Stillings Street Garage. It is estimated that hundreds took part in the Boston Tea Party. For fear of punishment, many participants of the Boston Tea Party remained anonymous for many years after the event. To date it is known that people are documented to have participated. Not all of the participants of the Boston Tea Party are known; many carried the secret of their participation to their graves. The participants were made up of males from all walks of colonial society.
Many were from Boston or the surrounding area, but some participants are documented to have come from as far away as Worcester in central Massachusetts and Maine. The vast majority was of English descent, but men of Irish, Scottish, French, Portuguese, and African ancestry were documented to have also participated.
Listed below are named of patriots recorded to have been involved in the Tea Party protest. Not all of the participants are known, as some carried the secret of their participation to the end of their days. Thomas Crafts. Samuel Cooper. George Hewes. David Kinnison. Thomas Melvill. Biographies of the participants provide interesting insights into the world of people who planned and carried out the destruction of tea.
With the ultimate question, who exactly planned the protest still unanswered these stories may have the clues. From the modern day perspective the Tea Party may seem like a powerful but a largely symbolic protest. But in heated atmosphere of anti-British struggle in Boston, participation in the event that would be regarded as treason was very dangerous.
To that testifies the fact that almost all patriots fled Boston shortly there after. In the summer of , Thomas Charles Williams, the London representative of an Annapolis merchant firm, tried to smuggle tea across the Atlantic into Annapolis by disguising nearly a ton of it in 17 packages labeled as linen, and loading it among the rest of the cargo on the brig Peggy Stewart.
The captain of the brig, Richard Jackson, only discovered the true nature of the "linen" while at sea. A few years before, an Annapolis precedent had been set when its customs officer refused to allow any ships to unload any portion of their cargo until the tax on all of it had been paid.
This now alarmed Captain Jackson because most of the rest of the Peggy Stewart 's cargo consisted of 53 indentured servants. The ship reached Annapolis on October 14, , and Williams's business partners decided they wanted nothing to do with his attempt at smuggling.
They could not think of risking the lives of the indentured servants by sending the ship back across the Atlantic during the storm season which had just begun. They paid the customs tax due and quickly got the human cargo ashore, leaving the tea onboard. The presence of tea aboard ship had inflamed public opinion in Annapolis. Williams and his business partners were threatened with lynching; their store and their homes, with destruction. To avoid that, the business partners offered to burn the Peggy Stewart , which they owned, along with its cargo, which they did, on the night of October This came to be called the Annapolis Tea Party.
The city of Annapolis marks this each year with a ceremony. On September 15, , the sloop Cynthia sailed into harbor at York, Maine, from Newfoundland with a cargo that included pounds of tea for its owner, local judge and Tory sympathizer, Jonathan Sayward. The local Sons of Liberty noted its arrival and called a town meeting on September Meeting participants voted to seize the tea, which was done against the objections of the ship's captain, Sayward's nephew, James Donnell.
The tea was placed in a storeroom, "until further Discovery could be made. Two days later, however, it was mysteriously returned, so perhaps Sayward was able to drink his tea after all, without having to pay customs duty on it because it had been stolen.
This was later called the York Tea Party. In the summer of , the captain of the small ship, Greyhound , loaded with East India Company tea, was reluctant to try to unload his shipment in Philadelphia, so just before the Delaware Bay, he put into Cohansey Creek, and anchored at the little hamlet of Greenwich, New Jersey.
There he unloaded his cargo, and it was put into the cellar of a Loyalist, Daniel Bowen, who intended to have it eventually carried overland into Philadelphia and to sell it there. On the night of December 22, , after planning in secret for several months, 40 locals dressed as Indians broke into Bowen's house, carried the cases of tea into a field, dumped the tea in a large pile, and set it all on fire.
Those who participated in this tea party were arrested but were not convicted because the jury was in complete sympathy with them. Benjamin W. John R. Ruth M. Edward S. Isaac Q.
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