wledge of the ways in which men will react
toward each other in their primitive, natural relations. In this
respect he was one of the wisest among the statesmen.

He does not seem to have joined in such clandestine methods as those
of the Committees of Correspondence, which Samuel Adams and some of
the most radical patriots in the Bay State had organized, but he said
in the Virginia Convention, in 1774: "I will raise one thousand men,
subsist them at my own expense and march myself at their head for the
relief of Boston."[1] The ardor of Washington's offer matched the
increasing anger of the Colonists. Lord North, abetted by the British
Parliament, had continued to exasperate them by passing new bills
which could have produced under the best circumstances only a
comparatively small revenue. One of these imposed a tax on tea. The
Colonists not only refused to buy it, but to have it landed. In Boston
a large crowd gathered and listened to much fiery speech-making.
Suddenly, a body of fifty men disguised as Mohawk Indians rushed
down to the wharves, rowed out to the three vessels in which a large
consignment of tea had been sent across the ocean, hoisted it out of
the holds to the decks and scattered the contents of three hundred and
forty chests in Boston Harbor.

[Footnote 1: _John Adams's Diary_, August 31, 1774, quoting Lynch.]

The Boston Tea Party was as sensational as if it had sprang from
the brain of a Paris Jacobin in the French Revolution. It created
excitement among the American Colonists from Portsmouth to Charleston.
Six more of the Colonies enrolled Committees of Correspondence,
Pennsylvania alone refusing to join. In every quarter American
patriots felt exalted. In England the reverse effects were signalized
with equal vehemence. The Mock Indians were denounced as incendiaries,
and the town meetings were condemned as "nurseries of sedition."
Parliament passed four penal laws, the first of which punished Boston
by transferring its port to Salem and closing its harbor. The second
law suspended the charter of the Province and added several new and
tyrannical powers to the British Governor and to Crown officials.

On September 5, 1774, the first Continental Congress met in
Philadelphia. Except Georgia, every Colony sent delegates to it. The
election of those delegates was in several cases irregular, because
the body which chose them was not the Legislature but some temporary
body of the patriots. Neverthele