Greenwich Tea Burning Monument

As students in United States schools are taught, opposition to the Tea Act passed by the parliament of Great Britain escalated hostilities between Britain and American colonists, a precursor to the Revolutionary War. On December 16, 1773, seven months after royal assent of the act, 16 members of the loosely organized Sons of Liberty, disguised as Native Americans, threw 342 chests of imported tea from a docked ship into Boston Harbor. “No taxation without representation,” they cried. (This will be on the exam.)

However, the Boston Tea Party (as it came to be known) was only the first and most famous response to the Tea Act. Other documented resistance occurred in Charleston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere along the East Coast. The last and least known protest occurred on December 22, 1774 in Greenwich, New Jersey. East India Company tea, originally bound for Philadelphia and entrusted to a British loyalist in Greenwich, was confiscated and burned.

The revolutionary action in Greenwich (pronounced green-witch) has been a source of local pride ever since. At the centennial of the event, that pride began to focus on a proposal to erect a monument remembering the Greenwich conflagration.

It took several decades to secure funding, but the granite monument was completed in 1908 and is now the centerpiece of the hamlet. The classical façade consists of a carved inscription and drape, separated by a bronze relief illustrating the tea burning, and flanked by Corinthian pilasters. The 23 names in raised letters on the sides are those recalled and collected in the 1830s by Dr. Ebenezer Elmer, who himself took part in the event. However, Jonathan Wood, a former president of the Cumberland County Historical Society, has stated without reservation that some of the listed people “absolutely did not participate.”

The factual error is understandable. Elmer was in his 80s when he collated the list of participants, recollecting an event that occurred six decades earlier. His age notwithstanding, Elmer was duly respected as a source. He was a surgeon in the Revolutionary War and a Brigadier General during the War of 1812. Elmer served in the New Jersey state assembly and senate, as well as the United States House of Representatives. He wasn’t some old coot.

Further, the raid took place at night and the men were disguised. The disguises themselves are another matter of dispute. Oral history has it that the Greenwich raiders wore Native American costumes and reenactors have followed suit. However, a contemporary diary account says only, “Last night the tea was, by a number of persons in disguise, taken out of the house and consumed with fire.” Disguised how is not recorded. Has the oral history evolved so that what occurred in Greenwich replicates what happened a year earlier in Boston?

The tea burning took place after a meeting of prominent citizens at the Shiloh home of  twin brothers Richard and Lewis Howell. The Howells and others would be sued for the theft but with the shift in political sympathies, not indicted for the crime. Richard Howell would go on to be governor of New Jersey from 1793 to 1802 and to an earlier point, neither he nor his brother are named on the monument.

Other than the diary entry, there is only one other contemporary report, a brief account in a Philadelphia newspaper. The oral histories, later reified as fact, are controvertible. Who participated? How were they disguised? Was the tea seized from the loyalist’s cellar or from a shed? Was it taken to a field to be burned, or the market square, near where the monument now stands? Are some of the finer points merely semantic, a difference only in terminology?

What can be said for certain is that 16 months before the beginning of the Revolutionary War, residents of Cumberland County expressed their displeasure with British taxation by burning a cargo of tea and the historic event is a source of local pride, evidenced by a handsome monument in the township of Greenwich.