Old Boston Days & Ways. Mary Caroline Crawford
found its way to the mother country and the news that tea was a tabooed beverage in Boston could not have failed to reach those interested. A meeting had been held at Faneuil Hall in which the men had voted to abstain totally from the use of tea (many of them really liked it, too, in those days), and soon the mistresses of four hundred and ten families pledged themselves to drink no more tea till the Revenue Act was repealed.
A few days later, one hundred and twenty young ladies formed a similar league. "We, the daughters of those patriots," said they, "who have and do now appear for the public interest, and in that principally regard their posterity, — as such do with pleasure engage with them in denying ourselves the drinking of foreign tea, in hope to frustrate a plan that tends to deprive a whole community of all that is valuable in life." And, not to be behind the Daughters of Liberty, the students of Harvard College bound themselves, in 1768, to use no more of "that pernicious herb."
Even the children caught the infection of liberty. Hannah Winthrop writes to Mrs. Mercy Warren, in 1769: "I went to see Mrs. Otis, the other day. She seems not to be in a good state of health. I received a visit lately from Master Jemmy. I will give you an anecdote of him. A gentleman telling him what a Fine Lady his mama is & he hoped he would be a good Boy & behave exceeding well to her, my young master gave this spirited answer, I know my Mama is a fine Lady, but she would be a much finer if she was a Daughter of Liberty." It once even fell to the lot of John Adams to be rebuked by a Daughter of Liberty for having called for tea in her house. "Is it lawful for a weary traveler to refresh himself with a dish of tea, provided it has been honestly smuggled or paid no duties?" he asked. "No, sir," responded the lady. "We have renounced all tea in this place, but I'll make you coffee."
Even the word aroused resentment, it will be seen.
In New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, mass-meetings of the people voted that the consignees to whom the East India Company had shipped the odious tea should be ordered to resign their offices, and they did so. At Philadelphia the tea-ship was met and sent back to England before it had come within the jurisdiction of the custom-house. At Charleston the tea was landed, and as there was no one to receive it or pay the duty, it was thrown into a damp cellar and left there to spoil. In Boston things took a different turn. Three times the consignees were asked to resign, and three times they refused. Their stubbornness is the better understood when we learn that two of them were Governor Hutchinson's own sons. It was on Sunday, November 28, 1773, that the "Dartmouth," loaded with tea, arrived in Boston Harbor. From Rotch, the owner of the vessel, the Committee of Correspondence promptly obtained a promise that the ship should not be entered until Tuesday. On Monday the towns about Boston were invited to attend a mass-meeting in Faneuil Hall.
As the result of this and other similar meetings, the firm resolve that that tea should on no account be landed took possession of the people. Two other ships soon came to anchor near the " Dartmouth" and were guarded, as she was, by a committee of citizens. The consignees by this time would have been willing to yield, but Hutchinson would not give a permit to let the vessels go sailing back to England. So the days wore away and the time was fast drawing near when the tea would be seized under the law and brought on shore. Then came the last day and the Collector of Customs still refused absolutely to grant a clearance to the ships unless the teas were discharged.
The next day was December 16, 1773, and seven thousand people were assembled in town meeting in and around the Old South Meeting-House. Eagerly they awaited, in the fast-darkening church, the return of Rotch, who had been sent out to the governor's house in Milton to ask as a last resort for a passport from him. At nightfall the ship-owner returned with the word that the governor refused such a passport.
No sooner had he made this report than Samuel Adams arose and said: "This meeting can do nothing more to save the country." The words were a signal, but they were also a simple statement of truth. For by sunrise the next morning the revenue officers, in the ordinary course of events, would board the ships and unload their cargoes; then the consignees would go to the custom-house and pay the duty, — and the king's scheme would be crowned with success.
Yet not so did things fall out. For, the instant that Adams' words left his lips, a shout was heard in the street and some forty or fifty men, disguised as Indians, darted by the door and down towards the wharves, followed by the people. Rushing on board the tea-ships, the "Mohawks," as they were called, set themselves, in most businesslike fashion, to clearing the vessels of their cargoes. No violence was committed, no tea was taken. British historians are wont to characterize the affair as a riot, but it was very far indeed from being that. Henry Cabot Lodge, in his illuminating book on Boston, has called the tea-party "a picturesque refusal" on the part of the people of Boston to pay the tax. "But," he adds, truly, " it was also something more. It was the sudden appearance, in a world tired of existing systems of government, of the power of the people in action.
The expression may have been rude and the immediate result trivial, but the act was none the less of the gravest consequence. It was the small beginning of the great democratic movement which has gone forward ever since, and which it would have been well for English statesmen who were then concerned with it to have pondered deeply."
Retaliation was, however, the only idea that the king and his ministers could then entertain and, in spite of opposition on the part of certain far-seeing men in Parliament, two acts to express this were passed. One was the Boston Port Bill designed to suspend the trade and close the harbor of the town which had dared rebellion. The other was the Regulating Act, by which the charter of Massachusetts was annulled, its free government swept away and a military governor appointed with despotic power such as Andros had had, nearly a hundred years before.
Odd that those well-read English ministers did not press to its logical conclusion that analogy of Andros!
CHAPTER III. TWO ENGLISH CHAMPIONS OF THE DAWNING REPUBLIC
AT the time of the Boston Port Bill and the disturbances it entailed, just as at the time of Sir Harry Vane and his troubles, one must look at the march of events in old England, no less than in New England, in order to understand the whole situation.
The resistance of the Massachusetts men to the tyranny of the king was as much applauded by certain great souls in England as by the patriots in the other colonies. The quarrel, in a word, was not between England and America, but between George III and the principles for which America stood.
Of those principles two Englishmen of great distinction — William Pitt and Charles Fox — were champions. And because every American who cares for the cause of Liberty must be interested in these men, who braved unpopularity for Liberty's sake, I want here to retrace their glorious careers, even if in so doing I run somewhat ahead of my narrative.
The William Pitt referred to is he whom Heber described as "Young without follies, without rashness bold, And greatly poor amidst a nation's gold," not, of course, the great Earl of Chatham, whose speech on the Repeal of the Stamp Act is the glorious heritage of all English-speaking people.
"Untarnished Chatham's genuine child," the second Pitt has been called, a son, that is, whose eloquence, probity and high-minded statesmanship serve to render him the peer in history's pages of even his distinguished father.
"I am glad that I am not the eldest son. I want to speak in the House of Commons, like papa," is the exclamation attributed to young Pitt, then a youth of seventeen, when he learned (in August, 1776) that his father had become Earl of Chatham. It was indeed towards speaking in the House of Commons that all the lad's thoughts and hopes were directed. At Eton and Cambridge he made the orations of history and literature an intimate part of his mental equipment. In these debates, it is interesting to observe, he always studied both sides. His favorite employment, Macaulay tells us, was to prepare harangues on opposite sides of the same question, to analyze them and to observe which of the arguments of the first speaker were refuted by the second, which were evaded, and which were left untouched. This practice made following actual debates in the House of Commons as fascinating an occupation to him as visiting the circus is to the country lad who has been performing acrobatic stunts with the old farm horse.
Fox,