Firmness of Pennsylvania.—Tea Ships.—Destruction of Tea at Greenwich.—Revolutionary Movements.
lating arguments against taxation, was received with loud acclaim. Alarmed at the progress of opposition in the colonies, Hillsborough, the colonial secretary, sent forth his countervailing circulars. Governor Penn was instructed to enjoin the Assembly to regard the Massachusetts circular as seditious and of a dangerous tendency, and to prorogue the Assembly if they should countenance it. The Assembly, firm in the right cause, practically asserted their privilege to correspond with the other colonies, and they heartily seconded the proposition of Virginia for a union of the provinces in a respectful petition to the king for a redress of grievances. Leagues, non-importation agreements, committees of correspondence, and other revolutionary machinery, such as were zealously engaged in New England, were equally active in Pennsylvania; and when the British government poured all its wrath upon Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, in word and deed, stood up as the bold champion and sympathizing friend of the New Englanders. Its course was more temperate than its sister colony, but not less firm. While a convention at Philadelphia recommended the people of Boston to try all lenient measures for relief, they assured them that "the people of Pennsylvania would continue firmly to adhere to the cause of American liberty."
In December, 1773, two of the "detested tea-ships" sailed up the Delaware as far as Gloucester Point. There they were ordered to anchor, and to proceed no further, at their peril. The authority acting on the occasion was a committee from a meeting of full eight thousand persons, then congregated in the State House yard. They allowed the captain of one of the ships (the Polly) to go up to the city and witness the manifested feelings of the people, by which he might determine which was the wiser course to pursue, to persist in landing the tea, or to weigh anchor for Europe. He chose the latter, and in the mean time the consignees of the tea were all forced to resign. In November, the following year, the brig Greyhound, bound to Philadelphia with a cargo of tea, landed at Greenwich, on the Jersey shore. There the cargo was discharged, and placed in the cellar of a house standing in front of the market grounds. On the evening of the 22d, about fifty men, disguised as Indians, took the chests from the cellar, piled them in a neighboring field, and burned them. Suits were brought against some of the leading young men who were engaged in this transaction, but the war breaking out, and courts of justice being abolished or suspended, they were abandoned. *
On the 18th of June, 1774, another meeting of at least eight thousand persons convened in Philadelphia. The governor had been requested to call a special session of the Assembly, but refused. ** John Dickenson and Thomas Willing were appointed chairmen of the meeting: the whole proceedings were revolutionary. They recommended a Continental Congress; formed a committee to correspond with the counties and with the other colonies in relation to the appointment of deputies to a general Congress, and to solicit subscriptions for the sufferers at Boston. A convention of deputies from all parts of the province was recommended, and, as peaceably as it convened, the mass meeting adjourned.
1774 A meeting of deputies from the several counties was held on the 15th of July, in which the kindred sentiments of loyalty and patriotism glowed with intensity. They resolved "that they owed allegiance to George the Third; that they ardently desired the restoration of their ancient harmony with the mother country on the principles of the Constitution; that the inhabitants of the colonies were entitled to the same rights and liberties
* The following are the names of the leading young men who composed this New Jersey Tea-party: Dr. Ebenezer Elmer, Richard Howell (afterward major in the army and governor of the state), David Pierson, Stephen Pierson, Silas Whitecar, Timothy Elmer, Rev. Andrew Hunter, Rev. Philip Fithian, Alexander Moore, Jr., Clarence Parvin, John Hunt, James Hunt, Lewis Howell, Henry Starks, James Ewing, father of the late chief justice of New Jersey, Dr. Thomas Ewing, Josiah Seeley, and Joel Fithian.
** In 1771 Governor John Penn returned to England, leaving executive affairs in the hands of Andrew Hamilton, the president of the council. In the autumn of that year, Richard Penn, a younger brother of John, arrived with credentials as lieutenant governor. He held the office until September, 1773, when John Penn returned, and resumed the reins of government. It was during the latter part of the first administration of John Penn, and those of Hamilton and Richard Penn, that the hostilities in the Valley of Wyoming occurred, of which we have written in the first volume.
Members of Assembly instructed.—Quakers Opposed to the Revolution.—"Testimony" of their Yearly Meeting in 1775.
within the colonies as subjects born in England were entitled to within that realm, and that the right of representation in the British Parliament was implied by the asserted power of the government to tax them." The convention also adopted a series of instructions for the Assembly about to convene, in which, in the strongest terms, colonial rights were asserted. These were from the pen of John Dickenson, and, though loyal in spirit, they were firm in resistance to the arm of oppression. * When the Assembly met, these instructions were regarded as binding, and were faithfully carried out. Joseph Galloway (who afterward became a Tory), the speaker of the Assembly, Samuel Rhoades, Thomas Mifflin, Charles Humphries, John Morton, George R-oss, Edward Biddle, and subsequently John Dickenson, were appointed delegates to represent Pennsylvania in the Continental July 22, 1774 Congress, to assemble in Philadelphia in September following.
We have seen that, from the founding of Pennsylvania, the Quakers held a commanding social and political influence in the commonwealth. Although this influence was much diminished at the commencement of the Revolution, a large influx of Germans and adventurers from New England having populated extensive districts of the province, their principles, precepts, and practices had great weight with the public mind. They had generally taken affirmative ground in the popular peaceable measures adopted to procure redress of political grievances, and warmly approved of the conduct of the first Continental Congress; but when an appeal to arms became an apparent necessity, and the tendency of action in popular conventions and legislative assemblies pointed to that dreadful alternative, their love of order, and their principles of non-resistance by force of arms, positively enjoined in their "Discipline," made them pause. They held extra and protracted meetings, even till after night, to determine what to do. There was a spirit abroad favorable to enforcing a compliance with the letter of the American Association recommended by the first Congress—an association designed to draw, in strong lines of demarcation, the separation between the friends of Congress and the friends of the king. To this spirit the Quakers were opposed, because it usurped the dearest prerogatives of conscience, and pronounced the exercise of honest opinions to be a political misdemeanor. They not only paused, but cast the weight of their influence into the scale of royalty, believing it to be the guardian of law and order.