Tales of the Second Boston Tea Party?

Boston’s first tea crisis lasted two months. The town heard about East India Company tea coming to certain merchants by 18 October, when the Boston Gazette published the news. The men and boys who destroyed that tea headed home late at night on 16 December.

In contrast, the second tea crisis in March 1774 was resolved in less than thirty-three hours. The town learned of the brig Fortune’s arrival with 28 1/2 chests of tea at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. By eight o’clock Monday evening that tea was going into the harbor.

Dumping tea before the tax could be collected on it had become almost ho-hum. Back in December, John Adams had exulted in his diary:

There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History.

In March, Adams simply wrote: “Last Night 28 Chests and an half of Tea were drowned.”

With far less tea to destroy, the March action would have taken fewer men and/or less time. Still, it’s remarkable how little documentation we have for the second Boston Tea Party.

We don’t have detailed letters from the night, like merchant John Andrews’s much-read account of 16 December. The press reports appeared in a sort of code, as I’ll discuss tomorrow.

We don’t have signs of the nineteenth-century Boston newspaper editors keeping track of old men who had participated in the March tea destruction. The two books that helped to popularize the December event and the joshing term for the men involved, Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party and Traits of the Tea-Party, don’t mention the March follow-up at all. Families didn’t pass down dramatic stories of the second Boston Tea Party.

Or did they? Is it possible that some of the tales people told about “the Tea Party” were actually about the March tea destruction, not the one in December? If the same men took part in both, did the details meld together in their memories?

Some specifics of the December action can be pinned down through other sources. For example, Ebenezer Stevens’s recollection that his future brother-in-law, Alexander Hodgdon, was a mate on one tea ship. And the way leaves piled in the shallow water beside the ships; astronomers have confirmed that the harbor was at low tide at the crucial hours on 16 December.

But do other memories come from March? Have we inherited tales of the second Boston Tea Party without knowing it?

COMING UP: The code of the Tea Party.

“Hove the Tea all overboard”

On the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party I’m sharing one of the more unusual eyewitness accounts of the event. This text was published in Traits of the Tea-Party in 1835, labeled “Extract from the Journal of the ship Dartmouth, from London to Boston, 1773.”

The Dartmouth, owned by the Rotch family of Nantucket and captained by James Hall, was the first of the three tea ships to arrive in Boston harbor. As such, its legal status determined the ticking clock that drove the drama. If the Dartmouth wasn’t fully unloaded by 17 December, the Customs service could confiscate the remaining cargo (i.e., the East India Company tea) and the ship itself.

Here’s the logbook as published in 1835:

Sunday, Nov. 28. This 24 hours first part fresh breezes, hazy weather, with rain at times. At sunset fetched close in with the Graves; tacked to the southward. At 10, P.M., came to anchor about two miles from the Light-House, got our boat out, and went on shore for the pilot. At 4, A.M., the pilot, Mr. Minzey, came on board. At 6, got under way, wind WNW. turned up Ship Channel and came to anchor in King’s Road. At 11, the tide being ebb, got under way, and turned up and came to anchor under the Admiral’s stern [i.e., Adm. John Montagu’s flagship, H.M.S. Captain]. At 10 at night, two Custom-House officers were boarded upon us by the Castle, we being the first ship ever boarded in this manner, which happened on account of our having the East India Company’s accursed dutiable Tea on board.

Monday, Nov. 29. This 24 hours pleasant weather, lying at anchor under the Admiral’s stern; the Captain went on shore, there being a great disturbance about the Tea. A town-meeting was held, which came to a resolution the Tea should never be landed. Had a guard of 25 men come on board this night at 9, P.M.

Tuesday, Nov. 30. This 24 hours cloudy weather; got under way, and turned up to [John] Rowe’s wharf. Employed unbending the sails, getting our boats out, &c. A watch of 25 men on board this night, to see that the Tea is not landed.

Wednesday, Dec. 1. This 24 hours cloudy weather: warped from Rowe’s to Griffin’s wharf; got out old junk and moored ship—getting our sails and cables on shore.

Thursday, Dec. 2. Cloudy weather; began to deliver our goods, and continued to land them from day to day, till Saturday, Dec. 11, having a guard of 25 men every night.

Tuesday, Dec. 14. Have had another town-meeting, which is adjourned to Thursday.

Thursday, Dec. 16. This 24 hours rainy weather; town-meeting this day. Between six and seven o’clock this evening came down to the wharf a body of about one thousand people;—among them were a number dressed and whooping like Indians. They came on board the ship, and after warning myself and the Custom-House officer to get out of the way, they unlaid the hatches and went down the hold, where was eighty whole and thirty-four half chests of Tea, which they hoisted upon deck, and cut the chests to pieces, and hove the Tea all overboard, where it was damaged and lost.

Historians have quoted from this text for many decades, but all the citations go back to Traits of the Tea Party. In other words, no one knows where the original manuscript is, so we rely on this transcription.

Traits of the Tea Party was written anonymously by Benjamin Bussey Thatcher based on extensive interviews with George R. T. Hewes and other old men. The logbook appeared in an appendix alongside the first attempt to list all the people who participated in the Tea Party, provided by ”an aged Bostonian.” Years ago I posited that that list came from the newspaper publisher Benjamin Russell. But who provided the logbook?

There are some internal clues. The author was aboard the Dartmouth when the tea was destroyed, having been told “to get out of the way.” If the transcript is correct, that author had already referred to the cause of the trouble as the “accursed dutiable Tea,” which suggests he shared the political views that dominated Boston and hadn’t chosen for the Dartmouth to carry that tea.

The captain of the Dartmouth, James Hall, was a Loyalist who left Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War. The Canadian historian L. F. S. Upton wrote that Hall commanded ships for the Royal Navy before dying in England in 1781. It’s therefore very unlikely that his logbook would have been available to an American author in 1835.

Ship owner Francis Rotch (1750-1822) spent the war and ensuing years outside North America, managing whaling operations from Britain, the Falkland Islands, and France. He returned to Massachusetts in the 1790s and became known for devising improvements to whaling technology. So it’s possible that the logbook had become Rotch’s property and his heirs shared it—but he couldn’t have written the log since he wasn’t aboard the ship. And the Rotches weren’t part of the Boston crowd.

The most likely author and source seems to be the Dartmouth’s mate, Alexander Hodgdon (1741-1797). We know from his brother-in-law Ebenezer Stevens that Hodgdon was on board the Dartmouth as the Tea Party began. He remained in Massachusetts through the war, at one point commanding a militia company in defense of the state. Hodgdon served in public offices and eventually became Massachusetts state treasurer. That seems to have been enough for some twentieth-century authors to say positively that Hodgdon wrote the Dartmouth logbook.

Ebenezer Stevens Exhibit in New York

The New-York Historical Society is featuring what I expect is a small but thorough exhibit on Ebenezer Stevens, a lieutenant colonel in the Continental artillery.

Stevens was a Boston mechanic who participated in the Tea Party, carefully avoiding the view of his brother-in-law Alexander Hodgdon, a mate aboard one of the ships. Sometime in the next few months Stevens and John Crane, a fellow carpenter and Tea Party veteran, moved to Rhode Island—perhaps because Boston’s economy was squeezed by the Boston Port Bill, perhaps because they feared arrest.

In December the Rhode Island assembly voted to form an artillery unit. As I’ll discuss in a talk for the Newport Historical Society late this year, the commanders of that unit were men from Boston, including Crane and Stevens. They returned to Massachusetts at the start of the siege.

At first Stevens served as one of Col. Crane’s subordinate officers, but he had further ambitions. He led a separate Provisional Artillery Battalion in the Saratoga campaign. Finally, he switched to Col. John Lamb’s artillery regiment to become a lieutenant colonel.

After the war, Stevens settled in New York and raised his family there while building a mercantile business. His descendants included the novelist Edith Wharton. And his papers and souvenirs of military service went to the New-York Historical Society. This exhibit includes “Stevens’ Society of Cincinnati badge and officer’s tailcoat.”

The Ebenezer Stevens display will be up through 2 October. That means it coincides with some other exhibits of interest at the N.Y.H.S.:

• Summer of Hamilton through August.
• Battle of Brooklyn, starting 23 September.
• Mo Willems’s Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny, and Elephant and Piggie.

Ebenezer Stevens on the Boston Tea Party

Back in February I spent an afternoon in the New York Public Library, a trip that produced some material on the legend of George Washington’s Hanukkah. But my real find that day was the original publication of Ebenezer Stevens’s recollection of the Boston Tea Party. I’d found that material quoted in many places, from Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves to Edith Wharton’s memoir A Backward Glance (she was a Stevens descendant). But I hadn’t found its earliest manifestation, even in Stevens family papers at the New-York Historical Society.

But it turned up in a small volume called Biographical Sketch of Ebenezer Stevens, Lieut.-Col. of Artillery in the Continental Army, by John Austin Stevens. Though this book doesn’t have a date, internal evidence shows it was prepared after 1877 (i.e., it mentions someone dying that year). It was apparently printed for members of the family, and a copy ended up at the N.Y.P.L. [ADDENDUM: I’ve since discovered that this material was first published in The Magazine of History in 1877, then reprinted on its own in 1900.]

The book discusses Stevens’s service in Boston’s prewar militia artillery company, commanded by Adino Paddock. Then the tea ships arrived, producing a split in the company, as the author describes:

Paddock’s company was called upon...to guard the tea and prevent its landing. Paddock, whose sympathies were with the Royal authorities, refused his consent, but at a company meeting the charge was accepted and undertaken by them, First Lieut. Jabez Hatch taking the command. Stevens was among those who volunteered on this service.

That squares with the minutes of the tea meetings kept by town clerk William Cooper, which describe militia companies patrolling the wharf where the first ship docked. Indeed, those notes list one of the early volunteers as “Benjamin Stevens,” which could have been a mistake for Ebenezer. It also squares with how the artillery company broke apart in 1774, with Paddock reaffirming his loyalty and many of his men joining the provincials.

Stevens told his family that he was also at the big public gathering in Old South Meeting-House on the night of 16 Dec 1773, when word came that the governor had refused to let the tea ships depart without unloading. This is Stevens’s “own recollection of the affair, as taken from his words at a later period by one of his sons”:

I went from the Old South Meeting House just after dark; the party was about seventy or eighty. At the head of the wharf [Griffin’s wharf] we met the detachment of our company on guard, who joined us.

I commanded with a party on board the vessel of which [Alexander] Hodgdon was mate, and as he knew me, I left that vessel with some of my comrades, and went on board the other vessel which lay at the opposite side of the wharf; numbers of others took our places on board Hodgdon’s vessel.

We commenced handing the boxes of tea on deck, and first commenced breaking them with axes, but found much difficulty, owing to the boxes of tea being covered with canvass—the mode that this article was then imported in. I think that all the tea was discharged in about two hours. We were careful to prevent any being taken away; none of the party were painted as Indians, nor, that I know of disguised, excepting that some of them stopped at a paint shop on the way and daubed their faces with paint.

In the past I’ve expressed skepticism about family accounts published long after the fact without contemporaneous documentation (as in the case of Sybil Ludington). But I’m inclined to believe this account. Why?

First, there’s earlier support for Stevens’s participation in the tea destruction. His name is on the earliest list of Tea Party participants, published in 1835. That list includes a lot of artillerists, and his account helps to explain why. Among those men was John Crane; he and Stevens left Boston shortly afterwards and set up a carpentry business in Rhode Island before returning to greater Boston as provincial artillery officers.

Second, Stevens’s story contains a detail that isn’t really important to the event, may even be a little embarrassing, and smacks of how real life works: as he started to board the Dartmouth, he found that its mate was Alexander Hodgdon, brother of the woman he was courting. Rather than risk being identified or compromising his future in-law, Stevens quickly took his squad to another ship. On 11 Oct 1774, Ebenezer Stevens and Rebecca Hodgdon married, and ten years moved into the the New York mansion shown above a hard century later (courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York). Alexander later became treasurer of Massachusetts.

Finally, when Stevens’s account goes against the established story of the Tea Party, it doesn’t do so in a way that makes him appear more heroic or romantic. In fact, it denies the most picturesque aspect of the event: that the tea destroyers dressed as Indians. Stevens told his son of improvised disguises instead. I think newspapers emphasized the notion that the men were indistinguishable from “Mohawks” in the weeks that followed as a way to discuss the event without acknowledging who had really done it. The many artists who depicted the event after the war up to now also seized on that striking visual detail, and who can blame them?