Non-Importation in the New Year

At the end of 1769, the Boston merchants’ non-importation agreement ran out. But the Townshend duties were still in effect, so the Whigs insisted on maintaining that boycott into the new year.

That required leaning on people who wanted to resume regular business. After John Mein’s 1769 publications accused leading merchants of importing goods, the Whigs couldn’t allow any exceptions.

One threat to the town’s united front came from two Glasgow ships’ captains who wanted to commission new vessels from local shipyards, producing lots of jobs. They asked the merchants’ committee to approve importing what was necessary for those ships. A Crown informant reported:

A petition to that effect was immediately sett on foot by some of the tradesmen, and in a few hours was subscribed by upwards of 70 people. In the evening they met to fix the manner in which it was to be presented, when [John] Ruddock a Justice of the Peace and one of the Select Men of the town went to them and assuring the person who had been most active in promoting the subscription that he was ruining himself & his Country insisted on his delivering up the Petition which he immediately destroy’d, and such was his influence amongst these people that not one of them made any objections to his violent proceedings.

So much for those seventy signatures.

The merchants’ committee had pressured almost all of Boston’s importers into storing any goods that had arrived from Britain in 1769 under lock and key until… Well, there was a dispute about how long that commitment was for. The committee insisted the promise should last until they called off non-importation. Some tradespeople said they had promised only until the end of the year.

Benjamin Greene and his son had received a large order of dry goods in October. In December the committee learned he had shipped some of that material, packed in fish barrels, to John Chandler in Worcester. Under questioning, the Greenes admitted to making that sale. They declared they’d kept it secret only to preserve the image of a unified non-importation movement.

Then another merchant named John Taylor used a skeleton key to get into his locked storeroom and start selling imports. “You see, Gentlemen, how it is,” he told the committee, “and I always designed to do so.”

Theophilus Lillie put some of his imported stock on display and, he acknowledged, sold it to people who asked for it. How much of his inventory was gone? Lillie refused to let the inspection committee into his shop. He recalled: “Captain [Samuel] Dashwood was in a great rage, challenging me to come out of my house and he would break my neck, my bones, and the like.”

In the 11 Jan 1770 Boston News-Letter Lillie and Taylor publicly announced they no longer felt bound by the non-importation agreement. In fact, they declared that they had been intimidated into signing it in the first place, violating the spirit of liberty that the Whigs supposedly championed. Lillie got off one of the great lines of the entire pre-Revolutionary debate:

I had rather be a slave under one master, for if I know who he is, I may perhaps be able to please him, than a slave to an hundred or more who I don’t know where to find or what they will expect of me.

The most vociferous Whig merchants were actually hurting their cause. In particular, on 12 January a Crown informant wrote that William Molineux was turning off potential supporters:

Many were disgusted at Mollyneaux’s violent proposals particularly at a speech made at the meeting at which the vote against Green Lillie &c was pass’d, wherein he declared that were it not for the Law he would with his own hands put to Death any person who should presume to open their goods

Reportedly the two Boston merchants who held the highest political offices, speaker Thomas Cushing and selectman and representative John Hancock, were souring on the movement.

It was time for a meeting.

TOMORROW: The “Body of the Trade.”