Carp’s account of how the crisis unfolded is particularly good at illustrating the politics that pitted the “friends of government,’’ led by Governor Thomas Hutchinson, against the Sons of Liberty, including Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren. His account details the efforts Boston’s patriot leaders made to defuse the looming crisis over the British imposition of a tax on tea, a crisis that would heighten with the arrival of cargoes of tea.
The first tea ship, the Dartmouth, arrived on Nov. 28 and had a deadline of 20 days — Dec. 17 — to clear customs. Twenty days, writes Carp, “for the Sons of Liberty to resolve the issue,’’ while three British warships were “[a] menacing presence in the harbor.’’
The negotiations involved the patriot leaders, the colonial government, the ship owners, and even volunteer negotiators like the painter John Singleton Copley, son-in-law of one of the tea merchants who had fled to Fort William (now Fort Independence on Castle Island). Copley rowed out in an unsuccessful attempt to get the cargo returned to England.
With the board of selectmen unable to resolve the crisis, unofficial authority fell to “The Body of the People,’’ townspeople and merchants, who gathered first at Faneuil Hall, then, as their numbers grew, at the Old South Meeting House. On Dec. 16, with the final deadline just hours away, meetings were suspended to allow ship owner Francis Rotch to ride out to Milton in an unsuccessful attempt to get Governor Hutchinson to allow the tea ships to return to England.
What ensued, Carp writes, was “a carnival of commotion,’’ as a group of some 20 young men disguised as Mohawks entered the meeting house and led the way to the waterfront where they boarded the tea ships and dumped the cargo, some 340 chests of tea, into the harbor.
A still “elusive’’ mystery, writes Carp, is the identity of the “Mohawks,’’ and even of who organized them. The actual participants, he writes, “kept the secret to their graves.’’
