In the wake of the Boston Tea Party—as Nathaniel Philbrick makes vividly clear throughout the opening pages of Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution—the British government had to take action. The Tea Party was merely the latest in a long series of provocations by Bostonians accustomed, for the past six generations, to running their own affairs with minimal interference from London. Given the immense resources expended by the Empire to protect the American colonies—most recently in the 1754-63 war [known variously as the Seven Years’ War (by English-speaking Canadians), the French & Indian War (by those in what would become the United States), or the War of Conquest (by French-speaking Canadiens)]—some sort of clash between the colonies and the Crown seemed inevitable. Outright armed rebellion and a war of independence, however, did not.
The first action taken by Parliament was passage of the Port Act, closing the third largest port in North America and effectively cutting the town of Boston off from the rest of the colonies and the wider world until such time as the vandalized tea had been paid for.
“Bostonians were stunned by the severity of the act. An entire community had been punished for the actions of a hundred or so rabble-rousers. Contrary to Britain’s own laws, Bostonians had been tried and condemned without having even been accused of a specific crime.“
However, while Bostonians may have been stunned, the reaction elsewhere in the 13 colonies was far more muted. Many colonists basically agreed with Parliament—this wasn’t the first time those Puritan troublemakers in Boston had gone too far; clearly some sort of punishment was justified.
Later in 1774 came word of additional legislation called the Coercive Acts, including:<!–more–>
“…the Administration of Justice Act, which the patriots branded `the Murderer’s Act’ because it allowed governors to move the trials of royal officials accused of a crime to a venue outside their own colony (and thus `get away with murder’); the Quartering Act, which provided for housing British soldiers in a colony’s unoccupied buildings; and finally the Quebec Act, which, besides allowing French Canadians to practice Catholicism (not a popular provision among New England’s papist-hating Congregationalists), expanded that province all the way to the Ohio River to the south and to the Mississippi to the west…. By effectively prohibiting western expansion, Parliament had found a way—unrelated to the unrest in Boston—to anger and frustrate not just the citizens of Massachusetts but virtually all of colonial America.“
It was one thing to punish Bostonians for their extremist (and repeated) destruction of property. It was another to foreclose the economic and political ambitions of speculators like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin who had invested heavily in trans-Appalachian land and had nothing to do with the actions of a few Boston radicals.
But the law that likely did the most damage to the loyalist cause throughout Massachusetts (which included approximately 300,000 colonists spread out in towns across present-day Maine and Massachusetts) was the Massachusetts Government Act.
The act disbanded the provincial assembly, named 36 mandamus (i.e., chosen by Governor Gage from a list of royal nominees) councilors to the provincial government, and changed the law for jury selection in the superior courts. Perhaps most importantly, it all but outlawed town meetings.
New Englanders had been governing themselves through open town meetings for over 150 years and considered it their most important mechanism of self-rule. By banning town meetings throughout the colony, and revoking the colonists’ traditional election of their own representatives to the provincial government, Parliament and the Crown had effectively linked the political self-interests of virtually every Massachusetts colonist to those of the radical patriots in Boston—who may not even have comprised a majority of that town, which had only 5% of the colony’s population.
“One after the other, in town after town, mandamus councilors were forced to either resign or flee to the safety of Boston….”
“In just about every town outside Boston it had become impossible to support, publicly at least, the British government. A unanimity unlike anything ever experienced in the previous hundred years had swept across Massachusetts….”
Replacing the mandamus councilors, the men of Massachusetts held county conventions and elected representatives to a Continental Congress in Philadelphia and to a Provincial Congress that began meeting in Concord.
At the end of 1773, the British empire faced a clear and provocative threat to its authority in the actions of the Boston Tea Party. Rather than isolating and punishing the incipient patriot movement and their sympathizers in Boston, the King and Parliament reacted to the provocation by passing sweeping legislation affecting the political and economic interests of all its North American colonies.
The result was that by the end of 1774 London had effectively lost control of the institutions of government (town meetings, courts, militias, tax collection, etc.) throughout the entire province of Massachusetts. Months before initial military skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, and the far larger, more deadly and consequential battle of Bunker Hill, the colony’s governor and 4,000 of His Majesty’s troops were effectively besieged and isolated on the tiny peninsula that contained the town of Boston.
Furthermore, the Coercive Acts had provided the impetus for the convening of the First Continental Congress (Sept. 5 – Oct. 26), a body that would quickly grow into the federal government that called for (1776) and won (1783) independence from Great Britain.
There’s no way to go back and replay history to see what (if anything) would have happened differently if a decision or event were changed. However Philbrick, by focusing so closely on events in and around Boston in the 18 months before the battle of Bunker Hill, does raise the tantalizing question of whether a more targeted response to the Tea Party by the British government might have isolated the Boston radicals and forestalled the entire independence movement. As it was, the British reaction, embodied in the Coercive Acts, added fuel to the fire of the patriot cause, and helped spread it up and down the Atlantic seaboard.
(For more on Philbrick’s Bunker Hill, see here, here and here.)
crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
