American Tempest (5 page)

Thomas Hancock. Founder of the House of Hancock, he was one of the great enterpreneurs in colonial America. He was the uncle of the patriot John Hancock. From a portrait by John Singleton Copley in the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University.
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With his wealth and political and social prominence came social responsibility—
noblesse oblige
, as British aristocrats called it—and Thomas Hancock personally undertook, at his own expense, the care and maintenance of the entire Boston Common—the forty-five-acre park that stretched from his front door down Beacon Hill. He had the Frog Pond cleaned regularly to prevent stagnation, planted a grove of elm trees to shade the park, and continually saw to the upkeep of all public areas. Like other prominent Boston merchants—Hutchinson, Oliver, and a few others—he also made generous gifts to the Church, and together they earned the collective epithet “The Saints of Boston.”

The Molasses Act of 1733, however, had already turned many lesser saints into sinners. Rum, by then, had become New England's most popular drink, and New England distillers imported the vast majority of molasses to make their rum from the French and Spanish sugar islands of the Caribbean. Although sugar cane grew in the British West Indies, output was small, and the molasses they produced was 25 to 40 percent more costly than that of the foreign sugar islands. Rhode Island's thirty distilleries imported nearly 900,000 gallons of molasses a year, of which 725,000 came from foreign islands; the sixty distilleries in Massachusetts produced 2.7 million gallons of rum a year and imported about 1 million gallons of molasses annually—only 30,000 of it from the British West Indies. By adding a six-pence-a-gallon duty on foreign molasses, the Molasses Act threatened to drive production costs and the price of rum beyond the reach of most New England consumers and cripple an industry on which thousands of American shipfitters, sailors, longshoremen, coopers, distillery workers, merchants, tavern keepers, wine shops, and their employees depended. The
Boston Evening Post
charged Parliament with passing the act merely to allow “a few pampered Creolians to roll in their gilded equipages thro' the streets of London” at the expense of two million American subjects.
²
Some physicians and blue-nosed church ladies, however, hailed the Molasses Act, citing the dangers to physical and moral health and the benefits of tea. Some ministers joined in railing
against demon rum and, unaware of the historic irony of their words, urged congregants to hold tea parties instead, and, little by little, many Americans began consuming tea in increasing quantities.

Faced with a collapse of the rum trade and the distilling industry, distillers, merchants, and shipping firms combined to smuggle molasses from foreign sugar islands. Taking advantage of hidden coves along the long, isolated stretches of New England coastline, shippers landed hundreds of cargoes out of sight of customs officials—and, therefore, duty-free. It was the first time that so many otherwise loyal British subjects in America had turned against their king's government.

“It is a defrauding of the King of those dues which the law hath granted to him,” Peter Oliver growled, “which fraud is equal in criminality to the injuring of a private person.”
³

But unpredictable waves and currents often sent ships crashing into the rocks, spilling cargoes into the sea. However, with merchants sitting in some of the highest government posts, it was not difficult for them to reduce their losses by bribing underpaid customs officials to declare shiploads of molasses and other dutiable goods as nondutiable “ships' stores” or “for personal use by owner.” With armies of burly waterfront workers in their employ, merchant-bankers easily convinced reluctant customs officers that accepting bribes provided both financial security and physical security for their persons, families, and properties. Within a few years, even admiralty judges, who had the last words in deciding whether or not a cargo was dutiable, found many financial advantages to overruling the customs service in favor of Boston's merchant-bankers.

There were also social and political advantages to letting ships slip in and out of Boston harbor without official interference. Boston's leading merchants were political and social leaders who could advance the careers of lesser figures in government—or leave them hopelessly mired in subsistence posts.

Together, the city's merchant-bankers
were
Boston: Thomas Hutchinson, Sr. was a member of the Massachusetts Executive Council, or upper house of the General Court; his son, Thomas, Jr., was a Boston selectman and member of the lower house. The Hutchinsons were direct descendants
of Anne Hutchinson, the religious leader who arrived from England in 1634, only fourteen years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Daniel Oliver had married royal governor Jonathan Belcher's daughter and, together with James Bowdoin, another prominent merchant, served on the governor's Executive Council and as a Boston selectman. Bowdoin also served in the upper house of the General Court. Oliver traced his American roots back to the earliest days of the seventeenth century, whereas Bowdoin's father had been among the French Huguenots who fled France for America in the late seventeenth century after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and banned Protestantism in France. Thomas Hancock's grandfather Nathaniel was a minister and one of the early settlers of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Collectively, Boston's “saints” lived in the city's most opulent mansions; they owned and occupied the front pews of the Old South Meeting House and sustained it and other Boston institutions financially.

And, with the exception of the minister's son Thomas Hancock, they were all men of Harvard, the educational and social institution that conferred the only equivalent of noble rank that America had to offer.

Founded as a divinity school in 1636, Harvard had broadened its curriculum in the late seventeenth century to adapt to the needs of American mercantile society. Although textbooks were in Latin—and every student admitted to Harvard could read, write, and converse fluently in Latin—the curriculum included Greek and Hebrew along with logic, rhetoric, ethics, metaphysics, and the
belles lettres
—mostly English prose and poetry of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Harvard emphasized the study of Greek and Hebrew to permit students to read original texts of the Scriptures, including the Aramaic books of the Old Testament and the Syriac New Testament. Some students studied French—the mark of a “Gentleman's Education”—with a private tutor. The Harvard day began with prayers at five, followed by a
bever
, or light breakfast, then a study hour at seven and the day's first lecture (in Latin) at eight—often lasting three hours. Students ate dinner at eleven, followed by a recreation hour and three hours with a tutor, who reviewed the morning lecture and quizzed students until they had ingested the subject matter. Evening prayers followed at five, then supper and a few hours of recreation—smoking, chatting, and, finally, sleep—usually at about nine.

But above all, Harvard, as the oldest of America's only three colleges,
^*
taught its sons to lead “their country,” which was synonymous with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in an age when each of the colonies were independent “countries.” From the day they entered Harvard, incoming fresh men addressed upperclassmen as “Sir”—Sir Hutchinson, Sir Oliver, Sir Bowdoin, Sir Hancock. And at commencement exercises, the entire student body—about one hundred strong at the time—sang this hymn with fervor and confidence in the truths it revealed:

And as Harvard—and, presumably, God—had ordained, Jonathan Belcher, born in Cambridge, the son of a prosperous merchant, graduated from Harvard, amassed a fortune in his father's business, and won appointment as royal governor of
both
Massachusetts
and
New Hampshire in 1730. Three years later, he simply turned his official eyes away when his father and other merchants—his “kindred”—ignored the Molasses Act and began smuggling molasses and other dutiable goods into Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

During Belcher's reign as governor, New England merchants smuggled an estimated 1.5 million gallons of molasses a year, on which they should have paid £37,500 in duties. The merchants argued disingenuously that the duties would have doubled retail prices of rum and left colonists unable to afford a drop of their favorite drink. In truth, only greed lay behind their objection to paying the duty on molasses, for they were able to distill a 16-pence gallon of molasses into a gallon of rum to
sell at 192 pence—a gross profit of 1,200 percent! The six-pence-per-gallon duty would have cut profits to 1,161.5 percent!

Harvard College. Engraving of the college buildings in the eighteenth century, when John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and other Tea Party Patriots attended. Hancock lived in Massachusetts Hall on the right. Founded in 1636, Harvard was America's first college. Its original buildings burned and were replaced by Harvard Hall in 1675 (left), Stoughton Hall in 1699 (center), and Massachusetts Hall in 1720.
(L
IBRARY OF
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ONGRESS
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In all, New England merchants paid about £100,000 a year for molasses and earned gross revenues of about £1.2 million, on which they refused to pay a mere 3 percent—£37,500—in taxes. Although merchants in England routinely paid duties on imports, decades of unfettered free enterprise had left American colonists convinced of their “natural” right to import cheap, duty-free molasses—and any other commodity, for that matter—from the French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies, even if doing so undermined the economic future of their fellow countrymen in the British West Indies. For Boston merchants, duties, no matter how small,
on molasses, tea, or any other commodity that they purchased in the marketplace, represented confiscation of part of their own private property and an infringement on their liberties. Taxes suddenly emerged as a central, incendiary issue in their relationship with the government of their motherland.

In addition to reducing the flow of British government revenues, however, smuggling took on a darker complexion in 1754, when the first sparks of war set the wilderness of western Pennsylvania aflame, and some merchants hoped to ensure the survival of their businesses after the war by secretly supplying both sides during the war. A westward migration across the Appalachian Mountains into what Britain claimed as its Ohio Territory brought French troops streaming down from Canada to fortify the area and reaffirm French claims to sovereignty over what they deemed a part of French Louisiana. Virginia's royal governor ordered twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington to lead a force of militiamen to reassert Britain's (and Virginia's) claims at the Forks of the Ohio (now Pittsburgh), where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet and where the French had built a rudimentary fortification they would later expand into Fort Du Quesne. By mid-May, Washington and his force reached a point sixty miles south of the French fort and made camp. On May 27, a scout reported fifty French troops only six miles away, and Washington set out to attack with forty troops and a contingent of friendly Indians. “We were advanced pretty near to them, when they discovered us,” he said later.