The Spirit of '74

How the American Revolution Began

Ray Raphael, Marie Raphael

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781620971277
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

How ordinary people went from resistance to revolution: “[A] concise, lively narrative . . . the authors expertly build tension.” —Publishers Weekly
 
Americans know about the Boston Tea Party and “the shot heard ’round the world,” but sixteen months divided these two iconic events, a period that has nearly been lost to history. The Spirit of ’74 fills in this gap in our nation’s founding narrative, showing how in these mislaid months, step by step, real people made a revolution.
 
After the Tea Party, Parliament not only shut down a port but also revoked the sacred Massachusetts charter. Completely disenfranchised, citizens rose up as a body and cast off British rule everywhere except in Boston, where British forces were stationed. A “Spirit of ’74” initiated the American Revolution, much as the better-known “Spirit of ’76” sparked independence. Redcoats marched on Lexington and Concord to take back a lost province, but they encountered Massachusetts militiamen who had trained for months to protect the revolution they had already made.
 
The Spirit of ’74 places our founding moment in a rich new historical context, both changing and deepening its meaning for all Americans.

PART I

SETTING THE STAGE

I propose, in this Bill, to take the executive power from the hands of the democratic part of the government. . . . I therefore move you, Sir, that leave be given to bring in a Bill for the better regulating of the government of the province of Massachusetts Bay.

—Prime Minister Lord North in the House of Commons, March 28, 1774

1

BOSTON: TEA

The Boston Tea Party, the daring episode of a single night, was in reality the work of twenty nights and days or more, accomplished as thousands rallied to the series of meetings beforehand and conferred in caucuses, committees, and subcommittees. Men confronted officials, stood watch in the harbor, drafted petitions, orated from church pulpits, composed arguments for the press, and speechified endlessly in taverns. If they cried out against taxation without representation, other imperial offenses compelled them equally, increasing tension and resolve. In the decade before, protesters had tormented individual government men or submitted petitions or conducted boycotts, but in December 1773, after purposeful deliberation, they subscribed to an especially treacherous action. They defied not only the Crown but also the East India Company, a seemingly invincible global corporation whose fate and Britain’s were inextricably tied. All knew the Crown would protect her own, and that vandalism on this scale could be called treason—any man might hang for it. As fierce activity built to a crescendo, colonials found themselves on a precipice. They came to this place of their own free will.

Before dawn in Boston on November 29, 1773, men and boys whose names went unrecorded posted a handbill “in all Parts of the Town.” People saw it on the wall of a warehouse on Long Wharf or on a wooden fence in a street that twisted this way and that up a hill as if, like the town’s headstrong inhabitants, it had a mind of its own. It appeared everywhere.

Friends! Brethren! Countrymen!

That worst of Plagues the detested TEA shipped for this Port by the East-India Company, is now arrived in this Harbour; the Hour of Destruction or manly Opposition to the Machinations of Tyranny stares you in the Face; every Friend to his Country, to himself and Posterity, is now called upon to meet at Faneuil-Hall at NINE o’Clock,

THIS DAY,

(at which Time the bells will ring) to make a united and successful Resistance to this last, worst and most destructive Measure of Administration.¹

Bostonians recognized signal calls to action in words like “Hour of Destruction,” “manly Opposition,” “Machinations of Tyranny,” and “Resistance.” Most had risen at first light, as eighteenth-century people did, and, after seeing the posted message, carried the news wherever they went. On very short notice thousands arrived at Faneuil Hall.

Just half as large as it is now, having room for only twelve or thirteen hundred, the building could not hold the crowd. Men marched purposely for a few hundred yards to Old South Meeting House, on the corner of Milk and Marlborough Streets. Constructed forty-four years earlier for its Puritan congregation, Old South was the largest building in Boston. It could contain even the vast numbers that the evangelist George Whitfield drew when he preached there in 1740; the building then was “so exceedingly thronged that I was obliged to get in at one of the windows,” Whitfield wrote. On this late November day it was thronged too—as many as “5,000, some say 6,000 men,” according to Samuel Adams, who was present. Respected as he was at the age of fifty-one for his seniority and experience, and expert as he was at forging compromises and maintaining alliances, Adams played a prominent role at the vast meeting.²

One hundred and more box pews lined the main floor, and as many as thirty men sat shoulder to shoulder in each. Those who stood filled every gap in every aisle. Men made their way upstairs and settled themselves on the balcony’s pews. Others trudged higher still, perching on benches in the upper galleries that extended over the balcony. When there was no more sitting room or standing room inside the meetinghouse, men occupied the three church vestibules, and when the vestibules could not contain another body, they lined up outside the open doors, craning their necks to see into the interior.³

Stipulations that limited attendance at town meetings to those holding property were not in force. It was the “body of the people” that had turned out, including men of the “lower sort” who would otherwise be disenfranchised; seamen, laborers, apprentices, and the lesser tradesmen, like shoemakers, swelled the numbers in the conclave. They took their places beside those of the “middling sort”—printers, distillers, engravers, craftsmen and master artisans, clergymen, and small shopkeepers. Also in attendance were men of the “better sort”—shipowners, merchants engaged in international trade, lawyers, landed gentry, and gentlemen born to wealth and influence. Men of any class could have a voice in the day’s proceedings, responding to speakers and determining the fate of any motion with a yea or nay. Although women did not participate in bodies such as this where votes were taken, they found other ways to make their mark.

Atop Old South rose a towering steeple, one of more than a dozen on view in the skyline. These steeples testified to Boston’s spiritual leanings, tilting toward a Puritan righteousness that animated citizens who continually occupied the moral high ground in altercations with British authorities. But Boston faced the sea, and mercantile interests and dogged ambition compelled opposition, too. Tossed together, stirred and mixed, the ingredients made a potent concoction.

The export of lumber and fish made up fully half of New England’s wealth in trade, and ships bound for distant ports sailed out of the harbor with dried or pickled fish in their holds or boards, planks, wooden shingles, hoops, and staves. Ships traveled regularly to other colonies as well, carrying every manner of saleable merchandise, be it nails, barreled beef, or produce. Also on board were the luxurious English imports that had arrived safely in Boston Harbor after challenging weeks at sea only to be immediately dispatched elsewhere. In the province’s chief seaport, in its surrounding towns, and in the backcountry, commercial transactions enriched men of influence, while a fraction of the wealth trickled down in relatively dependable fashion to men who cut sails from huge sheets of canvas with their sharp sheeps-foot-blade knives, or to seamen who clambered up a ship’s rigging, or to any of the hundreds upon hundreds of others who kept trade alive and ships afloat. Boston, in short, was a trading town. “The Town itself subsists by trade,” a contributor to the Boston Gazette explained. “Every inhabitant may be considered as connected with it.” In the late 1760s, a merchants’ organization called the Boston Society for Encouraging Trade and Commerce had opened its membership to artisans and evolved into the Body of the Trade, often called simply “The Body.” Everybody in Boston took note when the mother country enacted some law that affected commerce, particularly if that law was billed as the “worst and most destructive Measure of Administration.”⁴

The inflammatory broadside called tea “that worst of Plagues,” and Abigail Adams called it “that bainfull weed” when she wrote to the literate Mercy Otis Warren, who was to be her decades-long mentor and correspondent. If the times denied Adams a public forum, her letters often testified to an avid interest in the politics of the day, and in these she could take the podium when she chose:

Great and I hope Effectual opposition has been made to the landing of it. . . . The flame is kindled and like lightening it catches from Soul to Soul. Great will be the devastation if not timely quenched or allayed by some more Lenient Measures.

Altho the mind is shocked at the Thought of Sheding Humane Blood, more Especially the Blood of our Countrymen, and a civil War is of all Wars, the most dreadfull. Such is the present Spirit that prevails, that if once they are made desperate, Many, very Many of our Heroes will Spend their lives in the cause, with the Speech of Cato in their Mouths, “What a pitty it is, that we can dye but once to save our Country.”⁵

But why did Abigail Adams imagine that tea might cause such a commotion and lead to heroes dying and civil war?

Tea itself was a character in the drama by 1773, although when it was first introduced into Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, its consumption was negligible and role only minor. It was almost prohibitively expensive and for good reason. In Canton, tea was loaded on East India Company vessels for an arduous six-month passage to England, where the British imposed stiff importation duties. Twice a year it was auctioned off, and the colonial merchants who placed their bids in London then shipped it across the Atlantic’s unpredictable waters. Only an elite set drank the beverage, setting out silver sugar tongs and creamers, tea tables, caddies, and the rest of the required paraphernalia.⁶

But by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, improvements in navigation, the cultivation of trade connections, favorable Parliamentary legislation, and expansive sales led to a drop in the price of tea, as did smuggling—ubiquitous on both sides of the Atlantic. In Massachusetts about half of probated estates during this period included tea wares, such as silver teapots and fanciful porcelain cups. Other households consumed tea from everyday crockery never itemized in a will, but by now almost all drank it, brewed very dark.⁷

In 1767, when Parliament decided to levy duties on five indispensable colonial items, tea was one. The Townshend duties engendered widespread unrest and led to the reestablishment of nonconsumption and nonimportation agreements that had been used to great effect in Stamp Act times. In less than three years, with funds lost from customs duties, colonists agitating, and British merchants and manufacturers complaining mightily as their sales plummeted, Parliament capitulated. When the Crown relinquished the duties on glass, lead, paint, and paper, resistance did subside, as intended. It refused to relinquish its principles, however, and reasserted its right to tax by retaining the duty on tea, the item that garnered most of the Townsend revenues. Because Britain did not yield entirely, tea became the symbol of its oppressive policies. Standing on principle in their turn, colonists shunned it. Some imbibed crude substitutes although the vast majority simply consumed smuggled varieties, primarily tea that arrived from Holland.

By choosing not to consume a given item, women as well as men engaged in civic action. “The wise and virtuous Part of the Fair Sex in Boston and other towns,” the Boston Gazette boasted early in 1770, “being at length sensible that by the Consumption of Tea, they are supporting the [Customs] Commissioners and other famous Tools of Power, have voluntarily agreed, not to give or receive any further Entertainment of that kind, until those Creatures, together with the Boston Standing Army, are removed, and the Revenue Acts are repealed.”⁸

The taxing of tea was doubly resented because its proceeds were put to injurious use. Before 1768, the provincial legislature paid the salaries of the most powerful colonial officials. It was the old story of not biting the hand that feeds you, and as long as the hand was an elected body, officials had to pay heed to the people’s representatives. A governor who dissolved an obstreperous assembly, for example, could not receive his salary unless he reconvened it. In 1768, however, the Crown decided to remunerate the chief justice of Massachusetts directly, drawing requisite funds from customs duties, including the duty on tea. Starting in 1771, the Crown disbursed the salaries of the lieutenant governor and the governor and, in 1772, the salaries of five superior court justices, taking yet more officials under its wing. Once recompensed by the Crown, officials were “degraded to hirelings, and the body of the people shall suffer their free constitution to be overturn’d and ruin’d,” as Samuel Adams indicated when reacting to the judicial appointments.⁹

Britain’s usurpation of the power of the purse escalated the tension around the tea tax. The Crown not only collected monies it had no right to collect but also funneled them to colonial officials who at once became Crown dependents. When Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, a new drama unfolded, with the East India Company cast in a starring role. The company had originated in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I as Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, when, as a reward for advancing the queen’s imperial designs, it received a charter, as colonies did, and, additionally, an advantageous monopoly on Far Eastern British trade. For a century and three-quarters it was akin to a nation in its own right, engaging in battles with England’s competitors on the seas while maintaining its own armies in distant lands. The East India Company extracted tea, spices, silks, gold, silver, jewels, and other Far East exotica with one hand and did business in a flagrant manner with the other—selling opium to the Chinese people in spite of an emperor’s objections or assuming the civil administration of Bengal and extracting taxes there during a drought that killed more than a million. Its functionaries returned to England as wealthy as lords and approximately as powerful, even if they lacked the proper aristocratic credentials.¹⁰

Although the East India Company seemed too big to fail, by 1772 it was indeed failing. When speculative banking schemes collapsed throughout Europe, it was hard hit, and by then smugglers were cornering the global markets it once controlled. Seven million pounds of Dutch tea entered Britain in the 1760s according to estimates. During those years, the lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson guessed that as much as three-quarters of the tea consumed in Massachusetts was unloaded in darkness onto small colonial vessels and spirited away or admitted into the country after bribes exchanged hands. “We have been so long habituated to illicit Trade that people in general see no evil it,” he groused. Unsold tea piled up in company warehouses as a result—to the tune of some eighteen million pounds by 1772.¹¹

The impend...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Missing Sixteen Months
• How the American Revolution Began: Timeline
• A Note on Nomenclature
• Part I: Setting the Stage
• Part II: The Revolution of 1774
• Part III: Defending the Revolution
• Postscript: Local Events, National Narratives, and Global Impact
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors