The Tea Burning of 1774

There is perhaps no event more seared into the nation’s mythos as the defining image of the Revolution than the Boston Tea Party. An incident of less renown but one that similarly captures the agitative spirit of the war of American independence occurred in 1774 in Greenwich, NJ. The actions of the British inspired the war-hastening vandalism of the Boston Tea Party which in turn inspired the copycat tea burning at Cumberland County a year later.

Greenwich still exists and is the location of the former and current Cumberland County Historical Society headquarters, the Wood Mansion and the Gibbon House respectively. At the time, however, Greenwich was a small farming community. A ship called the Greyhound, carrying a cargo of tea from the East India Tea Company set out through the Delaware Bay with Philadelphia as the destination. Given that Philadelphia was the intellectual epicenter of the revolutionary movement, in order to avoid encountering hostilities from the radically-minded, the Greyhound did not dock there directly. They made their way through the Cohansey River to Greenwich and stored the cargo at the cellar belonging to the loyalist Daniel Bowen for safekeeping.

The county’s inhabitants formed an impromptu, locum tenens committee of five citizens to secure the tea. On December 22, a more formal assembly was convened in Bridgeton, attended by representatives of the various townships of Cumberland County. Due to the mysteriousness of the circumstances, from the arrival to the identity of the importer, the assembly agreed to store the tea pending investigation.

The importer was, of course, the East India Tea Company. The East India Tea Company was a joint-stock company chartered by Britain that by 1774 was substantially controlled and administered by the Crown. The Tea Act of 1773 incited a great pathos among the Colonial Americans, and a great anger. The Act was a protectionist measure by Britain, an effort to outmaneuver independent tea merchants by selling directly to consumers in the American colonies at lower prices than the merchants could match. Covertly, it was an attempt to get Americans to consent to the notorious “taxation without representation” laterally through the direct purchasing of British goods.

The morning following the assembly, the committee discovered that the tea chests had been seized, stolen, and destroyed. The perpetrators were reputedly disguised as Boston Mohawks but it is difficult to discern what’s fact and what’s legend of an era in which the reliability of the historical records is hampered by the communicative limitations of rurality. The tea burners are believed to have been members of the Admonishing Society in Bridgeton, another of the type of clubs of young men that met in coffeehouses and discussed politics, a staple of the intelligentsia throughout Europe and America since the Age of Enlightenment. It was members of the closely-knit network of friends and families that were the Elmers, Ewings, Fithians, Newcombs, Piersons, Howells, Hunts and Seelys, who were tried for the crime. Having the sympathy of much of the county’s residents, no one was ever indicted. The May 1775 trial had a jury stacked in the favor of the radicals and the September 1775 trial had a jury stacked with Tories but both resulted in the same: the tea burners had garnered garnered enough public support to avoid prosecution, or at the very least the people of the county had vindicated the tea burners because they implicitly agreed with their actions.

Reference material

Gerlach, Larry R. Prologue to Independence: New Jersey in the Coming of the American Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1976. Print.