“Poor Boston will feel the whole weight of ministerial vengeance”

One facet of the Boston Tea Party that I’m thinking about this season is how many observers expected quick retaliation of some sort from the London government.

But those same Massachusetts men got busy convincing themselves that reaction would be no worse than they would have suffered anyway, given Lord North’s established policies.

A day and a half after the tea destruction, the merchant John Andrews wrote to his brother-in-law in Pennsylvania:

However precarious our situation may be, yet such is the present calm composure of the people that a stranger would hardly think that ten thousand pounds sterling of the East India Company’s tea was destroy’d the night, or rather evening before last, yet its a serious truth; and if your’s, together with ye. other Southern provinces, should rest satisfied with their quota being stor’d, poor Boston will feel the whole weight of ministerial vengeance.

However, its the opinion of most people that we stand an equal chance now, whether troops are sent in consequence of it or not; whereas, had it been stor’d, we should inevitably have had ’em, to enforce the sale of it.

On 17 December, John Adams worried in his diary:

What Measures will the Ministry take, in Consequence of this?—Will they resent it? will they dare to resent it? will they punish Us? How? By quartering Troops upon Us?—by annulling our Charter?—by laying on more duties? By restraining our Trade? By Sacrifice of Individuals, or how.

But in a letter to his friend James Warren (shown above), Adams was more dismissive of the dangers. First he quoted the Wellfleet merchant Elisha Doane: “The worst that can happen, I think, Says he in Consequence of it, will be that the Province must pay for it. . . . it will take them 10 Years to get the Province to pay for it. If so, we shall Save 10 Years Interest of the Money. Whereas if it is drank it must be paid for immediately.”

Then he tried to convince Warren and himself that the consequences of the tea destruction couldn’t be worse than paying the tea tax in the first place:

the final Ruin, of our Constitution of Government, and of all American Liberties, would be the certain Consequence of Suffering it to be landed. . . .

Threats, Phantoms, Bugbears, by the million, will be invented and propagated among the People upon this occasion. Individuals will be threatened with Suits and Prosecutions. Armies and Navies will be talked of—military Execution—Charters annull’d—Treason—Tryals in England and all that—But—these Terrors, are all but Imaginations. Yet if they should become Realities they had better be Suffered, than the great Principle, of Parliamentary Taxation given up.

In response, Warren agreed with Adams on 3 Jan 1774:

They have now Indeed passed the River and left no retreat and must therefore Abide the Consequences. What those will be seems to be the great matter of Speculation and as People are determined by Reason or by the frightful List of Scarecrows and Bugbears (mentioned in your last and which are Employed on this Occasion) their speculations will differ.

Adams and Warren both insisted that the real blame for the crisis lay with Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and the Customs Commissioners for being such sticklers about the law.

So did their friend Samuel Adams. Anticipating a crackdown, he wrote to Arthur Lee in London on 28 January:

The Destruction of the Tea is the pretence for the unprecedented Severity shown to the Town of Boston but the real Cause is the opposition to Tyranny for which the people of that Town have always made themselves remarkeable & for which I think this Country is much obligd to them. They are suffering the Vengeance of Administration in the Common Cause of America.

Adams offered that spin even before the details of the imperial government’s “unprecedented Severity” and “Vengeance” became clear.

A transatlantic crossing in this era took about six weeks. That meant it would be three months, or until mid-March, before Boston would hear about how people in London were responding to the tea destruction, and at least a couple of more weeks before they learned about Parliament’s official reaction.