Farewell Post: Only a Hiatus

After this week’s blog posts, I’ll be waiting out the rest of 2012. These upcoming posts may very well be the last on this blog, but it’s much more likely that I’ll be returning in some fashion. Some incarnation of this blog will be continued in January 2013, possibly incorporated into another blog.

The narrow focus of chiefly Cumberland County history has been good for discovering oft-overlooked people, places, events and ideas. But I may broaden the scope. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’ll be something more ambitious. That’s a scary word that carries a connotation of –gulp—responsibility. And there is a trend of my oversold and overstated goals floundering completely. So I’ll be keeping it, whatever it turns out to be, simple and tight.

My first “greatest hit” is The First Pioneer Artist of Glasstown Speaks. I most enjoy watching the Dennis Tawes video, for he is a creative spirit. It didn’t take any prodding from me (nor much post-production editing) for him to weave together a coherent story from his disparate ruminations on art. My second greatest hit, and the post I most enjoyed writing was last week’s on The Tea Burning of 1774. It’s an event with a number of elements I find appealing: early American history, rebellion & social unrest, economics and even a little maritime activity. My third and fourth greatest hits are An Insight Into Glass and A Brief Comment on Glass Art. Glass is so central to South Jersey, especially Cumberland County. Glass, as an industry, commodity and artform, is so interwoven with the history of the area that it deserved three posts. David Iams is also very informative. My fifth greatest hit, and the post that got the most attention and feedback was the Moron post. A little low on the content side, I thought, but that will be fixed very soon. Very soon.

Thanks. After Monday, check back in January for updates.

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.