A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (16 page)

Boston’s Tea Party

Under such circumstances, all that was needed to ignite the Revolutionary explosion was a spark, which the British conveniently provided with the passage of the Tea Act in 1773. Tea played a crucial role in the life of typical America colonists. The water in North America remained undrinkable in many locations—far more polluted with disease and bacteria than modern drinking water—thus tea, which was boiled, made up the staple nonalcoholic drink. The East India Company had managed to run itself into near bankruptcy despite a monopoly status within the empire. Its tea sent to America had to go through England first, where it was lightly taxed. But smugglers dealing directly with Dutch suppliers shipped directly to the colonies and provided the same tea at much lower prices. The Tea Act withdrew all duties on tea reexported to America, although it left in place an earlier light tax from the Townshend Act.

Britain naturally anticipated that colonists would rejoice at the lower aboveboard prices, despite the imposition of a small tax. In fact, not only did average colonists benefit from drinking the cheap smuggled tea, but a number of merchant politicians, including John Hancock of Massachusetts, also regularly smuggled tea and stood to be wiped out by enforcement of the new act. Even those merchants who legitimately dealt in tea faced financial ruin under the monopoly privileges of the East India Company. Large public meetings produced a strategy toward the tea, which involved not only boycotting the product but also preventing the tea from even being unloaded in America.

Three ships carrying substantial amounts of tea reached Boston Harbor in December 1773, whereupon a crowd of more than seven thousand (led by Sam Adams) greeted them. Members of the crowd—the Sons of Liberty dressed as Mohawk Indians—boarded the vessels and threw 342 chests of tea overboard while the local authorities condoned the action. The British admiral in charge of the Boston Harbor squadron watched the entire affair from his flagship deck.

In Delaware, nine days later, a similar event occurred when another seven hundred chests of tea sank to the bottom of the sea, although without a Sam Adams to propagandize the event, no one remembers the Delaware Tea Party. New Yorkers forced cargo to remain on its ships in their port. When some tea was finally unloaded in Charleston, it couldn’t be sold for three years. Throughout, only a few eminent colonists, including Ben Franklin and John Adams, condemned the boardings, and for the most part Americans supported the “Mohawks.” But even John Adams agreed that if a people rise up, they should do something “to be remembered, something notable and striking.”
³¹

“Notable and striking,” the “tea party” was. Britain, of course, could not permit such outright criminality. The king singled out Boston as the chief culprit in the uprising, passing in 1774 the Intolerable or Coercive Acts that had several major components. First, Britain closed Boston Harbor until someone paid for the tea destroyed there. Second, the charter of Massachusetts was annulled, and the governor’s council was to be appointed by the king, signaling to the citizens a revocation of their rights as Englishmen. Third, a new Quartering Act was passed, requiring homeowners and innkeepers to board soldiers at only a fraction of the real cost of boarding them. Fourth, British soldiers and officials accused of committing crimes were to be returned to England for trial. Fifth, the Quebec Act transferred lands between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the province of Quebec and guaranteed religious freedom to Catholics. New Englanders not only viewed the Quebec Act as theft of lands intended for American colonial settlement, they also feared the presence of more Catholics on the frontier. John Adams, for one, was terrified of the potential for a recatholicization of America. Antipapism was endemic in New England, where political propagandists fulminated against this new encroachment of the Roman “Antichrist.”

Southerners had their own reasons for supporting independence. Tidewater planters found themselves under an increasing debt burden, made worse by British taxes and unfair competition from monopolies.
³²
Lord Dunmore’s antislavery initiatives frightened the Virginia planters as much as the Catholic priests terrified New Englanders. At a time when slavery continued to exert mounting tensions on Whig-American notions of liberty and property, the fact that the Southerners could unite with their brethren farther north had to concern England.

Equally as fascinating as the alliance between the slave colonies and the nonslaveholding colonies was the willingness of men of the cloth to join hardened frontiersmen in taking up arms against England. John Witherspoon, a New Jersey cleric who supported the resistance, warned that “there is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire.”
³³
Virginia parson Peter Muhlenberg delivered a sermon, then grabbed his rifle.
³⁴

Massachusetts attorney and New Jersey minister; Virginia farmer and Pennsylvania sage; South Carolina slaveholder and New York politician all found themselves increasingly aligned against the English monarch. Whatever differences they had, their similarities surpassed them. Significantly, the colonists’ complaints encompassed all oppression: “Colonists didn’t confine their thoughts about [oppression] simply to
British
power; they generalized the lesson in terms of human nature and politics at large.”
³⁵
Something even bigger than resistance to the king of England knitted together the American colonists in a fabric of freedom. On the eve of the Revolution, they were far more united—for a wide variety of motivations—than the British authorities ever suspected. Each region had its own reason for associating with the others to force a peaceful conclusion to the crisis when the Intolerable Acts upped the ante for all the players.

If British authorities truly hoped to isolate Boston, they realized quickly how badly they had misjudged the situation. The king, having originally urged that the tea duty be repealed, reluctantly concluded that the “colonists must either triumph or submit,” confirming Woodrow Wilson’s estimate that George III “had too small a mind to rule an empire.”
³⁶
Intending to force compliance, Britain dispatched General Thomas Gage and four regiments of redcoats to Massachusetts. Gage was a tragic figure. He proved unrelenting in his enforcement methods, generating still more colonial opposition, yet he operated within a code of “decency, moderation, liberty, and the rule of law.”
³⁷
This sense of fairness and commitment to the law posed a disturbing dilemma for his objective of crushing the rebellion.

The first united resistance by the colonies occurred in September 1774, when delegates to a Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in response to calls from both Massachusetts and Virginia. Delegates from every colony except Georgia arrived, displaying the widespread sympathy in the colonies for the position of Boston. Present were both Adamses from Massachusetts and Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and the “indispensable man,” George Washington, representing Virginia. Congress received a series of resolves from Suffolk County, Massachusetts, carried to the meeting by Paul Revere. These Suffolk Resolves declared loyalty to the king, but scorned the “hand which would ransack our pockets” and the “dagger to our bosoms.” When Congress endorsed the Suffolk Resolves, Lord Dartmouth, British secretary of state, warned, “The [American] people are generally ripe for the execution of any plan the Congress advises, should it be war itself.” King George put it much more succinctly, stating, “The die is cast.”

No act of the Congress was more symbolic of how far the colonies had come toward independence than the Galloway Plan of union. Offered by Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania, the plan proposed the establishment of a federal union for the colonies in America, headed by a president general (appointed by the king) and advised by a grand council, whose representatives would be chosen by the colonial assemblies. Presented roughly three weeks after the Suffolk Resolves, the Galloway Plan was rejected only after a long debate, with the final vote taken only in the absence of many of the advocates. Still, it showed that the colonies already had started to consider their own semiautonomous government.

Revolutionary Ideas

In October 1774, the First Continental Congress adopted a Declaration of Rights and Grievances, twelve resolutions stating the rights of the colonists in the empire. Among the resolutions was a statement of the rights of Americans to “life, liberty, and property…secured by the principles of the British Constitution, the unchanging laws of nature, and [the] colonial charters.” Where had the colonists gotten such concepts?

Three major Enlightenment thinkers deeply affected the concepts of liberty and government held by the majority of the American Revolutionary leaders. Certainly, all writers had not read the same European authors, and certainly all were affected by different ideas to different degrees, often depending on the relationship any given writer placed on the role of God in human affairs. Nevertheless, the overall molding of America’s Revolution in the ideological sense can be traced to the theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the Baron Charles de Montesquieu.

Hobbes, an English writer of the mid-1600s, was a supporter of the monarchy. In
The Leviathan
(1661), Hobbes described an ancient, even prehistoric, “state of nature” in which man was “at warre with every other man,” and life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
³⁸
To escape such circumstances, man created the “civil state,” or government, in which people gave up all other rights to receive protection from the monarch. As long as government delivered its subjects from the “fear of violent death,” it could place on them any other burden or infringe on any other “rights.” From Hobbes, therefore, the Revolutionary writers took the concept of “right to life” that infused virtually all the subsequent writings.

Another Englishman, John Locke, writing under much different circumstances, agreed with Hobbes that a state of nature once existed, but differed totally as to its character. Locke’s state of nature was beautiful and virtually sinless, but somehow man had fallen out of that state, and to protect his rights entered into a social compact, or a civil government. It is significant that both Hobbes and Locke departed substantially from the classical Greek and Roman thinkers, including Aristotle, who held that government was a natural condition of humans. Both Hobbes and Locke saw government as artificial—created by man, rather than natural to man. Locke, writing in his “Second Treatise on Government,” described the most desirable government as one that protected human “life, liberty, and estate”; therefore, government should be limited: it should only be strong enough to protect these three inalienable rights. From Locke, then, the Revolutionary writers took the phrase “right to liberty,” as well as to property.
³⁹
Hobbes and Locke, therefore, had laid the groundwork for the Declaration of Rights and Grievances and, later, the Declaration of Independence, which contained such principles as limitations on the rights of the government and rule by consent of the governed.

All that remained was to determine how best to guarantee those rights, an issue considered by a French aristocrat, Charles de Montesquieu. In
The Spirit of the Laws
, drawing largely on his admiration for the British constitutional system, Montesquieu suggested dividing the authority of the government among various branches with different functions, providing a blueprint for the future government of the United States.
⁴⁰

While some of the crème de la crème in American political circles read or studied Locke or Hobbes, most Virginia and Massachusetts lawyers were common attorneys, dealing with property and personal rights in society, not in abstract theory. Still, ideas do seep through. Thanks to the American love of newspapers, pamphlets, oral debate, and informal political discussion, by 1775, many of the Revolutionaries, whether they realized it or not, sounded like John Locke and his disciples.

Locke and his fellow Whigs who overthrew James II had spawned a second generation of propagandists in the 1700s. Considered extremists and “coffee house radicals” in post-Glorious Revolution England, Whig writers John Trenchard, Lord Bolingbroke, and Thomas Gordon warned of the tyrannical potential of the Hanoverian Kings—George I and George II. Influential Americans read and circulated these “radical Whig” writings. A quantified study of colonial libraries, for example, shows that a high number of Whig pamphlets and newspaper essays had made their way onto American bookshelves. Moreover, the Whig ideas proliferated beyond their original form, in hundreds of colonial pamphlets, editorials, essays, letters, and oral traditions and informal political discussions.
⁴¹

It goes without saying, of course, that most of these men were steeped in the traditions and teachings of Christianity—almost half the signers of the Declaration of Independence had some form of seminary training or degree. John Adams, certainly and somewhat derogatorily viewed by his contemporaries as the most pious of the early Revolutionaries, claimed that the Revolution “connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”
⁴²
John’s cousin Sam cited passage of the Declaration as the day that the colonists “restored the Sovereign to Whom alone men ought to be obedient.”
⁴³
John Witherspoon’s influence before and after the adoption of the Declaration was obvious, but other well-known patriots such as John Hancock did not hesitate to echo the reliance on God. In short, any reading of the American Revolution from a purely secular viewpoint ignores a fundamentally Christian component of the Revolutionary ideology.

One can understand how scholars could be misled on the importance of religion in daily life and political thought. Data on religious adherence suggests that on the eve of the Revolution perhaps no more than 20 percent of the American colonial population was “churched.”
⁴⁴
That certainly did not mean they were not God-fearing or religious. It did reflect, however, a dominance of the three major denominations—Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal—that suddenly found themselves challenged by rapidly rising new groups, the Baptists and Methodists. Competition from the new denominations proved so intense that clergy in Connecticut appealed to the assembly for protection against the intrusions of itinerant ministers. But self-preservation also induced church authorities to lie about the presence of other denominations, claiming that “places abounding in Baptists or Methodists were unchurched.”
⁴⁵
In short, while church membership rolls may have indicated low levels of religiosity, a thriving competition for the “religious market” had appeared, and contrary to the claims of many that the late 1700s constituted an ebb in American Christianity, God was alive and well—and fairly popular!