Charlestown’s Tea Burning at High Noon

As I noted back here, when the Boston Gazette reported on the people of Lexington burning their tea on 13 Dec 1773, the newspaper said Charlestown was about “to follow their illustrious example.”

It took a little while, and perhaps a boost from the Boston Tea Party, but on 3 Jan 1774 the Boston Gazette was able to report:

The Inhabitants of Charlestown, agreeable to a unanimous Vote of said Town the Tuesday proceeding [28 December], on Friday last voluntarily bro’t all their TEA into the public Market Square, where it was committed to the Flames at high Noon-Day.—An Example well worthy Imitation.!!

The tea burned in Lexington and Charlestown (and in other communities later) had already come ashore, so importers had already paid the tariff on it (unless they smuggled it in, of course). That tea was also owned by private citizens and local shopkeepers, not by the distant, rich East India Company.

The folks burning their tea were thus making a bigger sacrifice than the men on Griffin’s Wharf, and for a purely symbolic result—signaling their solidarity with the continent-wide tea boycott. That sort of commitment is hard to square with the idea that the Tea Party movement was driven by a handful of tea smugglers. There was real communal fervor.

In his new study, Tea, James R. Fichter writes that Charlestown’s businesspeople agreed at that Tuesday town meeting to divide up their losses so the people who had large inventories of tea wouldn’t be wiped out financially.

Prof. Fichter will no doubt speak of this event when he talks tea, international commerce, and revolution to the Charlestown Historical Society next weekend. That event will take place on Sunday, 31 December, starting at 1:00 P.M. at the Bunker Hill Museum, 43 Monument Square.

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, on the other side of Boston…