Peggy Stewart was a Maryland cargo vessel burned on October 19, 1774, in Annapolis as a punishment for contravening the boycott on tea imports which had been imposed in retaliation for the British occupation of Boston following the Boston Tea Party. This event became known as the "Annapolis Tea Party". [1]
In February 1770, the brig Good Intent arrived at Annapolis from London, bringing goods ordered by local merchants during 1769. Some of the orders had been placed before the local resolutions in June–July 1769, to boycott goods subject to British tax under the "Townshend Acts" of 1767. The Customs collector at Annapolis would not allow any goods to be landed, even those not subject to tax, until the tax had been paid. The local committee supervising the boycott would not allow tax to be paid on any goods. Merchants importing the goods, led by James Dick and his son-in-law Anthony Stewart, finally gave up, and sent Good Intent back to London, still fully loaded. [2] Ironically, while Good Intent was in mid-Atlantic, the British government gave in to the boycott and removed taxes on all goods—except tea. The Tea Act of 1773 allowed only one company, the British East India Company, to sell tea in America without paying tax, but such a one-sided deal seemed as unjust to Americans as the original taxes, eventually leading to the famous Boston Tea Party and, following British overreaction, to a widespread re-introduction of tea boycotts.
Most ships' captains refused to carry tea, but in the summer of 1774, one merchant, Thomas Charles Williams, the London representative of an Annapolis family firm, thought he had found a cunning way around that problem. [3] [4] He loaded 2,320 pounds (about one ton) of tea, in 17 packages, aboard the brig Peggy Stewart, principally owned by Dick and Stewart (business rivals to the Williams firm), which was about to make the Atlantic crossing. The worried captain, Richard Jackson, was told that the packages contained linen, [5] but to avoid the possibility of being prosecuted for smuggling, Williams correctly identified the consignment as tea on his Customs declaration. Hence, when he was clearing Customs at the mouth of the River Thames (some distance from London) Jackson learned that he had been right to suspect the packages and that part of his cargo was going to cause major trouble in America. [6] However, once declared to Customs officials in Britain, the tea had to be taken to its appointed destination — preferably before the autumn gales began, for Peggy Stewart needed an overhaul and leaked quite badly. That made the voyage most unpleasant for the main cargo: 53 indentured servants.
The Peggy Stewart arrived at Annapolis on the morning of 14 October 1774, and Anthony Stewart was notified of the tax payable on one small part of the cargo. He went immediately to Joseph and James Williams, Thomas's brothers and business partners, and informed them of the situation. Whatever Thomas had intended, his brothers had no interest in his mad scheme, so they refused to pay the tax, and arranged a meeting with the committee which supervised the tea boycott, to discuss the problem. [7] Anthony Stewart feared a rerun of the Good Intent case, for none of the cargo could come ashore until the tax had been paid on that tea tucked away in a corner of the hold—not even the indentured servants.
Stewart knew they could not send the entire cargo back to London because it included the 53 indentured servants, who might easily die in the autumn storms. He therefore guaranteed payment of the tax on the tea himself, got the servants ashore as soon as possible, and left the rest of the cargo aboard to await the committee's decision. [8]
Only four of the committee were available for a meeting that afternoon, so they invited the public to contribute to the discussion, and it was decided that all the cargo except the tea could be unloaded, 12 supervisors being appointed by the meeting to ensure that this stipulation was adhered to. A full committee meeting was then arranged for the morning of the following Wednesday, 19 October, [9] and over five days, a great deal of politics occurred. On the one hand, Stewart and the two Williams brothers met with committee chairman Charles Carroll and formulated an agreement that they would burn the tea and publish an apology in the Maryland Gazette . On the other hand, one committee member, Mathias Hammond, published a handbill on 15 October, denouncing Stewart (and omitting to mention that the Williams brothers themselves had been the ones who notified him of the tea importation), and stirred up a great deal of popular fervor. [7] Thus the second committee meeting was thronged with people, many of whom had come specifically to make an example of the wicked Mr Stewart and his cronies.
The reporting of this affair in the Maryland Gazette was, by modern standards, less than conscientious. No mention was made of the indentured servants, no attempt was made to remind readers of the Good Intent case, and the report of the fateful second meeting was oddly abbreviated:
The committee were of opinion, if the tea was destroyed by the voluntary act of the owners and proper concessions made, that nothing further ought to be required. This their opinion being reported to the assembly, was not satisfactory to all present. Mr Stewart then voluntarily offered to burn the vessel and the tea in her... [9]
A letter to the Baltimore Patriot newspaper immediately after the death of successful physician and businessman Dr Charles Alexander Warfield, in 1813 expands greatly on that short account. [10] Warfield, recently appointed a Major in the new Anne Arundel County militia, had not only argued with moderate patriots like Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase; he had allegedly had a gallows erected outside Stewart's house. Some details of the account seem false, but other sources agree that he led the calls for harsh penalties, whipping up mob hysteria. The Gazette did publish a letter from the Williams brothers in which, among other things, they complained that their complete willingness to co-operate with the committee was "kept entirely secret" from the angry throng, and instead "a most ungenerous piece was drawn up by Mathias Hammond." [7] An anonymous letter to another newspaper (quite probably written by Thomas Williams) claimed that "the minds of the people were so inflamed, that they threatened death to Mr. Stewart, and desolation to his store and dwelling-house." [11]
The offer to burn Peggy Stewart was enough to satisfy the mob, so the brig was moved to a convenient spot "with her sails and colours flying", and, after reading out a statement apologising for their conduct (which was subsequently published in the Gazette), Anthony Stewart, Nehemiah Moxley, Joseph Williams and James Williams jointly set the vessel and the tea alight. Within a few hours, "in the presence of a great number of spectators" Peggy Stewart had burned down to the waterline. [9] The event has since become known as the "Annapolis Tea Party".
Thomas Charles Williams, the real cause of the problem, later published an apology for his own actions [12] - but if the anonymous letter really was his work (it was published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger on 4 January 1775, just two days after Thomas signed his apology, also in Philadelphia) he blamed everybody except himself. The letter outlined an alleged plot involving another rival firm, Wallace, Davidson and Johnson- Davidson being Deputy Comptroller of Customs in addition to his business interests. Stewart was the principal victim, partly because he had voted against a proposal (nominally in retaliation against the British government's punishment of the people of Boston) for American lawyers to refuse to handle actions for debts due to persons in Great Britain, partly because Peggy Stewart had taken trade the Wallace firm had lost when a vessel of theirs ran aground in the English Channel. The writer was convinced that the plot would have failed if Stewart had followed Joseph and James's lead- but then, the writer knew nothing about the 53 indentured servants, and claimed instead that Stewart, as an owner of the vessel, was "anxious for dispatch, in order that she might proceed to another port." [11]
Anthony Stewart and his family spent most of the years of the American Revolutionary War living in New York, where he served on the board of directors of the Associated Loyalists; then in 1783 he attempted, with one Samuel Gouldsbury, to found a community called New Edinburgh, in Nova Scotia. Legal obstacles prevented the plan from being fully realised, but the community still exists today. [13] Despite the significant financial loss he sustained in the "Tea Party", Stewart remained wealthy, although the 1,200 acres (4.9 km2) of land he owned in Maryland would be forfeited at the end of the War in 1783. Ironically, he died on a business visit to Annapolis, in 1791.
After the American Revolutionary War, citizens of Maryland came to view the burning of Peggy Stewart as an act of heroism, considering the angry crowd who demanded the burning to be devoted patriots for their resistance of the British Tea Act. On October 19, 1904, the city of Baltimore commemorated the event with The Burning of the Peggy Stewart, a mural by Charles Yardley Turner (1850–1919), painted on the west wall of the Criminal Court Lobby in the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse. [14] On October 19, 1974, the Bicentennial Council of the 13 Original States created a silver ingot honoring the two-hundredth anniversary of the burning. The incident is also honored by "Peggy Stewart Tea", a blend sold by Eastern Shore Tea Co. The burning is honored each year by a ceremony in Annapolis. The story was recounted in a children's book Ahoy, Peggy Stewart by Maud Esther Dilliard, published by Dutton, 1956.
Thomas Stone was an American Founding Father, planter, politician, and lawyer who signed the United States Declaration of Independence as a delegate for Maryland. He later worked on the committee that formed the Articles of Confederation in 1777. He acted as president of Congress for a short time in 1784. Stone was a member of the Maryland Senate from 1777 to 1780 and again from 1781 to 1787.
Sir Robert Eden, 1st Baronet, of Maryland, 23rd Proprietary Governor of Maryland was a British official and the last colonial Governor of Maryland. Although a popular governor and an able administrator, Eden's authority was overthrown by the events of the American Revolution, and in June 1776 he was invited by the Maryland Convention to leave for England. Eden was well-regarded at home and in the same year, 1776, he was made a baronet. He eventually returned to Maryland where he died in 1784 at the age of 42. He was buried in Annapolis and was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son, Frederick, a noted author.
The Sons of Liberty was a loosely organized, clandestine, sometimes violent, political organization active in the Thirteen American Colonies founded to advance the rights of the colonists and to fight taxation by the British government. It played a major role in most colonies in battling the Stamp Act in 1765 and throughout the entire period of the American Revolution.
The Continental Association, also known as the Articles of Association or simply the Association, was an agreement among the American colonies adopted by the First Continental Congress on October 20, 1774. It called for a trade boycott against British merchants by the colonies. Congress hoped that placing economic sanctions on British imports and exports would pressure Parliament into addressing the colonies' grievances, in particular, by repealing what were referred to as the Intolerable Acts.
In the American Revolution, committees of correspondence, committees of inspection, and committees of safety were different local committees of Patriots that became a shadow government; they took control of the Thirteen Colonies away from royal officials, who became increasingly helpless.
The Boston Tea Party was an American political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1773. The target was the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts. The Sons of Liberty strongly opposed the taxes in the Townshend Act as a violation of their rights. Protesters, some disguised as Indigenous Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company.
William Buckland (1734–1774) was a British architect who designed several important buildings in colonial Maryland and Virginia.
The Chestertown Tea Party was a protest against British excise duties which, according to local legend, took place in May 1774 in Chestertown, Maryland as a response to the British Tea Act. Chestertown tradition holds that, following the example of the more famous Boston Tea Party, colonial patriots boarded the brigantine Geddes in broad daylight and threw its cargo of tea into the Chester River. The event is celebrated each Memorial Day weekend with a festival and historic reenactment called the Chestertown Tea Party Festival.
Jonathan Plowman Jr. (1717–1795) was a spy and a privateer during the American Revolutionary War. His spying activities were as part of a group of Revolutionaries who reported on British troop movements. After the war broke out and trade with Britain was halted, Plowman and other merchants of Baltimore became privateers. They took their merchant ships and sent them out to raid and plunder British commerce enriching themselves and Baltimore. His resistance to British rule began earlier than that when, as a prominent merchant in Baltimore, Jonathan Plowman Jr. signed the non-importation agreement along with other merchants throughout the 13 colonies in a united effort to resisted British taxation and abuses. His sons fought the British redcoats on the battlefield as members of both the regular army and the Maryland Militia. Jonathan Plowman Jr's many accomplishments ranged from a town commissioner member, an attorney, and justice of the peace. He was also a Freemason and a developer laying out streets and lots and having the land added to Baltimore. Most of all he was a successful merchant, and owned at least one ship named Pokomoke and trading in goods including indentured servants. Plowman's own father was shipped to the United States at age 12 as an indentured servant. Jonathan Plowman Jr. became a member of the town commission of Baltimore, Maryland, prior to and served during the American Revolution. Many references to Jonathan Plowman may be found in the Maryland Archives, as he participated in town business and ran afoul of the British more than once. Jonathan Plowman Jr. usually signed "Jon" Plowman on documents such as the records of the many indentured servants he imported to the Americas.
Henry Ridgely Warfield was a U.S. Representative from Maryland. He was born in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, at the 1300-acre property "Bushy Park". He was the son of Charles Alexander Warfield and Eliza Ridgely, and grandson of Maj. Henry Ridgely. His father, Dr. Warfield (1751–1813), was an originator of the medical school of the University of Maryland, and as a member of the Whig club, set fire to the Peggy Stewart at Annapolis, Maryland, destroying her cargo of tea.
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The Peggy Stewart House, also known as the Rutland-Jenifer-Stone House, is a Georgian style house in Annapolis, Maryland. Built between 1761 and 1764 by Thomas Rutland as a rental property, it was owned at various times by Thomas Stone and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer. In October 1774 it was owned by Anthony Stewart, owner of the ship Peggy Stewart. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 for its associations with the burning of Anthony Stewart's ship, Peggy Stewart, as well as for its architectural significance as a mid- to late 18th century Georgian mansion. Furthermore, the dwelling was recognized as a National Historic Landmark for its associations with Jenifer and Stone, and for the thematic representation of politics and diplomacy during the American Revolution
Francis Blackwell Mayer was a prominent 19th-century American genre painter from Maryland. While he spent most of his life in that state, he took a trip to the western frontier in the mid-nineteenth century and executed a series of drawings of Native Americans; he also studied in Paris for five years in the 1860s.
Charles Yardley "C. Y." Turner was an American painter, illustrator, muralist and teacher. His genre scenes and American historical paintings were popularized through engravings and book illustrations.
Zadok Magruder (1729–1811) was an American politician and military officer who served as an elected official in the government of Maryland and as a colonel in the state militia. He also helped establish Montgomery County.
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Zachariah Hood was an Annapolis businessman who in 1765 was given the job of stamp collector for the Province of Maryland, collecting the duty payable under the new Stamp Act. Returning to Maryland from England in August 1765, he was attacked by an angry mob, and was forced to flee to New York for his life, in what may have been the first forcible resistance in America to British taxation in the years preceding the American Revolution. Hood returned to Maryland but, finding himself persona non grata, he left for the West Indies. In 1774 he was appointed comptroller of the Port of Philadelphia, but he fared little better and in May 1775 he was forced again to flee, this time to England, where he was granted a salary by Prime Minister Lord North.
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