Burning Peggy Stewart

On October 19, 1774 a tyrant minority in Annapolis compelled traders James Dick & Anthony Stewart to burn the merchant brigantine Peggy Stewart. The so-called Annapolis Tea Party differed from its Boston precedent in that there were no disguises, no concealing cover of night. The disposition of the Peggy Stewart and its cargo were topics of open deliberation and debate in public meetings organized to decide the matter. The meetings underscored and magnified local political tensions between patriots and their several methods of dissent and resistance. 24-year old Alice Lee of Blenheim (eyewitness to the bonfire) returns to Stratford Mail to offer her take on the immolation of the Peggy Stewart. 

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Transcript

Stratford Mail

VII. 

Welcome to Stratford Mail, a Production of Stratford Hall Historic Preserve, where the voices of American history still speak. This episode is made possible by the generous support of Chapter 23 of the Colonial Dames of America. Here now is our Director of Research, Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey.

Let ‘er burn, burn, burn, and so she did! This month a twenty-something eyewitness to the burning of the Peggy Stewart, which was run aground at old Windmill Point in Annapolis and burned to the waterline on October 19, 1774.  

The burning of the merchant brigantine Peggy Stewart (sometimes called The Annapolis Tea Party in recognition of that other event up Boston way) capped a decade of escalating tension between Britain and her North American colonies. Named for co-owner Anthony Stewart’s 7-year-old daughter, the Peggy Stewart arrived from London on October 14th. Her cargo included 53 persons committed to 4 years of indenture in exchange for passage and assorted other goods, some of it consigned to Thomas Charles Williams & Co. of Annapolis. Among the goods consigned to Williams & Co. were 17 and ½ chests of tea or (as one newspaper put it) “2320 pounds of that detestable weed,” a cargo that had been surreptitiously loaded aboard the Peggy Stewart and later misrepresented to its Captain. In an August letter to his Annapolis-based trading partners, Joshua Johnson of Wallace, Davidson & Johnson, shares a striking bit of commercial intelligence from London about the Peggy Stewart months before she makes Annapolis: “I have a hint that a certain TW has shipped tea on board of her and that Captain Jackson applied to old Russell and told him that he was suspicious of it, … Russell satisfied him by telling him it was linens.” There can be no question that Johnson let this cat out of the bag, leaking information about the tea secreted aboard the Peggy Stewart; his partner (on the receiving end of that letter), John Davidson, was deputy comptroller of customs at the Annapolis port. When Anthony Stewart arrived to receive the Peggy Stewart, he was informed that its cargo would not be landed until the applicable taxes were paid, specifically, the Townsend tax on tea. 

Tea aboard the Peggy Stewart was (by some accounts) news to Mt. Stewart. Now in Annapolis Captain Jackson briefed Stewart on his meeting with old Russell back in London and his misgivings about what Russell told him were ‘linens.’ James Russell was a London-based commission merchant handling large consignments of tobacco from Virginia and Maryland planters. Russell was also the London representative of the Annapolis firm of Dick & Stewart, and it soon became clear that Russell arranged with TW (Thomas Charles Williams) to ship to Maryland British tea purchased from London merchant Amos Hayton. This matters because after the Annapolis Tea Party was done and dusted, the Maryland Gazette published the deposition of Lambert Wickes, Captain of the merchant vessel Neptune. And what did Capt. Wickes have to say? That he’d refused to ship British tea to Maryland for Thomas Charles Williams & co. (who’d purchased it from Amos Hayton). This was a game that had been played before. In his deposition, Wickes reported that “Mr. James Russell, of London, merchant, in conversation with this deponent about his refusal to bring tea to America, said ‘What need ye care mon, so as ye get your freight.’” 

Russell was a valued member of the Lee family network, having married Ann Lee, first cousin to the Lees of Stratford, and he was entrusted both with Lee business and the supervision of young Arthur Lee while the boy studied abroad at Eton. Whatever Russell’s motives for the deception (whether advantage to Stewart, WIlliams, the East India Company, and/or himself), the tea aboard the Peggy Stewart was subject to the Townsend tax on tea, and Stewart applied to the importers, James and John WIlliams, to pay it, which they refused to do because of the non-importation policy or boycott that came into effect during the Peggy Stewart’s passage from London to Annapolis. And now Stewart made a fateful decision, he paid all applicable taxes (though the tea wasn’t his) in order to land the Peggy Stewart’s cargo, including those 53 persons with indenture contracts. This was in direct violation of the boycott; and it wasn’t a good look for Stewart, who had once before tried to land boycotted goods in Annapolis (see the 1770 incident involving the Good Intent).

Tea was a culturally important product in the colonies, playing a critical role in hospitality and other social settings. Offering a cup of tea was a gesture of welcome or at least a token of your host’s civility. As much as 90% of the millions of pounds of tea consumed annually by Americans was smuggled into the colonies, where it significantly undersold pricy British teas. Price aside, some colonists preferred for patriotic reasons to drink contraband tea or another beverage entirely. So British tea struggled in the American market. In 1773 Parliament introduced the Tea Act to shuffle the deck on the tea industry and to bail out the British East India Company, which was leveraged to the hilt, up to its ears in 17m pounds of unsold teas, and on the brink of insolvency. 

The Tea Act wasn’t a tax; it was a tax break for the East India Company, which was now permitted to sell direct to American retailers without first paying import taxes in Britain. So it stood the market on its head by equipping the Company with a competitive advantage over blackmarket teas even with the Townshend tax on tea imports to the colonies still in effect. That tax was the sole survivor of the unpopular 1767 Townshend Acts. Prime Minister Lord North kept the Townshend tax on tea as a face-saving measure after repealing the rest in 1770: the tea tax was a flex, a statement and enactment of Britain’s right to tax its colonies. Some Americans thus saw the Tea Act as a brazen attempt to buy with cheap tea colonial submission to the sovereignty of Parliament (which was implied in the Townshend tax)–others were troubled by the economic fallout of the Tea Act for colonial wholesalers and smugglers too.

Non-importation agreements (boycotts) had been effective tools of colonial protest in the past. And folks from different levels of society (women and ordinary folks) could get involved and feel like they were making a contribution to the cause of justice. Parliament imposes tax on some set of everyday goods, the colonists boycott those goods, possibly prefer other goods, Parliament repeals the tax. The Townshend taxes (minus the tax on tea) were repealed in the wake of widespread boycotts, and the Tea Act (though it was a tax break) refocused attention on the odious specter of the unrepealed Townsend tax on tea. British Tea was cheap but it stank of that symbolic unrepealed Townsend tax. 

Some refused to be bought, and some folks in Massachusetts Bay Colony tipped 342 chests of cheap East India product into Boston harbor in December 1773. Parliament responded with measures designed to punish and bring Massachusetts to heel, including an act mandating the closure and blockade of the port at Boston beginning June 1st, 1774. Outrage multiplied across the colonies and by late June the Maryland General Assembly (convening illicitly) adopted a non-importation policy (a boycott) in solidarity with Massachusetts: “Notwithstanding the people of this province will have many inconveniences and difficulties to encounter, by breaking off their commercial intercourse with the mother country, … yet their affection and regard to an injured and oppressed sister colony, their duty to themselves, their posterity, and their country, demand the sacrifice—and therefore that this province will join in an association with the other principal and neighbouring colonies, to stop all exportations to, and importations from, Great Britain, until the said acts … be repealed,” namely, until Parliament reopened the port of Boston. 

In Annapolis and Anne Arundel County, a boycott on British tea was already in place, enforced by customs officials (like John Davidson) working the port and by a county oversight committee. The protest in Anne Arundel did not stop at boycott; they added a resolution calling on lawyers to cease and desist prosecuting any suits involving debt owed to British creditors. This debt resolution was a flashpoint for local political tensions, between loyalists and patriots certainly, but also between patriots whose methods of opposition to British policy were forceful yet temperate and radical patriots whose methods were confrontational and tempestuous. Annapolis merchant Anthony Stewart (a loyalist) publicly opposed the debt resolution, later saying that his stance on the matter was a root of the Peggy Stewart affair, a tale to which we now return.

Thomas Charles Wlliams purchased the tea, James Russell signed off on loading the shipment in Peggy Stewart, and both men knew full well which way the winds were blowing in Maryland. Stewart hadn’t purchased the tea, did not own the tea, seems not to have been involved in the decision to ship it, and seems also to have learned about it after the fact. But he paid the Townsend tax in violation of the non-importation policy, and had been done before on account of trying to import embargoed goods. Stewart thus became the focus of public outrage despite likelier candidates for that outrage. 

Patriot radicals suffering from local political setbacks used the 4 days between Peggy Stewart’s arrival and her final disposition to stoke resentment and rage. Handbills were distributed pointing the finger at Stewart. More moderate measures (like burning the 17 and ½ crates of tea) were set aside in favor of grander gestures and outsized political theater. Meanwhile a special committee was appointed to supervise landing the other goods shipped aboard the Peggy Stewart. The tea stayed where it was. Stewart and the Williams brothers issued public apologies and left the disposition of that detestable weed to the Anne Arundel committee in charge of non-importation policy. “We … do … acknowledge that we have committed a most daring insult and act of the most pernicious tendency to the liberties of America…and we will … commit to the flames or otherwise destroy as the people may choose, the detestable article which has been the cause of this, our misconduct.”  

Again, the 4 days between initial meetings about the embargoed tea and the public meeting scheduled for the 19th to decide the matter meant that radicals could steal a march on patriot moderates, fanning the flames of a vocal minority hellbent on doing violence either to Mr. Stewart’s property or to his person. In the end, the Committee and Stewart’s partner and father-law gave consent for the Peggy Stewart to be burned to appease the tyrant minority despite the majority view that a tea bonfire was adequate recompense. Crowds gathered at the waterfront to witness the spectacle. As one scholar put it, “Annapolis had out-Bostoned Boston,” with the consequence that, as eye-witness to the event John Galloway of Tullp Hill wrote to his father: “This most infamous and rascally affair makes all men of property reflect with horror on their present situation to have their lives and property at the disposal and mercy of a Mob.” John continued, “If this is Liberty, If this is Justice, they certainly must have found a new code of laws on Elkridge,” which was an area of Anne Arundel which some of the mob’s ringleaders called home. 

On the 20th of October 1774, 24 year-old Alice Lee of Blenheim scribed a letter addendum to John’s sister Ann Galloway of Tulip HIll, who was away in Philadelphia. Stratford Mail regulars will recall meeting the serious-minded 12-year old Alice Lee in Episode 3: Dear Cousin, where Alice shared her views on marriage and life with her second cousin, William Lee of Stratford and London. Alice was now 24 and visiting in Annapolis. In a letter began on the 19th Alice dished to Ann on her social encounters round town with eligible young men: “dearest fellow, for entre nous, notwithstanding his fine eyes, politeness & soforth he has not those eyes and manners which touch the Soul I think, but these are opinions I spout to you alone.” Her observations on the young men of Annapolis are clinical, far from giddy, and express her canny good sense. Alice concludes her letter: “I think I have done pretty well for tonight but I will not conclude–if anything material happens, shall continue, Adieu Love, your AL.” And now an addendum written on October 20th: “Last night I saw the Brig Peggy Stewart consumed before our windows, on account of the Tea, a spectacle that shocked me much. Mr. S. offered to make all proper concessions yet the merciless mob would not spare his property. I begin to be out of love with Patriotism.” From the mouths of babes, as they say. Rage and faction-first politicking quickly outrun the demands of justice. 

Anthony Stewart and his family were compelled to flee Annapolis: Stewart and Williams later reckoned the loss at 1896 pounds sterling and applied to his Majesty’s government for relief, though the outcome of their application is unknown. Ten weeks before Peggy Stewart harbored in Annapolis, Joshua Johson wrote to his partners there: “I should not be surprised to hear that you had made a bonfire of the Peggy Stewart,” and some will suggest that here was evidence of a rival firm plotting the downfall of a competitor, not proof of Johnson’s prophetic credentials. Eastern shore planter Thomas Ringgold agreed there was a plot, but the mastermind was his acquaintance Anthony Stewart: “From the whole of Mr. Stewart’s conduct I have no doubt but he has premeditated the exploit to endear himself to the ministry.”

6 months to the day, on April 19, 1775, events at Lexington and Concord at once eclipsed and made good on the forces coiled expectantly inside the Annapolis Tea Party, and that is a story for another day

From Stratford Hall Historic Preserve in Westmoreland County, Virginia, I’m the DIrector of Research, Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey.  

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Sound effects courtesy of Pixabay
Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of Play.ht and Murf.ai (except Dr. Steffey)

Thanks to Dwight Sullivan for directing my attention to this letter fragment.

“Let ‘er Burn” (Thomas Guay) from the folk opera, Burn the Peggy Stewart. Elvia Thompson (vocals), Karen Guay (shaker, vocals), Ken Norkin (banjo, vocals), Andy Fegley (shaker, vocals), Kevin Books (bass, vocals) and Tom Guay (guitar, vocals). Directed by Gaylord Livingston.

Episode Art: "The Burning Of The Peggy Stewart," by Jack Manley Rosé, Historic Annapolis. 

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2023