Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [176]
Relations between the colonies and the mother country went from bad to worse after passage of the Tea Act of May 1773. Ostensibly, Parliament wanted nothing more than to revive the fortunes of the ailing British East India Company, bulwark of British influence in India, by allowing it to sell tea directly in America. It was bad enough that this would cut out colonial middlemen, but Americans also suspected that Parliament really wanted the company to grab control of the colonial tea market in order to collect the duty on tea held over from the Townshend program—a devious ploy to make the colonists swallow the principle of parliamentary taxation.
By September 1773 half a million pounds of East India Company tea were on their way to selected consignees in the major American ports. For the next two months, as everyone awaited the arrival of the tea, another wave of defiance rolled through the colonies. Perhaps the first public demonstration of opposition anywhere occurred in New York, where, in mid-October, Sears and McDougall formed a Committee of Vigilance to plan a course of action and congratulate ship captains refusing to handle cargoes of dutied tea. McDougall launched a series of inflammatory essays called The Alarm. “A New Flame is apparently kindling in America,” William Smith wrote in his diary.
Summoned by the Committee of Vigilance, a huge crowd assembled on November 5 (Guy Fawkes Day) outside the Coffee House. After denouncing Parliament and East India Company agents, they hanged in effigy one local merchant who had advised the company to ship to New York. Later that same month the Sons of Liberty formed an association to defeat the Tea Act. Anyone who stood against them, they declared, would be treated as “an enemy to the liberties of America.” Governor Tryon ruefully admitted that this resolution was “universally approved by all the better sort of the Inhabitants.”
No doubt remembering the fate of stamp distributors eight years earlier, the East India Company’s agents hastily resigned. Sears and McDougall began to talk of shutting down the port altogether to prevent the landing of tea. McDougall went even further: “What if we prevent the Landing,” he asked a horrified William Smith, “and kill [the] Gov[ernor] and all the Council?” On December 17,1773, as many as three thousand of the city’s inhabitants gathered at City Hall to protest the Tea Act. They pledged to use force, if necessary, to resist the unloading of East India tea and elected a Committee of Correspondence, consisting of Sears, Lamb, McDougall, and several other Liberty Boys, to reopen communications with patriots in other colonies. Not until Paul Revere brought the news to town four days later did anyone know that on December 16 patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians had dumped several hundred chests of East India tea into Boston harbor. Word soon arrived that Philadelphia too had turned back a tea ship. Two ships were reported on their way to New York.
Sears and McDougall had ample time to prepare. Hampered by bad weather, New York’s tea ships didn’t arrive until mid-April 1774. The captain of one, told by “sundry gentlemen” on a Committee of Inspection that “the sense of the citizens” wouldn’t permit him to land his cargo, quietly turned around and sailed for home. He was seen off by the greatest crowd “ever known in this city” and a “band of music” playing “God Save the King.” The captain of the other (already notorious for having brought the hated tax stamps to New York in 1765) failed to bluff his way past the inspection committee and was forced to apologize before a public meeting at Fraunces Tavern. A party of “Mohawks” dumped his cargo into the harbor, “and it was not without some risk of his life that he escaped.” Lieutenant Governor Colden—now eighty-seven and once again in charge of the colony because Tryon had gone back to England for a year-long