BFW Revisited: The Tea Crisis of 1773 AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Ben Franklin's World
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (BFW Revisited: The Tea Crisis of 1773) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Ben Franklin's World) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.
Ben Franklin's World episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog
Episode: BFW Revisited: The Tea Crisis of 1773
Author: Liz Covart
Duration: 00:43:27
Episode Shownotes
In Episode 401, we’ll be exploring the Tea Crisis and how it led to the non-importation/non-exportation movement of 1774-1776. Our guest historian, James Fichter, references the work of Mary Beth Norton and her “The Seventh Tea Ship” article from The William and Mary Quarterly. In this BFW Revisited episode, we’ll
travel back to December 2016, when we spoke with Mary Beth Norton about her article and the Tea Crisis of 1773. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/112 Sponsor Links Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Complementary Episodes Episode 135: Moral Commerce: The Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy Episode 160: The Politics of Tea Episode 228: The Boston Massacre Episode 229: The Townshend Moment Episode 337: Early America's Trade with China Listen! Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Amazon Music Ben Franklin's World iOS App Ben Franklin's World Android App Helpful Links Join the Ben Franklin's World Facebook Group Ben Franklin’s World Twitter: @BFWorldPodcast Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page Sign-up for the Franklin Gazette Newsletter
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_00
You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.
00:00:17 Speaker_00
Hello and welcome to Ben Franklin's World Revisited, a series of classic episodes that bring fresh perspective to our latest episodes and add deeper connections to our understanding of early American history. And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.
00:00:31 Speaker_00
The Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773.
00:00:35 Speaker_00
In next week's episode, episode 401, we'll be speaking with James Fichter, the author of Tea, Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773 to 1776, about the tea crisis of 1773, which precipitated the Boston Tea Party.
00:00:51 Speaker_00
Now, to help expand on James's work and our conversation with him, our next two episodes in the Ben Franklin's World Revisited series will offer perspectives in two different areas of the tea crisis.
00:01:02 Speaker_00
The tea ships that carried English East India Company tea to Great Britain's North American colonies and the politics of tea consumption.
00:01:10 Speaker_00
In this episode, we'll revisit episode 112 with Mary Beth Norton, a professor of history emerita at Cornell University. In 2016, Mary Beth published an article called The Seventh Tea Ship in the William and Mary Quarterly.
00:01:23 Speaker_00
And this article offered a lot of new details about the tea crisis of 1773. So to get us ready for our conversation with James Fichter next week in episode 401, let's revisit our 2016 conversation with Mary Beth Norton.
00:01:51 Speaker_00
Joining us is the Mary Donlan Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University. She's the president-elect of the American Historical Association, an award-winning historian, and the author of five books.
00:02:03 Speaker_00
Today, she joins us to discuss the tea crisis of 1773 and the story of the seventh tea ship, which she recently documented in an article in the October 2016 edition of the William & Mary Quarterly. Welcome to Ben Franklin's world, Mary Beth Norton.
00:02:18 Speaker_00
Well, thank you very much for having me. In August 1773, the English East India Company dispatched seven ships to North America carrying nearly 600000 pounds of tea.
00:02:30 Speaker_00
The company sent four ships to Boston and one ship each to New York City, Philadelphia and Charleston. Mary Beth, 600,000 pounds of tea seems like a lot. Would you tell us about the relationship British North Americans had with tea?
00:02:44 Speaker_01
Well, all the contemporary observers said that Americans drank prodigious. That was a word that I picked up from the documents, prodigious amounts of tea, and that all parts of American society at the time were addicted to tea.
00:02:58 Speaker_01
There's even a wonderful account of a foreign traveler on the frontier seeing Mohawk Indians drinking tea.
00:03:05 Speaker_01
So everybody seems to have drunk a lot of tea and even though 600,000 pounds of tea seems like a lot, if you're trying to corner the tea market in North America as the East India Company was trying to do at the time, you'd send a lot of tea.
00:03:19 Speaker_00
So what role did tea play in colonial American social and consumer culture? Because it seems like if Americans were drinking prodigious amounts of tea, the beverage must have had some sort of symbolic or social importance to them.
00:03:32 Speaker_01
They did two different things. First was a lot of them just drank it for breakfast the way I do, I'm a tea drinker. But there's also a real cultural and social meaning to tea in the 18th century in North America.
00:03:43 Speaker_01
It's valued for its role in women socializing. I mean, the standard belief at the time was that men socialized in taverns over ale and women socialized over tea in their homes. And so there's a massive amount of literature about
00:04:00 Speaker_01
the cultural significance of tea parties. As early as the 1720s, people in newspapers are parodying women in tea parties, supervising, having tea very genteely with their friends, with women and some men, and socializing and gossiping.
00:04:18 Speaker_01
There's a whole parody of women gossipers and there's a lot of complaints about women gossiping over tea and wasting time over tea and so forth. So we know that it's very important. There's a big cultural value placed on tea.
00:04:31 Speaker_01
We know from people who studied consumer culture in the 18th century that the first consumer good that a family that gets a little money buy is a teapot because it means you have some little claim to gentility and then after you buy the teapot, then you start to buy proper teacups
00:04:49 Speaker_01
which didn't have handles by the way and were very thin and fine china for the best of them. And you'd buy the accoutrement of the teapot, you'd buy a sugar bowl and a cream pitcher and things like that.
00:05:01 Speaker_01
And you'd buy a tea table or a tea tray on which you would display all this china when your friends came to visit and then pull it out and use. So it was actually of tremendous cultural importance. The socializing over tea was very important.
00:05:16 Speaker_00
It sounds like British American colonists used tea as a status symbol. Was this use of tea unique to British America, or did Britons back in Great Britain also use tea to display status?
00:05:27 Speaker_01
Yes, it's very much the same in Britain. It is a status symbol. There's no question. And British women are equally parodied for drinking tea in the afternoons, wasting time with their friends gossiping over tea.
00:05:40 Speaker_00
Earlier, you mentioned that the English East India Company was trying to corner the market for tea in North America. Where did Americans get their tea from? I mean, what import options did they have?
00:05:51 Speaker_01
Well, it had no legal competition.
00:05:54 Speaker_01
The East India Company was a legal monopoly established in England in the early 17th century, and it legally controlled all imports into Britain and the British colonies from what was then generally called the East Indies, which is basically anything in Asia.
00:06:10 Speaker_01
So the tea itself that Americans were drinking originated in China. And the only way you could get it legally was to buy it through the East India Company. The Americans, however, had a lot of smugglers.
00:06:22 Speaker_01
The British Customs Service complained a lot about smuggling in the colonies. And it does seem that there was an enormous amount of smuggling of tea into the colonies in the 18th century.
00:06:33 Speaker_01
So the idea of sending all this tea from the East India Company was to basically flood the market with legal tea. Now, there was a lot of smuggling in England as well and Britain as well as in the colonies.
00:06:46 Speaker_01
In fact, East India Company complained bitterly about the smuggling to the British Isles as well as to the colonies.
00:06:52 Speaker_01
I should explain that the other big source of tea was the Dutch East India Company, which logically enough operated out of the Netherlands and was the same kind of thing as the British East India Company.
00:07:04 Speaker_01
That is, it was a legal monopoly in the Netherlands. But the tea that was brought into Europe
00:07:10 Speaker_01
and into the Dutch Caribbean islands by the Dutch had a interesting tendency to often end up in the British North American colonies brought there by smugglers.
00:07:20 Speaker_01
So the tea that Americans got, they could only get legally through the East India Company, but they got a lot of illegal tea and it was always called Dutch tea regardless of where it actually physically came from.
00:07:32 Speaker_01
In my research, I discovered that some of the tea came from Germany, some of it came from Sweden, and as I said, a lot of it came from the Caribbean and Dutch islands, but nevertheless, they always called it Dutch tea.
00:07:42 Speaker_01
When it was smuggled tea, they called it Dutch tea.
00:07:45 Speaker_00
Tea must have played a really important role in the British imperial economy for the government to give the company an exclusive right to sell tea within the empire. Would you tell us about the role tea played within the larger British empire?
00:07:57 Speaker_01
Well, the East India Company had a monopoly on all items coming in from Asia into the British empire. And so that included, in addition to tea, textiles and spices. Those were the other major commodities in the trade.
00:08:11 Speaker_01
And all three of them were very important. And in fact, when the Americans started talking about boycotting the East India Company tea, some people also said, well, we should also boycott East India Company textiles and East India Company spices.
00:08:24 Speaker_01
So all three of those things were very important in the empire as sources of revenue if they were traded and sold legally.
00:08:32 Speaker_00
Smuggling must have really hurt the English East India Company's business.
00:08:36 Speaker_01
Yes, there is no question about it. One of the things that we have are the customs records for the 18th century in the colonies, which show us the amount of tea that was legally imported into the colonies and that paid customs duty in America.
00:08:52 Speaker_01
So, for example, there's one year in the early 1770s when all of 250 or so pounds of tea are legally imported into Philadelphia at a time when local people say that Philadelphians are probably drinking 250,000 pounds of tea a year.
00:09:07 Speaker_00
Now, in April of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which King George III signed into law in May. Marybeth, would you tell us about the Tea Act? What was it and why did Parliament pass it?
00:09:19 Speaker_01
Well, the East India Company, as I said, was a monopoly. It was very badly run and it was in the middle of a financial crisis in 1773. But members of Parliament, it will not surprise you to hear, were among the investors in the East India Company.
00:09:34 Speaker_01
So when East India Company came to Parliament to basically ask for a bailout, Parliament asked them to change the conditions under which they had to sell tea in North America. Parliament passed the Tea Act to do that.
00:09:46 Speaker_01
And the Tea Act, from the perspective of the American trade, there's other provisions that have to do with trade elsewhere. The provisions of the North American trade made two major changes in the way that the law was followed previously.
00:09:58 Speaker_01
The law had previously said that the East India Company, after importing tea into Britain, had to sell that tea at public auction in London.
00:10:07 Speaker_01
So that meant that anybody, even though there was a monopoly of tea coming into Britain, any merchant who wanted to buy tea could buy tea and could sell it the way he wanted to.
00:10:17 Speaker_01
And so sometimes that's people who were wholesaling tea and sending tea over to North America. Sometimes it was people who were individual
00:10:24 Speaker_01
Americans who were in London and who decided to buy a chest or two of tea to take back and sell on their own, sometimes it was people who wanted to sell it in Britain. But the rule was that the tea had to be sold at auction in London.
00:10:37 Speaker_01
And of course, that the price would be determined by the auction. So that's the first provision that was changed.
00:10:42 Speaker_01
And the Tea Act said that, yes, the East India Company could still sell tea that way, but it could also send tea on its own account directly to North America. It did not have to sell its tea at auction in London. It could, in fact,
00:10:57 Speaker_01
dispatch tea by itself directly to consignees, that is to merchants, it would pick in advance in America who would then sell the tea. And in fact, that's of course what the 600,000 pounds of tea that we were talking about earlier was doing.
00:11:10 Speaker_01
It was coming directly to America to men who had been designated in advance as the people to receive the tea. So in other words, favored tea merchants in effect, who would then become the people who would wholesale the tea in North America.
00:11:23 Speaker_01
That was the first thing it did. The second thing the law did was under the previous law, the tea was taxed twice. It was taxed once when it came into Britain and once when it went out of Britain.
00:11:32 Speaker_01
What the Tea Act did was to provide that when the tea was re-exported from Britain, the original tax on it coming into Britain would be drawn back. That is, the company would be reimbursed for that.
00:11:45 Speaker_01
So there would be a tax at the end of the process, but not at the beginning of the process. And as far as the Americans were concerned, this meant that they were paying a tax to Britain.
00:11:56 Speaker_01
This went back to the Townshend Duties of 1767, which was an attempt by Britain to get the Americans to pay some cost of the empire. The Townshend duties were unusual in that they actually laid duties on items traded within the British Empire.
00:12:12 Speaker_01
Before that, Americans had paid customs duties, but only on items coming in from outside the empire. Say, for example, on Madeira wine coming from the Madeira Islands or on sugar coming from the French Islands or something like that.
00:12:24 Speaker_01
They had paid customs duties on items coming into the empire, but not on items traded within the empire.
00:12:31 Speaker_01
The Townsend Duties of 1767 laid duties on tea and a few other items traded within the empire in an attempt to get the Americans to pay what the British felt were some costs of running the empire.
00:12:44 Speaker_01
So what the Tea Act did was to keep the Townsend Duty on tea in place, but by removing the other tea tax that the East India Company had to pay when the tea came into Britain, still allow it to sell its tea for a lower amount in North America.
00:13:00 Speaker_01
So in other words, the point of both of these provisions was that the East India Company legal tea could compete in price with smuggled tea in North America because both things were thought to be possibly reducing the price in North America.
00:13:16 Speaker_01
I should say that as far as I can tell, it's very hard to get pricing information, but it appears that legal tea sold at about three shillings a pound, whereas smuggled tea sold at about one and a half to two shillings a pound.
00:13:31 Speaker_01
So that smuggled tea would have been about half or two thirds the price in North America than was legal tea. So it was cheaper to buy smuggled tea. And that was one reason why Americans liked it. They're always looking for a bargain.
00:13:45 Speaker_00
The Tea Act sounds like it had major implications for the early American economy and that after the passage of the act, only designated people or consignees could sell tea from their shops.
00:13:56 Speaker_01
That was the idea. And of course, some of the people who most objected to the Tea Act were merchants who had been selling tea, because this meant they would not have control over the tea.
00:14:05 Speaker_01
They would have to go to the consignees to buy it from the consignees. They couldn't, for example, send some representative to London to buy tea at the auction for themselves. They would have to buy it from these designated people.
00:14:17 Speaker_01
So some of the objections to the Tea Act came from concerns of merchants about things like that.
00:14:22 Speaker_00
How did the East India Company choose their consignees? Was this a job that any merchant or shopkeeper could apply for?
00:14:29 Speaker_01
Mostly the people who became key consignees were very large merchants who had close connections in London who negotiated this for them.
00:14:38 Speaker_01
In fact, what's really interesting is that most of the tea consignees in 1773 didn't know they were tea consignees until the tea ships arrived because it was their buddies in London who had very good connections to the ministry and to the East India Company who had negotiated for them to get them named as tea consignees, but it was thought they would make a big profit.
00:14:57 Speaker_01
Everybody thought that the consignees would make a big profit, so it was going to be a big deal. So their friends in London went all out to get them the designation of the consignees in the various colonies. Of course, it didn't work out that way.
00:15:08 Speaker_01
Now, they may have been just playing dumb when they said officially when the T arrived, oh, I had no idea I was a T consignee.
00:15:15 Speaker_01
Maybe they did know, but the official position was in many cases that they didn't know that they were going to be the T consignees.
00:15:22 Speaker_00
So when we consider the new position of tea consignee, we could really look upon the Tea Act as increasing the social status that tea could confer upon the colonists. I mean, it sounds like not just anyone could be a tea consignee.
00:15:35 Speaker_01
I suppose you could say that. It certainly was aimed at increasing the status of the merchants who were designated as the consignees.
00:15:42 Speaker_01
I mean, given the size of the colonial market, if the East India Company could actually undercut smuggled tea, you could see that these consignees would make big profits.
00:15:51 Speaker_00
Now, one thing I'm curious about is when we've read books and articles about the American Revolution and about the T-Act, we've read interpretations where the Americans interpreted the T-Act as Parliament forcing a power to tax upon them.
00:16:05 Speaker_00
Is this an accurate interpretation of the T-Act?
00:16:08 Speaker_01
Well, that's the way Americans interpreted it, but that wasn't the aim of the act. The aim of the act, as I said, was to reduce the price of legal East India Company tea in America.
00:16:18 Speaker_01
And if you read the debates in parliament over the Tea Act, that's what people are talking about. They're talking about that. They're talking about competitiveness with smuggled tea. They aren't talking about, let's make the Americans pay a tax.
00:16:31 Speaker_01
Now, why is that symbolic? Well, we have to go back to the towns and duties of 1767. That tea tax that was being drawn back when the tea was re-exported from Britain was imposed by the towns and duties of 1767 originally.
00:16:50 Speaker_01
And the Americans were going to have to continue to pay that tax.
00:16:53 Speaker_00
When we think of the Tea Act and the colonial response to it, most of us think of Boston, where the colonists threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773.
00:17:05 Speaker_00
Mary Beth, if the East India Company dispatched seven T-ships to the colonies, with only four designated for Boston, it really seems like there should have been a much larger colonial response to the Tea Act.
00:17:17 Speaker_01
There was. Actually, the cities to which the T-ships were sent, that is Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia and New York, all organized in opposition to the tea in one way or another.
00:17:29 Speaker_00
We have the power of knowing how events around the Tea Act played out. So we know that the Bostonians destroyed their tea. Mary Beth, did the people of Boston ever consider less destructive options for their protest against the Tea Act?
00:17:42 Speaker_00
And how much did the people of New York, Philadelphia and Charleston follow the Bostonians lead?
00:17:47 Speaker_01
Yes. Boston, in fact, tried very hard to avoid destroying the tea. All the records that we have that show the discussions that went on in Boston show that Bostonians tried desperately to get the T-ships to leave the harbor.
00:18:02 Speaker_01
There were three T-ships that arrived in Boston Harbor over the course of several days in early December, 1773. The problem was the customs laws.
00:18:12 Speaker_01
Once a ship of any kind arrived in the harbor and formally, quote, entered its cargo, that is, said it was there, came to the customs house and said it was there, the clock started ticking.
00:18:22 Speaker_01
And the clock was a 20-day time period during which the duty on any product coming in had to be paid.
00:18:30 Speaker_01
And the law said that once any ship had entered the harbor and that clock had started ticking, it could not leave the harbor without paying the duty.
00:18:39 Speaker_01
So in Boston, they went round and around and around for days on end, for 20 days, literally, trying to get somebody to agree to let the T-ships leave. And the owners of the ships
00:18:53 Speaker_01
and the TECON signees would have been perfectly willing to let the ships leave. But the customs officers and the governor, Thomas Hutchinson, refused to let the T-ships leave unless the duty had been paid.
00:19:05 Speaker_01
And of course, paying the duty, as far as the Americans were concerned, was the crux of the matter. They didn't want that duty to be paid. And so that's why the T was destroyed in Boston. In the other three cities, deals were worked out.
00:19:20 Speaker_01
And so that didn't happen in each of the other three cities. There were, shall we say, negotiated agreements of various sorts in which that deadline did not become so operative.
00:19:32 Speaker_00
Why couldn't the people of Boston just let the T sit on the ships? I mean, what happens at the end of that 20 day time period? It's not like the ships were going to self-destruct in the harbor.
00:19:42 Speaker_01
Well, what happened at the end of the 20 days was the destruction of the T. That's exactly why the T was thrown into the harbor on the night of December 16th, because December 17th was the 20th day after the first ship entered the harbor.
00:19:56 Speaker_01
And so something had to be done that night to the T or else the next day there would have been a direct confrontation on the wharf.
00:20:04 Speaker_01
The Bostonians had set up a guard on the wharf to make sure the tea could not be quietly and clandestinely offloaded without them realizing it, and they were determined not to let the tea land.
00:20:16 Speaker_01
And the Bostonians were afraid that the next morning, the customs officers were going to come armed to forcefully unload the tea, and they were very much afraid of an armed clash.
00:20:26 Speaker_01
And they did not want to get into another battle with British authority. Let's remember what happened in 1770 in the so-called Boston Massacre when the soldiers killed five Bostonians.
00:20:38 Speaker_00
OK, but why were the Bostonians so dead set against the T landing and sitting on the docks? And it sounds like the colonists in New York, Philadelphia and Charleston had similar concerns about allowing the T to come off the ships.
00:20:51 Speaker_01
Yes, the other colonies were also dead setting or semi-métis land. In the other colonies, the customs officers and the governors were willing to work out settlements. In Boston, they were not.
00:21:02 Speaker_01
Bernard Balin, who wrote a very famous biography of Thomas Hutchinson, who was the governor of Massachusetts at the time, basically attributes the problems in Boston to Hutchinson.
00:21:12 Speaker_01
That is, he said, because Hutchinson was rigid, because Hutchinson refused for all kinds of reasons to allow there to be some kind of a negotiated settlement to allow the T-ships to leave.
00:21:23 Speaker_01
That's why the Bostonians felt it necessary to destroy the T. What was the colonists' chief worry if the T had landed?
00:21:31 Speaker_00
Why couldn't they just lock it up in a warehouse and not pay the duty?
00:21:34 Speaker_01
Well, they were afraid that once it was on shore, people would buy it. And that's very explicit in all the four cities.
00:21:41 Speaker_01
The people who are opposing the tea are very much afraid that if it's there, Americans who are so addicted to tea will actually buy the tea.
00:21:48 Speaker_01
That once it's on shore, who knew that locking it up wouldn't necessarily work, the consignees could get their hands on it. And Samuel Adams is very explicit about this.
00:21:56 Speaker_01
Samuel Adams says at one point in one of the tea meetings in Boston, we can't trust people not to buy the tea once it's on shore.
00:22:04 Speaker_01
In fact, my research, if I can jump ahead here, on the ship William, which was the fourth ship bound for Boston, the seventh tea ship overall, which crashed and shipwrecked on Cape Cod, what happened to the tea on that ship shows us that they were right because people on Cape Cod wanted to buy tea that had been salvaged from the William.
00:22:22 Speaker_00
You've piqued our interest, Marybeth, because you noted earlier that four of the seven East India tea ships were bound for Boston, and yet Bostonians destroyed tea from only three ships.
00:22:32 Speaker_00
So would you tell us about the William, that fourth Boston bound tea ship that never seems to have made it to Boston?
00:22:39 Speaker_01
So what happened was, and I was fortunate enough to find the actual account of the captain of the ship, a detailed account of what happened. Basically, there was a huge storm as he was approaching the harbor in Boston in the middle of December.
00:22:53 Speaker_01
He was a few days after the other ships and he was blown off course. He was blown almost all the way up to Cape Ann Gloucester, more than 30 miles north of Boston.
00:23:04 Speaker_01
Basically, he had to escape from this storm and so he tried to get out of Massachusetts Bay and he ended up almost making it in the middle of this incredible storm, but he actually ended up crashing into not the exact tip of Cape Cod, but very close to the tip of Cape Cod at what turns out to be quite well-known sandbank where a British ship actually went aground several years later.
00:23:28 Speaker_01
So it's a quite well-known navigational hazard just around the tip of Cape Cod, about two miles south of the main point of Cape Cod. And the upshot was that the ship came ashore and some of the tea chests were damaged.
00:23:42 Speaker_01
He and a local justice of the peace who came to help out, hired local guys to help move the tea off the ship. And a lot of the tea got sent up to Boston. not to Boston itself, but to the British headquarters on an island in the harbor.
00:23:57 Speaker_01
But some of the tea remained on the Cape. And that's the story that I tell in my article, what happened to that tea.
00:24:03 Speaker_00
Many people conflate the Bostonians response to just about every event of the American Revolution as the response for all of Massachusetts and New England.
00:24:12 Speaker_00
So how did the people of Cape Cod react to the fact that a lot of the Williams tea cargo was salvaged and remained in Cape Cod?
00:24:20 Speaker_01
they wanted to buy the tea. I mean, they argued about it. There were big arguments on the Cape about what to do. Some people said, we can buy this tea, it hasn't paid any duty.
00:24:29 Speaker_01
What we're arguing about is the tea duty and this salvaged tea is not paying a duty so we can buy it.
00:24:35 Speaker_01
Other people said, no, no, we shouldn't buy any tea at all because of the symbolism of buying it from the East India Company, which we want to boycott. So there were big arguments on the Cape.
00:24:44 Speaker_01
And it led to major confrontations with local authorities and with several wealthy men in whose hands the tea chests ended up.
00:24:54 Speaker_00
How do you think knowing about the story of the William and what happened to the tea that landed on Cape Cod affects our understanding of the tea crisis of 1773 and of the American Revolution?
00:25:04 Speaker_01
Well, I think knowing about the Williams shows us that not every American was utterly opposed to the East India Company tea. I mean, they wanted tea. They were willing to forget about the issue of it's coming from the East India Company.
00:25:18 Speaker_01
Some of them seem to be willing to forget about the tea duty. They wanted tea. And Samuel Adams was right. You couldn't trust these people. As far as he was concerned, he was very much an advocate of resistance to Britain.
00:25:30 Speaker_01
And I think what it shows us is there was really a lot of disagreement in the colonies at the time over opposition to Britain. It's not as though everybody in the colonies was opposed to the East India Company.
00:25:42 Speaker_01
It's not as though everybody in the colonies was gung-ho for what became the revolution. There are lots and lots of disagreements.
00:25:49 Speaker_01
In a way, the William becomes a case study of showing us in microcosm the kinds of debates that in fact occurred all over the colonies.
00:25:59 Speaker_01
not just in Massachusetts, but in New York and South Carolina and Virginia and so forth over what to do in this circumstance. I mean, I think from the perspective of today, hindsight, we know there's the American Revolution.
00:26:12 Speaker_01
We know the Americans won their independence. And so we tend to think that everybody at the time was in favor of it, but they weren't.
00:26:19 Speaker_01
And there were lots of disagreements about what to do, when to do it, how to do it, even among people who were in favor of resisting the British. they did not all agree on what tactics to pick.
00:26:30 Speaker_01
And that's, to me, one of the interesting things that has remained unexamined in this very much studied sequence of events that we call sort of the run-up to the American Revolution.
00:26:39 Speaker_00
We know that the T-ships began arriving in the colonies in mid-November 1773, and we know that the colonists in Boston destroyed the T instead of landing it because they feared Americans would find that cheaper T irresistible and pay the duty on it, which, thanks to the case study of the William, we can see that that fear was justified.
00:26:59 Speaker_00
Now, in 1764, Boston formed a Committee of Correspondence to encourage opposition to British customs. In 1765, New York City formed a similar committee to keep other colonies apprised of their resistance to the Stamp Act.
00:27:14 Speaker_00
And in March 1773, the Virginia House of Burgesses proposed that each colonial legislature form a Committee of Correspondence so that the colonies could stay abreast of what actions colonists were taking during the imperial crisis.
00:27:28 Speaker_00
Mary Beth, did committees of correspondence play any role in helping the colonists in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Charleston coordinate their responses to the Tea Act?
00:27:39 Speaker_01
No. In a word, this is really before the committees of correspondence become an important player in the game, as it were. They don't become very active until after the tea crisis.
00:27:50 Speaker_01
As you said in your question, the Virginia Assembly in 1773 suggested that the other assemblies establish formal committees of correspondence, and most of them did that, but the assemblies were not in session in December 1773 and early 1774.
00:28:06 Speaker_01
They were not around to coordinate anything. There were local committees of correspondence in Massachusetts, and those were active.
00:28:14 Speaker_01
But as far as the other colonies were concerned, the reactions to the tea had absolutely nothing to do with committees of correspondence. They just were not there. They were not there as institutions. They were established later.
00:28:24 Speaker_01
What did happen was newspapers. And it took a while for the information to get from one place to another.
00:28:31 Speaker_01
Now, after the destruction of the tea in Boston, Bostonians did send their messenger, Paul Revere, south to New York and to Philadelphia with the news. But that's as far as he went.
00:28:41 Speaker_01
And after that, the message had to be carried further south by other means, either by ships or by land. And most of the information traveled by newspapers. So basically, the first two cities to receive T-ships, that is Boston and Charleston,
00:28:56 Speaker_01
operated entirely independently, neither of them knew what was going on in the other town.
00:29:00 Speaker_01
By the time the T-ship arrived in Philadelphia and New York, Philadelphia and New York knew what had happened in Boston and they kind of knew what was happening in Charleston, what hadn't been resolved in Charleston yet.
00:29:12 Speaker_01
So they were able to respond to the T-ships in their midst with the knowledge that the T had been destroyed in Boston and that negotiations were going on in Charleston. That's true in Philadelphia. The T ship arrived in New York much later.
00:29:25 Speaker_01
The T ship that was going to New York was actually blown way off course, I think by the very same storm that wrecked the William. And the T ship captain there spent the winter in Antigua Wouldn't we all like to spend the winter in Antigua?
00:29:38 Speaker_01
Anyway, spent the winter in Antigua. And so by the time he arrived in New York in April, he knew he had no chance to land the T or sell it or anything. And so he actually sent a letter in advance saying to the people in New York, look, I'm arriving.
00:29:51 Speaker_01
I'm coming because I have to come, but I'm not going to do anything other than resupply the ship and head back to England. And so everybody in New York said, that's great. The guy's a great guy.
00:30:00 Speaker_01
And they greeted him warmly when he arrived and they waved happily goodbye to him when he left. And so that was a completely different story.
00:30:07 Speaker_00
Did the fact that newspapers shared news of what went on in the other colonies affect debates about what to do with the tea in New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, and perhaps even elsewhere in the colonies?
00:30:17 Speaker_01
Yes. A lot of the early anti-tea essays actually come out of Philadelphia. Boston actually drags its heels. Boston is not deeply involved in the early debates over the tea.
00:30:29 Speaker_01
A lot of the early debates over the tea come out of Philadelphia and then New York. So it's kind of ironic that Boston has become the iconic place where we think about the destruction of the tea.
00:30:39 Speaker_01
But the newspapers picked up things that were written in other colonies. And so you'll see, for example, a essay from Philadelphia reprinted in a Charleston newspaper or something like that.
00:30:52 Speaker_00
Wow, that seems pretty remarkable that Boston lagged behind Philadelphia and New York in worry and response over the Tea Act. I mean, as you said, history has portrayed Boston as a leader in the revolutionary movement.
00:31:04 Speaker_00
Now, our exploration of the tea crisis has uncovered a much bigger picture of the tea crisis than we typically read or hear about.
00:31:11 Speaker_00
Mary Beth, why do you think historians who have studied the revolution and the tea crisis have limited the story of this event to Boston and to what seems like its extreme response to the crisis?
00:31:23 Speaker_00
I mean, the other cities were able to turn their tea ships away.
00:31:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, I think it's because it's so dramatic. It's also extremely well documented. I can tell you that it's harder to extract the information about what happened in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York. New York, by the way, is kind of ho-hum.
00:31:39 Speaker_01
I mean, the ship arrives and immediately leaves. It's not as though there's any big confrontation there. Although in the fall, there were preparations for a confrontation in New York, they just didn't happen.
00:31:50 Speaker_01
So I think that the reason that historians very much emphasize Boston is the drama of it.
00:31:56 Speaker_00
Why the discrepancy in the historical record? Why were the actions in Boston so well documented and the actions in the other colonies not so well documented?
00:32:05 Speaker_01
In part, it's because of the drama. Definitely. In part, it's because Boston newspapers were deeply committed to resistance. Some of them, not all of them. There were a couple of conservative newspapers. It's because the Bostonians were more organized.
00:32:18 Speaker_01
They had a tradition of town meetings. There is no such tradition in New York, Philadelphia or Charleston. So there is town meeting records. And we just have a lot more documentation generally about New England.
00:32:29 Speaker_01
One of the problems, frankly, about dealing with records in South Carolina is that a lot of the colonial records of South Carolina were destroyed in the Civil War. So they're simply not available to us.
00:32:38 Speaker_01
It's possible that there were more records made at the time. We just don't have them anymore.
00:32:43 Speaker_00
So how did you uncover these other stories, given the lack of historical sources?
00:32:48 Speaker_01
I did a lot of work in newspapers and I did a lot of work with correspondents. I went to Charleston, South Carolina. I did work at the South Carolina Historical Society. I did work at the New York Historical Society and so forth.
00:33:01 Speaker_01
So I looked carefully for personal correspondents as well as through the newspapers and all those places.
00:33:07 Speaker_00
Did you happen to find a unique or non-typical source that really opened up the story of the tea crisis for you?
00:33:12 Speaker_01
Well, one of the things that was really great for me was in June, a couple of years ago, I actually went up to Cape Cod and looked at the site where the William went aground.
00:33:23 Speaker_01
I was helped by National Park Service people because the site is now in the Cape Cod National Seashore and it really opened my eyes to think about what what would happen to a ship that came aground there in December. I was there in June.
00:33:37 Speaker_01
It was warm and sunny, but there were huge sand dunes. And I know it was no different in the 18th century.
00:33:43 Speaker_01
Just thinking about what it would take to unload that ship and to get the tea overland to Provincetown, which is where they moved it, was actually a real revelation to me.
00:33:53 Speaker_00
Before we move into the time warp, we should explore Great Britain side of the story.
00:33:58 Speaker_00
What did Parliament do when it received news that the Bostonians had destroyed their tea and that the people of New York, Charleston and Philadelphia had turned their tea ships away?
00:34:08 Speaker_01
Parliament, actually, with the Lord North administration, they were extremely unhappy by it. And in fact, it led to the passage of the Boston Port Act in the spring of 1774, closing the Port of Boston until the T was paid for.
00:34:22 Speaker_01
And that was the first of what we know as the Coercive Acts, which helped to set off, in fact, the American Revolution. So Parliament came down very, very hard on Boston.
00:34:30 Speaker_01
And it wasn't happy with the other cities either, but it was mostly focused on Boston.
00:34:35 Speaker_00
It's time for the Time Warp. This is a fun segment of the show where we ask you a hypothetical history question about what might have happened if something had occurred differently or if someone had acted differently.
00:35:06 Speaker_00
In your opinion, what might have happened if the T-ships had arrived in Philadelphia and New York City first and had been delayed to Boston and Charleston? How would Philadelphia and New York City have responded if they had to have acted first?
00:35:20 Speaker_01
I think to answer that question, what we need to do is to look at what was going on in Philadelphia and New York before the T-ships arrived and what the role of the administration and the customs officers were in those two cities.
00:35:33 Speaker_01
The governor of New York made it clear in the run-up to the arrival of the T-ship in New York that he was open to compromise. He offered several possible compromises.
00:35:43 Speaker_01
As I said earlier, none of this ever happened because the T-ship arrived so late that it didn't apply. governor of Pennsylvania was, shall we say, not in the picture. He just stayed out of it.
00:35:55 Speaker_01
And in fact, Lord Dartmouth, the American secretary, was furious at him and rebuked him later to say, why were you totally a non-entity? And why did you not have anything to do with what happened when the T-ship got to Philadelphia?
00:36:08 Speaker_01
And his basically response was, nobody asked me. Nobody asked me to get involved. He said the T-ship captain didn't ask me to get involved, the customs people didn't ask me to get involved, and so I didn't do anything.
00:36:18 Speaker_01
So he basically was passive and took it on the chin from the British authorities for having been passive. So basically, I think what would have happened in New York and Philadelphia was that
00:36:30 Speaker_01
In New York, there would have been some kind of a negotiated settlement. In Philadelphia, who knows, but probably another kind of negotiated settlement with the governor staying completely out of it.
00:36:40 Speaker_01
As far as Boston was concerned, it's really the crucial thing is Thomas Hutchinson. He refused to give in. He's really the crucial figure. If he had changed his mind, everything would have been different.
00:36:50 Speaker_00
To continue with our hypothetical scenario here, in Boston had seen that the people in Philadelphia had prevented the T from being entered into their custom books, that the Bostonians could have done the same?
00:37:03 Speaker_01
I don't think so because of the difference in actually the way the harbor is set up. In Philadelphia, you know, it's way up the Delaware.
00:37:09 Speaker_01
The Philadelphians had a lot of warning that the ship was coming and they stopped it before it got into the harbor. They were able to stop it before it got into the harbor. In Boston, there was no such possibility.
00:37:21 Speaker_01
If you look at Boston Harbor, once a ship gets in the harbor, that's it. There's no way to stop it short of the harbor. Philadelphia, you can stop it short of the harbor.
00:37:28 Speaker_00
We've just had a fairly in-depth exploration of the T-Crisis of 1773 and colonial responses to it. Mary Beth, would you tell us more about the larger project you're working on, which is where this information comes from?
00:37:40 Speaker_01
Yes, I'm doing a very intensive study of basically what I call the long 1774, that is the period of American history from December 1773 through the outbreak of fighting at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.
00:37:58 Speaker_01
Because in my long years of teaching the American Revolution, I've come to the conclusion that this is a very important period that American historians tend to amazingly enough pass over. There've only been a couple of books
00:38:10 Speaker_01
that have focused on 1774 as a crucial period. One of them focuses almost exclusively on Boston and Massachusetts, which I think is a big mistake. I think you have to look at all the colonies. I mean, this is not a revolt of Boston.
00:38:24 Speaker_01
It's a revolt of all the colonies. And they tend to be very teleological. That is, the people who work on these know that the revolution is coming.
00:38:33 Speaker_01
I'm trying to write my book as though I don't know the revolution is coming, as I'm trying to give equal time to all parties in the way I'm discussing the debates that occurred throughout the year 1774, and to show what the disagreements were, and then to show why resistance eventually came to prevail.
00:38:50 Speaker_01
But it was not at all clear that that was going to happen throughout most of the year.
00:38:55 Speaker_00
That sounds like an incredibly fascinating story. Do you know when your book will be done and published so we can read more about it?
00:39:02 Speaker_01
No, it depends on when I finish it. I'm still in the middle of writing it. My book will be published by Alfred Knopf. I can tell you what the title of it's going to be or the tentative title of it is 1774 Year of Revolution.
00:39:14 Speaker_01
But I can't tell you when it will be published because it all depends on when I finish it. And I'm about I would say I'm about half done with it now.
00:39:22 Speaker_00
And where is the best place to look for more information about you and how we can contact you if we still have questions about the tea crisis of 1773?
00:39:31 Speaker_01
Well, I don't have my own personal website, but if you go to the Cornell University History Department website, there is a link to my biography and to my work and so forth. Another thing you can do is to simply Google me up on the web.
00:39:46 Speaker_01
There are some interviews with me. I did a Q&A with the history blogger, historian, a few years ago, which I talk about my work.
00:39:53 Speaker_01
There's a couple of videos that you can see on the web where I'm talking about previous books, not about this one, especially my book about Salem witchcraft.
00:40:00 Speaker_01
So yeah, there's lots of places people can find out about me and my work by going on the internet.
00:40:05 Speaker_00
Mary Beth Norton, thank you for taking us behind the scenes of your new project and for helping us better understand the tea crisis of 1773.
00:40:12 Speaker_01
Well, thank you, Liz, for allowing me to tell that story, because it's one that not very many people know.
00:40:19 Speaker_00
When we think of the tea crisis of 1773, we think of Boston's destruction of the tea, because this is how we learned about this aspect of the American Revolution in school.
00:40:29 Speaker_00
But as our conversation with Mary Beth just revealed, Boston wasn't the only colonial city to respond to the tea crisis. The English East India Company sent tea ships to New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston too.
00:40:41 Speaker_00
And each of those cities protested the Tea Act in slightly different ways from each other and in opposite ways from Boston. Plus there's the story of the William, that Boston-bound tea ship that wrecked on the coast of Cape Cod.
00:40:53 Speaker_00
Now taken alone, the story of the William shows us that the people of Massachusetts, who we often read about and see portrayed as firebrand revolutionaries, were not at all united in their support for the revolution. And this was normal.
00:41:06 Speaker_00
The revolution was not something that all Americans supported, which is why revolutionary leaders like Samuel Adams really feared what would happen if the East India Company's tea landed on North American shores.
00:41:18 Speaker_00
And this is what makes the story of the Williams so interesting and powerful. It shows us that these leaders were right to fear the tea's landing.
00:41:25 Speaker_00
Because just as in Cape Cod, many Americans would have found ways to justify paying the tea duty in order to have their tea.
00:41:33 Speaker_00
Now, we didn't have the opportunity to explore as many details as we would have liked about Charleston's response to the tea crisis.
00:41:41 Speaker_00
And this is because Mary Beth is still in the process of doing history, of researching, contextualizing, and thinking about what historical sources really have to say about that event.
00:41:51 Speaker_00
nor did we have time to explore all the details of Cape Cod's response to the tea crisis. However, unlike the story of Charleston's response, we don't have to wait for Marybeth's book.
00:42:01 Speaker_00
Marybeth published this story in the October, 2016 edition of the William & Mary Quarterly.
00:42:07 Speaker_00
It's in an article called The Seventh Teaship, and our friends at the Omohundro Institute are making this article available to us for free in their OI Reader tablet app.
00:42:16 Speaker_00
For more information about Mary Beth and notes for everything we talked about today, check out the show notes page, benfranklinsworld.com slash 112.
00:42:26 Speaker_00
If you enjoyed this conversation and you'd like to hear more from Mary Beth Norton about her book, 1774, The Long Year of Revolution, be sure you check out our conversation in episode 294, where we talked about that book.
00:42:39 Speaker_00
You can find that conversation at benfranklinsworld.com slash 294. Friends tell friends about their favorite podcasts. So if you enjoy Ben Franklin's world, please tell your friends and family about it.
00:42:51 Speaker_00
Production assistance for this podcast comes from Morgan McCullough. Breakmaster Cylinder composed our custom theme music. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. To discover and listen to their other podcasts, visit airwavemedia.com.
00:43:06 Speaker_00
Finally, be sure you tune in next week to episode 401 for our conversation with James Fichter. Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.