[This coming weekend marks the 250th anniversary of one of the most significant events in Colonial America, the Boston Tea Party. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that important moment, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of the many BostonStudiers from whom I’ve learned a great deal!]
On what
differentiates the “Annapolis
Tea Party,” and what it adds to the Boston story.
Less than
a year after the Boston Tea Party, an even more dramatic attack on a tea-laden
ship took place in Annapolis, Maryland. Neither the general taxes imposed by
the Townshend Acts
of 1767 nor the specific ones enacted by the Tea Act of 1773, against
both of which as I wrote in Monday’s post the Boston crowd was protesting, had changed
in any substantive way in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party. As a result,
many of the colonists were taking part in another form of protest, ongoing
tea boycotts, which were making things difficult for merchants hoping to
trade in the popular commodity. And in the summer of 1774, a London merchant
named Thomas
Charles Williams decided to respond by secretly loading up a ship named the Peggy Stewart (after the daughter of
its co-owner Anthony Stewart) with roughly a ton of tea and hoping to get it
into America and pay the tax on it without attracting attention. He did not
succeed.
To that
point, the story seems like it could have unfolded very similarly to the
lead-up to the Boston Tea Party. But what transpired over the five days between
the Peggy Stewart’s October 14th,
1774 arrival in Annapolis and the burning
of the ship and all its cargo on October 19th is quite different
from, and far more organized and planned than, the events in Boston. There was
an existing committee in the city that was in charge of the tea boycott, and when
news of the Peggy Stewart began to
spread that body convened for two separate, extended meetings and negotiations
with Anthony Stewart, Williams’ two brothers and partners, and many others to
decide what actions to take. Those steps included the businessmen publishing
a formal apology in the Maryland
Gazette and, most strikingly, a formal ceremony to burn the ship and its
contents. On the evening of October 19th, in the aftermath of the
second committee meeting, Stewart and the Williams brothers set the Peggy Stewart ablaze, and (as the Gazette
reported it the next day) “in
the presence of a great number of spectators” the ship and its cargo were
destroyed.
It’s
interesting to think about a Tea Party where most of the merchants were fully
on board with the protest and even the destruction of their goods, although it’s
worth adding that Anthony Stewart became an ardent Loyalist
during the Revolution and went on to found the proto-British community of New
Edinburgh in Nova Scotia. But I would also say that we should put the
Boston and Annapolis Tea Parties on a continuum, and indeed that we can see the
latter event as having evolved directly out of the former. That is, the
Annapolis Tea Party reflects Revolutionary protesters who were learning from
the past and becoming more intentional and sophisticated in their efforts to
challenge the taxes, to thwart the English, and to maintain their community’s overarching
goals in the face of different needs and actions from individual businessman
like Williams. Too often history is boiled down to individual events or
moments, but big changes develop out of multiple, interconnected such events,
no two the same but no one occurring in a vacuum. As we commemorate the Boston
Tea Party, let’s make sure to include Annapolis in the conversation as well.
Last Tea
Party post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Tea Party takes you’d share?
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