On this day 250 years ago in London, the British Cabinet began drafting what would become the Boston Port Act. This bill would order the closing of the port of Boston until the East India Company was repaid for the Destruction of the Tea. The bill would become the first of the “Intolerable Acts” Parliament would pass in response to the Boston Tea Party although the British used what they presumed would be the less offensive term “Coercive Acts” for the bills.

Source: https://historyofmassachusetts.org/british-react-boston-tea-party/

On this day 250 years ago from London Benjamin Franklin wrote his friend and ally Joseph Galloway, Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly an optimistic assessment of the future of America after the coming war with Britain concluded:

I must soon quit the scene, but you may live to see our country flourish; as it will amazingly and rapidly after the war is over; like a field of young Indian corn, which long fair weather and sunshine had enfeebled and discolored, and which in that weak state, by a sudden gust of violent wind, hail, and rain, seemed to be threatened with absolute destruction; yet the storm being past, it recovers fresh verdure, shoots up with double vigor, and delights the eye not of its owners only, but of every observing traveler.

Ironically, Galloway would not participate in the optimistic future for America predicted by Franklin. After serving in the First Continental Congress, Galloway became one of the leading Loyalists opposing Independence and supporting British forces in the Revolutionary War. Fleeing to Britain at the end of the War, Galloway never returned to America.

Source: https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/benjamin-franklin-quotes/

On this day 250 years ago, George Washington wrote to Andrew Lewis that Lord Hillsborough, the former Secretary of State for the Colonies, had held a “malignant disposition towards Americans,” so Washington disregarded Hillsborough’s interpretation “that Provincial officers were not comprehended in that Proclamation” authorizing land grants to veterans of the French and Indian War. Washington reasoned that “the services of a Provincial Officer” were “as worthy as those of a regular one”, and that the Proclamation land grants could “only be withheld from him with injustice.”

Source: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/71162a0b-144f-48cd-b6da-567f105ba785/content at p. 94.

On this day 250 years ago the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that “we hear from Princeton, in New Jersey, that the officers and students of the college, have unanimously agreed to drink no more TEA.”

Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Revolutionary_Princeton_1774_1783/2SMAEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22January+31,+1774%22&pg=PT291&printsec=frontcover

On this day 250 years ago in London, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly (and future member of the Continental Congress and Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts) Thomas Cushing about Franklin’s humiliation by the Privy Council in January. Franklin explained that he was insulted for merely looking out for the interests of Massachusetts colony that he was representing and that “Where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair.”

Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/359133?read-now=1&seq=14#page_scan_tab_contents at p. 384.

On this day 250 years ago the South Carolina Gazette reported on the warfare on the Georgia border with the Creek Nation including the massacre of the William White family on December 25, the massacre of the William, Sherrill family on January 14, the rout on January 23 of the force of 100 Georgia militia sent to the border to protect the settlers and the torture and murder of Lieutenant Daniel Grant following the militia’s defeat.

Source: https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/haynes_joshua_s_201308_phd.pdf at 62-65.

On this day 250 years ago in Charleston, South Carolina, Superintendent of Indian Affairs John Stuart wrote Lord Dartmouth about the torture and murder of Lieutenant Daniel Grant of the Georgia militia by Creek Indians in January. This incident and associated raids conducted by the Creeks and Cherokees against white settlers in the Carolina backcountry would lead to widespread warfare on the Frontier in the early days of the Revolution.

Source: https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/haynes_joshua_s_201308_phd.pdf at p. 64

On this day 250 years ago in London, Lord Dartmouth wrote to his friend John Thornton about the resistance of the Patriots in Boston:

How fatally and effectually they have now shut the door against all possibility of present relief for any of the things they complain of, and how utterly vain it must be to expect that Parliament will ever give it to them till there appears to be a change in their temper and conduct

Interestingly both Dartmouth and Thornton were involved in the founding of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire during this time period.

Source: https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/11/earl-dartmouth-secretary-state-colonies-second-year-november-1773-august-1774/

On this day 250 years ago in Boston, the young African-American poet Phillis Wheatley wrote to the Reverend Samuel Occum to commend him for an open letter he had written criticizing Christian ministers who enslaved Africans. Wheatley wrote:

I have this day received your obliging kind Epistle, and am greatly satisfied with your Reasons respecting the Negroes, and think highly reasonable what you offer in Vindication of their natural Rights: Those that invade them cannot be insensible that the divine Light . . . [r]eveals more and more clearly, the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably united, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one without the other . . . for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance, and . . . I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant deliverance . . . [from] those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their Fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Works and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse disposition for the Exercise of Oppressive Power over others agree, — I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.

Source: https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/phillis-wheatley-peters-letter-to-reverend-samuel-occum-february-11-1774

On this day 250 years ago in London, Lord Dartmouth, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote to Attorney General Thurlow and Solicitor General Wedderburn to demand that they provide a formal legal opinion in response to the questions he had previously submitted regarding Patriot resistance to the Tea Act in Boston including the Boston Tea Party:

“Do the acts and proceedings [in Boston] amount to the crime of high treason?” and “If they do, who are the persons chargeable with such crimes and what will be the proper and legal method of proceeding against them?”

Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23064102?read-now=1&seq=15#page_scan_tab_contents