Bunker Hill

from England. The revenues from these taxes were to be used to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges, which the colonial legislatures had formerly paid with funds raised through locally administered taxes. Although in this instance the act relieved the province of a financial burden, it increased the likelihood that the officials would act in the best interests of the crown instead of the colonies. Boston merchants responded by refusing to import British goods, and by the spring of 1768 the Massachusetts legislature had sent out a circular letter encouraging the other colonies to support a nonimportation agreement.
    Even more significant to relations with Britain was the creation of the American Customs Board to facilitate the collection of customs duties, monies that not only went toward paying the colonies’ collective tab back in Great Britain but also helped pay the salaries of the customs officers. The board’s five commissioners were headquartered in Boston and came to embody the loathsome “innovations” being insisted upon by the British ministry. Armed with what were known as “writs of assistance,” the officers did not have to obtain a warrant before searching ships, shops, and homes for smuggled goods. As early as 1761 the lawyer James Otis had argued that because these writs violated English constitutional rights, they were illegal. Otis lost the case in court, but New Englanders continued to insist upon their rights. In 1768 a riot erupted when officials seized John Hancock’s merchant vessel
Liberty
—an outbreak of violence that contributed to the decision by the British government to send several regiments of troops, known as the regular army, to Boston.
    With the arrival of the regulars, the focus shifted from the issue of taxation to the evils of a military occupation. Patriot leaders began keeping a journalistic diary of the many abuses the townspeople supposedly suffered at the hands of the soldiers. On the night of March 5, 1770, escalating tensions climaxed in what came to be known as the Boston Massacre. An angry crowd of sailors, artisans, apprentices, and boys surrounded a small group of regulars, who in the confusion of the moment fired their muskets. When the fusillade ceased, five people lay dead or mortally wounded. Outrage swept through the city’s unlit network of convoluted streets as hundreds and then thousands of Bostonians surged into the center of town. With the people threatening to attack the soldiers, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson appeared on the balcony of the Town House and promised that “the law should have its course.” The crowd reluctantly dispersed. After several rancorous town meetings, the regulars were withdrawn from Boston.
    The trial of the British soldiers was delayed until the fall, but several months before that, in late June 1770, a comet appeared in the night sky. John Greenwood, then ten years old, remembered that more than just a comet had blazed over Boston. “Armies of soldiery had been seen fighting in the clouds overhead,” he wrote; “and it was said that the day of judgment was at hand, when the moon would turn into blood and the world be set on fire.” The regiments of soldiers were gone, but the sense of foreboding was stronger than ever. “For my part,” he remembered, “all I wished was that a church which stood by the side of my father’s garden would fall on me at the time these terrible things happened, and crush me to death at once, so as to be out of pain quick.”
    Due in large part to the brilliance of Josiah Quincy and John Adams, the accused soldiers were either found not guilty or were convicted of manslaughter, which entailed the comparatively minor punishment of branding on the base of the thumb. With a partial repeal of the Townshend Acts, a period of calm settled across New England. And then, in the summer of 1773, more than three years after the Massacre, Bostonians learned of the passage of the Tea Act.
    —
    The British ministry had a problem. The crown-chartered East India Company was burdened with too much tea. To eliminate that surplus, it was decided to offer the tea to the American colonies at the drastically reduced price of two shillings per pound—a third less than the original price. Unfortunately and unwisely, Parliament included in the reduced price a tiny tax of three pence per pound. This gave the patriots ideological grounds on which to object to an act that might otherwise have