Volume 3, Chapter 44, Boycotting the Importers
By late 1769, merchants of every province but New Hampshire had organized to support non-importation agreements of varying comprehensiveness and scope. How were they enforced?
The Merchant Association's generally appointed committees to watch over vessels and shipments
and to promote the public boycotts of offenders. In New York, the boycott was remarkably effective.
Total imports from Great Britain to the port fell from over 490,000 pounds in 1768 to about 75,000
Confronted by a scaffold and a mob at the Liberty Pole was forced to pledge his cooperation.
The following June, a transient, non-cooperating merchant named Hills had his goods seized
and burned by a mob. Hills promptly fled New York, but these dishonorable instances
were few and far between, and the Merchant's Committee of Inspection denounced the mob
All-Abaction Against Hills is the work of lawless ruffians.
Philadelphia's record of compliance was remarkable when one recalls that cities' original reluctance
to join the boycott. The merchants' main efforts were to weaken the agreements to the looser
terms enjoyed by the Albany and Maryland merchants. Philadelphia imports fell from £440,000 to
to some two hundred and five thousand pounds the following year.
No coercion or intimidation of the merchants appeared in Philadelphia. Connecticut, New
Jersey and Delaware also cheerfully complied with the agreement and gave little trouble.
Apart from the cauldron of Boston, which will be treated below, only reluctant Newport
in the Northern Colonies gave the non-import movement much trouble. Indeed, there is evidence
that even prominent members of the Newport Sons of Liberty, as well as the Merchants
Committee itself, connived at virtually open violations of the non-importation covenant.
Compliance with the boycott in the southern provinces was another story. The indifference
or hostility of the merchants caused imports from Britain actually to increase during 1769,
particularly in Virginia. The opposition of the British factors and their agents in Virginia
forced the resistors to modify the boycott agreement and attempts at enforcement by the
merchants committees of inspection or county associations were few and feeble. Enforcement
efforts were far more successful in Maryland where many more of the merchants were native-born
and hence more enthusiastic about resistance. Two, and not unimportant, the Philadelphia
merchants kept a watchful and suspicious eye upon their Baltimore confreres. The boycott
movement was not more successful in North Carolina and Georgia than in Virginia. The
Merchants ignored the Provincial Associations instituted by the North Carolina Assembly
in late 1769. Finally, in early June 1770, the Sons of Liberty called a general meeting
at Wilmington, comprising many planters and others from six of the larger counties. The
meeting agreed to boycott and publicly condemn all non-compliers with the agreement, and
Merchants' Committees of Inspection were selected in each county, concentrating on the towns
of Brunswick and Wilmington. By the fall of 1770, enforcement had become effective as
a result of these efforts. In contrast to the strenuous, if belated, efforts at enforcement
in North Carolina, Georgia made no attempt whatever to pressure compliance with the boycott.
Fortunately, Georgia's trade was so negligible that its desertion had little effect.
Nevertheless, a general meeting of inhabitants of Charleston at the end of June 1770 unanimously
urged the total boycott of all trade with Georgia, which ought to be amputated from
the rest as a rotten part that might spread a dangerous infection.
The most interesting southern reaction, and one potentially explosive, to the problem of
compliance occurred in South Carolina. There, Christopher Gadsden and his vigilant band
of radical liberals stood alert to exert maximum pressure on reluctant merchants. These men,
with their great ardor and zeal for liberty, were comparable only to the embattled libertarians
of Boston. Like their comrades in Boston, the popular liberal forces of South Carolina
confronted organized and articulate opposition, which was led by the wealthy young planter
William Henry Drayton. Battling in the pages of the South Carolina Gazette during August
1769, Drayton denounced Gadsden as an advocate of enslavement masquerading as a libertarian.
For private associations to brand non-compliers with the boycott as traitors was a usurpation of the function of the legislature.
Here Drayton confused the vital distinction between voluntary and coercive actions, and hence between private and governmental actions.
It was typically conservative for Drayton to believe that estate branding and punishing a man for treason was somehow legitimate and not really coercive, whereas private denunciation and peaceful boycott were illegitimately coercive.
Also typically conservative, Drayton advocated jailing Gadsden for the latter's views.
The famous Gadsden-Draton debate finally led the people of Charleston to publish and distribute
handbills in early September containing the names of the recalcitrants.
The original motto of the Charleston General Meeting establishing the boycott had been
sign or die, but this proved to be braggadocio as no attempt was ever made to go beyond boycott
and Public ostracism to such violence. The leading non-signers, aside from the inevitable
royal officials, were Drayton, William Rag, and John Gordon. Again, Drayton and Gadson
engaged in debate on the fundamental nature of liberty. Drayton asserted that the Gadson
liberals were laying illegal restraints upon the free wills of free men, that is, of the
and Non-Signers. Gadsden retorted that the association violated not a single law, and
that free men had the right to associate, and hence not to associate, with whom soever
they pleased. Drayton replied by falling back on such cant as the old Tory doctrine of conspiracy,
which supposedly made such boycotts punishable by law.
Rage was more explicit in pointing out that such boycotts should be as illegal as combinations
of labor to raise wages.
In his rebuttal, Gadsden transcended the preceding debate to proclaim the right of a people, where
their rights have been invaded by government, to reassert their inalienable natural rights,
those inherent rights of society, which no climate, no time, no constitution, no contract
can ever destroy or diminish.
Drayton did try to suppress the boycott at law. He could not go to the courts, for most
of the judges, to say nothing of the juries, were signers of the association, and the South
South Carolina House summarily rejected his plea, which testified to the effectiveness
of the boycott. Finally, the boycotters won. Drayton left in defeat for England in early
January 1770, sailing, appropriately, on a ship carrying unsold, boycotted goods back
to Britain. Editor Peter Timothy of the Gazette thereupon exultantly listed among the unacceptable
The Charleston General Committee, enlivened as it was by mechanics and planters, vigorously
enforced the boycott, aided by the Alert Merchants Committee of Inspection. Slaves imported by
British traders were promptly sent back. Indeed, so effective was the boycott that total English
Imports in both Carolinas fell from over 305,000 pounds in 1769 to slightly over 145,000 pounds
in 1770. Particularly significant was the non-importation movement in Boston, for here
the struggle for the boycott coincided with Boston's necessarily more acute conflict
with the Customs Board and with the British Army.
The first town to organize the boycott, Boston had to face the hostility of the British Customs
officials and troops.
They also had to face the effective organized opposition of John Mine, the Scottish publisher
of the new newspaper, The Boston Chronicle.
The Chronicle was not only the most typographically advanced paper in the country, it was also
The Chronicle had recently begun as a newspaper above partisan stands in the political fray.
But the Customs Board shrewdly saw an excellent opportunity for a propaganda coup and secretly
set about subsidizing Mein's paper. Mein profited handsomely from the subsidy of being
and after a year his stationery, or rather his vitriolic championing of the Tory cause,
was so appreciated that the board made him its sole supplier. Mine also had clandestine
help in writing his material from William Birch of the Customs Board and from the richly
hated customs officer Samuel Waterhouse, whom John Adams denounced as the most notorious
The glorious scribbler and libeler in the service of the conspirators against the liberties of America.
Yet, Mines jealously maintained in public that he was completely unbiased and not connected with the government.
The major confrontation between Mines and the liberals began in the spring of 1769.
In May 8, the Boston town meeting praised the bulk of the merchants for abiding by the
non-importation agreement. In the next few weeks, the Committee of Merchants of Boston,
headed by John Hancock, helped to distribute thousands of handpills, urging a boycott of
the few merchants who had not complied. The list included three relatives, two sons and
and a nephew of the leading Tory, Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor of the province.
Another nephew of Hutchinson, later added to the list, quickly recanted his position.
To tighten enforcement, the Boston merchants in late July appointed a committee to inspect
any vessels from Great Britain with goods condemned by the agreement and to publish
the names of violators.
Another committee circulated a pledge among Boston inhabitants to boycott any merchant
so publicized in the handbills as violators. Governor Hutchinson was outraged by the effectiveness
of these measures. He was particularly outraged by such regular and vital functions being
conducted by purely private, non-governmental bodies. In short, by non-state, revolutionary
Revolutionary institutions springing up directly from among the people. So
effective were the committees that in early August most of the merchants named
in the original handbills hastened to recant and to promise to abide by the
agreement. Pressing their advantage, the Boston Committee of Merchants in mid
August condemned the remaining recalcitrants as enemies to the
The Constitution of their country and urged their boycott. The list now included John
Mein who stepped up his attacks to a level of continuousness. One unfair and misleading
charge said that the signing merchants themselves, including the eminent Hancock, were secret
violators of the non-importation agreement. Anguished and lengthy denials by the victims
The conclusions of Mines' smear attacks did not at all deter him from compiling his charges into a large book, which was then widely distributed by eager customs officials throughout the colonies. Mines' shrewd aim was to split the libertarian movement and to sow distrust of the Boston leaders in the other provinces.
John Mines' widely disseminated libel had a chilling effect in the colonies and gravely weakened the zeal of the non-importation movement even among the radical cadres in New York, Newport and Philadelphia.
Mines' campaign also emboldened the non-signing merchants and heartened Hutchinson's consistent attempts to induce Parliament to outlaw boycott agreements.
The liberals reacted by stepping up their pressure campaign.
The Boston town meeting in early October condemned the seven recalcitrant merchants and resolved
to enter their names on the town records so that posterity may know who those persons
were that preferred their little private advantages to the common interest of all the colonies.
The merchants, backed perhaps by hints of destruction of the recalcitrant's property,
then forced the sons and nephews of Hutchinson into line. Now there remained only three merchants,
including mine, whose names were advertised as those who audaciously continued to counteract
the united sentiments of the body of merchants throughout North America. Of these, of course,
The most hated was John Mein. The Free American Fire Company expelled Mein from membership,
and the seniors of Harvard College resolved never again to have dealings with him. Finally,
harsher measures were taken, and his property was defaced and his person threatened. Mein,
it should be noted, was the inevitable focus of a growing climate of violence in Boston.
In the first place, mine had never been forgiven for the brutal and sudden clumping of John Gill, a co-editor of the Boston Gazette a year and a half earlier, an attack that Sam Adams and James Otis denounced as a Spaniard-like attempt on a free press.
A far more precipitating event was a brutal crime that stunned the whole town of Boston.
The Liberals' popular leader, James Otis, had denounced the Customs Board commissioners in the Gazette of September 4, 1769, for maligning the Liberals as rebels and traitors.
The next night, in brutal retaliation, John Robinson, one of the commissioners who had been so cordially hated a few years earlier in Rhode Island,
set upon Otis with a gang of tufts and beat him unmercifully.
From this assault, Otis never recovered, having been rendered permanently insane.
Boston's beloved leader had fallen martyr to Tory violence.
To what the aggrieved Sam Adams and the Gazette charged was an intended and nearly executed assassination.
The people of Boston were ready to retaliate.
And so, on October 28, a street crowd gathered against mine and his co-editor, John Fleming.
The frightened mind shot into the crowd, wounding an innocent bystander. Some angry
citizens swore out a warrant against mine for having put innocent people in bodily fear.
Mine fled for his life to his spiritual home on a British vessel and thence to England,
where the grateful King George awarded mine a handsome pension for his diligent services.
The hated Tory mine had finally been routed, but his venomous work went on. His faithful ally, Fleeming, continued to publish the Chronicle, and to publish and distribute updated editions of his and mine's compendium of charges against the non-importing merchants of Boston.
Finally, however, Mines' heavy debts and the dwindling of subscriptions and advertisements
caught up with the enterprise.
John Hancock was able triumphantly to take possession of the paper in behalf of Mines'
creditors.
By late June 1770, the voice of the most dangerous Tory organ in America, the Boston Chronicle,
had finally been stilled.