Penguin History of the United States of America (30 page)

Dr Franklin, writing to the Speaker of Massachusetts Bay, sounded the alarm. It was, he thought, a plot to bribe the Americans to acquiesce in the tea-duty and thus submit to the principle of Parliamentary taxation. Bitterly giving vent to a long-mounting disgust with the English, he commented

They have no idea that any people act from any other principle but that of interest; and they believe, that 3d. in a lb. of tea… is sufficient to overcome all the patriotism of an American.

The British government had made no such calculation, but should have known that this was how its actions would appear, even to an experienced man like Franklin. As the news of the Act and of the East India Company’s plans crossed the Atlantic, alarm spread and resistance mounted. The
patriot party seized the opportunity to rally opinion on yet another great symbolic issue. In October, as inter-colonial committees of correspondence were set up in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, Philadelphia and New York passed resolutions denouncing the Tea Act. But as usual it was Massachusetts which took the lead.

That summer Sam Adams had at last effected the political destruction of Thomas Hutchinson, for Dr Franklin had sent him ill-gotten copies of some letters that the Governor had written to England several years before, containing opinions that, with judicious twisting, could be made to prove that Hutchinson was an enemy to his country. The twisting was done, the letters, against Franklin’s wishes, published, and the Governor was condemned by all sections of Massachusetts. His popularity vanished for ever. He was thus helpless to check the tide of events now rushing to a climax.

On 21 October the Massachusetts correspondence committee called for common action by all the colonies against the Company. Boston town-meeting (assembling unofficially) passed anti-Tea Act resolutions on 5 November. The first tea-ship arrived on 28 November, and the next day the town heard the first suggestion that her cargo should be dumped in the harbour. There followed nearly three weeks of bitter contention. Under the laws of trade the tea could not be sent back to England, as Sam Adams wanted, without a clearance from the Governor, and that clearance Hutchinson refused to give, since the re-exportation duty had not been paid and he would not let himself be forced into acquiescing in Adams’s scheme. Besides, he thought he had the upper hand: if the duty had not been paid by 17 December, the tea could legally be seized by the customs, landed and sold. At length, on 16 December, at a mass-meeting in Faneuil Hall, John Rowe, one of Sam Adams’s associates, asked pointedly, ‘Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?’ In the first gloom of a winter evening, after candles were lit, news came in that Hutchinson was still adamant, and cries for ‘A mob! A mob!’ went up. Adams came forward and announced that ‘This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.’ It was a signal, taken up with a war-whoop in the gallery, which in turn was answered from the door by a band of men roughly disguised as Indians. ‘Boston harbour a teapot tonight!’ they shouted, and a huge crowd rushed down to the waterfront, the ‘Indians’ in the lead. The harbour was now bathed in bright moonlight. The three tea-ships were boarded, the 342 or so tea-chests were hauled on deck and broken open, and the tea was poured into the dark waters, nearly choking them (it was low tide). No other damage was done, and the Tea Party ended with a triumphal march through Boston to fife and drum.

It was the apotheosis of the Boston mob, and Sam Adams’s masterpiece. Many of the ‘Indians’ were his followers from the North End of Boston – sailors, shipwrights and other artisans. Others had come from the allied Massachusetts towns, summoned, no doubt, through his committees of
correspondence. He was in ecstasies at his success. ‘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,’ he wrote a few days later, ‘excepting the disappointed, disconsolated Hutchinson and his tools.’ The disconsolated Hutchinson, in his
History of Massachusetts
, was to call it the ‘boldest stroke which had yet been struck in America’; and the other Adams, who had been inexplicably absent from Boston during the culminating stage, exulted in his diary:

This is the most magnificent moment of all. There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last effort of the patriots, that I greatly admire. The people should never rise, without doing something to be remembered – something notable and striking.

The news flew through the colonies, rousing and uniting patriot Americans and establishing the unquestioned leadership of Massachusetts. Further resistance to the Tea Act was greatly encouraged. Ten days later Philadelphia returned its tea-ships to England; tea was landed at Charles Town but not distributed; on 9 March 1774 Boston destroyed thirty more chests; on 22 April New York city also had a tea party.

The affront to the royal government was staggering. The Tea Act had been nullified and the legitimate Governor spurned, but the matter went deeper than that. Said John Adams,

The question is whether the destruction of this tea was necessary? I apprehend it was absolutely and indispensably so… To let it be landed, would be giving up the principle of taxation by Parliamentary authority, against which the Continent has struggled for 10 years.

Another question was developing from the old one: not Parliamentary authority to tax, but Parliamentary authority at all was in question. Challenged by Hutchinson (‘I know of no line that can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies’) the Massachusetts House of Representatives had already claimed, less than a year before, that the American colonies, by virtue of their charters, were ‘distinct States from the mother country’, independent of Parliament though owing allegiance to the King. Even this theory could hardly justify the assault on the property of the King’s subjects in the East India Company.

The news of the Tea Party was published in London on 20 January 1774, and the majority in Parliament instantly turned to the question of how to chastise, once and for all, the insurgent province and ‘secure the dependence of the colonies on the mother country’. It was not so much a calculated response as a loss of temper. For the desire to punish Massachusetts had been felt, probably with increasing power, at least since 1768, when Lord North had observed that some of Boston’s actions had approached treason,
when Lord Hillsborough had proposed the alteration of the Massachusetts Charter, and when Lord Camden, a wise friend of the colonies, had held that the Townshend duties ought to be repealed everywhere, except perhaps in Massachusetts Bay, to bring that unruly province to heel. Nothing had since mitigated British hostility. The Tea Party was the last straw. The British now blamed themselves for having repealed the Stamp Act. In their own unphilosophical way they had come to see the full, fatal implication of that abdication. It had been, they decided, an act of weakness. They were now resolved on very different measures. It had become a duty to crush Boston. Lord North ranted,

I would rather all the Hamilcars and all the Hannibals that Boston ever bred; all the Hancocks, and all the sad-Cocks, and sad dogs of Massachusetts Bay; all the heroes of tar and feathers, and the champions, maimers of unpatriotic horses, mares and mules, were led up to the altar, on to the Liberty Tree, there to be exalted and rewarded according to their merit or demerit [he meant hanging] than that Britain should disgrace herself by receding from her just authority.

So the Coercive Acts (to be known in America as the Intolerable Acts) began to make their way through Parliament. The first, the Boston Port Act (signed by the King on 31 March), provided that the port of Boston should be closed to trade until the townsmen had paid compensation for the tea to the East India Company. The next two Acts were processed more or less simultaneously, becoming law on 20 May. Of these, the Act for regulating the government of Massachusetts made the provincial council appointive, as it was in most of the other colonies,
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rather than elective; gave the Governor sole power to dismiss inferior judges, sheriffs and other lesser officers of the law; gave him powers to control and restrict the activities of the town-meetings; even the institution of the jury was tampered with. The Act for the impartial administration of justice tried to protect revenue officers and other servants of the crown in Massachusetts: it provided that if they were accused of capital crimes in the performance of their official duties, they might be tried in another colony or in Great Britain, at the discretion of the Governor. Next came the Quartering Act, signed by the King on 2 June. This attempted to settle an ancient controversy by empowering the Governor to quarter troops more or less wherever he saw fit. Finally, on 22 June, the King signed the Quebec Act. This measure, which was long overdue, was an honest attempt to settle the future status of the French-speaking inhabitants of Canada: its chief features were that it set up a non-elective legislative council to make laws; extended the authority of Quebec into the Ohio and Illinois regions, where there were already some French communities; and recognized the traditional rights of the Catholic Church in Canada. The Act was not designed to be one of the
Intolerable Acts, but the accident of its timing and the unpopularity of its contents in the thirteen colonies
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made them lump it in with the rest. To enforce the new laws, Governor Hutchinson was to be replaced by General Gage, long an advocate of stricter measures towards the colonies. He had boasted that he could restore order in Massachusetts with four regiments. He was now given the chance to try, and landed at Boston on 17 May. A fortnight later Thomas Hutchinson left for an exile in England from which he was never to return.

The opposition had tried in vain to deter North from these, he hoped, devastating counter-moves. Fox hammered, glittering Burke ridiculed a government which had contrived that ‘so paltry a sum as threepence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe’. ‘Why will you punish Boston alone?’ asked Dowdeswell. ‘Did not other towns send your tea back to England, and refuse the landing?’ The former Governor of West Florida warned that the Port Act would be ‘productive of a general confederation to resist the power of this country’. It was no good. Opinion was immovable, and Franklin despaired of colonial petitions: ‘The violent destruction of the tea seems to have united all parties against our province.’ It was too true.

As usual, the news was slow to leak over the Atlantic. It was greeted with rage and astonishment when it did arrive, but with no weakening. On the contrary, the ranks of the radicals were much increased, for now it seemed clear that they were right, and that there was afoot, as young Thomas Jefferson of Virginia put it, ‘a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery’. Such was the universal language. It was used in connection with the Intolerable Acts by John Dickinson and George Washington as well as by all hotter heads. Andrew Eliot wrote of ‘a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism’. ‘The Parliament of England have declared war against the town of Boston,’ one patriotic young Virginian, Landon Carter, confided to his diary. ‘… This is but a prelude to destroy the liberties of America.’ So thought the
Boston Evening Post
, commenting that ‘It is not the rights of Boston only, but of
ALL AMERICA
which are now struck at. Not the merchants only but the farmer, and every order of men who inhabit this noble continent.’ All America seemed to agree. In March the men of Massachusetts had begun military training. News of the Boston Port Act arrived on 10 April. As it spread along the coast, Boston’s appeal was heard, and farmers throughout the colonies sent provisions to the beleaguered town. In late May the Virginia House of Burgesses appealed for public support of the Bostonians and was dissolved for its pains; but on 27 May it met extra-legally at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and invited
delegates from all the other colonies to meet in a general congress to discuss the crisis. The idea had already been aired and was eagerly taken up. During the months that followed, in one colony after another, assemblies and Governors clashed, and delegates were appointed to the proposed Congress, which opened, amid vast enthusiasm, in Philadelphia on 5 September. Meanwhile in Massachusetts Gage found that the Intolerable Acts were unenforceable outside Boston, though inside the city their operation was effective enough to put hundreds of men out of work. The committees of correspondence were by now well able to defy him, and he had not troops enough to crush them or reduce the province, as North and the King were eagerly expecting. He dared not even arrest the radical leaders, who went unconcernedly about their business under his nose.

The First Continental Congress was an infinitely more impressive body than the Stamp Act Congress which was its forerunner. This time, of all the colonies, only Georgia hung back. The others had each sent their brightest talents and best characters to speak for them, and all were welcomed at Philadelphia with fitting ceremony, rejoicing, wines and dinners – ‘Turtle, and every other thing – flummery, jellies, sweetmeats of 20 sorts, trifles, whipped syllabubs, floating islands, fools, etc… Wines most excellent and admirable.’ Not all the delegates were radicals, by any means: in fact the contingent from Massachusetts was regarded with some distrust, on account of its advanced views; but radical ideas dominated, above all the repudiation of Parliamentary supremacy. This was an important, perhaps a crucial step, for, James Madison was to assert in 1800, ‘The fundamental principle of the Revolution was that the colonies were co-ordinate members with each other and Great Britain of an empire united by a common sovereign, and that the legislative power was maintained to be as complete in each American parliament as in the British parliament.’
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This seemed the merest good sense to such delegates to the Congress as Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina, who, according to John Adams, was ‘violent against allowing to Parliament any power of regulating trade, or allowing that they have anything to do with us. – Power of regulating trade he says, is power of ruining us – as bad as acknowledging them a supreme legislative, in all cases whatsoever.’ The Congress showed its radicalism by approving the so-called Suffolk Resolves, resolutions passed by the Bostonians and their neighbours on 9 September 1774, refusing obedience to the Intolerable Acts and detailing measures of defiance to be taken against them; by rejecting the ingenious and statesmanlike plan of Joseph Galloway, the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, for reconciliation with Britain; and above all when, on 18 and 20 October, a few days before dispersing, it agreed to a policy of immediate
non-importation and eventual non-exportation and set up a ‘Continental Association’ to enforce it. It was in one sense not new: there had been non-importation agreements before; in every important sense it was unprecedented. Never before had a pan-American body like the Congress appeared and laboured so effectively and so long; never before would its behests have been so strictly enforced. The committees of correspondence, by familiarizing the radical leaders with the techniques of inter-colonial co-operation, had been the first step towards political union. The Continental Congress was a long second step.