriot camp for the first time, along with wealthy and influential Pennsylvanians and Marylanders who had also invested in the Ohio Valley. Once fiercely loyal British subjects—most of them devout Anglicans as well—Virginia's planter aristocracy now faced the loss of properties accumulated over generations. With few exceptions, they agreed to pool their wealth and organize tens of thousands of Virginians who depended on them economically into an army to protect their property from the British government.