Free American Tempest by Harlow Giles Unger Page A

Hancock. Founder of the House of Hancock, he was one of the great enterpreneurs in colonial America. He was the uncle of the patriot John Hancock. From a portrait by John Singleton Copley in the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University. (C OURTESY OF THE H ARVARD P ORTRAIT C OLLECTION, P RESIDENT AND F ELLOWS OF H ARVARD C OLLEGE . G IFT OF J OHN H ANCOCK TO H ARVARD C OLLEGE , 1766. P HOTO BY D AVID M ATTHEWS . I MAGE C OPYRIGHT , P RESIDENT AND F ELLOWS OF H ARVARD C OLLEGE , H ARVARD U NIVERSITY .)
    With his wealth and political and social prominence came social responsibility— noblesse oblige , as British aristocrats called it—and Thomas Hancock personally undertook, at his own expense, the care and maintenance of the entire Boston Common—the forty-five-acre park that stretched from his front door down Beacon Hill. He had the Frog Pond cleaned regularly to prevent stagnation, planted a grove of elm trees to shade the park, and continually saw to the upkeep of all public areas. Like other prominent Boston merchants—Hutchinson, Oliver, and a few others—he also made generous gifts to the Church, and together they earned the collective epithet “The Saints of Boston.”
    The Molasses Act of 1733, however, had already turned many lesser saints into sinners. Rum, by then, had become New England’s most popular drink, and New England distillers imported the vast majority of molasses to make their rum from the French and Spanish sugar islands of the Caribbean. Although sugar cane grew in the British West Indies, output was small, and the molasses they produced was 25 to 40 percent more costly than that of the foreign sugar islands. Rhode Island’s thirty distilleries imported nearly 900,000 gallons of molasses a year, of which 725,000 came from foreign islands; the sixty distilleries in Massachusetts produced 2.7 million gallons of rum a year and imported about 1 million gallons of molasses annually—only 30,000 of it from the British West Indies. By adding a six-pence-a-gallon duty on foreign molasses, the Molasses Act threatened to drive production costs and the price of rum beyond the reach of most New England consumers and cripple an industry on which thousands of American shipfitters, sailors, longshoremen, coopers, distillery workers, merchants, tavern keepers, wine shops, and their employees depended. The Boston Evening Post charged Parliament with passing the act merely to allow “a few pampered Creolians to roll in their gilded equipages thro’ the streets of London” at the expense of two million American subjects. 2 Some physicians and blue-nosed church ladies, however, hailed the Molasses Act, citing the dangers to physical and moral health and the benefits of tea. Some ministers joined in railingagainst demon rum and, unaware of the historic irony of their words, urged congregants to hold tea parties instead, and, little by little, many Americans began consuming tea in increasing quantities.
    Faced with a collapse of the rum trade and the distilling industry, distillers, merchants, and shipping firms combined to smuggle molasses from foreign sugar islands. Taking advantage of hidden coves along the long, isolated stretches of New England coastline, shippers landed hundreds of cargoes out of sight of customs officials—and, therefore, duty-free. It was the first time that so many otherwise loyal British subjects in America had turned against their king’s government.
    â€œIt is a defrauding of the King of those dues which the law hath granted to him,” Peter Oliver growled, “which fraud is equal in criminality to the injuring of a private person.” 3
    But unpredictable waves and currents often sent ships crashing into the rocks, spilling cargoes into the sea. However, with merchants sitting in some of the highest government posts, it was not difficult for them to reduce their losses by bribing underpaid customs officials to declare shiploads