The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (51 page)

towns; by this time the deadline for payment of duties was three days hence. When the decision was made to destroy the tea if it were not cleared for return to England is not clear. On December 14 another great mass meeting instructed Rotch to request clearance for the return voyage and sent ten men to accompany him as he made the rounds at Customs. The next day the collector, Richard Harrison, son of Joseph and one of the victims of the
Liberty
riot in 1768, refused clearance, and on the day following, December 16, Governor Hutchinson declined to issue a pass for sailing by the Castle. The ship had not been cleared by Customs, the governor observed in turning Rotch down; but if Rotch wanted naval protection the governor would request it for him from Admiral Montagu. Thinking of his ship and cargo, Rotch decided he did not want protection.

By the time Rotch reported his failure to the meeting in the Old South, it was nearly six in the evening -- and nearly dark. There he found a gathering that knew it could wait no longer. After satisfying itself that Rotch would not return the tea and that he might attempt to unload it should the public authorities require him to do so, the meeting heard Sam Adams announce that there was nothing more they could do to save their country. There was, of course, and Adams's words signaled what should be done. War whoops greeted his announcement as the crowd flooded out of the meetinghouse, pouring along the waterfront and backing up on Griffin's Wharf where
Dartmouth, Eleanor,
and
Beaver
lay, the last two recent arrivals and, like the first, with tea aboard. About fifty men "dressed in the Indian manner," faces darkened and bodies wrapped in blankets, broke off from the crowd and set to work, brewing tea in Boston harbor. The men performed their mission with dispatch, hoisting the casks of tea on deck, smashing them open, and dumping the tea over the side. The water around the ships was soon covered, and before morning some of the tea had floated as far as Dorchester Neck. The ships themselves were not damaged. A newspaper reported a week later that a padlock belonging to a captain was broken, apparently by mistake, for another was soon sent to him. In all 90,000 pounds of East India Company tea, valued at 110,000, was destroyed, a small price, these men would have said, to pay for liberty.
¹¹

Who did the actual work of jettisoning the tea cannot be known. The crowd may have included a fairly broad spectrum of Boston's population and probably farmers from nearby villages.
For the resistance to

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the Tea Act drew on the "people" in a way nonimportation had not. Merchants had contributed much of the leadership in nonimportation even though lawyers and other professionals had forced the pace. Destruction of property left men from all these groups uneasy, but they had seen the matter through. They were called the "rabble" by Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the American Colonies, who, far removed in England, could not imagine the mood -- a fear of tyranny -- that compelled otherwise sober citizens into an act of rebellion.
¹²

An official report of the Tea Party from Thomas Hutchinson reached England on January 27, 1774. By that day the news was at least a week old, for a ship carrying the story had arrived on the 19th; and on January 25 the
Polly
with the tea intended for Philadelphia sailed into Gravesend. Soon a number of witnesses arrived to be interrogated by the government, Francis Rotch, owner of the
Dartmouth,
among them.
¹³

As further information seeped in about resistance to the Tea Act, the conviction grew that something had to be done about the colonies or they would become totally independent. The common way of putting this theme was to argue that if the supremacy of Crown and Parliament were not asserted it would be lost, as though -- to use the language the king's ministers favored -- the father must discipline the rebellious child or abandon him forever. Such pronouncements were made in an atmosphere already darkened by recent events -- the publication in Boston of Hutchinson's letters to Whately, the petition from the Massachusetts House requesting the removal of Hutchinson and Lt. Governor Andrew Oliver, and the autumn disorders throughout America.

The ferocity of feeling toward America was exposed before any proposals for action could be made. The exposure occurred in the cockpit of the Privy Council two days after official news of the Tea Party arrived. The occasion was a hearing on the petition from Massachusetts asking that Hutchinson and Oliver be removed from office. As agent for the Massachusetts legislature Benjamin Franklin was ordered to appear.
At

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the hearing he discovered that the ministry had decided to discredit him and relieve itself of accumulated frustration over American defiance of its authority. To do its work the ministry chose Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general, skillful in the use of invective and without scruples in its employment. For over an hour Franklin stood in silence in a room packed with the rulers of Britain while Wedderburn reviled him. The petition was barely mentioned; Franklin's character, supposedly lost in depravity, was lashed as Wedderburn rehearsed for the committee the story of Franklin's part in obtaining Thomas Hutchinson's letters. At the end Franklin, impassive in his old-fashioned full-bottomed wig and his suit of figured Manchester velvet, left the chamber knowing that more than the petition had been lost.
¹⁴

If self-restraint was lacking in Wedderburn and in the ministers who allowed him to go on unrebuked, so also were the good faith and respect which might have permitted the government to examine American grievances seriously. But the shock and revulsion felt at the destruction of the tea was too great for a detached review of differences over policy and, more importantly, the nature of the constitution itself. Even staunch friends of the colonies refused to defend the Tea Party. There was no way it could be justified, Rockingham insisted; and Chatham said simply that it was "criminal." After a talk with General Gage, who was in England on leave, the king recommended that force be used to bring the colonies into proper dependence. North caught the mood exactly a few weeks later when he declared that "we are not entering into a dispute between internal and external taxes, not between taxes laid for the purpose of revenues and taxes laid for the regulation of trade, not between representation and taxation, or legislation and taxation; but we are now to dispute whether we have, or have not any authority in that country."
¹⁵

This description of American affairs admitted of no compromise. On the day of Franklin's ordeal in the cockpit, the cabinet decided that action must be taken to reduce the colonies to a state of dependence or, as some imagined, to restore the sway Parliament had once enjoyed in America. The cabinet which backed this policy had not changed much since North had taken over from Grafton. North still led as chancellor of the Exchequer and first lord of the Treasury.
He was, however,

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no stronger within himself than before. A fine helmsman in calm waters, he lacked the grip for heavy weather. Nor did he have the anger or the intensity to force through measures to smash American self-government. But neither did he have the will to stop those who wanted hard reprisals, for North too believed in Parliamentary supremacy, a belief which in this case disarmed him. North's step-brother, Dartmouth, had become American secretary in 1772. Like North he was a moderate in colonial matters, but he too believed in the supremacy of Parliament and felt no disposition to slow its exercise. Three sterner spirits in the cabinet demanded measures which would leave no one in doubt as to where sovereignty lay. They were Suffolk, Secretary of the Northern Department, an old Grenvillite and a man of considerable ability; Gower, president of the Council, and Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, both Bedfordites. Of the two, Sandwich may have had more personal force; he was a conventional politician but a superbly capable minister. Rockford and Baron Apsley did not count for much in the cabinet, but both supported coercive action against the colonies.

With this alignment the decision to take action came easily. Still, a month passed before the ministerial wheels began turning. During this time Dartmouth explored the possibility of limiting the government's response to punishment of the leaders of the Tea Party. He first obtained a ruling from Attorney General Thurlow and Solicitor General Wedderburn that the Bostonians had committed treason and then awaited evidence that would justify bringing them to trial. After a month of taking depositions from witnesses and deliberating on the question, Thurlow and Wedderburn replied -- to the irritation of Dartmouth and the kingthat the evidence was not strong enough to warrant prosecution of the ringleaders in Boston.
¹⁶

While the law officers were considering the case, the cabinet had decided to close the port of Boston and to move the provincial government to a less explosive site. Although the legal experts agreed that the port could be shut up by executive action, the government decided to avoid asserting the prerogative in colonial affairs and to ask Parliament to do the job. Parliament was more than willing: North announced the government's plans on March 14, and four days later presented the Boston Port bill to Commons. The bill proposed that Boston be closed to all ocean-borne trade except for certain coastal vessels which would be permitted under tight supervision to enter with food and fuel.
The

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port would remain closed until the king decided to reopen it, and he was not authorized to act until the East India Company had been fully compensated by the town for the destruction of the tea.
¹⁷

The debate on the bill was not the most distinguished ever heard in the Commons. North explained that the purposes of the bill were to punish Boston, get the East India Company's money back, and secure the port for business undisturbed by riots and mobs. No one seems to have opposed these pieties, though Dowdeswell said that the government was recommending action without bearing Boston's side. Most members apparently thought that they had heard quite enough from Boston, and even the old friends of the colonies praised the bill, Isaac Barré, for example, saying of it, "I like it, adopt, and embrace it cheerfully for its moderation."
¹⁸

Moderate or not, the bill moved through the Commons at an immoderate speed. The House did not even bother to divide at the second reading and immediately afterwards brushed aside Rose Fuller's amendment that Boston be fined rather than shut up. On March 25 the bill received its third reading and was sent on to the Lords, where it was quickly approved. By the end of the month the king had given his assent -and Boston by law was to be closed to all commerce as of June 15.