Colonial_Eight

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ROAD TO REVOLUTION
Lecture 8: The Boston Tea Party
and the First Continental Congress

Lord North

     By 1770, British plans to reorganize the empire lay in a shambles. Colonial governors and legislatures were at loggerheads. Mobs were becoming increasingly common in the cities and in the countryside. Intimidation of British customs officials made efficient and even-handed enforcement of customs duties impossible. The revenues gathered hardly seemed worth the cost.

     In 1770, after years of chaos, King George appointed a new prime minister, Lord North, to clean up the mess. North convinced Parliament to repeal most of the Townshend duties. Only one tax remained--the one on tea--to serve as a mark of Parliament's right to tax and govern the colonists.

     With the repeal of the Townshend duties, the chaos in the colonies temporarily subsided, but the damage had been done. Most Americans had come to believe that the British government did not represent their interests and hopes--and indeed, threatened their own rights and liberties. There was no going back.

The Gaspee Affair

The Gaspee Burning

     Although the two years following the repeal of the Townshend Acts were relatively tranquil, events that transpired in this interval insured that the issues of the previous crises never totally subsided from the public view.

     Many Americans continued to defy the British navigation acts by smuggling taxable items. Warships of the Royal Navy often pursued these smugglers. Such was the case when the British warship Gaspee chased a suspected smuggler into the bay at Providence, Rhode Island. However, the warship ran aground during the pursuit and the crew temporarily abandoned it. During the night, unknown persons went out to the harbor and set fire to the Gaspee, destroying it.

     The destruction of a British warship infuriated royal officials, and in response Parliament appointed a commission to go to America and investigate the destruction of Crown property and bring the perpetrators to justice. This angered the colonists, who felt that it showed the British were going back on earlier promises to follow regular judicial procedures. Thus, when the commission arrived in Rhode Island, they found an entirely uncooperative populace: no one would claim they had seen or heard anything. This only convinced the British that Americans were an undisciplined rabble with no respect for the law.

     Although the Gaspee incident involved only Rhode Island, colonial reaction to the incident indicated just how unified the colonists had become in the preceding years. In the wake of the Gaspee affair, Peyton Randolph rose in the Virginia assembly to propose the establishment of permanent committees of correspondence with the other colonial assemblies. With the communication network in place, the British would not be able to divide up the colonies by playing off one interest against another.

     Massachusetts remained a hotbed of dissent. In 1772, Bostonians published a fiery document, The Votes and Proceedings, a record of their town meeting, in which they listed all British violation of American rights, including taxing and legislating Americans without their consent, introducing standing armies in peacetime, and more. The response to this protest brought the greatest outpouring of ordinary local opinion the resistance movement had yet seen. By the end of 1772 independence was being freely discussed in colonial newspapers. A confrontation seemed unavoidable.

The Tea Act and the Coercive Acts

The Boston Tea Party

     In 1773 Parliament provided the occasion for that confrontation. In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which gave the nearly bankrupt East India Tea Company an exclusive monopoly on selling tea in America while simultaneously lowering the the duty on tea (the only remaining duty on the books from the Townshend era) in order to stimulate American consumption of tea by lowering its price. From the British point of view, the Act seemed like a good thing for everyone: Americans would get cheaper tea, and the East India Tea Company (whose stockholders including Members of Parliament) would improve its business. Everyone would be happy.

     The colonists were NOT happy. The Tea Act set off a series of explosion in the colonies, allowing the radicals like Samuel Adams to draw attention once again to the unconstitutionality of the existing tax on tea, as well as the new issue of Parliament granting a monopoly to sell tea to select colonial merchants--a provision that especially angered them because it excluded American traders.

    The Tea Act spread alarm throughout the colonies. In several ports colonists stopped ships of the East Indian Tax Company from docking and unloading their tea. In Boston, dockworkers, many of them members of Samuel Adams' Sons of Liberty vigilante group, refused to unload the tea or allow anyone else to do so. The royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, was equally determined that the ship would sit at the dock until it was unloaded. (Hutchinson had no love for the Sons of Liberty: they had tarred and feathered Hutchinson, a customs official at the time, during the Stamp Act Crisis, as well as looting Hutchinson's home.) It was a standoff.

     On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of about twenty-five Sons of Liberty, painted to look like Indians (but fooling no one), boarded the tea ship in Boston Harbor. They took the crates of tea, hacked them open with hatchets, then dumped them overboard into the harbor. The "tea party" had destroyed £10,000 worth of tea.

     For the British, the Boston Tea Party was the last straw. Of all the colonies, Massachusetts had been the greatest thorn in their side, and Boston in particular had proven nearly ungovernable. Parliament determined to punish Boston and prove once and for all their right to legislate for the colonies.

     In 1774, Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts aimed solely at Boston and the colony of Massachusetts. The acts included the Boston Port Act, which closed Boston to all trade until the colony paid back the cost of the destroyed tea. It passed the Massachusetts Government Act, which did away with all self-government (dissolving the colonial assembly and outlawing town meetings), and the Administration of Justice Act, which said that any royal official accused of a capital crime could not be tried in colonial courts. Finally, it included a New Quartering Act, which demanded that the colonists--who were already responsible for paying for the upkeep of the British troops in their colony--would have to put up the troops in their own homes, and provide them with beer, food, blankets, and whatever else they needed. The idea was that having British troops quartered among the colonists themselves, it would effectively quash any further resistance.

     Finally, there was the Quebec Act. The Quebec Act organized a government for the territory of Quebec, which became part of the British empire following the end of the French and Indian War. The absorption of Quebec posed some potential problems. One was language. Most Quebeçois spoke French rather than English. Their court system was not based on English common law, where one had a right to trial by jury or other elements. And they were Catholic. (Remember, there is no separation between church and state in this era.) The Quebec Act proved amazingly tolerant: it allowed Quebec to retain its court system, its language, and did not impose the Church of England as the state church.

     The colonists reacted to the Quebec Act with consternation and anger. The British were demonstrating far more lenience towards their former enemy than towards their own American subjects! Moreover, some Americans viewed the retention of the French justice system as a possible first step towards taking away their rights to a jury trial. Finally, the hostility towards Catholicism (especially strong in the wake of the Great Awakening) alarmed Protetsants in America.

     The royal officials thought they had wised up. They saw how after the Townshend Acts the colonies had responded in unity to an act that affected all of them, but in passing acts aimed only at Massachusetts, they were following their old divide-and-rule policy of playing off one colonial interest against another and betting that none of the other colonies would risk economic punishment by standing with Massachusetts. They were wrong.

The First Continental Congress

     The Intolerable Acts produced a wave of sentiment for the beleaguered Bostonians. In every colony newspapers urged readers to see Boston's plight as their own. The South Carolina Gazette exclaimed that it considered the "horrid attack" on Boston as an attack on the Continent as a whole. George Washington, by now an influential Virginia planter and militia officer declared that "the cause of Boston now is and ever will be the cause of America." Colonists gathered supplies to send to Boston (whose main source, the harbor, had been closed off, even to food).

     Colonial sympathy for Boston did not stop at material and emotional support. In pamphlets and political essays, they placed these acts into the larger context of systematic oppression by Britain. Many referred to the British government as "the enemy," conspiring to deprive Americans of their liberty, and urged colonists to defend themselves against the "power and cunning of our adversaries."

    On September 5, 1774, delegates from every colony except Georgia gathered in Philadelphia for a continental congress. Few of the delegates of the people they represented thought of themselves as revolutionaries, yet in the eyes of the British, their actions amounted to something close to treason. Neither the king nor Parliament had authorized the congress to which colonial assemblies and self-appointed committees has sent representatives. Moreover, this congress was intent on resisting acts of Parliament and defying the king.

     Some of the most articulate political leaders in the colonies attended this First Continental Congress. Conservative delegates such as Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania hoped to slow the pace of colonial resistance by substituting petitions to Parliament for more radical actions, such as a total boycott of British goods suggested by Samuel Adams. Radicals like Samuel Adams and his cousin, John Adams, and Patrick Henry, demanded the boycott and more. Most of the delegates, however, fell somewhere in between the two extremes and searched for a way to express and find redress for their grievances without further eroding their relationship with England.

     The mounting crisis in Massachusetts diminished the chances of a moderate solution. Rumors spread that the Royal Navy was planning to bombard Boston, and that General Gage, commander of British troops, was preparing to invade the countryside. Thousands of Massachusetts militiamen had begun mustering in Cambridge, just outside of Boston. The growing conflict drove many delegates into the radical camp.

     In this atmosphere of dread and anxiety, the Continental Congress approved the Continental Association, a boycott of all English goods, set to begin December 1, 1774. The Congress also passed resolutions declaring their strong support of Massachusetts and demanding the repeal of the Intolerable Acts.

Thomas Jefferson

     The First Continental Congress had chosen radical tactics, but many delegates remained torn between loyalty to two governments and their conflicting claims to power. Thomas Jefferson, a young Virginia planter and intellectual, tried to find a way out of this dilemma by separating loyalty to the king from resistance to Parliament. He argued that the colonists owed allegiance to the nation's king, not to Parliament, and that each colony indeed had the right to legislate for itself. Not everyone agreed.

      If no compromise was reached, the delegates--and Americans everywhere--would have to choose where their strongest loyalties lay.  Joseph Galloway believed he had worked out the necessary compromise. In his Plan of Union, Galloway proposed a drastic restructuring of imperial relations. The plan called for a Grand Council, elected by each colonial legislature, that would share with Parliament the right to originate laws for the colonies. The Grand Council and Parliament would have the power to veto or disallow each other's decisions if necessary. A governor-general, appointed by the Crown, would oversee council operations and preserve imperial interests.

    After much discussion and debate, Congress rejected Galloway's compromise by the narrowest of margins. Then it was John Adams's turn to propose a solution. Under his skillful urging and direction, the Congress adopted the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. The declaration politely but firmly established the colonial standard for accepting legislation by Parliament. Colonists, said the Declaration, would consent to acts meant to regulate "our external commerce." But they absolutely denied the legitimacy, or lawfulness, of an "idea of taxation, internal or external, for raising a revenue on the subjects of America, without their consent."

     The delegates knew that the force behind the declaration came neither from logic of argument nor genius of political reasoning. Whatever force it carried came from the unspoken but nevertheless real threat of rebellion that would occur if the colonists' demands were not met. To make this clearer, Congress endorsed a set of resolutions rushed to Philadelphia from Suffolk County, Massachusetts. These Suffolk Resolves called on the residents of that county to arm themselves and prepare to resist British military action. Congressional support for these resolves sent an unmistakable message that American leaders were willing to choose rebellion if politics failed.

     The delegates adjourned and headed home, but not before agreeing to convene again in a year's time to revisit these issues, when they would know Britain's reaction to their demands. Now the colonists waited for the Crown's response. When it came, it was electric. King George had declared: "Blows must decide whether they are subject to this country or independent."

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