Earlier this month, I wrote about the June 1770 arrival in Annapolis of a ship from Rhode Island, where some residents had reportedly abandoned their boycott of English goods, thereby breaking faith with their fellow Americans. Annapolitans resolved to cut their business ties with Rhode Island, and they voted unanimously to consider any locals who purchased goods from Captain Whitney’s ship guilty of violating the nonimportation association. Thomas Williams protested that he had no way of knowing that acquiring some molasses and rum would land him and his company in such hot water.
Even before Whitney’s ship sailed into Annapolis harbor, Boston merchants began pressuring their Newport counterparts to get their diminutive colony back in line. According to an article printed in the June 21, 1770 Maryland Gazette, that’s exactly what had already happened three weeks earlier.
In Newport, the “Merchants and Traders of this Town had Two Meetings” at which they renewed their boycott agreement and appointed a Committee of Inspection to carefully inventory and properly secure any goods which had already been received “contrary to said Agreement.” The Committee would check on the impounded goods “at least once every Week, ’til the Duty on Tea is repealed, and expose every Person who shall be so base as to offer to open any of the Packages; and to render it impossible for the Owners of said Goods to commit any Fraud without being discovered.”
Newport was clamping down, and Annapolis patriots were determined to do the same. The local Committee of Inspection called a June 26th meeting and instructed “the Importers of Goods into Annapolis and its Neighborhood, which have already landed, to lay their Papers before the Committee.” In the future, papers should be “submitted to Inspection before the landing of the Goods.”
The next column over from these two brief notices in the Maryland Gazette was taken up by a letter “TO THE PRINTERS” by an unsigned author. The anonymous writer cautioned readers not to be “duped into an entire Neglect of their Resolutions” by fake news that other colonies were loosening their boycotts; instead, such ploys should “put them more than ever upon their Guard.” He warned that “Discord and Division in the Community has proved the Ruin of many a State and Nation.” Patriotic Americans should “use every Means in their Power to detect and expose any such Person … who pursues any Measures destructive to the Rights and Liberties of ourselves and Posterity.” Only by such means could colonists “preserve our Liberty, and, with that, our Loyalty to our Sovereign.”
The author continued: “Liberty and Loyalty, my Countrymen, must either stand or fall together.” The tyrannical destruction of liberty and oppressive enforcement of obedience “has cost some Sovereigns and many Subjects their Lives, and in the End has proved the Overthrow of Kingdoms and Nations.” That America would never suffer such a wretched fate was the writer’s sincerest wish.
Read the full June 21, 1770 issue of the Maryland Gazette starting here: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001281/html/m1281-1054.html
Glenn E. Campbell
HA Senior Historian
