This is an installment in the new series “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
On July 4, 1774, residents of the town of Orangetown, New York—a few miles across the Hudson River from the Starbucks where I happen to be sitting—adopted a series of resolutions at the home of resident Yoast Mabie. In a way, that wasn’t especially remarkable: towns up and down the Atlantic seaboard were adopting similar resolutions, and this one resembled any number you might read from New England to North Carolina. The first four resolutions read as follows:
That we are and ever wish to be, true and loyal subjects to his Majesty George III, King of Great Britain.
That we are most cordially disposed to support his majesty and defend his crown and dignity in every constitutional measure, as far as lies in our power.
That however well-disposed we are towards his majesty, we cannot see the late acts of Parliament imposing duties upon us, and the act of shutting up the port of Boston, without declaring our abhorrence of measures so unconstitutional and big with destruction.
That we are in duty bound to use every just and lawful measure to obtain a repeal of acts, not only destructive to us, but which, of course, must distress thousands in the mother country.
As you can probably sense, the first two resolutions, typical for documents of this kind at the time, are meant to soften the blow for the ones that follow—resolutions that are respectful but nevertheless carry an edge, one that certainly would be sensed in London (“as far as lies in our power”). But why? What was it that had the residents of Orangeburg so angry about what was happening to them—and what was happening hundreds of miles away in Boston—and which they claimed rattled people of goodwill across the Atlantic?
The answer to this question dates back to the previous year, when British Prime Minister Lord North thought he could solve two problems at the same time. The first was the recent bankruptcy of the British East India Company, which went into receivership and left the government sitting on a huge supply of perishable premium tea, a global luxury item. The other was the government’s increasingly testy relationship with the colonies over tax policy. Ever since the French and Indian War (1756-1764), a worldwide conflict that was won with colonial help, Britain sought to recover the gigantic costs with help from colonists whom they had been protecting for over a century. But the colonists thought they had been protecting the empire, and in any case had enjoyed many decades of relative autonomy, which included control over their own purse strings. A series of taxes had been imposed and repealed in the face of colonial resistance, some of it violent. North’s gambit was quite clever: he would sell tea that would otherwise be a dead loss at a discount, undercut the large number of smugglers—like John Hancock—who were routinely failing to pay their taxes, and affirm the imperial government’s control over economic policy, all at the same time. Iced venti lattes with almond milk, extra foam, and two pumps of Stevia for two bucks (plus tax). What’s not to like?
Plenty. When the tea arrived in Boston in late 1773, radical elements in the radicalized city responded by dressing up in indigenous costumes (they called themselves Mohawks, still a power in the Hudson Valley adjacent to Massachusetts) and dumping the equivalent of about a $1 million in tea into Boston Harbor. His Majesty’s government was not amused. In response, it passed a series of laws—among them placing Boston under martial law, removing local legislators in favor of officials from London, stripping local courts of their jurisdiction, and requiring colonists to help cover the cost of food and housing for British troops. These laws went into effect in the six months following the Boston Tea Party, unfolding in slow motion as news traveled across the ocean that spring. But instead of cowing the colonies, they led to wider and deeper resistance. Hence the response of the residents of little Orangeburg, whose name alluded to the town’s origins as part of the Dutch empire a century and a half earlier in the House of Orange. Rather than isolating Boston, other colonies were rallying to its rhetorical defense. They weren’t necessarily willing to dump tea in harbors—or explicitly endorse those who did—but they worried about imperial high-handedness, and said so.
In the months that followed, this support would prove to be more than rhetorical, a ball that would get rolling a few weeks later at the First Continental Congress, which began as a moderate approach to resolving tensions and became increasingly radical. Still, on this day, two years to the day before the Declaration of Independence, most colonists were still looking for ways to reconcile their cognitive dissonance about an empire to which they had always belonged—indeed, depended upon for their safety and prosperity. But minds were changing. For some a break would be impossible, even unimaginable—especially in New York, with such deep commercial ties to the mother country. But sometimes, and sometimes imperceptibly, the impossible ends up the inevitable.
And that’s the way it seemed on July 4, 1774.