The first of the “Intolerable Acts”: punishing Boston for the Tea Party

What caused the American Revolution, anyway? Well, there were a lot of things, but one of the major dominoes in the chain was the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Not that destroying a bunch of tea was really important, but it set off a chain of events that escalated to armed warfare about a year and a half later.

When England heard of the Tea Party, the King and Parliament were furious. This was the last straw: for years they had been patient with the Americans and tried to work things out with them; they had bent farther than they wanted to; but they were not going to give in any more. In the spring and early summer of 1774, they set about punishing Boston (and Massachusetts in general) and putting the colonies in their place.

One member of Parliament put it this way: “The town of Boston ought to be knocked about their ears and destroyed. Delenda est Carthago*…I am of opinion you will never meet with that proper obedience to the laws of this country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.” Note that he didn’t say “obedience to the laws of their country,” but to the laws of this country — England. The majority of Parliament viewed themselves as the supreme legislative authority for the colonies — and to be fair, the colonies were just that: colonies. But colonies never seem to like the authority of their “mother country” once they start growing up and think they can stand on their own. Kind of like kids…

The punishment of Boston was known as the Boston Port Act. No ships could enter or leave Boston until the Bostonians had paid for the tea. (It’s strange to think that tea was on center stage in the struggle for American liberty!) The Royal Navy enforced this law. Boston depended on ships for much of its food and other supplies, and many of its citizens were merchants who made their living from importing or exporting goods by ship. Many were dockhands or sailors; many ran businesses that bought or sold the goods that came and went by ship. With no ships allowed to come or go, Boston would starve.

At least, that was the idea. But people all over Massachusetts — New England — all of the colonies rallied to support Boston. One town sent wagonloads of corn; another sent barrels of dried fish; another sent sheep. In August 1774, for example, the people of Baltimore, Maryland, wrote to the revolutionary leaders in Boston that they had chipped in and sent “three thousand bushels of corn, twenty barrels of rye flour, two barrels of pork and twenty barrels of bread, for the relief of our brethren, the distressed inhabitants of your Town,” along with another thousand bushels of corn from Annapolis. The ship that took this cargo to New England — there to be unloaded and taken to Boston by land — was appropriately named the America.

This one law, which was a direct result of the Boston Tea Party, went a long way toward uniting the colonies and stirring up resistance to British authority. There were more laws to follow, however; together they became known as the “Intolerable Acts.”

*Delenda est Carthago is Latin for “Carthage must be destroyed.” This is a reference to the time (in ancient history) when Rome and Carthage were constant rivals and enemies; some Roman leaders argued that it wasn’t enough to simply defeat Carthage: they needed to destroy it and so eliminate the Carthaginian threat forever. Eventually, that’s just what happened.

Sources

The Spirit of ‘Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants. Bicentennial Edition. Pages 12, 32.

A Yankee recruiter and his horse

Although the American Revolution was a serious thing, there was plenty of humor in it, too. Even the people living through it found things to laugh at, as most of us do, even during hard times. Here’s one example from a few months before the war started:

Many British soldiers were stationed in Boston during the years leading up the revolution. Some Americans, anxious to weaken the British army, encouraged and helped soldiers to desert. They would offer money, entice them with promises of land, give them clothes to disguise themselves, and help them sneak out of town. Although these plans sometimes worked, and many soldiers did in fact desert, sometimes the plans backfired. In December 1774, a couple of people in Boston wrote about how a British corporal tricked a Yankee “recruiting officer”:

Last week a corporal of one of the regiments was asked by a countryman to desert, and offered six dollars a month to teach their militia; the corporal pretended to be willing, and the countryman procured him a good suit of cloaths, which he put on and tied up his own in a bundle. They then went to mount the countryman’s horse, when the corporal pretending he was not horseman enough to ride behind, the countryman allowed him to place himself in the saddle, and then got up behind; when they were seated, the corporal, instead of riding out of town, set the horse a galloping towards the Barracks, which when the Yankee discovered, he threw himself off, and the corporal continued his rout to the barracks. The countryman did not think fit to call for either horse or cloaths, and the matter being represented to the General, he has ordered the Corporal to keep both.

You can imagine how the two men felt: the “Yanky” would have been frightened — not to mention angry — at the fact that he could easily have been caught and punished by the redcoats for trying to help one of them desert, at the fact that he had lost his horse and the clothes he had furnished, and at the fact that the corporal had made a fool of him. The British corporal, on the other hand, would have been laughing at how he had tricked this foolish country yokel and gotten himself a horse and some good clothes in the process. I imagine him sharing the laugh with his friends, telling and re-telling the story to everyone who wanted to hear it — perhaps even making a “fish story” out of it, and enjoying it as his listeners laughed.

The problem is that so many people, then and now, consider battles and proclamations to be more important than stories like this. If more people had taken the time to write about the everyday things that made them laugh, then we’d have a much more amusing account of the Revolutionary War.

Source: Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, edited by Margaret Wheeler Willard, pages 23-28.

Welcome to Day-by-Day America!

My mission is to share with you some of what I’ve learned and experienced as I’ve read firsthand accounts of the American Revolutionary War. I’ve always liked history, but I never really got into it until somebody gave me some Library of America volumes: writings of Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the many debates about ratifying the U.S. Constitution. From that moment, I knew that I had found my niche in life.

I began reading the letters and writings of these men, and I began to get to know them personally. Of course I already knew their names and some important facts about them — things I had been taught — but as I read what they wrote, what they said, I began to form my own opinions. I began to know them — as people, not merely as historical figures; as human beings, not as flawless marble statues; as fallible people who could and did make mistakes and sometimes learn from them; as people whom I can respect and sometimes admire while acknowledging their imperfections.

I have never found as much enjoyment in reading books about history as I have in reading the words of the people who lived it. It’s harder to get all the facts straight that way — a historian who has spent months or years researching a particular event will be able to give  you more details than a single eyewitness can — but for me, the historical documents bring to life the people who lived then and the times they lived through. They didn’t see themselves as living in a documentary any more than you and I do, but little things about their daily lives — things they took for granted — peek through what they had to say about events that have since become historic or even legendary.

The old saying, “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes,” applies just as much to people who lived centuries ago as it does to your next-door neighbor. If you want to get to know someone, you shouldn’t just read a book about them; you need to spend time with them, to walk beside them as they go through life, as they deal with their challenges (we all have them), as they make their choices, as they fall down and get up. That’s what I’ve done, in a small way, and that’s what I hope to share with you.