American Tempest (26 page)

As predicted, bells across the city pealed at nine. What began as a crowd of several hundred swelled to nearly five thousand, and organizers moved the meeting from Faneuil Hall to the more spacious Old South Meeting House. Governor Hutchinson ordered Hancock to assemble the Corps of Cadets and disperse the crowd. Hancock refused. Adams called the meeting to order and moved that the tea be shipped back to England, duties unpaid. A radical supporter, Dr. Thomas Young, shouted above the cheers with a call to dump the tea overboard. After Adams restored order, the meeting rejected the Young proposal and unanimously approved the Adams resolution. Adams ordered a watch on the wharf to prevent the
Dartmouth
from tying up and unloading its tea. Hancock jumped onto his horse and led the Corps of Cadets to pierside to help Adams's men guard the wharf to prevent any tea from landing.

Patriots in other New England ports followed suit, and one by one, towns across New England banned the use of British tea, with some going a step farther with a ban on all tea drinking. With tea now a symbol of the tyranny of big-government taxation, four ports in New Hampshire—Portsmouth, Newcastle, Exeter, and Dover—refused to offload British tea ships, and in New York, Patriots succeeded in forcing East India Company agents to resign. Despite efforts by New York Royal Governor William
Tryon to land the tea at the British troop encampment, the captain decided to sail his cargo back to England. A British journalist covering events in Boston sensed a major story developing and sent this running dispatch:

Faneuil Hall. This is where British troops first lodged when they arrived in Boston on October 1, 1768, to quell the mobs that had overrun the streets of Boston.
(L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS
)

The Town Meeting resumed the following morning, with word that Hutchinson's sons and the Clarkes had fled to Castle William. The sheriff read a governor's order to disperse, but the crowd booed, cursed, and jeered until he fled the hall. The meeting voted again to block landing of the tea, and it agreed to send a report of its proceedings to other colonies
and London. At five the next morning, Hancock sent an aide on horseback with copies for New York and Philadelphia. Governor Hutchinson responded to the extraordinary two-day meeting by ordering harbor authorities to bar the tea ships from leaving the harbor until their owners paid duties. He condemned Hancock for joining the rebel camp. “It is in everybody's mouth,” he wrote, “that Hancock said at the close of this meeting he would be willing to spend his fortune and life itself in so good a cause.”
³⁴

The
Dartmouth
remained at anchor for three days before docking at Griffin's Wharf, more than a half-mile south of Long Wharf (see
map 1
,
page 12
). A few days later, the second of the four Boston-bound tea ships tied up beside the
Dartmouth
. One of the two trailing ships sailed into port two days later, but the fourth ship, which carried Boston's precious new street lamps as well as tea, ran aground at Provincetown, on Cape Cod. Local workers joined the crew in salvaging the three hundred lamps—all undamaged—and fifty-eight chests of tea. As wagons carried the lamps off to Boston, one of the Clarkes sneaked into Provincetown, put the tea aboard a fishing schooner, and brought it safely to Castle William—the only tea that slipped through Patriot hands into consumer teapots.

But the tea ships in Boston had sailed into the worst type of legal trap—subject to government seizure, both ships and cargoes, if they did not land their cargo and pay the appropriate duties within twenty days. Nor could the ships turn around and return to England. By law, once the ships entered the harbor, they would not be able to return to sea without landing their cargo, but armed members of the Sons of Liberty stood on the wharves day and night to prevent the ships' crews from doing so.

At 10
A.M.
on Thursday, December 16, more than five thousand people from Boston and the surrounding area pushed their way into Old South Meeting House and demanded that Francis Rotch, a part-owner of one of the tea ships, order his vessel back to England. Rotch said the British guns at Castle William would not let him pass without paying duties on the ship's cargo. After sending him to demand safe passage for his ship from the governor, the meeting adjourned until three that afternoon. Hancock, Adams, and the other leaders huddled in conference to decide their next move. When the meeting resumed, Rotch was nowhere to be found. Patriot
leaders kept the crowd under control with a few rousing, albeit repetitive, speeches. After several hours, the crowd grew tired and the meeting was about to adjourn when Rotch returned. It was 5:45, with only a spark of candlelight piercing the winter's eerie early-evening darkness. Rotch said the governor had rejected Boston's demands, refusing to let the ship return to England and asserting that the Boston meeting had no legal standing. The governor issued this declaration: “I warn, exhort and require you and each of you thus unlawfully assembled, forthwith to disperse and surcease all further unlawful proceedings at your utmost peril.”

An angry wail filled the hall. Some in the crowd said they heard Hancock call out, “Let every man do what is right in his own eyes.”
³⁵
Adams adjourned the meeting with an angry cry, “This meeting can do no more to save the country.”
³⁶
The English journalist reported hearing “a terrific war-whoop . . . almost on the instant, in front of the Old South Meeting House, and about fifty Mohawk Indians, with whom Adams seems to be acquainted and speaks without interpreter.” Some at the scene believed the war whoop was a prearranged signal for the Mohawks to march to Griffin's Wharf. In the hall, there were cries of “Boston harbor a tea-pot tonight!” “Hurrah for Griffin's Wharf!” and “The Mohawks are come!”
³⁷

“And sure enough,” wrote the British reporter,

The crowd had poured out of the meeting house and followed the Mohawks to Griffin's Wharf, but remained a discreet distance behind, marching silently, eventually stopping at a safe distance to watch the spectacle—still silent, almost in mourning for an era it sensed had come to an end.

Accounts vary as to just how many Mohawks worked the tea ships. Members of Hancock's Corps of Cadets stood on guard when the Mohawks
arrived, and corps members waved them aboard the ships and joined in facilitating their travails. Most witnesses put the number of Mohawks at more than fifty; together with Hancock's men, the number of Tea Party participants probably totaled at least eighty. All pledged to keep their exact number and identities secret. Although the notorious Ebenezer Mackintosh of the South End Gang claimed that his “chickens did the job,” there is no evidence that many street toughs participated. Hancock had warned Adams sternly that any repetition of the violence, plundering, and wanton destruction of property that accompanied the Massacre would forever alienate large numbers of merchants and other moderates, and Adams was careful to make the “Tea Party” an orderly affair conducted by responsible citizens—evidently skilled craftsmen by the way they worked.

After escorting customs officers and ships' crews to safety, they began working methodically, almost artfully, lifting tea chests from the hold with blocks and tackles, carefully splitting each open with hatchets and axes, then dumping the tea and splintered chests into the water. “The night was clear, the moon shone brilliantly,” making the work easier, swifter. The
Massachusetts Gazette
reported that “the town was very quiet during the whole evening.”

“Depend on it,” John Adams wrote years later. “These were no ordinary Mohawks. The profound secrecy in which they have held their names, and the total abstinence of plunder, are proofs of the character of the men.”
³⁹

The men worked steadily, silently, until they had dumped all the tea in the harbor—342 chests in all, valued as £9,659
⁴⁰
or $1 million in today's currency
⁴¹
—without damaging any other cargo, stores, or materiel. There were no fights, no brutality, no injuries—nothing but calm, orderly, disciplined discharging of tea. It did not take long—less than three hours. A crowd of about one thousand watched silently, whispering occasional comments to each other, always looking over their shoulders for the approach of British troops.

The Boston Tea Party. Here, it is as imagined by artist/engraver Nathaniel Currier in 1846.
(L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS
)

By morning, wind and tidal flows had washed a thick blanket of tea leaves and splintered tea chests over the bay from Boston to the Dorchester flats to the south. According to the
Massachusetts Gazette
, “Those who were from the country went home with a merry heart, and . . . joy appeared in almost every countenance, some on account of the destruction of the tea, others on account of the quietness with which it was effected.”
⁴³

On the morning after the Tea Party, Sam Adams sent this letter on behalf of the Committee of Correspondence of Boston to other committees:

Adams was more ebullient in a letter he sent to Arthur Lee, Richard Henry Lee's younger brother, who was serving as the Massachusetts agent in London. “You cannot imagine the height of joy that sparkles in the eyes and animated the countenance as well as the hearts of all we meet on this occasion; excepting the disappointed, disconcerted Hutchinson and his tools.” And in a subsequent letter to Lee, Adams insisted that