Knollenberg Bernhard. Growth of the American Revolution: 1766-1775
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COLONIAL OPPOSITION TO
THE TEA ACT AND THE
BOSTON TEA PARTY
T
that news of the Tea Act initially aroused
much excitement in the colonies, probably because it was thought
for some time that the new act repealed the Townshend Act duty on tea.¹
But this misunderstanding was pointed out in the Pennsylvania Journal
of September , , quoting a letter from a colonist in London as-
serting that the Tea Act was a scheme of Lord North to establish the
Townshend Act duty on tea, which, if effective, “will for ever after be
pleaded as precedent for every imposition the Parliament of Great
Britain shall think proper to saddle with us. It is much to be wished,” the
writer added, “the Americans will convince Lord North that they are
not yet ready to have the yoke of slavery riveted about their necks and send
back the tea whence it came.” A week later (October ) the New-York
Journal published another letter from London, making clear that the Tea
Act did not repeal the Townshend Act duty on tea and adding, “I have
told several of the [East India] Company that the Tea and Ships will all
be burnt...as I think you will never suffer an Act of Parliament to be
so crowded down your Throats; for if you do, it is all over with you.”²
There followed a strong attack on the Tea Act and the Company’s
plan to ship tea on its own account to the colonies. The act was de-
nounced by “Scaevola” (Thomas Mifflin)³ in the Pennsylvania Chronicle of
October , and soon afterward in newspapers throughout the colo-
nies.⁴ Furthermore, a mass meeting at Philadelphia on October
passed resolutions denouncing the measure as an attack “upon the lib-
erties of America which every American was in duty bound to oppose,”
and the Committee of Correspondence of the Massachusetts House
sent a letter to the Committees in other colonies pointing out the ne-
cessity for every colony to take “effectual methods to prevent this mea-
sure from having its designed effects.”⁵
The act was attacked not only because it was designed to implement
collection of the Townshend Act duty on tea, but because of its threat
to give the East India Company a monopoly of the colonial market for
tea.⁶ Moreover, once a monopoly of tea was established, the Company,
it was said, could be expected to secure legislation enabling it to estab-
lish a monopoly of the colonial market for all East Indian products.⁷
Schlesinger’s well-known statement that even if the act had ex-
empted tea shipped by the Company from the Townshend Act duty on
tea, “there is every reason to believe that the course of American oppo-
sition would have developed unchanged and the tea would have then
been dumped into the Atlantic as an undisguised and unmixed protest
against a grasping trade monopoly”⁸ almost certainly goes too far; there
is massive evidence that the threat of the colonial duty on tea was at least
as important as the threat of monopoly in arousing American opposi-
tion to the act.⁹ But, apparently, the threat of monopoly was an essential
ingredient of the explosion of colonial opposition about to be described.
The plan to nullify the act adopted by Whig leaders was to secure
the resignation of the East India Company’s local agents before the tea
arrived, a plan similar to that successfully employed in to nullify
the Stamp Act by securing resignation of the Stamp Distributors before
arrival of the stamps.¹⁰
As brought out later in the chapter, this plan was successful at
Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York. But at Boston, the consignees,
including two sons of Governor Thomas Hutchinson,¹¹ encouraged by
Hutchinson to stand fast,¹² refused to resign.¹³
On October , a group of Boston Whigs, known as the North End
Caucus, resolved to “oppose the vending any tea, sent by the East India
Company,...with our lives and fortunes,”¹⁴ and on November ,
a group of men, headed by William Molineux,¹⁵ tried to frighten the
agents into resigning, but the effort failed.¹⁶
Next, the town of Boston at a meeting held November , elected a
committee consisting of the selectmen of the town, headed by John
Hancock, and three other leading citizens to wait on the consignees and
“request them from a regard of their own characters and the peace and
good order of this Town and Province immediately to resign their ap-
pointment.”¹⁷ Three of them replied immediately that they must defer
decision until they were informed “what obligations either of a moral
or pecuniary nature we may be under to fulfill the trust that may be de-
volved on us”; the next day, November , a similar reply was received
from the fourth.¹⁸
Here the matter rested until November , when, on the return from
England of Jonathan Clarke,¹⁹ son and partner of the agent Richard
Clarke, another town meeting was held: a new committee was chosen
to request from the consignees an immediate answer to the question of
whether or not they would resign their agencies. Their initial answer,
delivered the same afternoon, was a categorical “No.”²⁰ In the after-
noon of November , Jonathan Clarke arranged a meeting with the
selectmen of the town at which he promised them that when the tea ar-
rived, none of it would be unloaded or disposed of and that, on receipt
of further orders from the Company which were expected with the tea,
he would “immediately hand in proposals to the Selectmen to lay be-
fore the town.”²¹ But, as we shall see, this promise was not kept.
On the very night following this meeting, the Dartmouth, first of the
tea ships to reach America, anchored off Boston harbor and the next
day (November ) entered the harbor.²² Three days later she docked at
Griffin’s wharf.²³
Many years later Hutchinson wrote that, following instructions from
the Boston tea consignees, the Dartmouth anchored outside the Port of
Boston awaiting word if the tea could be safely landed, but that a Boston
town committee, including Samuel Adams, ordered the master “to bring
the ship up to land.”²⁴ The implication is that the committee sought to
provoke an incident. But, as brought out in an appendix to this chapter,
no contemporary evidence has been found supporting Hutchinson’s
statement, and there is strong evidence of its being untrue.*
* Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
), –; Bernhard Knollenberg, “Did Samuel Adams Provoke the Boston Tea Party and the
Clash at Lexington?” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, (), –. [B.W.S.]
On learning of the Dartmouth’s arrival the Boston selectmen sent
Clarke a message requesting that he let them have his promised pro-
posals, only to be told that he was out of town, his whereabouts un-
known.²⁵ Where he was that day has not come to light. However, the fol-
lowing day Clarke and the other consignees fled to the protection of the
British troops stationed on Castle Island since the Boston Massacre in
, where Governor Hutchinson had arranged for their reception.²⁶
The frightened Commissioners of the American Customs Board went
with them.²⁷
The Boston Committee of Correspondence, organized a year ear-
lier (as told in Chapter ), immediately met,²⁸ and, presumably under
its auspices, early the following morning (November ) handbills were
distributed reporting the arrival of a ship with East India Company tea
on board and calling for a mass meeting (as distinguished from a formal
town meeting) at Faneuil Hall at nine that morning, to arrange to pre-
vent the landing of the tea.²⁹ So large a number appeared that the meet-
ing, after voting that the tea must be returned, was adjourned to meet
that afternoon in a larger room, the auditorium of the Old South
Meeting House. There, the crowd, estimated at around twenty-five
hundred, voted unanimously that the tea must be sent back without pay-
ment of duty and chose a watch of twenty-five men to guard the vessel
and cargo, headed by Captain Edward Proctor of the North End Caucus
and including Paul Revere and several other members of the Caucus.³⁰*
On November , there was a second mass meeting, at which Fran-
cis Rotch, part owner of the Dartmouth, promised, under pressure, to send
his ship back to London with the tea on board.³¹ To this latter meeting
the Boston tea agents, through Richard Clarke’s son-in-law, the artist
John Singleton Copley, sent an offer to store the tea and submit it to a
committee of inspection until they heard from the Company what to do
with it. But since this premised the agents’ retaining their agencies, the
offer was, of course, unacceptable and was promptly rejected.³²
In the early part of December two more of the Boston-bound tea
ships, the Eleanor and the Bruce, arrived and were ordered by a committee
of local Whigs to dock beside the Dartmouth.³³ (The tea on the fourth of
* David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, ). [B.W.S.]
the Boston-bound tea ships, the William, accidentally wrecked on Cape
Cod on December , was taken to Castle Island a few weeks later.)³⁴
But attention was centered on the Dartmouth because, under British law,
goods subject to customs duty could be seized to secure payment of duty
twenty days after the carrying vessel entered port,³⁵ and the deadline
with respect to the tea on the Dartmouth would expire December .³⁶
Finding that Rotch was not making arrangements for the return of
the Dartmouth’s cargo of tea, before the deadline,³⁷ the Boston Commit-
tee of Correspondence arranged for a mass meeting at Old South Meet-
ing House on December , which was attended by over five thousand
inhabitants of Boston and neighboring towns. The meeting passed a
resolution requiring Rotch to apply immediately to the Collector of
Customs for clearance of the Dartmouth and its tea to leave Boston. The
Collector declined to give an answer until he had talked over the mat-
ter with the local Comptroller of Customs, whereupon the meeting was
adjourned for two days.³⁸
By the time the people assembled at Old South Church for the ad-
journed meeting on December , two days before the tea on the Dart-
mouth would become subject to seizure, there had been important de-
velopments. The Collector, after consulting with the Comptroller, had
refused clearance,³⁹ and a report had spread that the tea on all three of
the tea ships in port was about to be taken under the protection of the
British war vessels stationed at Boston and deposited at Castle Island.⁴⁰
Having thus secured the safety of the tea, the consignees, it was feared,
would pay the duty and then secretly market the tea.⁴¹
There still remained two possibilities of avoiding seizure of the Dart-
mouth’s tea and payment of the duty: sailing the vessel secretly out of the
harbor with the tea on board or sailing her out openly under a clear-
ance from the customs officers or, as a last resort, a pass from Governor
Hutchinson.
The first was eliminated by messages from Hutchinson to the com-
mander of the British troops at Castle William, at the mouth of the
main channel of Boston harbor,⁴² not to let any vessel leave the har-
bor without clearance or a pass and to Admiral John Montagu to keep
watch over less-used channels of the harbor through which the ship
might try to slip out.⁴³
The second was eliminated by the refusal of the customs officers to
grant a clearance and of Hutchinson to grant Rotch a pass. The failure
of this last resort was reported by Rotch to the adjourned mass meeting
in the late afternoon of December .⁴⁴
What followed was described by Hutchinson in a letter to an English
correspondent giving an account of the whole affair.⁴⁵
“The owner [of the Dartmouth],” said Hutchinson, “was first to apply
to the Custom House for a clearance and that being refused, to me for
a pass which you may easily suppose I did not grant. All this time no-
body suspected they wou’d suffer the Tea to be destroyed,⁴⁶ there being
so many men of property active at these meetings as Hancock, Phillips,
Rowe, Dennie and others besides the Select men and the Town Clerk
[William Cooper] who was Clerk of all the meetings. [Samuel] Adams
never was in greater glory.*
“In the afternoon of the last day of the meeting the owner of the Dart-
mouth came to Milton to demand or desire a pass for his vessel; after I had
told him when his vessel was regularly cleared out and not before he
shou’d have a pass, I asked him what he imagined the intentions of the
people to be with respect to the Tea; he said he had always supposed they
had no other intention than forcing it back to England and he believed
they wished to have the vessel go down and be stopped by a shot from
the Castle that they might say they had done all in their power....⁴⁷
“The Speakers in the meeting kept the people together until he re-
turned with the answer which I had given, when Dr. Y
——g [Young]⁴⁸
pronounced him a good man who had done all in his power to gratify the
people and charged them to do no hurt to his person or property, and im-
mediately after, the meeting was declared to be dissolved and the wharffs
were surrounded with the greatest part of the same people whilst a select
number, prepared for the purpose, were unloading the vessels and emp-
tying Chests into the Dock which was done completely in two or
three hours. Nobody seriously pretends to separate the meeting in Doc-
tor Sewalls [Old South] meeting house from the meeting at Griffins
wharf where the three ships lay but they say all is to be justifyed....
* Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Vintage
Books, ), –; Pauline Maier, “Coming to Terms with Samuel Adams,” American Historical Re-
view, (), –. [B.W.S.]
“Upon Information of an Intention to go down with the Ships with-
out a clearance I renewed to Colonel Leslie the orders to stop all vessels
without a pass⁴⁹ and gave notice to Admiral Montagu who disposed his
ships to prevent their passing thro’ the other channels as Captain Hall
suspected they shou’d.⁵⁰ This was all in my power, unless the owners of
the Ships wou’d have hauled them off under the protection of the men
of war, even if I had known of the design to have destroyed the Tea.”
Hutchinson was later criticized for not himself having asked Mon-
tagu to take the tea ships under his protection;⁵¹ it was even said or in-
timated that he had failed to do so in order to provoke an incident. But
this was unfair. As his contemporary letters show, the destruction of the
tea took him by surprise; he thought the tea would be safe because of
the numerous “men of property” who had taken an active, public part
in the meetings to compel return of the tea to England, and to protect
themselves from being forced to pay for the tea would seek to preserve
it.⁵² For him to call on Montagu⁵³ or on the commander of the troops at
Castle William⁵⁴ for help when apparently none was needed to preserve
the tea would subject him to bitter denunciation, if nothing worse, by
the Boston radicals.
Though Hutchinson’s account of the destruction of the tea gives
most of the essential facts, additional interesting bits of information are
available from other contemporary sources.
The Dartmouth’s log of December records that the crowd at the
wharf numbered about a thousand and consisted in part of men
“dressed and whooping like Indians”;⁵⁵ John Andrews, a Boston mer-
chant, wrote his brother-in-law, William Barrell of Philadelphia, on De-
cember that the meeting at the Old South did not break up until “the
candles were light,” that the party boarding the tea ships were “cloath’d
in Blankets with the head muffled, and copper color’d countenances,
being each arm’d with a hatchet or axe, and pair pistoles...,” and that
“before nine o’clock...every chest [of tea]...was knock’d to pieces and
flung over the sides.”⁵⁶ The Massachusetts Gazette of December adds
that this party, as it passed the meetinghouse on the way to the wharf,
gave a war-whoop, which was answered by some of those inside.⁵⁷
At a meeting of a committee of the Privy Council held the following
February, John Dean Whitworth, an onlooker at the Tea Party,⁵⁸ testified
that the boarding party consisted of between forty and fifty men⁵⁹
and Rotch contributed the well-known detail that when he reported the
Governor’s refusal to give him a pass, Samuel Adams, who was presid-
ing at the adjourned meeting in the Old South Meeting House, said he
“did not see what more they could do to save their Country.”⁶⁰
A petition from the Board of Directors of the British East India
Company to John Pownall, Under Secretary of State, dated Febru-
ary , , furnishes the information that the destroyed tea was worth
£,.⁶¹
One of the impressive aspects of the Tea Party was the orderliness
with which it was conducted. No one plundered or injured the rest of
the cargo on any of the tea ships.⁶²
Much has been written about mob violence in the colonies in the
pre-Revolutionary period;⁶³* but from until the outbreak of war,
most of the colonial resistance to unpopular British measures was, as in
the case of the Boston Tea Party, remarkably restrained. The occasional
tarring and featherings⁶⁴ were, indeed, a shockingly cruel form of ven-
geance or intimidation, but even these were not lethal.⁶⁵
The rioting, plundering, and wanton destruction of property in Bos-
ton, Newport, and New York incident to opposing enforcement of the
Stamp Act in apparently caused Whig leaders throughout the col-
onies to try to prevent a recurrence of this.⁶⁶
Another striking aspect of the Boston Tea Party was the perfect con-
cealment of the identity of those who threw the tea overboard. Sixty
years after the event a man in his nineties named himself and fifty-seven
others as members of the Party, and, still later, fifty-five names “derived
principally from family tradition,” were added to the list.⁶⁷ Hancock
was currently said to have led the boarding party;⁶⁸ a barber named
Eckley was arrested at the time for alleged participation, but he was
discharged for lack of evidence; and Hutchinson wrote in that
“Will Moore” was reputed to be “Captain of the Men who destroyed
the tea.”⁶⁹ But even as late as , John Adams wrote that he did not
* Gordon Wood, “A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly,
rd ser., (), –; Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, –
(New York: Academic Press, ). [B.W.S.]
know and never had known the name of a single participant,⁷⁰ and no
reliable evidence has ever come to light as to who was in the Party.
Probably, as Drake suggests in his well-known Tea Leaves, the lead
was taken by members of the North End Caucus,⁷¹ who are known to
have taken the initiative in resolving that the tea must be sent back and
furnished the initial watch over the tea in December.⁷²
Turning to the other ports to which the Company shipped tea, we
find that before December , when the London, bringing the Company’s
tea to Charleston, reached port, the consignees there had been “pre-
vailed upon by threats and flattery” to resign their agency.⁷³ Since no
one claimed the tea at the end of the twenty-day period for payment of
duty, the tea was seized by the local customs officers and stored in a
warehouse,⁷⁴ where it remained until seized and sold by the South Car-
olina revolutionary government in July, .⁷⁵
The Company’s agents at Philadelphia had also resigned before the
Polly, bringing the Company’s tea to Philadelphia, reached port.⁷⁶ When,
on December , it arrived at Gloucester Point on the Delaware, a little
down river from Philadelphia, its master, Samuel Ayres, was warned by
a crowd on the river bank to proceed no further. He anchored his vessel
there, and the next morning was haled before an immense mass meet-
ing in the square before the State House. At this meeting resolutions
were passed thanking the people of Boston for not allowing the tea to
be landed there, and demanding that Ayres return to England with the
tea on board.⁷⁷
Gloucester Point was within the Port of Philadelphia,⁷⁸ and hence
the tea had become liable for duty; but the local customs officers ap-
parently made no effort to detain the Polly, which, before the day was
over, set sail for England with the tea aboard.⁷⁹
In New York City, , copies of “an instrument of association”
dated November , , were circulated throughout the city inviting
the inhabitants “to associate together under the name and state of the
Sons of Liberty of New York” and to bind themselves to brand as “an enemy
to the liberties of America” anyone who “shall aid or abet...the in-
troduction of tea . . . into this Colony, while it is subject, by a British
act of Parliament, to the payment of a duty for the purpose of raising a
revenue.”⁸⁰ Two weeks later, local newspapers reported that the instru-
ment had been signed by “a vast number of the inhabitants, including
most of the principal lawyers, merchants, landowners, masters of ships
and mechanics of the city.”⁸¹
Following the destruction of the Company’s tea at Boston, the New
York tea consignees wrote a letter, dated December , to the master of
the tea ship headed for New York, to be delivered to him before he en-
tered port, stating that “we can neither receive the tea or pay the duty . . .
[and] give you our opinion that...it will be most prudent for you to re-
turn [without attempting to land the tea] as soon as you can be supplied
with such necessaries as you may have occasion for on the voyage.”⁸²
Due to foul weather, the New York tea ship, the Nancy, Benjamin
Lockyer, master, did not arrive at Sandy Hook outside New York har-
bor until April or , .⁸³
On receipt from the pilot who came out to meet him with letters
from the consignees, presumably similar to the one of December just
quoted, Lockyer halted his ship outside the port and came ashore in the
pilot boat.⁸⁴ He delivered a letter dated April to Henry White, ad-
dressed to him and the other consignees, stating that, “Having consid-
ered the circumstances mentioned in your letters...I have left the ship
and cargo at Sandy Hook for their safety” and making a formal “ten-
der of the cargo of tea” consigned to them, to which the consignees
replied formally, declining to receive the tea.⁸⁵
Lockyer had promised a committee, which met him on his landing,
that “as the consignees would not receive his cargo, he would not go to
the custom-house and would make all the dispatch he could to leave the
city,” and, on April , he sailed back to London with the tea on board.⁸⁶
Thus, when all returns were in, the Company found that at Boston
it still had agents but no tea, at Charleston, tea (held by the customs offi-
cers) but no agents, and at Philadelphia and New York neither agents
nor tea.⁸⁷