Patriots (25 page)

—

One afternoon in the last days of the nonimportation agreement, John Adams had dined at John Hancock’s mansion along with the two patriot doctors, Joseph Warren and Benjamin Church. When a green tea was served, John Adams hoped to himself that it had come from Holland, not Britain. But at Hancock’s table one could never be sure.

By late in 1773, John Hancock had imported four hundred chests of British tea, well over a million pounds. Despite the patriots’ ban, tea had remained a lucrative business in Boston. Thomas Hutchinson had secretly invested almost all of his ready capital, some four thousand British pounds, in the stock of the East India Company. He estimated that Americans drank six and a half million pounds of tea each year. In London, tea merchants thought the
figure was more like half that amount, but it was impossible to know since nine tenths of America’s tea came in illegally. New York was another leading port for smuggled tea, and the customs officer there was told that if he wasn’t overly diligent, he might expect thousands of pounds sterling each year from appreciative merchants. Thomas Hutchinson’s salary as governor was only a fraction of those New York bribes, but his pay was linked to the tax on tea in Massachusetts.

When George III retained the tea duties in 1770, it was less to raise income than to insist upon his right to levy a tax on the Americans. Townshend’s act had imposed the small import duty of threepence for every pound of tea, but it had also removed all duties in England from tea shipped to America. As a result, during the calm that followed the Boston Massacre legal tea from Britain cost less than smuggled tea.

But in 1771 the East India Company, once second only to the Bank of England among Britain’s financial institutions, was near bankruptcy. To recover, the company raised the price of tea to three shillings a pound; tea in Holland cost only two shillings. Overnight, smuggling became profitable again. Then, in May 1773, Parliament offered the East India Company further relief by changing the law once more. In the past, the company had been required to sell its tea at a public auction. English traders bid on it and then exported it to merchants in America. Now the East India Company would be permitted to handle both shipping and sales. That would greatly lower the price, but English and American traders like John Hancock would be stripped of a great source of their revenue. The new system would benefit only those few men who were licensed by East India’s monopoly to handle sales in the colonies. In Boston, five men comprised that favored group, including Thomas Hutchinson’s two sons and a son-in-law. The governor swore, falsely, that he had done nothing to win the commissions for them.

This time, Bostonians were alarmed, even without prompting from Samuel Adams, that the new method for selling tea could be applied to other commodities. Throughout the colonies, men realized that other British companies might adopt a similar approach. Then all trade would disappear and Americans would be reduced to fur trappers and lumberjacks.

Each colony had its own idea for fighting the menace. In Philadelphia, John Dickinson, whose letters as a “Pennsylvania Farmer” had helped to repeal the Stamp Act, denounced the past record of the East India Company. “They have levied war,” Dickinson wrote, “excited rebellions, dethroned princes and sacrificed millions for the
sake of gain.” An elderly citizen wrote to a Philadelphia newspaper to remind readers that years before, when tea was less popular, people had seemed both healthier and happier. A patriot physician in Boston agreed with him. He said that the introduction of tea to Europe from China in 1610 was responsible for spasms, vapors, apoplexy, palsy, dropsy,
rheumatism and nervous fevers.

More colonists, however, were saying they would back a boycott of tea when the patriots also agreed to give up rum, and no one could be sure that the same threats from the days of the Stamp Act would work this time. In October 1773, four cargo ships laden with tea—the
Dartmouth
, the
Eleanor
, the
Beaver
and the
William
—set out for Boston. On November 2 the North End Caucus met and voted “that the tea shipped by the East India Company
shall not be landed.” Once again, the patriots, led by John Hancock and Samuel Adams, rallied at the Liberty Tree and demanded that the five new representatives of East India appear and resign their commissions. When they didn’t obey, William Molineux took a delegation to their houses. But Hutchinson’s son-in-law dismissed him curtly.

Clearly this crisis was beyond the powers of the Boston mob. Throughout November, Hancock presided over Town Meetings, and each time Faneuil Hall was packed. But Benjamin Faneuil himself, another of the five East India agents, ignored a threatening letter slipped under his door. Far away from the public meetings, Samuel Adams and his trusted colleagues were preparing a more adventurous plan. “One cannot foresee events,” Adams wrote to a friend in London, “but from all observations I am able to make, my next letter will not be upon a
trifling subject.”

On Sunday, November 28, the
Dartmouth
arrived in Boston Harbor, carrying one hundred and fourteen chests of tea. Before dawn the next morning, a notice went up on trees and fences all over town: “Friends, Brethren, Countrymen—That worst of plagues, the detested tea shipped for this port by the East India
Company, is now arrived in this harbor. The hour of destruction, or manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny,
stares you in the face. . . .”

The poster called upon every friend of his country to hurry to Faneuil Hall upon the ringing of the bells at 9
A M
. It had become a ritual that the crowd would assemble first at Faneuil Hall. When that proved too small, the populace would be marched through the streets to the Old South Meeting-house. Thomas Hutchinson could anticipate every maneuver. He was sure Samuel Adams had never been in greater glory.

The audience on Monday morning exceeded five, even six, thousand. Bostonians were ignoring the restrictions that had limited the size of the Town Meetings. I may not own enough property to qualify to vote, men said, but my sons will, and I am entitled to protect their future. The crowd voted unanimously to approve the proposition
“that the tea should be returned to the place from whence it came, at all events.” The meeting also appointed a committee of twenty-five, including Henry Bass and the silversmith Paul Revere, to keep watch night and day at Griffin’s Wharf to make sure no tea was unloaded. The meeting stood adjourned until 9
A.M.
the next day. The East India Company’s five agents had become alarmed by the mounting hostility, and before sundown they withdrew to Castle William.

Tuesday morning, Thomas Hutchinson watched every prosperous merchant in Boston flock to the Old South Meeting-house. He still could not believe that they would press ahead in such madness, and he sent Sheriff Greenleaf to the meeting with a proclamation. Once inside the hall, Greenleaf asked for permission to read it. The crowd wasn’t in a mood for another lecture from Hutchinson, but Samuel Adams spoke on the sheriff’s behalf and he was allowed to proceed: “I warn, exhort and require you, and each of you, thus unlawfully assembled to disperse, and to surcease all further unlawful proceedings, at your utmost peril.”

When Greenleaf finished, the crowd gave a loud hiss, and Adams revealed the full fury of his hatred for Thomas Hutchinson. “He? He?” Adams demanded. “Is he that shadow of a man, scarce able to support his withered carcass or his hoary head! Is he a
representative of
majesty
?”

The meeting voted against dispersing. Hutchinson, who was being informed of events in the hall, noted with sour admiration
that no irregular or eccentric motion had been permitted from the floor. It all seemed planned by a few persons, the governor decided. Perhaps even by a single man.

—

One of the
Dartmouth’s
owners, a twenty-three-year-old Quaker named Francis Rotch, had come from his home on Nantucket to negotiate on behalf of his ship. The
Dartmouth
had arrived with other cargo besides tea, which the crew had been allowed to unload. At the Town Meeting, Rotch readily agreed to send his chests of tea back to England. But because his ship already had been entered at the Custom House, he couldn’t get clearance for its return trip until he paid the tea duty. And that duty couldn’t be collected until the tea had been unloaded. If he tried to run his ship out of the harbor without a pass, the British authorities would be justified in sinking the
Dartmouth
or confiscating its load. Increasing Rotch’s bind, the law gave him only twenty days to pay the tax or leave port. But he couldn’t sail without a pass.

With the days racing toward a confrontation on December 17, the
Eleanor
arrived at the harbor. The patriots ordered the second ship to join the
Dartmouth
at Griffin’s Wharf so that they needn’t keep a separate watch. Five days later, the brig
Beaver
approached port, but smallpox had broken out during the voyage, and the ship was moored at an outlying island for scrubbing and fumigating. An announcement came from New York that the local tea agents had refused all responsibility for any tea sent there, and a letter from Philadelphia said its agents had resigned outright. The letter also jeered at those Boston merchants who had violated nonimportation agreements in the past and asked whether they could be trusted in the current crisis.

On December 11, Samuel Adams summoned Francis Rotch before a town committee to ask why he had not honored his pledge to return the tea to England. Rotch claimed that it was impossible to get a pass. Samuel Adams advised him to try anyway.
“The ship must go,” said Adams. “The people of Boston and the neighboring towns absolutely require and expect it.” Adams himself and the two doctors, Warren and Church, would be among a committee of ten who would accompany Rotch to the Custom House. They would be on hand merely to witness his request, Adams said.

Making his plea to the customs collector four days later,
Francis Rotch saw the presence of the patriots differently. They were compelling him, he told Joseph Harrison, to demand a clearance for the
Dartmouth
with the tea still on board. The collector was unmoved. Rotch could have the pass only after his tea was unloaded. That was December 15. Rotch had two days before His Majesty’s warships, the
Active
and the
King Fisher
, would resolve his dilemma for him.

—

The patriots didn’t need handbills to draw a crowd on the morning of Thursday, December 16. Boston’s male population, along with two thousand onlookers from neighboring towns, were either jammed into the Old South or ignoring a cold rain and standing in the street, straining to hear at the windows. The patriots had learned that the fourth ship, the
William
, had been destroyed when it ran aground on Cape Cod, but that its cargo had been saved. The
Beaver
had been fumigated and had entered the port. There were now three tea ships at Griffin’s Wharf.

Rotch was told he must make one last appeal. He must go to the governor and ask Hutchinson for a pass out of Boston Harbor. Hutchinson was seven miles away at his country house in Milton. To allow Rotch ample time for the trip, the meeting adjourned until 3
P.M.

Hutchinson was braced for a showdown. He had written to Lord Dartmouth a day or two earlier that this was surely the time to put down Boston’s anarchy. The governor had researched legal precedents and found that provincial law prevented him from issuing a pass to a ship that had not been cleared by customs. Hutchinson believed that he had always upheld the law, even against the mob. Now he had the security not only of the law, but also of harbor guns from the king’s Navy. The only compromise he offered Rotch was that Admiral Montagu could tow the
Dartmouth
to Castle William. There, like the stamped paper of eight years ago, the tea could be stored until a more tranquil time.

Rotch protested that the mob would then turn its rage on him. He refused.

At that, Hutchinson made his denial official. To issue a pass would be to abet a violation of the Acts of Trade. Francis Rotch was left to ride back to Boston and report his failure to the Meeting.

The town had met again at three. When Rotch didn’t appear,
the leaders used the free time to invite speakers from neighboring towns to report on the way their communities were giving up tea altogether. That testimony provoked a resolution that any drinking of tea was pernicious, and towns were advised to appoint committees of inspectors to prevent its use.

After two hours of speeches, the crowd was restless and calling to dissolve the meeting. But in the Long Room over the Edes and Gill printing office, Samuel Adams had plotted his response to the governor’s certain refusal. He had consulted with Hancock, Molineux, Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Benjamin Church and a few dozen other patriots. The Meeting was persuaded to agree to an hour’s extension.

The Old South was lighted with candles when Francis Rotch returned to Boston shortly before the new deadline. He told his audience that the governor had denied his pass. A cry went up, “A mob! A mob!” But the louder cries for order prevailed. Two more questions were put to Rotch: Would he order his ship back to England with its cargo of tea? No, said Rotch, that would ruin him. Would he unload the tea? Yes, but only if the authorities insisted upon it and if he had no other way to protect himself.

Samuel Adams rose from his chair and said, “This meeting can do nothing more
to save the country.”

That was the signal. First came a war whoop from the gallery. Then suddenly forty or fifty men who had been lurking at the church door burst inside. They were dressed as Indians and were sounding their own war call. The Old South exploded. Three blocks away, families could hear the shouts—“The Mohawks are come!” “Hurrah for Griffin’s Wharf!” And, from those men who knew the plan,
“Boston harbor a teapot tonight!”

The meeting broke up with Hancock calling above the tumult, “Let every man
do what is right in his own eyes.”