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The Providence Tea Party: On Dry Land, in Daylight and Thrown By Women

Rhode Island patriots had no more love for tea than did their allies in Boston, and on March 2, 1775, they threw the Providence Tea Party in Market Square.

Rhode Island had already hosted one militant protest against Parliament’s customs policies. On June 9, 1772, Rhode Island’s Sons of Liberty captured the crew of a British customs schooner and burned the vessel to the waterline. Rhode Island has since celebrated the Gaspee Affair as its own version of the Boston Tea Party.

Though not the only Tea Party, the Boston affair happened first, and gained the most notoriety. It also inspired similar action from Charleston, S.C., to York, Maine. In some places, patriots threw tea overboard as they had in Boston. In others, they burned the tea as they did in Providence.

Provience’s Market Square, 1840s

Boston Tea Party Starts It All

Contrary to popular belief, the Tea Act didn’t increase the tax on tea. Rather, it lowered the price of tea – for one giant British company that had too much of the stuff. By enacting the Tea Act, Parliament gave a bailout in the form of a duty-free monopoly to the troubled British East India Company.

The cheap British East India tea threatened small merchants in North America – as well as the Dutch smugglers who sold it to them.

In 1765, eight years before the Boston Tea Party, the Rhode Island General Assemble opposed the Stamp Act with a resolution denying ‘the right of any power but itself to levy taxes in the colony.’

The Boston Tea Party

Word of the Boston Tea Party spread fast through the colonies. In January 1774, Rhode Island patriots held meetings in Newport and Providence to address ‘so interesting and alarming an occasion.’ And they agreed that if they didn’t express the ‘firmest resolution to vindicate our rights,’ it might be ‘construed as a cession of them into the hands of those who have wantonly evaded them in this instance.’

Walking the Walk

In addition to talking about their rights, Rhode Islanders had walked the walk. In the summer of 1774, the General Assembly sent Stephen Hopkins and Daniel Ward to the Continental Congress. The Assembly also created the Providence Light Infantry.

By winter, the General Assembly had chartered more companies in Providence, Newport and East Greenwich, the Train of Artillery, the Scituate Hunters, the Providence Artillery, the Providence Fusiliers and the North Providence Rangers.

Stephen Hopkins

The Providence Tea Party

Then in early 1775 Rhode Islanders held the Providence Tea Party.

In 1923, Providence Magazine gave one of the few accounts of the burning of the tea in Market Square. The magazine reported that on March 2, 1775, the Town Crier announced:

“At four of the Clock this Afternoon a Quantity of India Tea will be burnt in the Market Place. All true friends of the Country, Lovers of Freedom and Haters of Shackles and Hand-cuffs, are hereby invited to testify their good Disposition, by bringing in and casting into the Fire a needless Herb, which for a long time hath been highly detrimental to our Liberty, Interest and Health.”

As planned, patriots started a fire in the middle of Market Square and women fed 300 pounds of tea into it.

The Gazette on March 4, 1775, reported:

“At the appointed hour a fire was started in Market square, a barrel of tar was placed upon it, and copies of Lord North’s speech, and other obnoxious English papers were burned, while to the flames were added 300 pounds of tea, fed to the fire by the women of the town.”

“While the tea was burning a spirited Son of Liberty went along the streets with his brush and lampblack, and obliterated or unpainted the word TEA on the shop signs,” reported the Gazette.

More Tea Parties

Today, a plaque on the side of the Market House provides a rare reminder of the Providence Tea Party. It reads, “Near this spot the men and women of Providence showed their resistance to unjust taxation by burning British-taxed tea on the night of March 2, 1775. Erected by the Rhode Island Societies of the Sons of the American Revolution and Daughters of the American Revolution 1894.”

The Market House today

Providence patriots had plenty of company in the tea-destruction department. On the Christmas Day after the Boston Tea Party, the British ship Polly sailed up the Delaware River and put in at Chester, Pa., with 698 chests of tea. Philadelphian patriots met with the captain, escorted him upriver and suggested he return to London. Perhaps they showed him broadsides threatening to tar and feather him. He did.

Then in January 1774, Princeton College students broke into a storeroom, took all the tea and burned a dozen pounds of tea on the campus.

On April 22, 1774, a ship captain named Chambers tried to smuggle 18 chests of tea into New York. The Sons of Liberty got word of it, searched the ships, found the tea, dumped it overboard and burned the chests in the streets. Earlier that month, New York’s Sons of Liberty turned back the Nancy, which carried 698 chests of tea into Sandy Hook.

On May 24, 1774, patriots in Chestertown, Md., dumped tea from a brig into the Chester River. Chestertown still celebrates the event.

From Maine to South Carolina

In York, Maine, on Sept. 15, 1774, 150 pounds of tea came from Newfoundland on the sloop Cynthia. The Sons of Liberty seized the tea and stashed it in a storeroom. Then some ‘Pickwacket Indians’ made off with the tea. Somehow the tea returned mysteriously two days later.

In October 1774, patriots burned the Peggy Stewart, which had carried tea and indentured servants to Annapolis, Md. (The servants got off the ship beforehand.)

On Nov. 3, 1774, seven chests of tea were landed in Charleston, S.C., but local officials ordered the merchants who received it to dump it into the Cooper River. Fearing what the mobs might do if they didn’t, they dumped it.

On December 22, 1774, patriots in Greenwich, N.J., burned tea, six days after the Boston Tea party.

This story was updated in 2021. Image of the Providence Market House By Filetime – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98763110.

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The Battle of Margaretta, When Pitchforks Beat the British Navy

The Battle of Margaretta, by today’s standards, was really more of a skirmish: a sailing vessel with four guns attacked by woodsmen with farm implements.

But it was the first naval battle of the American Revolution, and James Fenimore Cooper called it “the Lexington of the Seas.”

The victors in the battle would protect Maine’s eastern coast during the Revolution and raid British ships.

And the Battle of Margaretta would have dire consequences for a town 200 miles to the south.

A British Royal Navy sloop-of-war, c. 1831, in the West Indies

The Battle of Margaretta

During the Siege of Boston, bottled-up British troops quickly ran out of wood. They tore up churches and fences for firewood, but they needed lumber to build barracks for their crowded soldiers.

A Loyalist entrepreneur, Ichabod Jones, lived in the lumbering village of Machias in Downeast Maine. He worked out a deal to send firewood and lumber to Boston in exchange for flour, pork and other much-needed provisions in Machias.

But Machias proved a poor choice as a trading partner for the British. Some of the town’s most prominent citizens sided with the patriot cause. They included militia colonel Benjamin Foster and Jeremiah O’Brien.

In the summer of 1775, two sloops carrying provisions sailed into Machias Bay, escorted by an armed British cutter with four guns, the Margaretta. The Margaretta’s captain, midshipman James Moore, circulated a document that he wanted the villagers to sign. The document said they would agree to protect the three vessels in exchange for the provisions they so desperately needed.

Many of the villagers agreed, but Benjamin Foster did not. He gathered militia from neighboring villages. The rebels then secretly plotted to capture the British officers while they attended church services on Sunday, June 11.

Machias in 1777, much as it would have looked in 1775.

Farce, Then Tragedy

There really wasn’t much to the Battle of Margaretta. It might have even seemed comical had it not ended in the deaths of seven combatants.

The Battle of Margaretta amounted to some three dozen woodsmen in a merchant vessel ramming a small, lightly armed cutter that sailed too clumsily to escape. The woodsmen overtook the British with pitchforks, axes and hunting rifles, using melted-down spoons as ammunition.

Hannah Watts Weston by an unknown artist. Courtesy the Farnsworth Museum.

So on June 11, the British officers noticed the Machias rebels coming after them in church. They escaped to their little ship Margaretta amidst a bit of shooting. Midshipman Moore threatened to bomb the town.

The two sides prepared for battle the next day. Two young women, Hannah and Rebecca Weston, traveled 16 miles from Jonesboro with bags of pewter plates, spoons and mugs for ammunition. Hannah, 17 and pregnant with her first child, lived to 97; the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution adopted her as their patron saint.

The Burnham Tavern.

On Monday, June 12, the rebels commandeered two sloops and chased the Margaretta, but the one captained by Benjamin Foster ran aground. The other, with Jeremiah O’Brien as skipper, chased the Margaretta.

As she headed toward the open sea, inept seamanship caused the Margaretta to lose her gaff and boom. That made the vessel hard to sail, and the crew had to capture another vessel for replacements. Then it had to fix the rigging.

That gave O’Brien’s sloop plenty of time to catch up with the Margaretta and ram into her side. The rebels then boarded her. Shooting and hand-to-hand combat resulted in the death of two Americans, four British and a mortal wound to Midshipman Moore.

Aftermath

Jeremiah O’Brien and his men captured two more British vessels, which made up a small privateer fleet.

Americans later staged several futile invasions of British territory from Machias. The British tried to attack the village in the summer of 1777, but broke it off as the aroused populace counterattacked.

As long as Machias held out against the British, they couldn’t seize the territory.

But they could retaliate, and retaliate they did: against Falmouth, now Portland, Maine. A fleet of British naval vessels fired flaming cannonballs into the town, burning down the harbor installations and most of the town’s buildings.

After the Battle of Margaretta, the Burnham Tavern was used as a hospital to tend the wounded of both sides. Moore died of his wounds in the tavern. Today a chest in the tavern said to be stained with his blood.

The Hannah Weston Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution now runs the Burnham Tavern as a museum. For more information about the Burnham Tavern, click here. This story was updated in 2022.

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Marian Anderson Sings at the Lincoln Memorial

It was one of the most extraordinary concerts in history. Marian Anderson sang before 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939. She did it because the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn’t let her sing before an integrated audience at their Constitution Hall.

Marian Anderson’s rich contralto voice, said conductor Arturo Toscanini, was heard “once in a hundred years.” Her dignified stage manner “melted the hearts of music lovers around the world,” wrote the New York Times. “Her determination helped shatter racial barriers in the arts.”

The Lincoln Memorial concert became a touchstone for the civil rights movement, a poignant symbol of African Americans’ struggle for equality.

Marian Anderson

Born Feb. 27, 1897, she rose from a poor childhood in South Philadelphia to acquire international fame and the warmth of a community in Danbury, Conn.

Until the mid 1930s, she performed mostly in Europe. There, she encountered less racial prejudice than in the United States. She sang everything from classical music to traditional American songs and spirituals.

In the late 1930s, Marian Anderson began to tour the United States, giving about 70 recitals a year. Despite her growing celebrity, she was denied admission to some hotels and restaurants. Albert Einstein helped her out. She first stayed at his house in 1937 when denied a hotel room before she performed at Princeton University.

Marian Anderson, 1940, by Carl Van Vechten. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The DAR’s refusal to let her perform thrust her into the international spotlight as a champion of racial equality. It sparked a furor in Washington, D.C., and a mass protest was planned. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR. She wrote about it in her weekly column. “They have taken an action which has been widely criticized in the press,” she wrote. “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.”

Then Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange the Lincoln Memorial concert.

The Concert

Anderson later admitted the prospect of that concert terrified her. But, she later wrote,” I could not run away from this situation. If I had anything to offer, I would have to do so now.”

Marian Anderson performed on Easter Sunday, not just to the 75,000 people standing before her, but to millions listening on the radio. Six microphones carried her voice for blocks.

Marian Anderson in front of the Lincoln Memorial..

The concert began at dusk. Ickes accompanied her to the stage under the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

“In this great auditorium under the sky all of us are free,” he said. “When God gave us this wonderful outdoors, He made no distinction of race or creed or color.”

She began with an emotional rendition of My Country ‘Tis of Thee. Then she sang she sang an aria from La favorite by Gaetano Donizetti. She followed that with Ave Maria by Franz Schubert and ended with the spirituals, Gospel Train, Trampin’ and My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord. At the end, the enthusiastic crowd insisted on an encore. She sang, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

Mitchell Jameson mural, “An Incident in Contemporary American Life,” 1943, inside the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Reaction

The concert lasted only a half hour, but it created a sensation. (Watch newsreel footage of it here.) The crowd rushed the stage, and police had to hold it back.

“I am so overwhelmed, I just can’t talk,” said Anderson when it was over. Then she thanked the crowd “from the bottom of my heart.”

Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, had joined Marian Anderson on stage. As the crowd surged forward, a single figure caught his eye.

It was a slender black girl dressed in somewhat too garishly hued Easter finery. Hers was not the face of one who had been the beneficiary of much education or opportunity. Her hands were particularly noticeable as she thrust them forward and upward, trying desperately, though she was some distance away from Miss Anderson, to touch the singer. They were hands that despite their youth had known only the dreary work of manual labor. Tears streamed down the girl’s dark face. Her hat was askew, but in her eyes flamed hope bordering on ecstasy. Life which had been none too easy for her held out greater hope because one who was also colored and who, like herself, had known poverty, privation, and prejudice, had, by her genius, gone a long way toward conquering bigotry. If Marian Anderson could do it, the girl’s eyes seemed to say, then I can, too.

Danbury

The year after the historic concert, Marian Anderson and her husband, architect Orpheus Fisher, bought a 100-acre farm on Joe’s Hill Road in Danbury. She lived there for 50 years.

The couple built a music studio on the property, now preserved and open to the public in downtown Danbury. They involved themselves in Danbury’s civic life. She joined the Danbury Music Centre board of directors. She also supported the Charles Ives Center for the Arts and the Danbury Chapter of the NAACP. He designed Danbury’s New Hope Baptist Church.

Marian Anderson insisted on being treated like an ordinary person. She would wait in line like everyone else at shops and restaurants. She visited the Danbury State Fair, gave a concert at Danbury High School, and at Christmas she sang at Danbury City Hall for the lighting of the Christmas tree.

Anderson died on April 8, 1993, one day shy of the 54th anniversary of her historic performance at the Lincoln Memorial.

The DAR

The Daughters of the American Revolution have since come full circle. Four years after refusing to let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall, they invited her to perform at a benefit for the American Red Cross. She said she felt no sense of triumph.

When I finally walked onto the stage of Constitution Hall, I felt no different than I had in other halls… I felt that it was a beautiful concert hall and I was very happy to sing there.

The DAR’s Constitution Hall.

Seventy-five years after Marian Anderson’s historic performance, the DAR scheduled a concert to honor her. Then in 2014, the DAR issued a press release.

The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is truly honored to celebrate the life, the talent and the legacy of world-renowned opera singer Marian Anderson on the upcoming 75th anniversary of her historic concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

With thanks to Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey by Alan Keiler. This story has been updated in 2022. Image: Constitution Hall By AgnosticPreachersKid at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17979389.

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Mabel Osgood Wright: The Bird Woman of Fairfield, Connecticut

Mabel Osgood Wright loved nature and wanted to study science at Cornell University, but her father thought her ambition unseemly. It was the 1870s, after all, and she was a proper young daughter of a well-to-do minister. Her father wanted her to get married instead. So on Sept. 25, 1884, Mabel married James Osborne Wright, an English antiquarian bookseller.

Mabel Osgood Wright on her porch at Mosswood

It didn’t turn out badly for her. She had a happy marriage. She also carved out a career as a pioneering nature writer, educator and bird conservationist. During her lifetime she would write 25 novel and nature books, nurturing America’s passion for birds along the way.

Mabel Osgood Wright

Mabel Osgood was born Jan. 26, 1859 in New York City, the third daughter of Unitarian minister Samuel Osgood. He was an accomplished writer himself, having written more than 70 well-regarded essays for Harper’s. He counted among his friends William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes and J. P. Morgan.

Samuel Osgood had built an 18-room summer home in Fairfield, Conn., called Mosswood, surrounded by eight acres of gardens and walkways. When he died in 1880, Mabel Osgood Wright and her husband spent their summers at there.

Mabel Osgood Wright

From the bucolic setting of Mosswood, she began to preach that gardening is not just home adornment. One could appreciate and conserve nature in one’s own back yard, she argued. Even small suburban landscapes can be treated as natural spaces.

Her husband discouraged her from writing, so she wrote a series of nature essays anonymously for the Evening Post and the New York Times. When she finally admitted she wrote them, James Wright helped her publish them. They appeared in a book called, The Friendship of Nature, a New England Chronicle of Birds and Flowers. The book follows the progress of seasons around Mosswood. Oliver Wendell Holmes gave it high praise, and it sold well at a time when few books on nature existed for popular audiences. Its success led her publisher to request she write a field book on birds.

Birdcraft

Mabel Osgood Wright spent the next two years in the American Museum of Natural History’s ornithology department. Then she wrote the first accessible bird manual, called Birdcraft: A Field Book of Two Hundred Song, Game, and Water Birds. It included quality illustrations by John James Audubon and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, then emerging as a topnotch ornithological artist. The publisher reprinted the book nine times between 1895 and 1936.

Illustration of a Chestnut-backed chickadee by Louis Agassiz Fuertes

In 1898, Mabel Osgood Wright became president of the Audubon Society of Connecticut. It happened by accident. The Fairfield chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution held a class in Parliamentary Law, and taught an exercise in the technique of forming a society. The name ‘Audubon Society’ was chosen, and it was such a good name the women voted to make it permanent. Its mission was to challenge overzealous hunters and the fashion industry, which was slaughtering birds for their feathers to adorn large hats.

The next year, Mabel became assistant editor of the Bird Lore journal, now Audubon magazine. She would then serve as president of the Connecticut Audubon Society for 26 years, later becoming a director of the National Association of Audubon Societies, now the Audubon Society.

Children’s Books

Around that time she came upon two boys who happily showed her a large jar filled with robin’s eggs they’d stolen from nests. She decided to turn her attention to writing for children. She wrote a book with ornithologist Elliott Coues, again with illustrations by Fuertes. They called it Citizen bird: scenes from bird-life in plain English for beginners. The Library of Congress cites it as a milestone in the conservation movement.

Exterior of the Connecticut Audubon Society Birdcraft Museum & Sanctuary in Fairfield, Conn.

The book, according to the library, brought together the talents of the greatest American ornithologist, a pioneering editor and an artist second only to Audubon. “Directed at the general public, especially children, and written in an entertaining and fanciful fiction style, the work imparts solid scientific knowledge while inculcating conservation values.”

She also wrote semi-autobiographical fiction, known as her “Barbara books.” Her alter-ago, “Barbara,” lives in the country with her husband, “Evan,” and they visit with their eccentric friends. The books comment on changing social mores and use servants for comic relief.

In 1914, Mabel Osgood Wright established Birdcraft , a small bird sanctuary, near her home in Fairfield. It is the oldest bird sanctuary in the United States and a National Historic Landmark. The Connecticut Audubon Society now maintains Birdcraft as a nature center.

James Wright died suddenly in 1920, and Mabel continued her writing and gardening. She died July 16, 1934 at the age of 75. A condominium complex replaced Mosswood.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Birdcraft by By Jllm06 – Own work (Original text: self-made), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14684776. White crowned pigeon By Rawpixel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75026677.

This story last updated in 2023.

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