Above image of a newspaper published in Providence, RI in 1775 courtesy of George Mason University, online link.
The newspaper article pictured above was published March 4, 1775, in Providence, Rhode Island, and reveals the popular sentiment of the overwhelming majority of mid-to-late eighteenth century Rhode Islanders in no uncertain terms. So fiery the language and so wonderful the images invoked, that it seems a waste to lose any of it; therefore the entire article is copied below in bold set type for your consideration and enjoyment:
Providence, RI, March 4, 1775
On Thursday last, the 2nd instant, about twelve o’clock at noon, the Town Crier gave the following notice through the Town: “At five o’clock, this afternoon, a quantity of India Tea will be burnt in the market-place. All true friends of their 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 has been detrimental to our liberty, interest, and health.”
About five o’clock, in the afternoon, a great number of inhabitants assembled at the place, where there was brought in about three hundred pounds weight of Tea, by the firm contenders for the true interest of America. A large fire was kindled, and the Tea cast into it. A tar barrel, Lord North’s speech, Rivington’s and Mills’s and Hicks’s newspapers, and divers other ingredients, were also added. There appeared great cheerfulness in commiting to destruction so pernicious an article; many worthy women, from a conviction of the evil tendency of continuing the habit of Tea drinking, made free-will offerings of their respective stocks of the hurtful trash. On this occasion the bells were tolled, but it is referred to the learned whether tolling or ringing would have been most proper. Whilst the Tea was burning, a spirited Son of Liberty went along the street with his brush and lampblack, and obliterated or unpainted the word TEA on the shop signs.
Notice the strong language that the town crier is recorded to have used in summoning the separatist patriots to the ‘tea-b-que’: “All true friends of their country, lovers of Freedom, and haters of shackles and hand-cuffs...” According to this zealous libertarian, if one was a hater of shackles and hand-cuffs (and what human being isn’t) then it follows that he also acknowledge India Tea, available only through the British East India Trading Company and taxed accordingly, to be not only “needless,” but also “for a long time… detrimental to our liberty, interest, and health.” Who knew that participating in the English tradition of afternoon tea was equivalent to Toryism! But so it was according to the article’s author, who mentions that a number of women who participated in Providence’s own tea party are but recent converts from the “evil tendency of… Tea drinking.” Luckily, these misled women soon repented their despicable tea-drinking ways, and alongside the ever-vigilant Sons of Liberty, freely discarded – nay, burned! – the “hurtful trash.”
Although Rhode Island’s Tea Riot took place almost 15 months after the famous Boston Tea Party, there had been multiple other demonstrations in the colony to clarify their feelings toward the Crown. Newport, still a prosperous seafaring and merchant town before the war, became especially famous as a hub for dissenters. One of the first revolts against British customs took place there. The HMS Liberty, originally owned by John Hancock but confiscated by the British and re-outfitted as a customs boat, was particularly hated, given its history and current use. On July 19, 1769, angry Rhode Islanders burned the ship in an act of open defiance. Several other ships were likewise pillaged and burned in the years leading up to the war, and soon Newport gained such a reputation as hostile to Loyalists that the English Colonel Gilbert wrote a letter of warning to James Wallace, commander of a British ship Rose docked at Newport, that when their men were gathered on land, they should expect to be attacked by “thousands of rebels” (Seibert).
Of course, Rhode Island has reasons that extended beyond that heart-felt patriotism and independence for which the tiniest of colonies is famous In his review titled “The Revolutionary Experience of Newport and New York,” Fred Anderson points out that ironic chiasmus which occurred in the historical port city during the war. Newport, wildly successful (albeit illegally) leader of the international Triangle Trade, and involved in other other-the-table trade ventures, was also a key port for the duration of the Revolution. From being the city from which the first rebel attack against British ships were launched in 1772, to 1780 when it became the first base for French relief soldiers to dock and disembark, Newport was crucial to the success of the American forces. However, by the time victory was achieved, Newport’s accumulative losses in trade companies’ profits (especially hampered beginning in 1764) combined with the usual cost of war, had taken such a toll on the once golden city that a 1782 visitor described the following scene: “a reign of solitude… only interrupted by groups of idle men standing with folded arms at the corners of the streets, houses falling to ruin, miserable shops…; grass growing in the public squares…; rags stuffed in the windows ” (Anderson 3). As it turned out, this rags-to-ruin phenomenon was one from which Anderson says Newport “never recovered,” and while the shambles were repaired enough to return the place to a properly functioning city, it would never regain its antebellum high social status. The gilding was gone for good.
Despite Newport’s pending doom, as it were, so independently-minded was the general populace of Rhode Island, so unyielding their resolve, that it was the first colony to defiantly succeed from the British empire, on May 4, 1776. And, ever consistent in its historical independence and unwavering in its convictions, the colony was also the last of the thirteen to ratify the United States Constitution, which document was also distrusted by Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who also feared that it gave too much power to a potentially corrupt and over-powerful government: the very type of government from which the colonists now rebelled. Had those cautious Rhode Islanders and their like-minded contemporaries, the infamous Virginians mentioned above, lived to witness the federal government in 1861wield that much-debated Constitution as a terrible sword to cut in twain their beloved Articles of Confederation, had they lived to see the unprecedented power which would be seized by the yet-unborn Abraham Lincoln; what horror should have filled their libertarian bones. Yet their keen foresight was tempered by their desire for the humanitarian peace and international protection promised them by a centralized government, and more than fourteen years after renouncing allegiance to England’s King George, on May 29, 1790, Rhode Island did at last ratify the United States Constitution.
SOURCES:
Anderson, Fred. “Review: Bringing the War Home: The Revolutionary Experience of Newport and New York.” Reviewed works: “A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era” by Elaine Forman Crane, and “The New York Loyalists” by Philip Ranlet. Reviews in American History.Vol. 15, No. 4 (1987): 575-584. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2701933. April 24, 2011.
Force, Peter. American Archives, consisting of a Collection of Authentick Records, State Papers Debates, and Letters and Other Notices of Publick Affairs. The whole Forming A Documentary History of the Origin and Progress of the North American Colonies. 4th ser. Vol II. (Washington, D.C. 1839): 15. Historymatters.gmu. February 2003. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/sia/newspaper.htm. Link: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/sia/teariot.htm. April 24, 2011.
Myrevolutionarywar.com. http://www.myrevolutionarywar.com/states/ri.htm. April 24, 2011.
Siebert, Wilbur H. “Loyalist Troops of New England.” The New England Quarterly.Vol. 4, No. 1 (1931): 108-147. http://www.jstor.org/stable/359219. April 24, 2011.
Visitrhodeisland.com. http://www.visitrhodeisland.com/make-plans/facts-and-history/. April 24, 2011.
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