On this day 250 years ago, the Britannia, carrying seven chests of East India Company tea, docked in Charleston harbor in South Carolina. The Patriots of Charleston in a couple of days would host the Second Charleston Tea Party to welcome the arrival of this tea.

Sources: https://www.powdermagazinemuseum.org/history250; https://oliverpluff.com/pages/charleston-tea-party

Also on that day in Alexandria, Virginia loyalist Nicholas Creswell recorded in his diary that:

This evening went to the Tavern to hear the Resolves of the Continental Congress. Read a Petition to the Throne and an address to the people of Great Britain. Both of them full of duplicity and false representation. I look upon them as insults to the understanding and dignity of the British Sovereign and people. Am in hopes their petitions will never be granted. I am sorry to see them so well received by the people and the sentiments so universally adopted. It is a plain proof that the seeds of rebellion are already sown and have taken very deep root, but am in hopes they will be eradicated next summer. I am obliged to act the hypocrite and extol these proceedings as the wisest productions of any assembly on Earth, but in my heart I despise them and look upon them with contempt.

Source: https://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/rebellion/text3/vacresswell.pdf

And on that day in Newark, New Jersey, the Essex County Grand Jury wrote a letter responding to Chief Justice Frederick Smyth’s charge that they were complaining about “imaginary tyranny” by the British Government:

If we rightly understood a particular part of your Honour’s charge, you were pleased to tell us, that while we were employed in guarding against “imaginary tyranny, three thousand miles distant,” we ought not to expose ourselves to a “real tyranny at our own doors.”  As we neither know, sir, nor are under the least apprehension of any tyranny at our own doors, unless it should make its way hither from the distance you mention, and then, we hope, that all those whom the Constitution has entrusted with the guardianship of our liberties, will rather strive to obstruct than accelerate its progress, we are utterly at a loss for the idea thereby intended to be communicated.  But, respecting the tyranny at the distance of three thousand miles, which your Honour is pleased to represent as imaginary, we have the unhappiness widely to differ from you in opinion.  The effect, sire, of that tyranny is too severely felt to have it thought altogether visionary.  We cannot think, sir, that taxes imposed upon us by our fellow subjects, in a Legislature in which we are not represented, is an imaginary, but that it is a real and actual tyranny; and of which no Nation whatsoever can furnish a single instance.  We cannot think, sir, that depriving us of the inestimable right of trial by jury; seizing our persons and carrying us for trial to Great Britain is a tyranny merely imaginary.

Nor can we think with your Honour, that destroying Charters and changing our forms of Government, is a tyranny altogether ideals.—That an Act passed to protect, indemnify, and screen from punishment such as may be guilty even of murder is a bare idea.  That the establishment of French laws and Popish religion in Canada, the better to facilitate the arbitrary schemes of the British Ministry, by making the Canadians instruments in the hands of power to reduce us to slavery, has no other than a mental existence.  In a word, sir, we cannot persuade ourselves that the Fleet now blocking up the Port of Boston, consisting of ships built of real English oak and solid iron, and armed with cannon of ponderous metal, with actual powder and ball; nor the Army lodged in the Town of Boston, and the Fortifications thrown about it, (substantial and formidable realities,) are all creatures of their imagination.  These, sir, are but a few of the grievances under which America now groans.  These are some of the effects of that deliberate of plan of tyranny concerted at “three thousand miles distance,” and which, to your Honour, appears only like the “baseless fabric of a vision.”  To procure redress of these grievances, which to others assume the form of odious and horrid realities, the Continent, as we learn, has very naturally been thrown into great commotions; and as far as this County in particular has taken part in the alarm, we have the happiness to represent to your Honour, that in the prosecution of measures for preserving American liberties, and obtaining the remove of oppressions, the people have acted in all their popular assemblies, (which it is the right of Englishment to convene whenever they please,”) with the spirit, temper and prudence becoming freemen and loyal subjects.

Sources: The Essex County Grand Jury to Chief Justice Frederick Smyth, November 1, 1774

Tyranny: Real and Imagined

An imagined painting of the “Foreman of the Grand Jury Rebuking the Chief Justice of New Jersey 1774” hangs in Courtroom 211 of the Essex County Historic Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey today.

Source: https://ia801505.us.archive.org/23/items/history-new-jersey/Essex%20Co%20Courthouse%20Newark.pdf