What shocked colonists like George Washington into war? Britain’s imperious actions in Boston (Gordon Wood Counters The 1619 Project)

See ‘1774’ Review: The Year That Changed the World. Excerpts:

"The 1619 Project, launched in August 2019 by the New York Times and designed to revise the teaching of American history in schools, claims that one of the primary reasons the Americans decided to declare independence from Great Britain in 1776 was to protect their institution of slavery. To back up this remarkable claim, the editor of the New York Times Magazine, where the project first appeared, cited the November 1775 proclamation of Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offering freedom to any enslaved person fleeing to the British army—a military expedient only. Then, to confirm the importance of this proclamation, the editor quoted the words of historian Jill Lepore from her recent history of the United States: “Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.”

Mary Beth Norton, in her new book, “1774,” suggests otherwise. Her account of the long year 1774, from the Boston Tea Party in December 1773 to the outbreak of hostilities in April 1775, shows conclusively that the scales had been tipped in favor of independence long before Dunmore issued his proclamation. Ms. Norton, who is professor of history at Cornell and a former president of the American Historical Association, does not fundamentally challenge the traditional trajectory of events in that decisive year. What she does do is enrich the narrative, filling in the story with a staggering amount of detail based on prodigious research in an enormous number of archives. She doesn’t just tell us how many pounds of tea (“nearly 600,000”) the East India Co. placed on seven ships sailing to Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, S.C., in late 1773, but she describes the kind of tea that was sent: “1,586 chests of Bohea, 70 chests of Congou, 290 chests Singlo, 70 chests of Hyson, and 35 chests of Souchong.” Some readers might think this is specification run wild."

"By the early 1770s, the crisis between Great Britain and its colonies that had begun with the Stamp Act in 1765 seemed to have eased. Faced with mobs and boycotts of British goods, the British government had twice backed away from trying to tax the colonists. It had repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, and, in 1770, it had withdrawn the Townshend duties, keeping only the duty on tea as a symbol of Britain’s authority to tax the colonists. This proved to be a big mistake. 

The Americans had generally ignored or dismissed this remaining duty on tea until the British inadvertently called attention to it, and disaster followed. In 1773 the British government decided to bail out a nearly bankrupt East India Co. by giving it a monopoly of the American market for tea. Although the British government had not intended this Tea Act as a means of forcing the colonists to accept Parliament’s right to tax them, Americans interpreted it that way. 

Ms. Norton painstakingly describes the colonists’ emerging opposition to the imported tea. The opposition took different forms in each of the ports, in some cases forcing the resignations of the merchants consigned to receive the tea, in others compelling the ships carrying the tea to sail back to England with their cargoes intact. Boston was different. The consignees refused to resign, and Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, a stickler for the law that prevented any ship once docked from departing without paying duties, refused to allow the tea ships to sail back to England with their cargoes. On Dec. 16, 1773, the night before the tea was to be unloaded and taxed, a band of men disguised as “Mohawks” threw 342 chests containing more than 46 tons of tea worth more than £9,000 into Boston Harbor. This became the famous “Tea Party.”

The colonists’ reaction to this destruction of private property was immediate but mixed, some condemning it, others celebrating it, with many remaining uneasy and uncertain about what to say or do. Although nearly all Americans remained adamantly opposed to paying tea duties, many suggested that Boston, or perhaps all the colonies, ought at least to pay for the destroyed tea. Many colonists outside of New England worried that the hot-headed Bostonians were much too rash and violent.

But, of course, the British government came to the rescue of the Bostonians’ reputation. British leaders were furious at the destruction of the tea. They had for far too long appeased the colonists, repealing acts of Parliament and retreating at every sign of colonial opposition. It was high time, the government declared, to show the colonists the power the British nation could wield over its dependencies. 

The British government passed a series of acts—acts that were so severe, so uncompromising, so drastic, that they fundamentally altered the imperial debate and forever changed the relationship between Britain and its colonies. The government closed the port of Boston, ordered Thomas Hutchinson back to England, and appointed a military general, Thomas Gage, as the new royal governor of Massachusetts.

The closing of the port of Boston shocked all the colonists, but Virginians especially. They had been upset at the clandestine destruction of private property, but the British reaction was too much to take. George Washington declared that “the cause of Boston. . . now is and ever will be considered as the cause of America.” Many colonists suggested a meeting of all the colonies to deal with the crisis. 

The British government followed with two more acts that made matters worse. The first altered the Massachusetts charter by having the council, the middle branch of government, appointed by the Crown rather than elected by the two houses of the colony’s legislature; and it forbade towns to hold more than one meeting a year without permission. The second, dubbed the Murder Act by the colonists, provided that military or customs officials who killed colonists in the performance of their duties would be brought to England for trial rather than face biased colonial juries. The other colonies realized at once that, if Britain could coerce Massachusetts in this outrageous manner, it could do the same to them.

The Massachusetts citizens forced the resignations of most of those appointed to the council, ignored the prohibition on town meetings and effectively closed the colony’s courts. In September a dispirited Gen. Gage told the colonial secretary in London that “civil government is near its end.” And the fever was spreading. No one, he later reported, could have imagined that the acts designed for Massachusetts alone “could have created such a ferment throughout the continent and united the whole in one common cause.”

As the colonies gathered together in a Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774, New Englanders were actually preparing to fight. When a rumor spread that British troops had killed some Bostonians, as many as 20,000 men from various parts of New England mobilized to march on Boston before they learned that the rumor was false. Although Americans in the other colonies were not as jittery as the New Englanders, many realized that the imperial relationship was disintegrating. Whatever royal authority was left in the colonies now simply disappeared. The royal governors stood in helpless astonishment as new, informal, extra-legal governments sprang up around them. These committees and conventions assumed many of the powers of government. Those loyal to the royal governments argued in the press that these extra-legal bodies were dangerous, treasonous and tyrannical, and the patriots responded by justifying their tar-and-feathering and other oppressive actions as expressions of the people’s will. In her detailed descriptions of these debates, Ms. Norton always gives a fair hearing to the views of the loyalists."

"His ministry sent military reinforcements to Boston and ordered Gen. Gage to use force against the Massachusetts rebels if necessary. The British government thought it was dealing with “a rude rabble” that had no substantial backing in the colony and could be put down with ease. Given this kind of misperception of reality, it was inevitable that a military clash would occur, as it did on April 19 in Lexington and Concord.

“By April 19, 1775,” concludes Ms. Norton, “Americans had not yet formally adopted a Declaration of Independence, but their leaders had long since practiced independence in thought and deed.” The colonists didn’t need Tom Paine in his “Common Sense” of January 1776 to tell them that the time was ripe for breaking away from Great Britain. In 1774 Americans had already in fact become independent, as Ms. Norton’s book makes only too clear. And never once in her detailed account of that long year does she declare that the protection of slavery had anything to do with bringing about that independence."