The plan had been schemed out by a conclave of citizens around a bowl of punch in Court Street, and was carried out with a success that was no less remarkable than its peacefulness. The trappings of the red man concealed the identity of many prominent citizens, friends of John Hancock and Samuel Adams, their rivals in ability and their peers in energy. The sham savages were so numerous and so determined that no resistance was offered by the captains or the crews of the vessels. The shore was picketed with sentinels ready to resist any interference on the part of any representatives of royal authority. There was no interference. The conspirators of the punch-bowl and those who obeyed their instructions kept their secret so close, and did their work so quickly, that those in authority knew nothing about the business until the business was happily over. In about two hours the entire cargo of the three tea-ships was dragged out of the hold and flung into the sea. The patriotic citizen who had asked significantly if tea could be made with salt water was satisfactorily answered by the Mohawks when they cast overboard the last of their three hundred and forty-two chests, and prepared to disappear as rapidly and as mysteriously as they had come. During the whole adventure only one man was hurt, who tried to secrete some of the tea about his person, and who was given a drubbing for his pains. The Mohawks {161} scattered and disappeared, washed their faces, rolled up their blankets, concealed their pistols and axes, and as many reputable Boston citizens returned to their homes. It is related that some of them on their way home passed by a house in which Admiral Montague was spending the evening. Montague heard the noise of the trampling feet, opened the window and looked out upon the fantastic procession. No doubt some news of what had happened had reached him, for he is reported to have called out: "Well, boys, you have had a fine night for your Indian caper. But mind, you've got to pay the fiddler yet." One of the Mohawk leaders looked up and answered promptly: "Oh, never mind, squire. Just come out here, if you please, and we'll settle the bill in two minutes." The admiral considered the odds were against him, that the joke had gone far enough. He closed the window, leaving the bill to be settled by whoso thought fit, and the laughing savages swept on to their respectable wigwams. If some very reputable citizens found a few leaves of tea in their shoes when they took them off that night, they said nothing about it, and nobody was the wiser. So ended the adventure of the Boston Tea-party, which was but the prologue to adventures more memorable and more momentous. We learn that at least one of these masquerading Indians survived to so late a date as the March of 1846. Men now living may have clasped hands with Henry Purkitt and David Kinnison and heard from their own lips the story of a deed that enraged a King, offended Chatham, was disapproved of by George Washington, and was not disapproved of by Burke.
[Sidenote: 1773—After the Boston "Tea-party">[
The news of the Boston Tea-party reached London on January 19, 1774, and was public property on the 21st. Other news little less unpleasant soon followed. At Charleston tea was only landed to lie rotting in damp cellars, not an ounce of it to be bought or sold. In Philadelphia a proclamation of December 27, 1773, announced that "THE TEA-SHIP being arrived, every Inhabitant who wishes to preserve the Liberty of America is desired to meet at the STATE-HOUSE, This Morning, precisely {162} at TEN O'clock, to advise what is best to be done on this alarming Crisis." "What was best to be done" proved to be to compel the tea-ship to return at once with its cargo to England. New York refused to allow the tea-ship "Nancy" to enter the harbor, and if some tea was eventually landed under the cannon of a man-of-war, it was only to be locked up as in Charleston, and to be left to lie unused. The bad news was received in England with an unreasoning fury by those whose fault it was, and by those who knew nothing at all about the matter; with a grave indignation by those who, like Pitt, were as resolute to support the supremacy of England as to plead for justice to her colonies; with despair by those who dreamed of an honorable and abiding union between the two peoples; and with applause by those who admired any protest against injustice, however vehement and irregular.
It is difficult, in reading the debates on the troubles in America, to credit the sanity of the majority of the speakers. These advocated a colonial policy that should only have commended itself to a session of Bedlamites, and clamored for a treatment of the colonists that might well have shocked the susceptibilities of a savage. No Virginian planter could be more disdainful of the rights of his slaves, or more resentful at any attempt to assert them, than the average member of Parliament was disdainful of the rights of the American colonists and resentful at their assertion. The English country gentlemen who applauded the ministers and who howled at Burke seemed to be absolutely unconscious that the men of Massachusetts and the men of New York were not merely like themselves made in the same image, but brethren of their own race, blood of their blood and bone of their bone, children of the same stock whose resistance to oppression was recorded at Runnymede and Worcester, at the Boyne and at Culloden. Even if the colonists had been the knaves and fools and cowards that the Parliamentary majority appeared to think them, the action of that majority was of a kind eminently calculated to lend strength to the most feeble spirit and courage to the most craven heart. The coarse {163} contempt, the brutal menace which were the distinguishing features of all that ill-timed oratory might well have goaded into resistance men who had been slaves for generations till servility had grown a habit. Yet this contempt and menace were addressed to men trained by harsh experiences to be stubborn in defence and sturdy in defiance, men who had won their liberty from the sea and the wilderness, who were as tenacious of their rights and as proud of their privileges as they were tenacious of the soil which they had wrested from the red man and the wolf, and proud of the stately cities which had conquered the forest and the swamp. It was the descendants of Miles Standish and John Smith, of Endicott and Bradford and Underhill and Winslow whom the Squire Westerns of Westminster were ready to insult and were eager to enslave.
It must, however, be remembered that even men who had advocated the claims of the colonies were, or professed to be, shocked at the daring deed of the men of Boston. Dean Tucker declared that mutinous colonies were no use to England, and had better be allowed to depart. Chatham found the action of the Boston people criminal, prompted by passions and wild pretences. In America George Washington disapproved of the exploit.
[Sidenote: 1774—Closing the port of Boston]
The East India Company, pressed by the pinch of financial difficulties, clamored for a revenge that the King was resolved to give them. Under his instigation Lord North, in the beginning of 1774, introduced the famous measure for closing the port of Boston against all commerce. The Bill declared that "in the present condition of the town and harbor the commerce of his Majesty's subjects cannot be safely carried on there." It was accordingly asserted to be "expedient that the officers of his Majesty's Customs should be forthwith removed from the said town." It was enacted that "from and after the first day of June, 1774, it shall not be lawful for any person or persons to lade, or cause to be laden, or put off from any quay, wharf, or other place within the town of Boston, or in or upon any part of the shore of the bay, commonly called the harbor of Boston, into any ship, vessel, boat, etc., any goods, wares, {164} or merchandise whatsoever . . . or to take up, discharge, or cause or procure to be taken up or discharged within the town, out of any boat, lighter, ship, etc., any goods, wares, or merchandise whatsoever . . . under pain of the forfeiture of the goods and merchandise and of the boat," and so on, in a long and drastic measure practically intended to ruin Boston. This was what the Government thought it well to describe by the word "expedient." This was not all. Comprehensive alterations of the laws of the province followed. The charter of Massachusetts was changed. The council for the province, which had hitherto been chosen by the people, was now to be chosen by the Crown, and the judges of the province were to be nominated by the Crown. Another measure authorized the Governor to send persons implicated in the disturbances to England for trial. Boston and the province were indeed to be heavily punished and sternly brought to their senses.
The King and the King's ministers had hoped fondly, in the old as well as the new sense of the word, that their action towards the port of Boston would effectually humble the spirit and crush the opposition of that mutinous city. Their scheme was founded upon a nice calculation of the innate baseness of human nature. They argued that the closing of the port of Boston would turn the stream of her commerce in the direction of other cities, which would be only too glad to enrich themselves at the expense of their disabled comrade. While they believed that the punishment of Boston would thus breed a selfish disunion in the province of Massachusetts, they trusted also that the spectacle of the severe punishment meted out to Massachusetts would have its wholesome deterring effect upon other colonies and destroy at once whatever desire for union might exist among them. The King and the King's ministers were the more deceived. Their ingenious scheme produced a result precisely the opposite of that which they so confidently anticipated. The other ports of Massachusetts did not seize with avidity the opportunity for plunder afforded them by the humiliation of Boston. The other colonies were not driven into discord by the sight of {165} the punishment of Massachusetts. On the contrary, the ports of Massachusetts refused to take advantage of the degradation of Boston, and the colonies were urged, and almost forced, into union by what they regarded as the despotic treachery of the English Crown. The most devoted friend, the most enthusiastic advocate of the rights of the American colonists could scarcely have devised better means of drawing them together and welding them into a solid fellowship than those which had been employed by George the Third and his advisers for the purpose of keeping them apart forever.
[Sidenote: 1774—General Gage]
An immense number of copies of the Boston Port Bill were sent with great rapidity all over the colonies. In the fine phrase which we must needs believe to be Burke's, these had the effect which the poets ascribe to the Fury's torch; they set the countries through which they passed in a flame. At Boston and New York "the populace had copies of the Bill printed upon mourning paper with a black border, which they cried about the streets under the title of a barbarous, cruel, bloody, and inhuman murder." In other places the Bill was publicly burned. All over the Continent great meetings were held, at which, with more or less vehemence of speech, but with a common enthusiasm and a common indignation, the Bill was denounced, and the determination to resist it defiantly asserted. When General Gage arrived on his mission of administration he found not merely the colony of Massachusetts, but the whole continent in an uproar. He had to deal with a vast majority of the people who were in proclaimed resistance to the Act, and who only differed in the extreme of resistance to which they were prepared immediately to go, and a minority who either approved or did not altogether disapprove of the Act. Gage was condemned to the government not of a cowed, humbled, and friendless province, but of a raging nation, frantic at the infringement of its rights, and sustained in the struggle it was resolved to make by the cheer and aid of a league of sister nations. The flame from the Fury's torch had spread with a vengeance. Gage was a brave man, an able man, an {166} honorable man; but for Alexander he was a little over-parted. The difficulties he had to encounter were too great for him to grapple with; the work he was meant to do too vast for his hands or the hands of any man. He was sent out to sway a chastened and degraded province; he found himself opposed by a defiant people, exalted by injustice and animated by attack.