From father to son - and the Boston Tea Party
Joseph Harrison eventually left America in the Autumn of 1768. According to Jenks Bell (who is often wrong) it was 1769. He cites a piece in the Boston Gazette which he dates 4 September 1769, written by James Otis. Harrison, says Otis, was "too contemptible ...... to take any further notice of at present, than to declare, that I think him if not a wicked, yet a very weak old man." A month later, asserts Jenks Bell, Joseph left America for good. Whether it was 1768 or 1769, Joseph had "leave of absence without limitation". The post remained open, and back in Boston Benjamin Hallowell was anxious to secure the Collectorship for himself. On 15 May 1770 he wrote to the Treasury asking for consideration for that office if Harrison did not return to America. It is likely that the post remained open until 1773. When Boston was evacuated in March 1776, Hallowell found himself sharing a cabin with 36 others in dreadful conditions, on a journey to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He went to England, before ending his days in Canada in 1799.
The later years of Joseph Harrison's life are obscure. Watson says simply that he "lived in semi-retirement and poor health until his death in 1787." Jenks Bell, on the other hand, states that he established himself as a person of influence and a valuable source of information to the government, and that "for several years Harrison was a partner of Joseph Manesty in trade in Liverpool" before retiring to the Acklom estate in 1778. The partnership with Manesty is dubious. There was a tenuous connection between the two men, in that Joseph's first employer in America, John Banister, had built ships for Manesty. But there was another Joseph Harrison who captained slave ships for Manesty, and this probably misled Jenks Bell. The fact is that Joseph, on returning to England, disappeared from the record, as did his wife Eleanor.
It appears that Joseph only finally resigned his post as Collector of Customs at Boston when his 23-year-old son, Richard Acklom Harrison, was ready to take up the job. Despite the worsening tensions in the area, Richard sailed back to Boston and was sworn in in August 1773. At first it seemed that a normal social life could be resumed. The diarist John Rowe wrote on 28 August:
"At Menotomy Pond [now Arlington] were Montagu and his wife and daughter. Lady Frankland and Henry Cromwell, the ladies Lechmere, Simpson, Inman,Flucker, several military and naval officers, Commissioner Hulton, and Collector Harrison. We were very jolly. The Admirall, Capt. Williams, and I had very poor luck, the fish very small."
The calm was soon shattered. Since May 1773 tensions had been mounting over the taxation of tea. What happened in December has been told many times, for a variety of audiences; but no one seems to have noticed that Richard Acklom Harrison was in the thick of it. Three tea ships arrived in Boston, and their arrival provoked a furious reaction. The crisis came to a head on 16 December 1773, when as many as 7,000 agitated locals milled about the wharf where the ships were docked. A mass meeting at the Old South Meeting House that morning resolved that the tea ships should leave the harbour without payment of any duty. A committee was selected to take this message to the Customs House to force release of the ships out of the harbour.
Richard, as Collector of Customs, refused to allow the ships to leave without payment of the duty. There was stalemate. The committee reported back to the mass meeting and a howl erupted from the meeting hall. It was now early evening and a group of about 200 men disguised as Indians assembled on a nearby hill. Whooping war chants, the crowd marched two by two to the wharf, descended upon the three ships and dumped their offending cargoes of tea into the harbour waters. |
Most colonists applauded the action, which became known as the Boston Tea Party, while the reaction in London was swift and vehement. In March 1774 Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts which, among other measures, closed the port of Boston.
Richard gave his own account of the event when he petitioned the Treasury on 16 December 1775 for compensation for hardship and loss of earnings: "Humbly sheweth: that your petitioner was appointed collector in August 1773. That soon after, that spirit of Resistance to the Revenue Laws, which had shewn itself on many occasions, began then to breake out into open Acts of Violence, particularly in the Destruction of Tea belonging to the East India Company, during which Transaction your Petitioner executed at hazzard of his life the Duties of his office, and although left without any other support than the Comptroller he never quitted his station during all that scene of anarchy and confusion which then prevailed in the Town of Boston, and when all the other officers of the Crown were obliged to leave the place, and take Refuge in the Castle and elsewhere." He went on to state that when the port was closed by the Act of 1774 he and the Comptroller were removed to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and that the ships usually discharging at Boston now entered and cleared at Salem. That meant that he received nothing but his salary - £100 per annum - and had lost the fees he had been accustomed to take from the merchants and ships at Boston. He hoped for compensation. |
From 16 August 1773 to 1 June 1774 the Collector's fees amounted to £1,259.9s.6½d in "lawful money", which came to £944.12s.1¾d in sterling. "The above is a true account of the money received for my Fees of Office during the Time therein specified." |