Episode 17: The Tyranny

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode 17: The Tyranny 

Written by Jim Ambuske, Ph.D.
Published July 30, 2025

JIM AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

AMBUSKE 

On January 25, 1774, customs official John Malcom trudged home through two-feet of snow in the streets of Boston. It had been just over a month since a group of Boston men, some dressed as Mohawk warriors, had sallied forth from the Old South Meeting House down to Griffin’s Wharf, boarded three ships carrying 46 tons of East India Company tea, and dumped it all into Boston Harbor.

AMBUSKE 

No one yet knew how Parliament would react to the choices made in those few hours. All they could do was wait.

AMBUSKE 

Bostonians had little affection for customs officials like Malcom. In their eyes, such men were agents of an increasingly oppressive Parliament inexplicably insistent on taxing British Americans without their consent.

AMBUSKE 

Malcom wasn’t well loved by his Boston neighbors. Or even well-liked for that matter. His personality and questionable past probably didn’t help. The Boston-born Malcom had served in the Seven Years’ War, fighting with his regiment across North America against the French and their Indigenous allies. When the war ended, he gained an appointment as a customs official, but also a conviction for counterfeiting and debt. 

AMBUSKE 

He also had a penchant for violence. In the spring of 1771, Malcom volunteered to fight alongside Governor William Tryon in his brutal suppression of North Carolina backcountry farmers calling themselves “Regulators,” who had long complained about the corrupt rule of the few over the many.

AMBUSKE 

Nor did Bostonians appreciate Malcom’s zealous fidelity to duty and Parliament’s laws. In November 1773, two months before his cold walk home, Malcom seized a ship in New Hampshire on such tenuous grounds that even his superiors were puzzled. In retaliation thirty sailors seized him, poured hot tar over his body, and doused him in feathers.

AMBUSKE 

It was a polite warning. After all, they had allowed Malcom to remain clothed, preventing most of the scalding tar from sticking to his body. Yet, any hopes that Malcom had learned his lesson vanished when he made his way home on foot from Boston harbor to Cross Street on the 25th of January.

AMBUSKE 

Somewhere between the harbor and home, a young boy on a sled came barreling toward him. The child struck Malcom in the legs, who in turn unleashed a flurry of angry words at him. Just then, a shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes was passing by, and hearing the commotion, tried to intervene. In the argument that ensued, Hewes allegedly taunted Malcom’s tar and feathering, and then felt the crack of Malcom’s cane on his skull, before all faded to black and he fell unconscious into the snow.

AMBUSKE 

By the time Hewes regained his senses, Malcom had gone home, probably thinking little of the incident, but the Bostonians who had witnessed the assault were not about to let it go.

AMBUSKE 

As the light faded, a crowd gathered outside Malcom’s house demanding that he come out. He answered by shoving a sword through his window, striking one man in the chest, and threatening to shoot anyone with the pistols he had just nearby. Now there could be no compromise. Unmoved by the pleas of Malcom’s wife, Sarah, the crowd began forcing its way into the house. After barricading the doors and windows, the Malcoms fled upstairs to the second story.

AMBUSKE 

But the crowd had ladders.

AMBUSKE 

They managed to break in, seize hold of John Malcom, and drag him downstairs to a waiting cart. He could probably smell the hot tar that awaited him. Unlike his last feathering, the Boston mob had no intention of being polite. They stripped Malcom to his waist clothes, loaded him into the cart, and poured the burning tar all over him. The pain was excruciating. The smell of burning flesh was pungent in the cold air. Feathers stuck to his body and swirled around him.

AMBUSKE 

And yet it was not over.

AMBUSKE 

The crowd carted him toward the Town House, the seat of imperial power in Massachusetts Bay, whipping him as they went. The mob ordered Malcom to damn the name of Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the widely loathed governor who like Malcom was keen to enforce Parliament’s will. And when he refused, they headed for the Liberty Tree. 

AMBUSKE 

Nine years earlier, the Liberty Tree had been the site of a mock execution for Stamp Distributor Andrew Oliver, who now happened to be the colony’s lieutenant governor. The Sons of Liberty had hung Oliver in effigy; this latest mob placed a real noose around Malcom’s neck. Ever defiant, if not laboring through the pain, Malcom dared them to kill him now and get it over with. 

AMBUSKE 

The mob did not afford Malcom that relief, but it did order him again to damn the governor, and this time, to damn the king. Still, he refused until finally, the pain and the cold became too great. He swore against Governor Hutchinson and King George III, and as a reward, they poured the hated tea down his throat until his stomach could hold it no more.

AMBUSKE 

Malcom survived his assault, but his days in Boston were numbered. As he recovered from his ordeal in the weeks that followed, he made arrangements to sail for Great Britain. Before his departure, Andrew Oliver suddenly died. Perhaps some of the men who had assaulted Malcom were among the mourners who gleefully shouted “huzzah” when Oliver was lowered into the ground. They then warned Governor Hutchinson that he would be next.

AMBUSKE 

Finally, in early May 1774, Malcom left for the Mother Country. He put to sea just as ships were nearing North American ports carrying news of how Parliament intended to deal with radicals who had destroyed the tea and left officials like Malcom covered in tar and feathers.

AMBUSKE 

One act to close the port of Boston until the town paid for the destroyed tea, another to change the colony’s government and imbue its governor with new powers, a third to allow royal officials accused of crimes in one colony to stand trial elsewhere in the empire.

AMBUSKE 

Some Britons on both sides of the Atlantic believed that Bostonians had brought Parliament’s response on themselves. More than a few argued that these coercive acts were justified. But some Britons believed that Parliament had gone too far, that its actions were an intolerable miscalculation, if not the triumph of tyranny over British liberty.

AMBUSKE 

I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution. 

AMBUSKE 

Episode 17: The Tyranny.

AMBUSKE 

In the months immediately after the destruction of the tea in Boston, Britons throughout the empire came to grips with what a small number of Bostonians had done.

AMBUSKE 

Some British Americans celebrated the ruined tea as a defense of their rights and liberties in the face of Parliament’s seemingly unrelenting overreach. None were more effusive than Boston’s Sons of Liberty and their allies. 

AMBUSKE 

Boston author Mercy Otis Warren praised the “Late Glorious Event” in Homeric verse. Warren was the sister of lawyer James Otis, Jr., with a pen no less powerful than her brother’s. In February 1774, Warren composed an epic poem about Amphitrite, the wife of the sea god Poseidon, in whose dominion the drowned tea now resided. Warren’s goddess had no patience for Titans and their minions from distant shores who forced the tea upon British America. She would not allow East India Company tea to pass her “rosy Lip,” and so:

MERCY OTIS WARREN 

"Flaming Torch she took in Either Hand, And as fell Discord Reign’d throughout the Land, Was well appriz’d, the Centaurs would Conspire, Resolv’d to set the No’thern World on Fire, By scatering the Weeds of Indian shores, Or Else to lodge them in Pigmalions stores, But if the Artifice shou’d not succeed, Then in Revenge Attempt some Bolder deed. For while old Oceans mighty Billows roar, Or Foaming surges lash the distant shore, Shall Godeses Regale like Woodland dames, First let Chinesean Herbage Feed the Flames."

AMBUSKE 

In Wilmington, North Carolina, a Scottish visitor named Janet Shaw recorded a conflagration in solidarity by some of the town’s women:

JANET SHAW 

"the ladies have burnt their tea in a solemn procession. But they had delayed, however, till the sacrifice was not very considerable, as I do not think anyone offered above a quarter of a pound.”

AMBUSKE 

 But instead of unity, the 46 tons of tea dumped into Boston Harbor only brewed division. While many British Americans believed Parliament had no right to tax them without their consent, few thought that Bostonians had charted a wise course. 

MARY BETH NORTON 

The problem is that everybody focuses on the Boston Tea Party and says, hurray, Boston threw the tea in the harbor. In fact, there was a lot of criticism of Bostonians for throwing the tea in the harbor. Much criticism, saying the Bostonians are really crazy, these New Englanders are getting us into trouble. We shouldn't be doing this. This is not the way to deal with the British. Mary Beth Norton, I'm the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. There were very, very few local groups in New England or in Virginia. And those are the local statements that survive, that actually explicitly said, hurray, boss, and you did the right thing, throwing the tea in the harbor, many others, in each area either didn't say anything, or said Boston, you made a mistake, you shouldn't have done that.

AMBUSKE 

The people of Freetown, Massachusetts Bay didn’t mince words. At a town meeting, the people resolved that the destruction of the tea was:

FREETOWN 

“Contrary to Law, and we fear will bring upon us the Vengeance of an affronted Majesty, and also plunge us in Debt and Misery, when the injured Owners of said Tea shall make their Demand for the Value of the same.”

AMBUSKE 

Even as local communities and leading colonists in Massachusetts Bay and elsewhere protested the Tea Act and Parliament’s claimed right to tax the colonies:

NORTON 

They didn't say we support the Bostonians. They said we support American rights. And they mostly stayed mum on the subject of whether the Bostonians had made a mistake or not. They just basically finessed that issue of whether they were going to support Boston explicitly.

BENJAMIN CARP 

A lot of people assume like, oh, after the Boston Tea Party, people were so inspired by this dramatic act of civil disobedience that had galvanized every American against parliament. And I always say no, no, actually, a lot of people, including George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin looked at the Boston Tea Party like was that the best tactic to use this now, gets us in trouble. Maybe Boston really ought to pay these Indian company back for what it's done. This kind of behavior only makes us look bad in the eyes of the British public. So there were some mixed feelings.My name is Benjamin Carp. I am the Daniel M. Lyons, Professor of American history at Brooklyn College, and I also teach at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I mean, look, it's not even called the Boston Tea Party until the 1820s. At the earliest, it's just called the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor. And although everybody understands that it was a relatively significant event, it is not necessarily considered an inspiring event. It's a somewhat controversial event among many people in New England and beyond.

AMBUSKE 

But to Parliament, the East India Company, and members of the British public, the destruction of the tea was an inspiring event, though not in the ways that Bostonians nor British Americans might have wanted.

AMBUSKE 

So, how did Parliament respond to the destruction of the tea in Boston? And what steps did colonists take to more aggressively defend their place in the British Empire?

AMBUSKE 

To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to London, to Whitehall and Parliament, to draw up plans for bringing a rebellious province to heel. We’ll then sail west to Boston, to negotiate a response to Parliament’s demands, before heading for Philadelphia to convene a continental congress, where some British Americans call for unity, bred division. 

AMBUSKE 

Word that a mob of Boston men had destroyed the cargo of three tea ships in mid-December 1773 sped across the Atlantic, reaching London in January.  

CARP 

A lot of British elites and members of the British public are really outraged by the destruction of the tea. They say, enough is enough. We repealed the Stamp Act. We repealed some of the Townsend act. If we keep backing down from the Americans, we're going to become colony of our own colonies. Somebody actually says that Parliament is really like enough is enough. We passed the Declaratory Act, reiterating the fact that Parliament had the right to make laws over the colonies in all cases whatsoever. And it's time to take this seriously. If Boston is really going to be this stubborn, then they need to be taught a lesson

AMBUSKE 

Almost immediately, the prime minister, Frederick, Lord North, and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth began formulating a response.

AMBUSKE 

At the command of King George III, Lord Dartmouth sought advice from England’s attorney general and the solicitor general on whether the perpetrators, or at least the men who deluded them into action, could be charged with high treason. 

AMBUSKE 

While the names of the men who had dumped the tea remained elusive, Dartmouth knew that Boston politician Samuel Adams and merchant John Hancock had organized the meeting where the perpetrators had rallied before setting off for Griffin’s Wharf. One report claimed that Adams and Hancock had “encouraged” a “body of men disguised like Indians” to destroy the tea.

AMBUSKE 

In the opinions of the attorney and solicitor generals, such actions did constitute high treason. The tea destroyers and their leaders had levied war against His Majesty by obstructing the lawful execution of the Tea Act.

AMBUSKE 

Fortunately for the alleged conspirators, under English law treason charges required more than one witness, but no additional witnesses were readily available. By late February, Dartmouth let the matter drop. Two or three men were not the problem. For many Britons, it was Boston itself. Lord North began drawing up plans to compensate the East India Company for their losses, and implement strong measures to punish Boston and restore British authority in Massachusetts Bay.

AMBUSKE 

In London, Benjamin Franklin could see which way the winds were blowing.

AMBUSKE 

For years, Franklin had lived in London, acting as an agent on behalf of several colonies, but by February, his influence with the king’s ministers was at a low ebb. Just days after reports of the tea’s destruction arrived in the capital, the solicitor general Alexander Wedderburn gave Franklin a verbal thrashing in front of the king’s privy council. He accused the Boston-born Philadelphian of leaking private letters written by Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson. Wedderburn’s torrent of words lasted for over an hour. When it was over, Franklin left the chamber, stripped of his position as postmaster general of North America.

AMBUSKE 

Three days later, on February 2nd, Franklin dashed off a letter to the Committee of Correspondence in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, urging the colony’s legislature to pay for the damaged tea. He did not yet know how Parliament intended to respond, but warned that the “Clamour” against what the Bostonians had done was “high and General.”

AMBUSKE 

The clamour in Parliament included calls for a series of new coercive acts to compel colonial obedience and secure British America’s dependence on the Crown. Here’s NORTON.

NORTON 

We tend to think of the Coercive Acts all being adopted simultaneously, and they weren't. We need to think of them separately. The Boston Port Act came stunningly quickly.

AMBUSKE 

On March 14th, the prime minister rose in the House of Commons to introduce the first of these Coercive Acts. As he told the House:

LORD NORTH 

“Boston [has] been the ringleader in all riots, and [has] at all times shewn a desire of seeing the laws of Great Britain attempted in vain, in the colony of Massachusetts Bay.”

AMBUSKE 

 North believed that had the Boston mob not acted so destructively, the Company’s tea would have been safely landed in New York, instead of returned to England. In his view, the Bostonians’ actions had frightened New Yorkers and other colonists onto a different path.

LORD NORTH 

“Boston alone [is] to blame for having set this example, therefore Boston ought to be the principal object of our attention for punishment.”

AMBUSKE 

That punishment took shape in late March when Parliament passed the Boston Port Act.  

CARP 

The most direct response to the Boston Tea Party is the Boston Port Act. We are actually going to close the port of Boston to almost all overseas commerce, and the port is going to remain closed and throw everybody out of work, pretty much, until Boston repays the East India Company for its losses.

NORTON 

Boston was allowed to have local trade in food and fuel under the Boston Port Act, but the Brits made it very difficult to do that. They actually insisted that the goods had to move from Salem, which was the only port that was legally open in the area, a lot of goods, even in this local trade, should have been allowed to go to Boston by sea, were taken and forced to be moved through Salem.

AMBUSKE 

The aim of the act, however, was more than just about forcing Boston to repay the East India Company for the destroyed tea.

JAMES FICHTER 

The purpose of the Port Act is to single out Boston for punishment in order to make the other colonies fall in line. They think it's the most recalcitrant colony if they bring Boston to heal, everyone's less recalcitrant will be sufficiently cowed into behaving. My name is James Fichter. I'm an historian at the University of Hong Kong, where I'm an associate professor of Global and Area Studies. The Port Act closes Boston Harbor until tea is paid for, and also till a few other things that pay for till other damages and other attacks on customs officials are paid for as well. The Port Act is deliberately vague, though, about exactly how much money that is, and it's also vague about the method of payment, because what they want is they want to use this as a way to get obedience.

AMBUSKE 

For Lord North, this was also a moment to press on with the work of reforming the empire. Since the 1750s, successive Parliaments, prime ministers, cabinet secretaries, and provincial officials had labored to secure Great Britain’s prosperity and independence by ensuring British America’s dependence on the mother country. That work involved new trade regulations, treaties with Indigenous nations, prohibitions on westward expansion, the incorporation of new colonies, and measures of administrative efficiency.

AMBUSKE 

The tea incident in Boston provided Lord North with the impetus to modernize the government of Massachusetts Bay and offer greater protections to crown-appointed officials. In April, the House of Commons began debate on two intertwined pieces of legislation. The Administration of Justice Act, empowered the governor to remove the trials of crown officials to another colony or to England if he believed the accused could not receive a fair hearing in Massachusetts Bay. The other was the Massachusetts Government Act.

NORTON 

It really did, from the standpoint of the Brits and from the standpoint of people in other colonies, was to change the Massachusetts government so that it paralleled the government of the other royal colonies. Massachusetts, in its 17th century charter had a situation where the governor's council was elected by the lower house of the legislature all the other colonies with later charters, the governor's council was appointed by the Brits, and this had been a major complaint of Massachusetts governors, that they could not rely on the council, which was also the upper house of the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature, they couldn't really rely on them for support, because they were beholden to the lower house of the legislature. So all that the Massachusetts government act really did was to make the government of Massachusetts look more like the government of the other colonies.

AMBUSKE 

And it went further. The new act struck at the foundations of local government in the colony by forbidding town meetings without the governor’s consent. 

AMBUSKE 

 In Parliament, some members objected to the act as a dangerous precedent and a gross violation of the colony’s charter rights. Yet, Lord North and the government believed that the colony’s lower house had infected the governor’s council with a democratic spirit that made some of its leading men complicit in the colony’s lawlessness, depriving the governor of any real power. 

AMBUSKE 

Parliament had declared its right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” and even then, it had been accommodating to British Americans in recent years, if not overly lenient. In Lord North’s mind, Parliament’s power and authority were at stake, just as it had been years earlier during the Stamp Act crisis. Either Parliament was the supreme legislature of the empire, or it was not. As he argued forcefully in the House of Commons on April 22nd:

LORD NORTH 

“The Americans have tarred and feathered your subjects, plundered your merchants, burnt your ships, denied all obedience to your laws and authority; yet so clement and so long forbearing has our conduct been that it is incumbent on us now to take a different course. Whatever may be the consequences, we must risk something; if we do not, all is over.”

AMBUSKE 

News of the risks that Parliament had taken began arriving in North America in mid-May 1774. Unlike their response to simply the idea of a stamp act nearly a decade earlier, this time:

NORTON

The colonists didn't want to respond to Acts until they had direct knowledge of the text,

AMBUSKE 

First, word of the Boston Port Act, then, in the weeks that followed, the rest of the Coercive Acts trickled in. The language of the new laws appeared in provincial newspapers. One ship also carried Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s replacement in the form of Major General Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, and now also the chief magistrate of Massachusetts Bay.

AMBUSKE 

 Before Gage sailed for his new post, Lord Dartmouth instructed him to enforce Parliament’s will with firmness, yet exercise patience and moderation when prudent. Should the new governor believe that he could persuade local officials to bring charges against the tea destroyers and their leaders, he should do it, though not at the risk of emboldening radical factions like the Sons of Liberty. And if Bostonians rioted in response to the Port Act, Gage had permission to deploy troops if necessary, although Dartmouth didn’t think colonists would resist it.

AMBUSKE 

The latest reports from Boston, however, inspired little hope that “order and obedience” would quickly replace “anarchy and usurpation.” Lord North’s gamble in Parliament did little to make Gage’s life any easier.

AMBUSKE 

The Boston Port Act threatened the town’s livelihood and the colony’s economy. Food and fuel could still be imported, but the goods on which the basic economy and polite society thrived would be harder to come by. Economic hardship might lead to widespread civil unrest.

AMBUSKE 

 Shuttering the port would prevent Elizabeth Greenleaf from importing the goods she sold in her shop on Union Street, or frustrate authors like Phillis Wheatley from receiving crates filled with her own books published in London. The first print run of Wheatley’s book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, had been on the first tea ship to arrive in Boston, though the copies had survived the attack. A second shipment arrived in the spring of 1774, promising to bolster her income. As she told the Reverend Samuel Hopkins in Rhode Island:

PHILLIS WHEATLEY 

“I have received in some of the last ships from London 300 more copies of my Poems, and wish to dispose of them as soon as Possible. If you know of any being wanted I flatter myself you will be pleased to let me know it”

AMBUSKE 

But beyond damaging the local economy, Parliament’s decision ceded the political high ground to the colonists. James Fichter explains:

FICHTER 

The Port Act is the big mistake by parliament before the Port Act, patriots looked like they were the ones overreaching, and with the Port Act, suddenly it's parliament that, again, goes into the position of overreaching, and it lets patriots do the most American of things they get, to play victim politics and to say, Oh, the evil British Parliament and ministry is oppressing us. Oh, whoa, are we? They had been the ones victimizing others a few months ago, and that was part of what was so divisive about the Boston Tea Party. But now they get to be the victims, which is by far their strongest rhetorical position.

AMBUSKE 

Even if many British Americans didn’t agree with the destruction of the tea, they now understood that if Parliament could shut up Boston’s port, there was little reason to think the same could not be done to other ports like New York or Charleston. 

AMBUSKE 

In Virginia, the planter George Washington, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and now a member of the colony’s House of Burgesses, condemned the Boston mob’s actions, while declaiming that the Port Act had made the “cause of Boston” the “cause of America.”

AMBUSKE 

The Port Act went into effect on June 1, 1774

FICHTER 

but it had no time limit. The Tea Party created a limited amount of damage. And after several weeks, if you'd opened the harbor again, then Parliament could have said, well, we've punished you. And it could have then declared victory and gone home and said, Well, we won. We punish you. Now it's over. But here there's no middle ground. By keeping the port of Boston closed until patriots pay for the tea, it concedes the decision making power to the Patriots about what's going to happen next,

AMBUSKE 

That there was no middle ground became clear as colonists debated who should compensate the East India Company for its damaged property and how that might be done. By the Company’s own estimate, the value of the destroyed tea stood at £9,659 6s 4d, or more than £1.2 million in our own time.

AMBUSKE 

In mid-May 1774, some moderate and conservative Boston merchants circulated proposals to pay for the tea, with one offering £2,000 toward the cause if others agreed to contribute. 

AMBUSKE 

 Some Philadelphians were of a similar mindset. With no love lost for the Tea Act, or for any of Parliament’s other reforms, one implored his fellow colonists that “While we contend for liberty let us not destroy the idea of justice.” In other words, destroying the Company’s private property was an unwarranted reaction to the law. It did more harm than good. 

AMBUSKE 

In July, local elites in Fairfax County, Virginia, including planters George Mason and George Washington, gathered to protest the Port Act, and resolved to help pay for the tea, but only after a redress of their grievances.

AMBUSKE 

Yet, such proposals were already dead in the water. The king’s ministers and Parliament would not accept gifts of private charity, they wanted public acts of contrition and submission.

FICHTER 

They want the city of Boston or the colony of Massachusetts to pay in its official capacity for the tea. And they even want the city or the colony to ask in its official capacity about the method of payment, about how much it should be and all of that. And until Governor Gage is asked by an official body, by the colonial legislature or by the town, he refuses to tell any private deputation of merchants or citizens how much money it is, because unless there's an official body behind paying for it, there's no official body that you can hold accountable making sure there's peaceable conduct in the port and in the town in the future. So there are lots of private movements to raise money to pay for the tea but then, after you've paid for it and reimbursed the company, what's to stop the same thing from happening again next time.

AMBUSKE 

This helps to explain why more radical colonists like Samuel Adams and members of the Sons of Liberty in Boston and other communities vowed to hold the line. If Boston or Massachusetts Bay paid for the tea, as Benjamin Franklin and others had counseled, then not only would it be an acknowledgement that the Boston mob had been wrong to destroy private property, but more dangerously, that Parliament had the right to tax British Americans in the first place.

AMBUSKE 

That colonists willingly imported and bought legal, dutied tea before that destructive night in December 1773 – and that more than a few continued to do so quietly ever since – could be conveniently ignored. By closing the port of Boston, Parliament gave moderate and more radical colonists good ground to once again pick at a festering imperial wound: Either the British Americans had the same rights and liberties as their fellow subjects in Britain, or they did not. Holding out for as long as they could bought time for the radicals to rally more moderates, perhaps a few conservatives, and maybe even sympathetic members of Parliament to their standard.

AMBUSKE 

The changes made to the governor’s council to bring Massachusetts Bay in line with the other colonies, and the limits imposed on town meetings by the Massachusetts Government Act, provided some additional leverage, though as NORTON notes, not as much as we might think:

NORTON

People in New York and South Carolina and Virginia said, Wait a minute. What's the problem? We've been dealing with governments just like this for years. Why are you complaining Massachusetts? You deserve it because of what you did with the tea and so we're not going to support you.

AMBUSKE 

The Administration of Justice Act, though, received widespread condemnation among colonists of all political persuasions. They called it:

NORTON 

The Murder Act. They felt it meant that people who were accused of hurting or attacking British officers would be tried in England.

AMBUSKE 

They doubted that a colonist accused of assaulting a crown-appointed official could receive a fair trial in England, imagining that English judges and juries would be all too eager to convict. And some feared that the act would give British officials license to commit crimes in the colonies, but never face true justice.

NORTON 

Some people said, This is terrible. This means that our homes and families are at risk from marauding Brits. No one would defend that.

AMBUSKE 

If British Americans could broadly agree that the new acts of Parliament were intolerable, there was less consensus on how the colonies should oppose them.

AMBUSKE 

In the weeks before Bostonians learned of the Port Act, the merchant John Hancock called for a congress to convene so that representatives from various colonies could lay the groundwork for a collective response. Such meetings were not unheard of. Representatives from some colonies met in Albany, New York in 1754 to negotiate with the Haudenosaunee and coordinate defenses against the French and their Indigenous allies. Nine colonies met in New York city in October 1765 to push back against the Stamp Act. And yet:

NORTON 

There are precedents in 1754 and 1765, I looked for explicit references to those in the discussions in 1774 and I didn't see anything. I didn't see anybody saying, oh, we can do this, just like we did the Stamp Act Congress or something like that. I didn't see that. Perhaps they thought the Stamp Act Congress was not comprehensive enough. Surely, the Albany Congress was not comprehensive enough. It only had a few colonies represented, and neither of them had achieved their goals.

AMBUSKE 

Nevertheless, after learning of the Port Act, some colonists began calling for a new congress, except:

NORTON 

It's not the Bostonians. The Bostonians were not in favor of a colonial wide Congress. They wanted the other colonies immediately to jump to their aid, as indeed they did with goods and things to support them with the Boston Port being closed. But the Boston leaders really wanted the other colonies to say, okay, an immediate trade boycott with Britain and Samuel Adams really did not want a delay. Did not want there to be time for people to think things through. He wanted everyone to come to the aid of New England. And as the news spread south the only colony that was willing to say, yes, we will support an immediate boycott of Britain in terms of goods is Maryland. All the other colonies say, officially, wait a minute. Let's talk about it. It was the moderates in the other colonies, in New York and Pennsylvania in particular, who said, Yeah, Boston, you're being hurt, but let's sit down and talk about everything. They're the ones who come up with the idea of meeting in Philadelphia in early September.

AMBUSKE 

Though sympathetic to Boston’s plight, even if they thought Bostonians had brought it on themselves, moderates in Philadelphia, New York, and other colonies had no desire to see the same fate befall their port towns nor allow rash actions by Samual Adams and others to earn them Parliament’s attention.

AMBUSKE 

Nor did moderates necessarily trust everything the Sons of Liberty said or published. Just as Paul Revere had allowed Philadelphians to believe that the cargoes of all four tea ships sent to Boston had been destroyed, instead of only three, like-minded printers sometimes misled readers to achieve certain political ends.

AMBUSKE 

Peter Timothy’s reporting in the South Carolina Gazette on debates about the arrival of tea in Charleston harbor illuminates how.

NORTON 

He is the most radical of the three newspaper editors in Charleston, and I think he's trying to promote unity. He's trying to convince people who are not physically present in Charleston and not attended these meetings that things are going much more smoothly than they actually were in the opposition to the tea and Britain in general, he doesn't lie, but he omits stories. He omits the account of how long the debates were, what the issues were, and then there's meetings that are unexplained, because when they can't reach a consensus of the community, it turns out that the planters have a meeting and the mechanics have a meeting and the merchants have a meeting. We know those happened, because he tells us those happen. But does he tell us what happened in any of those meetings? No, it convinced other colonies that the Charlestonians were going to send the tea back. And then, of course, when that didn't happen, when the customs officers instead confiscated the tea, they really felt betrayed, and they wrote these angry editorials, as it were, what happened in Charleston? Why did they lose their nerve? Because they didn't really understand what was going on, because Peter Timothy had literally misled other colonies and even other people in Charleston about what was happening on the ground.

AMBUSKE 

Convening a congress was a chance to debate a collective response to Parliament without having to parse reporting in newspapers or divine truths in letters from committees of correspondence. Arriving at a common strategy, though, wasn’t necessarily going to be easy. Prospective delegates might have shared common grievances as subjects of the same king, but they were still Virginians, South Carolinians, and New Yorkers first, with views ranging from the conservative to the more radical.

NORTON 

Now the next thing that happens, though, is that the Brits make a big mistake, and the big mistake is that Lord Dartmouth forbids the governors from allowing the legislatures to elect delegates to this Congress. Sometimes the governors did it on their own before they got the order from Dartmouth. One of them who did that was William Franklin, who was the governor of New Jersey, and of course, was Benjamin's son, and he saw the danger, but he thought that all I have to do is to prevent the legislature from meeting, and they can't elect anybody. It didn't occur to him that people in New Jersey would say, okay, we'll just elect people in a different way. And therefore, the only way that delegates can be selected is through extra legal bodies, either local bodies or colony wide, extra legal bodies that various colonies managed to get elected in a variety of different ways.

AMBUSKE 

Ironically, Massachusetts Bay managed to elect delegates before Governor Gage dissolved the assembly. Virginia’s elections, however, reveal other long, extra legal roads taken.

AMBUSKE 

Soon after Virginians learned of the Port Act in May 1774, the colony’s House of Burgesses voted to appoint June 1st – the day the act was to take effect – as a day for fasting and prayer in solidarity with Bostonians. Royal Governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore promptly dissolved the assembly. Undeterred, nearly 90 members of the House reconvened in nearby Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, where they called for a boycott of East India Company goods and advocated for a continental meeting.

AMBUSKE 

A few days later, the representatives who remained in town called for a convention to meet on August 1st to discuss Virginia’s response to the Coercive Acts. In June and July, freeholders in nearly all Virginia’s counties gathered to appoint delegates to the convention. None were as consequential as the meeting in Fairfax County.

AMBUSKE 

On July 14, Fairfax County freeholders met in Alexandria, a major port along the Potomac River, and selected George Washington and Charles Broadwater as their convention delegates. Four days later, they delivered Washington and Broadwater their instructions in the form of 26 resolutions. Probably written by George Mason, with editorial assistance from Washington, the resolutions were careful to acknowledge their loyalty to the crown and their wish for continued dependence on Great Britain, but:

FAIRFAX RESOLVES 

“there is a premeditated Design and System, formed and pursued by the British Ministry, to introduce an arbitrary Government into his Majesty’s American Dominions; to which End they are artfully prejudicing our Sovereign, and inflaming the Minds of our fellow-Subjects in Great Britain, by propagating the most malevolent Falsehoods”

AMBUSKE 

They rejected Parliament’s claimed right to tax British Americans without their consent, called for a boycott of certain British goods soon, and threatened an export ban if Parliament did not retreat. The freeholders also called for a continental congress:

FAIRFAX RESOLVES 

“to concert a general and uniform Plan for the Defence and Preservation of our common Rights, and continueing the Connection and Dependance of the said Colonies upon Great Britain, under a just, lenient, permanent, and constitutional Form of Government.”

AMBUSKE 

Perhaps most importantly, the Fairfax Resolves revealed a willingness on the part of southern slaveowners, who imagined themselves as landed English aristocrats, to ally themselves with more democratically-inclined northern settlers, many of whom made their living from the sea.

AMBUSKE 

The Virginia Convention met in early August 1774, with Washington and Broadwater in attendance.

AMBUSKE 

Like similar conventions in other colonies, the Virginia meeting had no legal authority, nor did it expressly claim any. To do otherwise could invite charges of treason. That helps to explain why the boycott of British goods adopted by the convention was voluntary only, and would require other forms of persuasion to enforce it. Likewise, the seven delegates chosen to attend the congress in Philadelphia had no formal legal powers.

AMBUSKE 

 Yet, the political processes that colonists followed to elect delegates to their conventions and to the congress gave both an air of legitimacy and the specter of legality. That did not bode well for British officials and colonists who believed such actions were unconstitutional.

NORTON 

The election of these extra legal bodies was really important, really important, in circumventing the British authority.

AMBUSKE 

Twelve of the twenty-six colonies sent delegates to Philadelphia. The Caribbean colonies, the two Floridas, the Canadian provinces, and Georgia declined to send representatives. Many Georgians agreed that Parliament had gone too far, but for the moment they wanted to avoid alienating British authorities, and especially the military, on whom they relied for defense against attacks by powerful Indigenous nations in the southern borderlands. 

AMBUSKE 

The delegates who did arrive were men of varying political persuasions. Among them were the radical Samual Adams from Massachusetts Bay, along with his learned cousin, John. The more moderate Philip Livingston, a member of New York’s powerful landed family, came. As did the conservative Pennsylvanians John Dickinson and Joseph Galloway. The firebrand Virginian Patrick Henry gained a seat, as did the more temperate George Washington. Richard Caswell, who had fought alongside Governor William Tryon against the Regulator rebels in North Carolina, represented his colony. And the wealthy and conflicted Henry Middleton ventured north from South Carolina.

AMBUSKE 

The delegates had barely begun their work in Carpenter’s Hall on Chestnut Street when on the afternoon of September 6th, an express rider galloped into Philadelphia bearing a letter from Israel Putnam of Connecticut, dated three days earlier, filled with the most dreadful news.

ISRAEL PUTNAM 

"Mr. Keys this moment brought us the news that the men-of-war and troops began to fire upon the people last night at sunset at Boston….He informs, that the artillery played all night; that the people were universally rallying from Boston as far as here, and desire all the assistance possible.”

AMBUSKE 

The Royal Navy began bombarding the town in the days after Governor Gage ordered the removal of the colony’s supply of gunpowder from the nearby town of Charlestown to Castle William in Boston Harbor for safekeeping.

AMBUSKE 

Rumors swirled that Governor Gage had sent Redcoats to Charlestown to seize the supply of gunpowder belonging to other towns as well. When a large number of people gathered to protest the removal, breaking a few windows along the way, six people were killed after soldiers fired into the crowd. The king’s ships opened fire on Boston hours later.

AMBUSKE 

Word of the attack spread quickly like a plague to western Massachusetts Bay and then south toward Philadelphia. Some twenty thousand men began mobilizing to avenge Boston’s ruins.

AMBUSKE 

John Adams didn’t know whether his wife Abigail or their children were alive or dead. Whether Boston had been shot to hell with cannon fire and burned to ashes. Whether after all the protests and boycotts, after all the resistance to Parliament, the horrors of civil war had finally come. 

AMBUSKE 

On the morning of September 8th, John wrote to Abigail, not knowing what had become of his “dearest friend”:

JOHN ADAMS

“My Dear. When or where this Letter will find you, I know not. In what Scenes of Distress and Terror, I cannot foresee.—We have received a confused Account from Boston, of a dreadfull Catastrophy. The Particulars, We have not heard. We are waiting with the Utmost Anxiety and Impatience, for further Intelligence.”

AMBUSKE 

Adams waited for news from the north. It would do little good to strike out for Boston now if the “confused Account” was true, that Boston was destroyed and its people scattered. Philadelphia was simply too far away. All he could do was attend to his duties and wait. 

AMBUSKE 

That afternoon, as Adams and his fellow delegates debated the origins of British American rights, the circumstances of their ancestors’ emigration to the colonies, and the foundations of their allegiance to the king, another rider galloped into Philadelphia. He carried news of the “dreadfull Catastrophy” that brought immediate relief to Adams’ anxiety. 

AMBUSKE 

“The confused Account” was confused indeed, for it was false. Governor Gage had ordered the colony’s gunpowder removed to Castle William, there had been a protest, but there had been no attack, no naval bombardment. No one had even been killed. Abigail and the children were alive and unharmed. Boston stood, still.

AMBUSKE 

By the time Adams heard the initial reports of the attack, what had never happened, was already over. 

AMBUSKE 

Boston’s Committee of Correspondence chastised Israel Putnam for his role in metastasizing the false narrative. The aging veteran of the Seven Years’ War should have waited for “authentick intelligence” from the committee before acting on information of this kind. In the future, he should hold his tongue until receiving word from the committee’s own express riders.

AMBUSKE 

The rumors that Putnam propagated had spread like wildfire, twisting and contorting as they went, inflaming the minds of women and men who were ready to rally to Boston’s cause until they too learned that the story was unfounded.

AMBUSKE 

Abigail Adams feared “an immediate rupture” was imminent.

AMBUSKE 

That willingness to mobilize was not lost on Britons on both sides of the argument or those just caught in the middle. It revealed just how perilous the state of imperial politics had become.

AMBUSKE 

For British officials like Gage, this fictive powder alarm demonstrated that a military confrontation was possible, perhaps even likely. For the delegates in Philadelphia, it was both heartening and horrifying. In one sense, it represented a patriotic spirit in defense of British American rights, but in another sense, it showed how little ability the elite men in Carpentar’s Hall had to control the masses or information.

AMBUSKE 

For people on the ground who witnessed the hysteria, like Customs Commission Benjamin Howell, the picture was bleaker. To crown-appointed officials like him, radical colonists had choked off a middle path. “Those who are not for them, they say are against them.” He feared that “justice and all civil power” would soon be at an end.

AMBUSKE 

The Continental Association only fueled such suspicions. In one of the congress’ final actions before the meeting closed in late October, it embraced calls from local communities and provincial conventions to advocate for colonial-wide boycotts of British goods and bans on future colonial exports. Here’s James Fichter.

AMBUSKE 

Congressmen held out hope that “justice and all civil power” in British America would endure under the British constitution, with the colonies dependent on the crown, and their rights as British subjects intact. Like most colonists, they wanted reconciliation with the Mother Country and the bright future they had imagined at the end of the Seven Years’ War.

AMBUSKE 

But at the same time, congress could not ignore Parliament’s latest actions, nor reforms going back a decade that now seemed more like a long train of abuses. To assert British American rights, they adopted principled statements, and turned to an old economic weapon.

AMBUSKE 

In mid-September, congress adopted a series of resolutions authored by a convention in Suffolk County, Massachusetts Bay, which had met in the wake of the powder alarm. These Suffolk Resolves condemned the Coercive Acts as “gross infractions” of their rights according to “the laws of nature, the British Constitution, and the charter of the province.” They also called for a boycott of British goods and a ban on provincial exports, and urged colonists to disobey all of the Coercive Acts.

AMBUSKE 

By adopting the Suffolk Resolves, congress made the plight of Massachusetts Bay its own. It also made a strong claim to speak with authority on behalf of all British Americans. The resolves quickly appeared in Philadelphia newspapers before spreading to other communities. Mere days after John Adams learned that his wife and children were unharmed, he called congress’s decision one of the “happiest” days of his life.

AMBUSKE 

Others were less sanguine. In London, customs official Charles Steuart opened a letter from his deputy Nathaniel Coffin in Boston only to find a dreary observation. In adopting the Suffolk Resolves, Coffin wrote, Congress had all but issued a declaration of war.

AMBUSKE 

Coffin’s alarm smacked of hyperbole, yet with some elements of truth. For crown-appointed officials like him, and for more moderate and conservative colonists who feared a breach with Great Britain, the radicals were pushing congress in a dangerous direction, with pretension to legal powers it did not have, risking the irreparable. If Parliament left no room for compromise over the Port Act, congress seemed to be closing the door as well.

FICHTER 

Congress meets and passes the Continental Association, which bans all imports from Britain after December 11, 1774 consumption of British goods and tea after March 11, 1775 and exports to Britain after September 10, 1775

AMBUSKE 

There was logic in the congress’s plan and lessons from the past. Colonists had voluntarily implemented trade boycotts and non-consumption agreements in the past to protest the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties, but those efforts had been disjointed and difficult to enforce. When Parliament repealed most of the Townshend taxes in early 1770, the boycotts collapsed fairly quickly. British Americans even resumed importing and drinking taxed tea.  

AMBUSKE 

In the congress’s view, a more united effort was now needed. NORTON explains:

NORTON 

The Americans thought that this is the way we can get the Brits to agree with us. We don't have a vote in Parliament, but the merchants that we deal with have brands in Parliament, and some of them are in Parliament themselves. So what we need to do is to put a lot of economic pressure on the merchants. The merchants will put pressure on Parliament, and parliament will then rescind these acts that we don't want. That was their logic.

AMBUSKE 

The staggered plan would allow colonists to stock up on goods before the measures took effect, and afford time for Parliament to consider the consequences of its actions.

FICHTER 

We know colonists stocked up on all sorts of goods in 1774 import from Britain increased by 30% in anticipation of the boycott of 1775 so people are stocking up. So of course, they're going to stock up on tea.

AMBUSKE 

As the congress had no legal authority, it had no legal means to enforce the Continental Association. It left that task to extra legal conventions and local committees. And enforcing those voluntary bans required coercion.

NORTON 

The most important thing that the Continental Congress did was to adopt the Continental Association and to direct in their language every city, county and town, to set up a local committee to enforce the rules of the association. Many local areas did indeed elect these committees. They included both old leaders and new leaders in these particular colonies, in these particular areas, and the local committees then, with more or less vigor, start to enforce the association. And the way you do that is you start by coercing the merchants you want to make sure that the merchants are not importing or exporting stuff against the rules of the association, and so they do things like direct merchants to give them their books so they can inspect them and find out what's happening.

AMBUSKE 

Those inspections reveal less willingness to sacrifice than the congress might have hoped.

FICHTER

Tea consumption and probably the consumption and probably the consumption of many British goods continued. We know this from two pieces of evidence. One, I went through several hundred merchant ledgers and their paperwork, and it shows, surprisingly, a lot of tea sales. This is funny because you would think it would be a black market good that you should sell under the table. You shouldn't announce that you're selling tea on paper. And presumably for all the tea sales that I did find, there are probably a lot more that were simply not recorded or hidden. But merchants needed to record this sometimes because they bought and sold goods on credit. Now, I think some merchants are smarter than others, and they don't write down that they're selling tea. Suddenly, after the boycott movement starts, they just sell and they're like. Ledger a lot of merchandise, and by calling it merchandise in their ledger, they're able to hide what it is they're selling, but still keep track of how much money they're owed. And so their practical solution to this problem,

AMBUSKE 

These local committees inspected more than just merchants’ ledgers.

NORTON 

They start coercing people who are doing things like slaughtering sheep. The association says you shouldn't kill sheep because we need the wool, so don't kill your sheep. There's other parts of the association that say don't do frivolous things, don't do horse races, don't go to plays, don't do things like that. And so in Virginia, there's coercion to stop horse racing. Now a lot of these committees then move beyond just doing that, and they start coercing speech. And I am reminded explicitly of one poor Scottish school teacher who wrote a letter home to Scotland about what was going on, critical of what was happening in the colonies. It was published in Scotland. That letter made its way back to Virginia, and so he was hauled up before the local committee and forced to literally get down on his hands and knees and to say, no, no, please forgive me. I'm sorry, and don't throw me out of the colony, because my life is now here.

FICHTER

Patriots tended to announce that the boycott movement was widespread, was widely popular and thoroughly adhered to. But of course, there's a difference between saying what you're going to do and what you actually do. They're not announcing the truth that the boycott was widespread. They're trying to lead colonists toward a boycott movement. We shouldn't take what they're saying at face value in these cases.

AMBUSKE 

These pronouncements were convincing enough, however

FICHTER

The result in the association and after was that colonists decided that they would agree that patriots were in charge, and they would accept Patriot authority and leadership, and patriots would agree not to look too closely into whether colonists actually adhered to the association because it mattered more that colonists supported them in their leadership than it really did whether they drank a little bit of tea.

AMBUSKE 

Yet, there were those who could not abide by the leadership of more radical colonists calling themselves true patriots. The adoption of the Suffolk Resolves and then the Continental Association alienated many moderate and conservative colonists – especially in commercial centers like New York city – who had been willing to give the congress the benefit of the doubt in hopes of a peaceful resolution. But in the wake of these events, they believed their fellow colonists were abandoning their natural loyalties and moving down an unnatural path they could not follow. 

NORTON 

People started to say that various things were unconstitutional. The word unconstitutional was used as a weapon by both sides. By constitutional, what they meant was not something that we would understand today, because there is no document like the constitution that did not exist at that time. It simply meant the current system of government. The radical Americans said that the Coercive Acts were unconstitutional, that the British had no right to do what they were doing. They said that the Tea Act was unconstitutional. These policies the British are adopting are unconstitutional because they're not the way things have always worked. The conservative Americans said that the extra legal bodies were unconstitutional because they have no basis in regular government.

AMBUSKE 

These moderate and conservative colonists urged the king’s ministers to deal with the radicals using a firm hand to settle matters once and for all. In December 1774, Jonathan Sewell, the attorney general for Massachusetts Bay, wrote to former governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was now living in exile in England, to outline the stakes for the British Empire. For many British Americans like him who began identifying themselves as “loyalists,” leniency was intolerable.

JONATHAN SEWELL 

“Temporizing Measures will be fatal to all American Loyalists immediately, and to all America finally.”

NORTON 

The word loyalist is very important because it shows the divisions in the community. The term wasn't used until late in the year 1774 and it was first used by a loyalist himself. What it meant was there are now people who are not seen as loyal. There's a group of people who are now recognized as being revolutionaries. And then once the term loyalist appears, it's clear that the reverse is there. The opposite is there. And to me, that's very important. By the end of the calendar year 1774 divisions have gotten so serious that at that point, if revolution is not inevitable, it's damn close to being inevitable.

AMBUSKE 

When the Continental Congress closed on October 26, 1774, the delegates pledged to meet again the following year if Parliament had not redressed their grievances. They invited the colonies who had not come to this first congress to join them in Philadelphia for the second as well.

AMBUSKE 

And none were more important to British Americans at this moment than Quebec.

AMBUSKE 

Twenty years earlier, Quebec had been the heart of New France, a bastion of Roman Catholicism, and a powerful ally of the formidable Indigenous nations who inhabited the Ohio Country.

AMBUSKE 

When Montreal fell to British forces in 1760, and the Seven Years’ War came to end three years later, Quebec became a colony of Great Britain.

AMBUSKE 

Some Britons on both sides of the Atlantic grumbled at the thought of adding a Catholic colony to their Protestant British Empire of Liberty. More than a few colonists complained when the king’s ministers and native diplomats negotiated a boundary between Indigenous and British America.

AMBUSKE 

Time alleviated some of those concerns. Catholicism seemed contained in the north, and the boundary line began eroding almost as soon as surveyors drew it on maps, opening the rich fertile lands of the Ohio Country for the taking.

AMBUSKE 

But in the summer of 1774, as British Americans debated how best to respond to the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, and the Murder Act, word arrived that Parliament was pressing on with its imperial reforms. For in a new act, no less intolerable, it seemed that New France had been reborn.

AMBUSKE 

Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. 

AMBUSKE 

I'm your host, Dr. Jim Ambuske

AMBUSKE 

This episode of Worlds is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE 

Head to r2studios.org, for a complete transcript of today's episodes and suggestions for further reading.

AMBUSKE 

Worlds is researched and written by me, with additional research writing and script editing by Jeanette Patrick.

AMBUSKE 

Jeanette Patrick and I are the executive producers. Grace Mallon is our British correspondent.

AMBUSKE 

Our lead audio editor for this episode is Curt Dahl of CD squared.

AMBUSKE 

Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant.

AMBUSKE 

Our thanks to Benjamin Carp, James Fichter, and Mary Beth Norton for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE 

Thanks to our voice actors: Kristin Jacobsen, Gillian MacDonald, Amber Pelham, Adam Smith, Anne Fertig, Issac Loftus, Patrick Long, and Jordan Slome.

AMBUSKE 

Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we'll see you next time you.