A History of Britain, Volume 2 (67 page)

They noticed. On 7 October 1773, when the first ships loaded with tea chests were already on the high seas, handbills signed ‘Hampden' were posted and distributed in New York, warning that, under the diabolical guise of cheap tea, Americans were once again being lured to accept taxation without their own consent. The fact that the duty was to be used to pay for colonial administration and that many of the selected ‘consignees' – the American merchants who would receive and sell it – were connected to the likes of the Governor of Boston, Thomas Hutchinson, only heightened the sense of a conspiracy. Two of the consignees were actually Hutchinson's sons, a third was his father-in-law. Hampdens suddenly were reborn everywhere. One of them, the Philadelphian Dr Benjamin Rush, his spirit possessed by the ghost of the foe of ship money, declared that ‘the baneful chests contain in them a slow poison . . . something worse than death – the seeds of
SLAVERY
'. In Charleston, New York and Philadelphia the intended consignees were put under such pressure of intimidation as the instruments of reimposed taxation that nearly all backed off, promising not to accept the cargoes.

In Boston, the destination for four brigs, the sudden crisis was a godsend for Sam Adams, whose efforts to sustain the trade boycott against Britain had been meeting with increasing indifference – until the tea was
on its way. At just the right time, private letters exchanged among Hutchinson, the Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Oliver and Thomas Whateley were discovered by Franklin and published. The letters sneered at the patriots, and expressed the hope that parliament and the British government would do its utmost to uphold the principle of their sovereign right to regulate trade and tax the colonies. The apparently devious way in which cheap tea was being used to seduce innocent and virtuous Americans to part with their liberty was evidence of the ‘diabolical' nature of the design. On 29 November, the day after the first ship, the
Dartmouth
, carrying 114 chests of Bohea, had tied up at Griffin's Wharf, notices in town called on ‘Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! The Hour of Destruction or Manly Opposition to the Machinations of Tyranny stares you in the Face!'

Boston instantly turned into a revolutionary hothouse with bells ringing to summon concerned citizens to public meetings. They came from the city, and they came from neighbouring towns and villages – Cambridge, Woburn, even Hutchinson's village of Milton. Thousands of them poured into Faneuil Hall – so many of them that the meeting had to be reconvened in Old South Meeting House, the fine Congregationalist Church, where light washed over the agitated speakers and their flock from high windows. The ‘baneful weed' could not, would not be unloaded; nor would the iniquitous duty be paid. It would be sent back to London in proper disgrace. But, the poor merchants who had shipped it, all unsuspecting, pleaded, British law forbids, on pain of forfeiture, the return of any dutiable cargo once shipped out. To send it back would be to guarantee their ruin. Too bad was the majority opinion. In the meantime, Hutchinson and his family consignees had fled to the safety of Castle William, where they too refused to think about returning the cargo. So it stayed on board ships at the wharves, guarded, in effect, by the patriots while the stand-off continued and two more ships, the
Beaver
and the
Eleanor,
arrived.

By the third week in December a deadline loomed. If duty had not been paid by then, the customs officers would (doubtless with the help of troops) seize the tea as forfeit. Knowing that, faced with financial disaster, the consignees would capitulate, pay and unload, the Boston Committee of Correspondence, the organizing arm of the patriots, summoned further meetings. On the 16th Old Southie was again filled to capacity as orators denounced enslavement by the pot and Josiah Quincy attacked Boston's foes for their ‘malice . . . and insatiable revenge'. An envoy, the ship's captain, had been sent to Hutchinson at Milton, demanding one last time that the
Dartmouth
be allowed to sail, if not for England, then at least out to
the harbour castle so that it could be said to be on its way. Around quarter to six, with the light almost gone, Hutchinson would not be swayed. Sam Adams got to his feet to say that he could not see what more could be done to save the country. It was not so much an utterance as a signal. An Indian war-whoop sounded in the church gallery; there were more at the door from a crowd of fifty or so, their faces crudely blackened with coal-dust, disguised as fancy-dress braves with blankets substituting for native dress. The ‘Mohawks' whom handbills had warned might attack the cargoes of tea if a solution were not found were on the war-path, and it led right to the wharf. Most of them, like the shoemaker Robert Twelves Hewes, were working men who had been drawn into the world of direct political protests over the past four years, and they had been deliberately selected by the patriot leaders for their relative anonymity. But they had also been carefully instructed on what to do. The noise they made was enough to stop one merchant, John Andrews, from enjoying his evening cup of tea. Arriving at the door of the Meeting House he collided with a roaring crowd as it exited into the softly falling Boston rain, heading for the docks and the
Dartmouth
and the
Eleanor
.

By the light of lanterns the ‘Mohawks' did their work, smashing their way with hatchets through 342 chests containing 45 tons of tea, value £9000: enough to make, it has been estimated, 24 million cups. Once split wide open to ensure maximum damage, the chests were heaved into the water where much of the loose tea escaped. A vigilant eye was kept on anyone who imagined that, for all their patriotic ardour, they might help themselves to a little by stuffing it down their coats or breeches. There was so much tea that before the job was done it began to back up against the sides of the ships as if the vessels were becalmed in some monstrous tide of Bohea slurry. The next morning, by the light of day, little boats went out into the water to make sure none of the cargo remained undamaged, using paddles to push the wooden chests and free-floating rafts of the stuff down into the muddy water. As they were drifting through the muck John Adams wrote in his diary, ‘This is the most magnificent Movement of all . . . there is a dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity in this last Effort of the Patriots that I greatly admire . . . the Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an Epocha [sic] in History.'

He was right. The Boston Tea Party was a classic instance of an issue and event, apparently trivial, even absurd, in itself, becoming floodlit into a great drama of national resistance. This was the way it was described in the instant accounts written in Boston for distribution throughout the
colonies and carried there by a network of fast-riding couriers, not least the silversmith Paul Revere. Not everyone was impressed, of course. There were many, even on the patriot side, who were outraged by the wanton destruction of property and believed that those responsible ought to pay compensation. For a while at the end of 1773 and the beginning of 1774 it seemed possible that the action might isolate Boston rather than automatically win it sympathy in the other colonies. That, at any rate, was what Lord North's government was calculating when it decided to punish the city and colony in the most draconian manner possible. The port of Boston was to be closed until compensation was paid for the tea, guaranteeing financial ruin for its mercantile community and real hardship for its citizens. The 1691 charter of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was to be called in and reissued so that a more orderly government would be established. A Quartering Act authorized the billeting of troops in unoccupied buildings and barns.

It was this act of coercion beyond anything that had happened before, which convinced waverers and sceptics who had doubted Sam Adams' insistence that they were facing not a reasonable and well-intentioned home government but a selfish and brutal tyranny that he was, in fact, right. George Washington, a stickler for the sanctity of property, wrote, ‘The cause of Boston, the despotick Measures in respect of it, now is and ever will be the cause of America (not that we approve their conduct in destroying the Tea).' In the weeks and months that followed, as regiments landed and a naval blockade took up position outside the harbour, America was created. Planters as far away as South Carolina sent rice to Boston; farmers in Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island established wagon convoys to get food supplies to the inhabitants, represented as the innocent victims of British retribution. Most seriously, the first inter-colonial Continental Congress since the Stamp Act Congress convened in Philadelphia in September 1774 to consider a coordinated response. By the time the Congress opened in Carpenters' Hall in October, another action of the British government had added to its suspicions and fears. By the terms of the Quebec Act, passed in August, parliament had agreed to preserve the French system of civil law and to allow the 70,000 Francophone Catholics of Canada to practise their faith without penalties, their Church to be supported by tithes. To the overwhelmingly Protestant Americans this heralded trials without juries, the effective end of habeas corpus and a government instituted in America without any kind of elected assembly, only a nominated council. It was ‘slavery and wooden shoes' entering by the back door, or more precisely up the St Lawrence and down the Hudson. And it was the most obvious
confirmation yet that George III was indeed a Stuart in all but blood. No wonder he displayed so many Van Dycks of Charles I at Windsor Castle.

What the king
ought
to be, wrote Thomas Jefferson in his
Summary View of the Rights of British America,
prepared for the Congress, was ‘the chief officer of the people', who presumably could be dismissed and replaced if he failed to honour his contractual obligations to his subjects. But Jefferson was too ill to go to Philadelphia and those radicals who did – some of whom demanded that citizens begin military training – did not dominate the proceedings. Cooler heads argued for a breathing space in which parliament and the king might be petitioned to hear the justified grievances of America. It was, moreover, a long, deep breathing space. Only if redress of those grievances had not been made by 10 September 1775 – a year hence – would the Americans begin a general cessation of all trade with Britain from 1 December.

It was a last, priceless opportunity for reconciliation, and it was not taken. Not, however, for want of statesmen on both sides recognizing that such a grace period might never come again. Even Lord North was attempting to hammer out some sort of middle way in which, if the colonies would agree to the sums needed for their own defence, they would be free to raise them in their own fashion and through their own assemblies. But could the British government, North asked an American representative, be assured that the several colonies would agree to their respective apportionments? No such assurance could be given. And, in any event, America had already gone past the point where it could be expected to accept even the
principle
of being taxed by the parliament at Westminster. For the king himself these last-minute efforts to cobble together some sort of agreement were so much sticking plaster over an open wound. Was it not evident, George asserted, that the colonists' pretence of disputing this or that imposition was so much disingenuous tomfoolery; that they had all along conspired to throw off the entire authority of parliament altogether? The only question now, as far as he was concerned, was whether the Americans were to be allowed to remove themselves from the allegiance they owed to their sovereign – king and parliament – without at least a fight.

Opinion inside Britain in the winter of 1774–5 was bitterly and frantically divided, especially in the mercantile cities whose trade faced catastrophe should war break out. Rival groups petitioning for reconciliation or military action contested for the same meeting halls in Manchester and Bristol and for the same signatures of mechanics and shopkeepers. Parliament was dominated by calls to inflict on the wicked and ungrateful children across the Atlantic a hiding they would never
forget. On 20 January 1775 William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, and tormented by sickness, arrived at the House of Lords in the company of his fifteen-year-old son William and Benjamin Franklin – with whom, at last, he had had earnest conversations about what, if anything, could be done to halt the march towards imperial self-destruction. Franklin was turned away from the door on the grounds that he was neither the eldest son nor the brother of a peer. Chatham entered, remarking as loudly as he could, ‘This is Dr FRANKLIN whom I would have admitted.' He then put a motion to withdraw General Gage's troops from Boston, in other words to stop a war before it started. Though few of his peers believed it, he promised them it would be unwinnable. What he then went on to say proved just how carefully the old man had listened to Franklin. For the first time he was staring at the vast expanse of America, and he knew he was staring at defeat. ‘What, though you march from town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary submission . . . how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you? . . . to grasp the dominion of 1800 miles of continent, populous in numbers, possessing valour, liberty and resistance?'

And where did the peers who denounced the Americans for their temerity imagine their stubborn attachment to representation came from? Had they looked in the mirror lately? Had they read any good books about their own history lately?