Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  The “powaws” and “whistles” were of course the preliminary calls to an action that has filled so many of pages history since. George Robert Hewes was one of those involved in the “hideous yelling,” and he recounted the events that followed with the clarity of a born storyteller.

  As Adams and the others tried to reestablish order inside the hall, Hewes and somewhere between sixty and a hundred others set out upon other business. “I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian,” Hewes said, “equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin’s wharf.”

  As he hurried through the darkening streets toward the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, Hewes recalled, he “fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination.”

  At the wharf the men were divided into three parties. “We were immediately ordered by the respective commanders to board all the ships at the same time, which we promptly obeyed,” Hewes said. “The commander of the division to which I belonged, as soon as we were on board the ship appointed me boatswain, and ordered me to go to the captain and demand of him the keys to the hatches and a dozen candles. I made the demand accordingly, and the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging.”

  The propriety and calm with which events unfolded from there on were echoed by both sides. The boarders were ordered to open the hatches of the ships, remove the chests of tea, and toss them into the harbor, and Hewes reported that the men were happy to comply, “first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water.

  “In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thus broken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time.” Hewes added, “We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.”

  According to Hewes’s account, the assault concluded with the same surreal quality with which it had begun: “We then quietly retired to our several places of residence, without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates; nor do I recollect of our having had the knowledge of the name of a single individual concerned in that affair. . . . There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.”

  Hewes was a Boston shoemaker who kept the details of the event to himself for almost fifty years, but his account squares with what has become legend, not only for the magnitude of the actions but for the deliberate manner in which they were carried out. Governor Hutchinson marveled at the efficiency of the operation: scarcely was the meeting at Old South dissolved, he said, when “the body of people repaired to the wharf, and surrounded the immediate actors, as a guard and security, until they had finished their work. In two or three hours, they hoisted out of the holds of the ships, three hundred and forty-two chests of tea, and emptied them into the sea.”

  Even John Adams, no advocate of mob action, wrote in his diary the next day, “There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last action of the patriots, that I greatly admire. . . . It must have so important consequences that I consider it an epoch in history.”

  Despite the mighty implications of the event, the atmosphere in Boston immediately afterward was preternaturally calm. There seemed to be no need for further action. There was only uncertainty as to how Great Britain would respond. As John Adams put it, “What measures will the Ministry take in consequence of this? Will they resent it? Will they dare to resent it? Will they punish us? How? By quartering troops upon us? By annulling our charter? By laying on more duties? By restraining our trade? By sacrifice of individuals? Or how?”

  Certainly many Britons resented the actions of the colony’s governor in the matter. In the opinion of a number of his critics, had Hutchinson simply issued the permit for the Dartmouth to leave port, the entire incident could have been averted. But the governor was resolute to the end. He was bound, as all the king’s governors were, he insisted, “to observe the acts of trade,” and he acted as he should have in refusing to issue an unlawful permit. As to the destruction of the tea itself, he had no means of preventing it. There were no longer sufficient troops stationed at the castle to allow a deployment at the docks, and even if he had sent armed soldiers to the scene, the catastrophe sure to have ensued would have been far worse than what had transpired.

  What had in fact occurred was the destruction of about £9,000 or more of excellent tea, believed now to have come from the bohea-producing region of China and to be worth $1 million or so in modern tender. But the damages went far beyond the monetary. As Hutchinson himself admitted, a powerful precedent was established and the previous rule of law subverted evermore. Protesters had destroyed private property in the service of their subversive aims, and little was to be done about it. Offering a reward for the identification of the perpetrators would be a joke. And no grand jury of the people would charge a participant anyway, for the actions taken would never be considered a crime.

  John Adams was not alone in ascribing great importance to the matter. Hutchinson called the events of December 16, which would not be referred to as a “tea party” for half a century or more, “the boldest stroke which had yet been struck in America. . . . The thing was done: there was no way of nullifying it. Their leaders feared no consequences.” In the end analysis, the governor declared that the people had “gone too far to recede, and that an open and general revolt must be the consequences.” The best he could come up with as a response was to dissolve the colony’s assembly for a month or more. As he put it, “No advantage could be expected from its sitting.”

  Certainly the ripple effects of the riot were evident at once. Samuel Adams compiled an account of the events for immediate circulation and dispatched the Boston silversmith Paul Revere, a dependable messenger for the Committee of Correspondence, to ride at once to New York and Philadelphia with the news. It was Adams’s position that he and “the people” had exercised every means at their disposal to see the tea returned safely but had been foiled by the designs of the governor, the consignees, and the customs council. At that final meeting, attended by as many as seven thousand men, including citizens of towns twenty miles away, frustrations had unavoidably boiled over, and in less than four hours, Boston harbor had become one giant teapot.

  Furthermore, the leader of the Sons of Liberty in Boston could not have been happier. “You cannot imagine the height of joy that sparkles in the eyes and animates the countenances as well as the hearts of all we meet on this occasion,” Adams wrote to his compatriot Richard Henry Lee in Virginia, “excepting the disappointed, disconcerted Hutchinson and his tools.”

  Adams was convinced that what happened in Boston was the event needed to unify the colonies once and for all, and it seemed that he was right. On December 25, the British ship Polly entered the Delaware River bound for Philadelphia, carrying nearly seven hundred chests of tea, twice the amount that had been dumped in Boston harbor. As the Philadelphia Gazette reported on January 3, 1774, townsmen had intercepted the ship at Chester, a few miles south of Philadelphia, forcing the captain to tie it off and accompany them to a meeting of thousands of citizens that spilled onto the common outside the state house on December 27. There, resolutions had been passed declaring that the tea aboard the Polly would not be permitted to land and the captain had been handed this message:

  What think you, Captain, of a Halter around your Neck—ten Gallons of liquid Tar decanted on your Pate—wi
th the Feathers of a dozen wild Geese laid over that to enliven your Appearance? Only think seriously of this—and fly to the Place from whence you came—fly without Hesitation—without the Formality of a Protest—and above all, Captain Ayres, let us advise you to fly without the wild Geese Feathers.

  If the captain thought at all, he did not think long. Shortly he was back on the Polly and bound for London, all thought of landing his cargo gone.

  In New York, meantime, word that a tea ship was on its way led to a formal reorganization of the Sons of Liberty there. On December 16, committee members issued a broadside that was distributed about the city, calling for a meeting at City Hall on the following day to undertake “business of the utmost importance.” Not only fellow Sons but “every other friend to the liberties and trade of America” was encouraged to attend.

  At that meeting, which was well attended in spite of bitter weather, as John Holt reported in his Journal, John Lamb read aloud several letters from fellow committees in Boston and Philadelphia. Though they had not yet heard what their fellow activists had achieved in Boston harbor on the previous evening, those in attendance in New York voted to appoint a permanent fifteen-person Committee of Correspondence to communicate with the other colonies “on the subject of the dutied Tea.”

  Lamb then introduced a series of resolutions under the banner of “The Association of the Sons of Liberty of New York,” dated November 29, 1773. The preamble of the document sketched out the history of the duties levied on tea in the colonies and the efforts of the British government to bail out the distressed East India Company. It had all devolved in a melancholy way: the company had chartered a number of ships to bring tea to the colonies, “which may be hourly expected, to make an important trial of our virtue,” the document continued. “If they succeed in the sale of that tea, we shall have no property that we can call our own, and then we may bid adieu to American liberty.”

  To help prevent such a calamity, it was resolved that anyone importing tea into New York, so long as the duties were imposed, would be deemed “an enemy to the liberties of America.” Anyone assisting in the landing or storage of that tea would be similarly regarded, as would anyone who sold or bought it. Furthermore, the Sons’ declaration stated, any attempts to disguise the process by arranging for pre- or postpayment of the duties in England would not be tolerated. Finally, the document stated “that whoever shall transgress any of these resolutions, we will not deal with, or employ, or have any connection with him.”

  Hardly had those resolves been agreed to by those in attendance when an emissary of the governor arrived with a proposal. Since he had been informed that indeed the tea was on its way, the governor wondered if it might be agreeable to unload and store the tea in the fort while it awaited final distribution to its various consignees? After reading this message to the meeting, Lamb glanced about the crowded hall to ask, “Gentlemen, is this satisfactory to you?” The answer was of course a resounding no, and, following an equally vigorous statement of resolve that no tea should ever be landed under the terms of the Tea Act, the group voted to adjourn “till the arrival of the Tea Ship” and that meantime news of their resolves be broadcast to the other colonies.

  In effect, then, the Sons of Liberty became the official voice of the people of New York. And when Paul Revere rode in shortly thereafter with news of the events in Boston harbor, Lamb and Sears were further heartened. A particularly enthusiastic subset of their associates formed a group they called “the Mohawks,” promising to do the same as had been done in Boston with any tea ship that found its way to the New York docks.

  Whereas Boston, Philadelphia, and New York kept tea away from their ports, the situation played out somewhat differently in Charleston. As the South-Carolina Gazette reported in its issue of December 6, the British ship London had arrived earlier in the week carrying 274 chests of tea. Christopher Gadsden and his followers immediately circulated handbills calling for a meeting to consider a response at the Exchange building on December 4. So many people packed the hall that the main support timbers of the floor were said to have cracked and threatened to give way.

  No one was hurt, however; the greater injury accrued to merchants of the town, who argued that since there was tea aboard the London that had been ordered by merchants who had chosen not to join the nonimportation boycott prior to the passage of the Tea Act, they retained every right to accept it, and that, furthermore, there was no valid reason to prevent the off-loading of the tea that had been shipped by the East India Company.

  Following two further meetings, the coalition between the planters and the mechanics engineered by Gadsden prevailed, resolving that the East India tea could not be landed and that its consignees should immediately resign their positions. The so-called private teas were permitted to be off-loaded, but Captain Alexander Curling of the London was instructed to take the British East India Company’s tea back from whence it came. All the wrangling took time, however, and by midnight on December 21, Curling’s ship was still tied off at the Charleston docks.

  With the deadline for payment of duty on the East India Company tea now passed, the loyalist governor, William Bull, ordered the cargo seized and placed in the government’s warehouse. Though the depth of passion expressed during the debates on the matter suggested that the citizens of Charleston might hold their own tea party, the dualistic nature of the opposition there dictated otherwise. The planters were not about to take to the streets over the matter, and the mechanics were not sufficiently galvanized to engineer such an operation on their own.

  In the end, the customs master reported that the seizure and storage operations had taken place without incident. As the Gazette described it, there had never been “an Instance here, of so great a Number of Packages, being taken out of any Vessel, and thus disposed of, in so short a Time.” The Earl of Dartmouth wrote Governor Bull to commend him on his actions, noting that although what had taken place in Charleston was “not equal in criminality” to what had happened in Boston and Philadelphia, the affair could be considered by the Crown “in no other light than that of a most unwarrantable Insult to the authority of this Kingdom.” Though his lordship closed by assuring Bull that it was the king’s intention “to pursue such measures as shall be effectual for securing the Dependence of the Colonies upon this Kingdom,” the East India Company tea never would be distributed to the consignees. It would languish in the government’s warehouse for more than three years, after which it was finally auctioned off in support of the revolutionary government.

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  Intolerable

  Though Samuel Adams might have seen the destruction of the tea in Boston as the event that would once and for all unite the colonies in opposition to the Crown, the immediate repercussions were not entirely favorable for the radical movement. Though most of the provinces—as well as forty other towns in Massachusetts colony—joined in declaring a boycott on dutied tea, the incident alarmed a number of the merchant class, especially outside the bounds of the Massachusetts seat of government.

  Though the events of December 16 established a precedent for the destruction of private property in the service of a goal deemed worthy by proponents of political change, it was not the sort of thing that could easily be embraced by men whose livelihoods depended upon the orderly exchange of goods. The town of Marshfield, Massachusetts, actually condemned the violent acts in Boston and called for the conviction of those responsible. For similar reasons, the town of Littleton disbanded its Committee of Correspondence. Neither could Adams convince the nearby province of Connecticut to adopt resolutions favorable to the cause.

  If only Parliament had been content to make a more reasoned response to the violence in Boston, a natural antipathy toward violence and mob rule in the colonies might have corrected the course toward independence, for a time at least. But when the news reached London on January 20, 1774, the results were predictable, with some calling for immediate military action against the colony.

&nb
sp; On February 4, King George, after conferring with General Gage, recently returned from the colonies, wrote Lord North to suggest that it was time to end their tolerant stance. Gage was ready to return to the colonies “at a day’s notice” and impose some much-needed order, the king assured North. “He says they will be lyons, whilst we are lambs; but if we take the resolute part, they will undoubtedly be very meek. He thinks . . . four regiments . . . if sent to Boston are sufficient to prevent any disturbance.”

  The king urged North to meet with Gage and hear for himself the general’s sentiments on how Massachusetts might best be dealt with. The king went on to lament that the repeal of the Stamp Act had probably been an unfortunate mistake. “All men seem now to feel that the fatal compliance of 1766 has encouraged the Americans annually to encrease in their pretensions to that thorough independency . . . which is quite subversive of the obedience which a colony owes to its mother country.” It was a statement attesting to the condescending attitude toward the colonies that many of the king’s subjects continued to hold.

  Still, overt military action seemed impractical to many Britons. To begin with, there were only 25,000 soldiers in the king’s army in 1774, and it was thought that the Americans might muster as many as 100,000 troops of their own. In addition, the massive expense and logistic challenges of supply and maintenance of a fighting force thousands of miles across an ocean were the reasons why England had gotten itself into this position to begin with.

  In the end, North determined to craft a set of punitive legislative measures, known as the Coercive Acts in England and termed the Intolerable Acts in the colonies, that would punish Bostonians and show the rest of the colonies that England meant business. “The Americans have tarred and feathered your subjects, plundered your merchants, burnt your ships, and denied all obedience to your laws and authority,” he said, introducing the measures in Parliament, “yet so clement and so long forbearing has our conduct been that it is incumbent on us now to take a different course. Whatever may be the consequences, we must risk something; if we do not, all is over. . . . It is political necessity.”