Tag:

townshend acts

How the Daughters of Liberty Fought for Independence

On August 14, 1768, the Daughters of Liberty cheered from windows as the Sons of Liberty paraded through Boston to commemorate their riots against colonial officials three years earlier.

They were far more than cheerleaders, though they did rally the men in Newport, R.I., to steer clear of taverns selling English whiskey. The women organized boycotts of British goods, especially tea, and they manufactured replacement products, especially cloth. They pressured men to embrace the patriot cause, refusing to date anyone unwilling to risk life and property for freedom. Some even took on dangerous military missions.

The Daughters of Liberty, though not as celebrated as the Sons, were crucial to the cause of liberty in the run-up to the American Revolution.

“With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble,” Samuel Adams said.

Daughters of Liberty

The Daughters of Liberty didn’t always organize and people didn’t always call them the Daughters of Liberty. Some newspapers called them ‘Daughters of Industry’ or ‘noble-hearted nymphs.’

Abigail Adams, 1766 (Benjamin Blythe)

Abigail Adams is often linked with the Daughters of Liberty, though she wasn’t a card-carrying member. So are Deborah Sampson and Prudence Cummings Wright. Sampson dressed as a man and joined the Continental Army, while Wright led a group of women in capturing two British spies. Sarah Bradlee Fulton, a card-carrying Daughter of Liberty, was the ‘mother of the Boston Tea Party’ and spied for George Washington.

Well before the Revolution, though, the ladies formed chapters throughout New England to free themselves from British economic tyranny. The ladies equated political independence with economic independence.

A Daughters of Liberty chapter branched off from the Sons of Liberty in Providence in 1766, followed in Rhode Island in East Greenwich and Newport.

Parliament unintentionally provoked more resistance among the colonial women when it passed the Townshend Acts in 1767, taxing imports of British glass, lead, paints, paper and tea.

In Massachusetts, there were 300 daughters of Liberty in Boston by February 1770; they were also in Beverly, Byfield, Ipswich, Newbury, Rowley and Salisbury.

Spinning for Freedom

From early in 1766 to about 1771, spinning bees were all the rage in New England. Women wanted independence from British textile manufacturers, and started making their own cloth. Homespun became the politically correct fashion item.

On April 7, 1766, the Boston Gazette reported 18 daughters of liberty gathered at the house of Dr. Ephraim Brown. “There they exhibited a fine example of industry, by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country, rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience,” reported the newspaper.

Spinning for freedom

Newspapers continued to report on the smallest cloth-making development.

Spinning schools were revived and awards were offered for the person who wove the most cloth. A woman raised 6,000 silk balls from a single mulberry tree in Windham, Conn. A 70-year-old woman in Newport, R.I., learned to spin for the first time. In February 1769, two Connecticut women held an all-day spinning contest in which the winner spun seven skeins and two knots of fine linen yarn, just a little more than her competitor.

Women began gathering in large groups, often at ministers’ homes, along the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. For 32 months starting in March 1768, more than 60 spinning meetings were held from Harpswell, Maine, to Huntington, Long Island.

“I presume there never was a Time when, or a Place where, the Spinning wheel could more influence the Affairs of men, than at present, in this and the neighbouring colonies,” wrote one contemporary writer in the newspaper series, A Journal of the Time.

The boycott worked: The value of imported goods from Great Britain fell by half in 1769 over the previous year, from 420,000 to 208,000 pounds.

Sarah Bradlee Fulton

In 1770, Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea. The Daughters of Liberty had already pledged not to drink the stuff. They made ‘liberty tea’ from currant and raspberry, basil, mint, even birch bark.

Then the Tea Act of 1773 gave a virtual monopoly on tea to the floundering Dutch East India Company. It also inspired the Boston Tea Party.

The Boston Tea Party

Sarah Bradlee Fulton was a Medford, Mass., housewife and leader of the Daughters of Liberty.

She is credited with the idea of disguising the men who dumped the tea into Boston Harbor as Mohawk Indians. She painted their faces and found Native American clothing for them. After the Tea Party, the men returned to her home to clean off the paint and get rid of their disguises.

When war broke out, the Daughters of Liberty melted metal for bullets and sewed soldiers’ uniforms. Fulton organized women to nurse soldiers wounded in the Battle of Bunker Hill. She also served as one of George Washington’s spies.

During the siege of Boston, Maj. John Brooks had important dispatches to send from Medford to Washington. Fulton volunteered, thinking the British wouldn’t suspect a woman of spying. She walked across enemy lines at night, rowed to Charleston and delivered the message.

Sarah Bradlee Fulton died in 1835, and 65 years later a memorial stone was placed at the Salem Street Burying Ground in Medford.

This story was updated in 2022.

2 comments 1.4k views

The Liberty Affair – John Hancock Loses a Ship and Starts a Riot

In the spring of 1768, Boston smuggler Daniel Malcolm approached the British customs officials overseeing the port of Boston. And so he set the stage for the Liberty Affair.

Malcolm asked how much they would charge to let him land a load of wine in the city without paying the mandatory taxes.

John Hancock

The British officials rebuffed Daniel Malcolm because they would no longer accept bribes.

Thus educated about the officials’ new tactics, Malcolm did what came naturally to him. He moored his vessel five miles off shore, unloaded the wine into smaller ships that went ashore in remote spots and sailed into Boston to declare the remaining portion of his cargo.

His lightly loaded ship teetered high on the water, and the customs officials doubted he had really bothered to import such a small cargo. But lacking evidence, they let the matter drop and assessed him tax on only the declared cargo.

Malcolm had dodged the law in eight years earlier when the sheriff had accompanied customs officials to his house to search it for illegally imported wine. In that case, Malcolm had employed an angry crowd of his friends to drive away the officials.

Now, however, the word was out. The lax days of accepting a bribe and letting cargo come ashore untaxed were over. The Liberty Affair was about to begin.

Seeds of The Liberty Affair

John Hancock, one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts, next came into the sight of the new customs agents. Hancock’s vessel the Lydia sailed into port in April and the customs officers tried to board it and search it.

Hancock demanded to see warrants authorizing the men to search his vessel. When they couldn’t produce them, the customs officials were asked to leave.

If British customs officials weren’t deliberately harassing John Hancock before the Lydia incident, they almost certainly put him on their radar following it.

The British had established the American Board of Commissioners in the fall of 1767 to step up the collection of customs mandated under the Townshend Acts. The new board wanted to show the government would no longer turn a blind eye to smuggling. The wealthy and popular John Hancock was just the person to use to send the message.

The Liberty Affair Begins

On May 9, 1768 the board got another chance. Hancock’s ship the Liberty came into port loaded with Madeira wine. Again, customs officers visited the ship – this time with the proper papers. The ship was offloaded and Hancock paid his customs. But the commissioners thought, as in the Malcolm case, the shipment seemed small – 25 casks of wine – about a quarter of the ship’s capacity.

Nevertheless, Hancock began loading the vessel for its next voyage. On May 17, however, the HMS Romney sailed into port and the dynamics in the city began to change. Armed with 50 guns, the Romney had a formidable presence and it marked a change in the way Britain dealt with the colonies.

Boston at the time of the Liberty Affair.

This Romney wasn’t there to defend the colonials; it was there to police them. The Romney’s captain, John Corner, had been ordered to do nothing to inflame the colonists and to make sure his sailors behaved.

Impressment

Corner, however, had requirements of his own. His ship needed men, and he began pressing (essentially kidnapping) sailors on in-bound ships into service. As word spread, even honest vessels, let alone smugglers, stayed away from the port of Boston, fearful of losing seamen.

Now the British angered honest merchants as well as the smugglers. On June 9, matters came to a head. Thomas Kirk, the customs officer who boarded the Liberty, changed his story.

While on the Liberty, he said, he had been offered a bribe. He could have several casks of wine if he would support the story that the ship contained only 25 casks. He insisted that he took no bribe, but that John Marshall, Hancock’s captain, had him locked in a hold. Kirk said he listened as a great portion of the ship’s cargo was offloaded. When Hancock’s men released him, he said, they threatened him if he told the truth.

Historians have tended to credit Kirk’s revised story, supposing that it was the British military presence, as well as the unexpected death of the ship’s captain, John Marshall, that emboldened him to talk.

The King’s Mark

Joseph Harrison, the official collector of the port, brought Kirk’s new statement to commissioners. They ordered him to take action. Harrison’s initial reaction was to place the king’s mark on the Liberty’s mast and wait for the legal proceedings.

Comptroller Benjamin Hallowell urged him to seize the Liberty instead, and Harrison enlisted the crew of the Romney for assistance. With his son and Hallowell for support, Harrison walked to the wharf. The smuggler Daniel Malcolm and a handful of men were startled to see Harrison boarding the vessel and making preparations to seize it. Malcolm argued that Harrison should at least wait for Hancock to arrive before taking action.

A scuffle broke out, but the men from the Romney cleared the Liberty and it was towed from the wharf to the side of the Romney. There it rested under the protective guns of the ship. Hallowell, Harrison and his son fled the wharf with scrapes and bruises, but an angry crowd began to assemble as word of the Liberty affair spread.

Castle William, where British officials fled during the Liberty Affair.

An outraged crowd of up to 3,000 people began searching the city for Harrison and Hallowell. When they couldn’t find the men, they satisfied themselves with shattering the windows on his house. When they returned to the harbor, the mob decided to respond to Harrison’s actions in kind.

Harrison maintained a pleasure boat in the harbor, and the angry crowd dragged it from the water and hauled it up the street to the Liberty Tree. There they reduced it to ashes in the final actions of the Liberty Affair.

Harrison, Hallowell and the Board of Commissioners fled the city. They spent the night of June 10 aboard the Romney, then relocated to Castle William.

Unable to negotiate the return of his vessel, Hancock, defended by John Adams, was later cleared of smuggling charges. The evidence against him in the Liberty Affair was simply too flimsy.

More Unrest

The Liberty Affair, however, set the stage for the greater unrest to come.

The British kept the Liberty and refitted her to serve as a Royal Navy ship in Rhode Island. The British used Liberty to patrol for customs violations along the Rhode Island Coast. In July of 1769, the summer after the Liberty Affair, the crew of Liberty seized two Connecticut ships. In retribution, a Rhode Island mob boarded the Liberty and later burned it.

This story about the Liberty Affair was updated in 2022.

12 comments 1.1k views

New England Colonists Thunderstruck by the Lightning Storms of 1768

Terrific lightning storms unsettled New England colonists during the summer of 1768, when rising tensions with Great Britain led to conflict and violence. But unlike the Puritans of a century before, the colonists didn’t view the lightning as a message from God.

Benjamin Franklin

The Age of Enlightenment had arrived, and reason and analysis won over superstition and traditional authority. Or at least began to.

So even as Sam Adams was proselytizing for rebellion against the King, inquiring minds tried to analyze the severe lightning that struck that summer. They were continuing the scientific analysis that Ben Franklin had started. He’d conducted his famous kite experiment 14 years before then.

The 1768 Lightning Storms

The tremendous lightning storms in the summer of 1768 came as the Townshend Acts passed in 1767, took effect and colonists in British North America resisted them.

In February 1768, Sam Adams circulated a letter among the colonies opposing the Acts, calling them taxation without representation.

Agitators in Boston harassed customs inspectors, and in May a British warship with 50 guns sailed into Boston Harbor. In July, Gov. Francis Bernard dissolved the General Court.

Harvard’s second Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, John Winthrop. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums.

On July 2, lightning struck Hollis Hall at Harvard College. In a letter to the editors of the Boston Chronicle, John Winthrop wrote that what happened supported the view that lightning was electricity. He described how the violent thunderstorm beat down a chimney top, shattered woodwork and windows and tore several feet of brickwork. Several students felt a blow, which they compared to an electric shock. One students was thrown from his chair, perceiving neither the flash nor the thunder.

And then Winthrop described the lightning rod, which Franklin had invented in 1749:

In my house, that has such an apparatus fitted with bells to give notice of the passage of the lightening along the rods, the bells began to ring as soon as the first thunder was heard at a distance.

The bells continued ringing briskly for about an hour, he wrote. The lightning “frequently flashed from one bell to the other, and with cracks loud enough to be heard in the farther part of the house.”

Boycott

In August, Boston merchants agreed to boycott British goods until the repeal of the Townshend Acts. Tremendous thunderstorms struck from Salem, Mass., to Norwalk, Conn., on the afternoon of August 1. In Roxbury, Mass., lightning shattered a window. In Boston, it knocked a clock case into fragments on a Winter Street home. It also threw clothes around a room in a Water Street home and melted a pewter plate on a mantel in Temple Street. It stunned two children, who recovered.

That storm extended to Connecticut, where lightning knocked over a tree in Hartford, killing two cows, and set a barn in Norwalk on fire.

The fierce lightning flashes inspired a citizen in Salem, Mass., to send a poem to the Essex Gazette:

What grumbling Noise comes thro’ the yielding Air!
Is it the Cannon’s Roar! The Din of War?
No! — ‘Tis the Voice of God; he Thunder rolls,
And flashes Lightnings to the distant Polls.

British warships arrive in Boston Harbor.

Sulfur and British Soldiers

In September, 4,000 British soldiers arrived to keep order and set up permanent residence in Boston. A few weeks before the British began their military occupation, lightning tore a large oak tree to pieces in Wrentham, Mass.

But the next evening, September 8, brought the weirdest lightning strike of all.

It struck Daniel Mann’s tavern, where ladies and gentlemen sat around a tea table. A flash of lightning came into the room, followed by an explosion, apparently as loud as the discharge of a cannon. Large sparks were seen, and the air in the room smelled like sulfur, which gave one person an intense headache. A windowpane broke, a clock injured, the ceiling and floors damaged. One man felt a violent shock on top of his head, another felt pain in his shoulder and found his coat scorched.

“All the inmates were filled with terror,” reported Essex historian Sidney Perley in Historic Storms of New England.

In Rehoboth, Mass., lightning killed a 10-year-old boy. A barn in Mendon, Mass., burned to the ground when struck. In Uxbridge, lightning tore up the heart and floor of a house and stunned several family members.

“This shower was not as local as thunder showers generally are,” Perley wrote, “but it extended over a large territory, and the lightning was sharper and more frequent and disastrous than it was remembered to have been before in many parts of the region.”

This story was updated in 2022.

0 comment 306 views

Christopher Seider: The First Casualty in the American Revolutionary Cause

Christopher Seider was just 11 in 1770, a working boy in Boston at a time when the city was awash in the debate over the Massachusetts colony’s relationship with Great Britain.

In 1770, the American colonies strongly resisted the British Townshend Acts. The Acts taxed goods such as lead, paper tea, paint and glass. However, the desire for British goods was also strong.

American-made clothing and other products were often rougher in appearance and less appealing. Some goods could only be had by importing them.

Non-Importation Agreements

Boston merchants had agreed to boycott British goods to protest the tax. But throughout the colony, people wondered whether they’d continue to honor non-importation agreements. Boston had played a leading role in implementing the non-importation strategy and convincing other colonies to join in. But the cost took its toll.

Frustrated by several years of struggling to make a profit, the stage was set for merchants to announce they would no longer honor non-importation agreements and would resume selling British goods.

Theophilus Lillie, a dry goods merchant, was one of the earliest to break the non-importation agreements. Though some merchants disregarded the ban altogether, most did it quietly. Lillie, though not political, did so with a flourish, announcing his intentions in a letter to the Boston Chronicle.

His decision led to dueling letters and articles in the newspapers and, on the night of February 22, a protest in front of his house.

Importer

“A number of boys had been diverting themselves with the exhibition of a piece of pageantry near the house of Theophilus Lillie,” the Boston-Gazette and Country Journal reported. They placed a sign, ‘IMPORTER,’ in front of his home.

Soon their protest turned explosive. Ebenezer Richardson, a British customs officer, stepped in and tried to stop the demonstration. He urged several passing men to tear down the sign and effigies in front of Lillis’ house.

The passersby declined to help, and the protesters drove back Richardson and pelted him with dirt and stones as he fled. But the crowd pursued him to his house.

Richardson went to a window and first fired his musket without shot to disperse the crowd. He returned to the window to shoot again — this time his gun loaded with “swan shot,” pea-sized lead balls.

Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the Boston massacre. In the background on the right a gun can be seen firing from a window, an oblique reference to Seider’s death.

Christopher Seider

The shot injured teenager Samuel Gore, but it killed 11-year-old Christopher Seider, the blast striking him in the chest.

The news raced through the city, with newspapers halting their presses to include accounts of the shooting. Later they would report more than 1,000 people attended his funeral procession days later, which started at Boston’s Liberty Tree. Poet Phillis Wheatley would also memorialize him in a poem.

“It is hoped the unexpected and melancholy death of young (Seider) will be a means for the future of preventing any, but more especially the soldiery, from being too free in the use of their instruments of death,” the Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal opined. However, 11 days later the Boston Massacre would take place and the march to Revolution continued.

As for Richardson, he was tried and convicted of killing Seider and imprisoned for a time, but was later pardoned by the king and offered a post in Philadelphia in 1773. In that city, publishers attacked Richardson with a broadside and spread the story that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. They said he allowed a Woburn pastor to take the blame for it.

Richardson, widely reviled, would later flee to England.

This story was updated in 2022.

6 comments 1.8k views

Crispus Attucks, ‘The First To Defy, The First To Die’ in the Boston Massacre

On the wintry night of March 5, 1770, a tall, angry sailor named Crispus Attucks led a resentful mob of civilians in a fight with British soldiers at Dock Square in Boston.

19th-century lithograph of the Boston Massacre, emphasizing Crispus Attucks

Tensions had risen between the British soldiers and the colonists since Parliament passed the hated Townshend Acts. They imposed import duties on paper, paint, lead, glass and tea.

For two years, British troops had been posted in Boston to protect Crown officials who tried to collect the tariffs.

In response, Boston boycotted British goods, which imperiled the livelihoods of struggling laborers. And off-duty British soldiers edged out American dockworkers. In addition, colonial sailors resented the British for impressing them into service in the Royal Navy.

As a result, working-class civilians and soldiers had clashed in the weeks and months before the Boston Massacre on March 5.

On that night, an argument between a wigmaker’s apprentice and a British sentry attracted a crowd, dockworkers, Irish immigrants and sailors like their leader, Crispus Attucks.

As W. Jeffrey Bolster writes in Black Jacks,

…a crowd of mostly white sailors followed a seafaring man of color into danger; and this time, into history.

Crispus Attucks

Attucks was born around 1723 somewhere near Framingham, Mass., perhaps Natick, the praying Indian town. His mother belonged to the Wampanoag tribe, and his father was an African-American slave. His mother may have been descended from John Attucks, hanged for treason because he sided with his people during King Philip’s War.

Crispus Attucks was enslaved for 27 years, probably by a man named William Brown of Framingham. In 1750 he won his freedom by running away to sea. Or he may have bought his freedom. In any case, he often worked on whalers, and in between voyages he worked as a ropemaker.

Crispus Attucks

Seafaring was one of the few occupations free men of color could enter. Twenty-five years after the American Revolution, one-fifth of the 100,000 men employed as sailors were African-American.

The sea allowed room for black leaders. White sailors would follow a skilled black seamen who could help navigate a ship out of danger.

African-American sailors also provided a vital communications link between North and South and among Africans everywhere. For example, they helped Boston abolitionist David Walker spread his inflammatory pamphlet, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, by taking copies to Southern ports.

And though the sea represented enslavement to Africans, it also gave a lifeline to freedom for people like Attucks. Northern sea captains not only employed black sailors, they helped southern slaves sail to freedom on their ships; Frederick Douglass, for example, disguised himself as a sailor to escape slavery.

The Boston Massacre

On the night of the Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks had just returned from a voyage to the Bahamas. He planned to sail to North Carolina. But he first joined the growing crowd harassing the sentry in Dock Square.

Witnesses said his eerie war-whoop egged on the angry civilians. They threw snowballs, sea coal and oyster shells at the sentry. Attucks then poked him with a stick, called him a ‘lobster’ and said he would have one of his claws.

British runners alerted the officer of the watch, Capt. Thomas Preston. Preston then gathered seven men and joined the sentry on the steps of the Custom House. They loaded their muskets.

According to most accounts, Crispus Attucks led the crowd forward. He shouted, “Come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare, God damn you, fire and be damned, we know you dare not.”

In the confusion, one soldier discharged his musket – hitting Attucks, according to witnesses. Soon after the soldiers fired into the crowd.

Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the Boston massacre.

First To Die

Crispus Attucks died on the spot, the first killed in what Samuel Adams named as the Boston Massacre. Samuel Gray , a ropemaker, and James Carpenter, a sailor, died alongside Attucks. Samuel Maverick, a 17-year-old, died the next day of his wounds. Patrick Carr, an Irish immigrant, died two weeks later.

After the killings, patriots carried the body of Crispus Attucks to Faneuil Hall, where it lay in state. Then they buried the four dead victims as heroes in the Granary Burying Ground.

Attucks became an icon of the black abolition movement.

In antebellum New York at the Coloured Seaman’s Home, boarders dined under a framed portrait of Attucks. In 1858, black abolitionists celebrated the first ‘Crispus Attucks Day’ at Fanueil Hall. Thirty years later, a monument was erected on Boston Common in honor of Attucks and the other victims, “the first to defy, the first to die.”

Reenactors typically reprise the Boston Massacre around the anniversary.

With thanks to MassMoments and Black Jacks. This story about Crispus Attucks was updated in 2023.

Image of Crispus Attucks By Original uploader was Mav at en.wikipedia. Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3559623

10 comments 2.4k views

Benjamin Edes, Father of the Boston Tea Party and Keeper of Its Secrets

Benjamin Edes instigated and paid for the Boston Tea Party – and, to his death, guarded the secret list of all who participated.

Edes along with John Gill published the Boston Gazette and Country Journal, a leading voice for American independence. The Royal Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver called it ‘that infamous paper.’

“The temper of the people may be surely learned’ from it,” Oliver said.

Benjamin Edes‘ son Peter was convinced his father would have been hanged or sent to England to be tried if he had fallen into British hands. Peter himself served 3-1/2 months in prison for cheering the patriot side during the Battle of Bunker Hill.

“If my father had been like some other men, he might have been worth thousands on thousands of dollars; but he preferred the liberties of his country to all,“ wrote Peter Edes.

Benjamin Edes

Benjamin Edes was born Oct. 14, 1732 in Charlestown, Mass., one of seven children of Peter Edes and Esther Hall. He married Martha Starr sometime around 1754. The next year he and Gill took over the Boston Gazette.

Edes helped form the Sons of Liberty and, through the Gazette, agitated against the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts and the tea tax. The newspaper broke news about tax disputes, the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, and it also served as a mouthpiece for Samuel Adams.

On Dec. 16, 1773, Benjamin Edes hosted a group of men in his parlor before they set out for the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver.

The Boston Tea Party, instigated by Benjamin Edes

His son Peter, who would turn 17 the next day, saw some of what happened. In a letter to his own grandson in 1836, Peter Edes recounted what he remembered of that event.

“I knew but little about it, as I was not admitted into their presence, for fear, I suppose, of their being known,” he wrote.

But he knew more than most.

He remembered that a number of gentlemen met in his father’s parlor in the afternoon before they destroyed the tea. Peter’s job was to make punch for them in another room. He filled the bowl several times.

(The punch bowl now belongs to the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

Eyewitness Account

The men stayed in the house until dark, he supposed to disguise themselves as Native Americans. When the sun set, they left the house and went to the wharves where the vessels lay.

Once the men left, Peter went into his father’s room. But Benjamin Edes wasn’t there. So Peter decided to walk to the wharves where he saw 2,000 people.

“The Indians worked smartly,” wrote Peter Edes.

“Some were in the hold immediately after the hatches were broken open, fixing the ropes to the tea-chests; others were hauling up the chests; and others stood ready with their hatchets to cut off the bindings of the chest and cast them overboard. I remained on the wharf till I was tired, and fearing some disturbance might occur went home, leaving the Indians working like good industrious fellows.”

Benjamin Edes did not fall into the hands of the British. During the Siege of Boston, Edes escaped arrest by disguising himself as a fisherman. He boarded a fishing boat and landed on one of the islands in Boston Harbor, from which he escaped to the mainland

He moved to Watertown, Mass., where he continued to publish the Gazette until 1798. Benjamin Edes died on Dec. 11, 1803.

How the Names Got Lost

Peter Edes later wrote that it was ‘a little surprising’ that the names of the Tea Party remained secret. [My] “father I believe, was the only person who had a list of them, and he always kept it locked up in his desk while living.

“After his death Benj. Austin (a Boston selectman) called upon my mother, and told her there was in his possession when living some very important papers belonging to the Whig party, which he wished not to be publicly known, and asked her to let him have the keys of the desk to examine it, which she delivered to him; he then examined it, and took out several papers, among which it was supposed he took away the list of the names of the tea-party, and they have not been known since.”

This story was updated in 2022.

18 comments 792 views