—
When Thomas Hutchinson heard about the burning of the Gaspee, he said that if so flagrant an insult to England was ignored, all friends of the government would despair. But this indignity would surely rouse the British lion, which Hutchinson thought had been asleep these past four or five years. He decided that executing a few of the raiders would be the only effective way to prevent further attacks. At its last session, Parliament had extended the death penalty until a man could now be hanged for destroying so much as an oar on one of the king’s boats.
The alarm quickly reached London. The attorney general called the burning five times as serious as the Stamp Act protests. But revenge would not be easy. Hillsborough ordered Admiral Montagu to go to Rhode Island and arrest the raiders. Then, within a week, Hillsborough resigned as secretary of state for the American Department, and William Legge, second Earl of Dartmouth, replaced him. The change held up Montagu’s mission.
With London in confusion, the Rhode Island patriots sought the expert counsel of Samuel Adams. A group of men, including the deputy governor, wrote to ask him what to do next. Adams agreed with Thomas Hutchinson that the Gaspee’s burning should open some eyes. But Adams wrote that it was the American colonists, not the British, who had been “too long dozing upon the brink of ruin.” The Gaspee affair should unite them again. Colonists must realize that an attack on one province was an attack on them all.
After pondering further, Adams wrote to Darius Sessions again: “I have long feared this unhappy contest between Great Britain and America would end in rivers of blood. Should that be the case, America, I think, may wash her hands in innocence.” Still, Adams said, that dreadful calamity should be prevented if at all possible. He urged Sessions to dissuade Rhode Island’s governor from cooperating with the royal commission being established to investigate the burning. The governor’s participation would only make the inquiry legitimate. And Rhode Island should draft a circular letter to tell the other colonies its side of the affair.
For the Tories, the episode was winding down to an unsatisfactory end. The official inquiry established that many of the raiders seemed to be gentlemen, although no specific names were cited. Lieutenant Dudingston recovered from his wound and tried to send a gold buckle to the man who had saved his life. It went unclaimed. Admiral Montagu’s solution for quelling the lawless people of Rhode Island was to ask London to send him warships.
—
Ever since the collapse of the nonimportation agreements, Samuel Adams had been casting about for a new way to bolster patriot spirits. Reviving the circular letter was his best inspiration. On behalf of the town of Boston, he drafted a pamphlet that attacked Hutchinson for accepting his governor’s salary directly from the crown. Each town in the colony was asked to endorse it. At first Thomas Hutchinson scoffed at the pamphlet as a puny weapon. Even in Boston, the governor wrote, the Whigs had not been able to revive their mob, and now they were trying to correspond with towns around Massachusetts, “which is such a foolish scheme that they must necessarily make themselves ridiculous.”
For once, Tory optimism did not seem misplaced. James Warren reported to Samuel Adams from Plymouth about the neighboring towns he had been canvassing. “They are dead,” Warren said, “and the dead can’t be raised without a miracle.”
“Nil desperandum,” Samuel Adams chided him. Never despair. “That is a motto for you and for me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will rekindle it.”
What did it matter that the Tories were laughing at their efforts? Samuel Adams said he knew they would, but gradually his faith in the tactic was justified. Endorsements of Boston’s position began to come in from the western towns—from South Hadley, Petersham, Leicester and Lenox; from Essex, Lynn, Marblehead. Even from Plymouth, where James Warren had lost hope. From Framingham and Medford. From Concord. Until more than a third of the two hundred and sixty towns in the province were allying themselves with Samuel Adams’ position.
On March 12, 1773, the House of Burgesses in Virginia named eleven members to maintain a correspondence with the sister colonies. Four months after Samuel Adams had linked the towns of Massachusetts, the colony of Virginia was expanding his plan into a full-fledged network across America. It was made only of paper, but Adams had forged a union.
—
One day in London, Benjamin Franklin was reviewing America’s affairs with a British friend. Franklin still expected a reconciliation between Britain and the colonies, and he had been angered when the Ministry in London sent troops to Boston. The other man told Franklin he was wrong. All the errors of recent years, he said, had been urged on Hillsborough and now Dartmouth by high-ranking American officials. Franklin claimed not to believe it. To convince him, the friend returned a few days later with a stack of letters.
They had been written between 1768 and 1771 to Thomas Whatley, one of the chief authors of the Stamp Act. Fourteen were from Thomas Hutchinson, and several had come from Andrew Oliver at the time he accepted the post of stamp master. Other Tories had also written frankly and unguardedly to keep Whatley informed of events in the colony. Hutchinson’s correspondence offered nothing that he hadn’t already said publicly many times, but when Franklin saw six of his letters he grasped their value at once. He got permission to send the originals to Boston, but the man who had provided them made certain stipulations: Whatley’s name was to be erased from each letter; no copies were to be made in America; and the letters were to be shown only to a few patriot leaders and then returned to England. Franklin insisted that his only motive in sending off the packet was to ease the bad feeling between the Americans and the London Ministry. The letters reached Thomas Cushing, the Massachusetts House speaker, at the end of March 1773.
History was repeating itself; the patriots remembered the time, four years earlier, when Francis Bernard’s letters had helped to destroy him. But then Edes and Gill had been able to publish them. Cushing wrote to Franklin that if Hutchinson’s letters were to prove equally damaging, they must be released. Franklin consulted with his friend and replied that the letters still couldn’t be copied or published, but they could be kept in America for as long as they were useful, and they could be shown to anyone.
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Rural life had palled quickly for John Adams, and he had returned to politics. Making the rounds of Superior Court, he took along Hutchinson’s letters and let them be read in the towns beyond Boston. As early as 1768 Samuel Adams had been suggesting that Hutchinson was engaged in a secret correspondence aimed at destroying America’s liberties. Now, although Adams didn’t have evidence, he had raw material that could be passed off as proof. But because of the restrictions on the letters, Adams didn’t believe they were proving useful, and he felt it was his duty to resolve the dilemma.
Over the next month, the patriots hinted that the letters would bring many dark things to light. The Massachusetts Spy, a new Whig newspaper underwritten largely by John Hancock, reported on June 3, 1773, that the amazing discoveries in the letters would make tyrants tremble. A week later, Samuel Adams announced that copies of the letters had arrived in Boston independently of those that Franklin had sent. To buttress that claim, John Hancock swore on the House floor that someone had passed this second set of letters to him on Boston Common. No one was fooled, least of all Benjamin Franklin. The copies were a ruse, he said, concocted to let the House break its pledge to him.
On June 15 the letters were published and went on sale, and Americans learned no more than what Hutchinson had said six months earlier during a debate with the legislature—that he believed that a colony because of its distance from the parent state could not enjoy every liberty of the citizens at home. But somehow that same point became far more sinister in a private letter, and Hutchinson was burned in effigy as far away as Philadelphia.
Writing as “Novanglus” in the Boston Gazette, John Adams denounced the governor as a vile serpent. In arguing for any abridgement of English liberties i
n America, Adams wrote, Hutchinson must surely be mad. Josiah Quincy, ignoring his earlier defense of the British soldiers, spoke now of their victims. He called Hutchinson “the man against whom the blood of our slaughtered brethren cries from the ground.”
Governor Hutchinson stood by helplessly as his letters were woven with those of other Tories into irrefutable proof of a conspiracy. Throughout America he was being accused of promoting views that he had never expressed, and his explanation of the limits on colonial freedom became, to readers, a call for England to deprive America of all her rights. That last slander, Hutchinson decided, was as though the patriots had accused King David of saying, “There is no God.” But what court could clear his name? The Massachusetts House was demanding that Hutchinson and his lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver, be removed from their posts. That petition would go to the Privy Council in London, and Hutchinson could hope that its members would absolve him of the patriots’ charges, but the investigation might take months.
Hutchinson wrote to Lord Dartmouth, asking for a leave of six to nine months. If necessary, he would sail to England during that time to defend his reputation. But he was sixty-two years old and prone to seasickness, and he hoped to be spared the voyage. As he waited for a response, communication with England seemed to be slower than ever. The summer passed without Hutchinson receiving word on either the Massachusetts petition or his request for a leave. Cursed on every side in a colony he still loved, the governor waited for instructions.
—
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, a
nd 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.
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