An Approaching Storm of War and Bloodshed
Massachusetts on the Eve of Revolution
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The people of Massachusetts were slow to anger, but when they got mad, there was hell to pay. They protested the Stamp Act in 1765, but they remained British subjects. They denounced the killing of five civilians in the Boston Massacre in 1770, but they didn’t strike back against the soldiers who patrolled their streets. What finally provoked them to take up arms was a play by the English government to disenfranchise them—in effect, to suppress their voting rights. The Massachusetts Government Act, passed by the British Parliament in May 1774, was the most intolerable of the so-called Intolerable Acts. The Massachusetts Government Act was itself a retaliation for the latest in a string of increasingly defiant acts by the people of Massachusetts—the one we know as the Boston Tea Party (a nickname coined half a century later). The colonists—or provincials, 24
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| Summer 2021
BY VICTOR CURRAN as they called themselves—had chafed for a decade under a series of taxes, but the most odious was the tax on tea. Tea wasn’t cheap in the American colonies, but despite the cost, tea had become a daily essential for just about everyone. So the tax aroused widespread resistance, with both men and women participating in boycotts. There was even a public tea-burning in Lexington in 1773. The most famous tea protest was the one in Boston Harbor December 16, 1773, when as many as 150 men boarded ships to destroy the hated tea while sympathetic onlookers cheered from the shore. Dramatic as it was, it remained a peaceful protest. The provincials took care to harm no one and even more surprisingly, British officers watched the whole scene from the deck of a nearby warship, but held their fire lest they injure the bystanders on shore.
England’s Prime Minister, Lord North, wasn’t so benign. “Boston had been the ringleader in all riots,” he fumed when informed of the Tea Party. “Therefore Boston ought to be the principal object of our attention for punishment.”1 Parliament’s first rebuke was to shut down the port of Boston, cutting off essential trade, but what really struck a nerve was the Massachusetts Government Act. The act removed elected judges, sheriffs, marshals, and other officials and replaced them with men appointed by the military governor, General Thomas Gage. Jurors would be chosen by the Governor’s handpicked sheriffs. All members of the Council, or upper house, of the Massachusetts legislature would be appointed by the Crown. Town meetings, the most vital channel for the voice of the people, were forbidden unless sanctioned by General Gage, who also
Library of Congress
England imposed the Massachusetts Government Act as retribution for the Boston Tea Party.
