radicals like Samuel Adams. But just as at the time
of the Stamp Act riots, cooler heads prevailed.
Announcing that he was “defending the rights of
man and unconquerable truth,” John Adams volun-
teered his services to make sure the soldiers got a
fair trial. Most were acquitted; the rest were treated
leniently by the standards of the day. In Great
Britain, confrontation also gave way to adjustment.
In April 1770 all the Townshend duties except a
threepenny tax on tea were repealed. The tea tax
was maintained as a matter of principle.
A kind of postmassacre truce settled over Boston
and the rest of British America. During the next two
years no serious crisis erupted. Imports of British
goods were nearly 50 percent higher than before the
nonimportation agreement. So long as the British
continued to be conciliatory, the colonists seemed
satisfied with their place in the empire.
106 Chapter 3 America in the British Empire
The Boiling Pot Spills Over
In 1772 this informal truce ended and
new troubles broke out. The first was
plainly the fault of the colonists involved.
Early in June the British patrol boat
Gaspeeran aground in Narragansett Bay,
south of Providence, while pursuing a
suspected smuggler. TheGaspee’s com-
mander, Lieutenant Dudingston, had
antagonized everyone in the area by his
officiousness and zeal; that night a gang
of local people boarded the helpless
Gaspee and put it to the torch. This
action was clearly criminal, but when the
British attempted to bring the culprits to
justice no one would testify against
them. The British, frustrated and angry,
were strengthened in their conviction
that the colonists were utterly lawless.
Then Thomas Hutchinson, now gov-
ernor of Massachusetts, announced that
henceforth the Crown rather than the
local legislature would pay his salary. Since
control over the salaries of royal officials
gave the legislature a powerful hold on
them, this development was disturbing.
Groups of radicals formed “committees of
correspondence” and stepped up commu-
nications with one another, planning joint
action in case of trouble. This was another
monumental step along the road to revo-
lution; an organized colony-wide resis-
tance movement, lacking in any
“legitimate” authority but ready to con-
sult and act in the name of the public
interest, was taking shape.The Tea Act Crisis
In the spring of 1773 an entirely unrelated event pre-
cipitated the final crisis. The British East India
Company held a monopoly of all trade between India
and the rest of the empire. This monopoly had
yielded fabulous returns, but decades of corruption
and inefficiency together with heavy military expenses
in recent years had weakened the company until it
was almost bankrupt.
Among the assets of this venerable institution
were some 17 million pounds of tea stored in English
warehouses. The decline of the American market, a
result first of the boycott and then of the smuggling of
cheaper Dutch tea, partly accounted for the glut.
Normally, East India Company tea was sold to
English wholesalers. They in turn sold it to AmericanSam Adams and other patriots—wearing the tri-cornered hat—force the stamp official
(wearing wig) to resign.