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The Tea That Truro Detested
At the same time that patriotic Bostonians were upset mentally and physically over British importation of tea heavily taxed into the young American colonies, Truro on Cape Cod, small as the town was, lifted its voice loudly in praise and support of its brethren in Boston.
The Truro record of February 28, 1774 supplies the following interesting comments:
Several persons appeared in the meeting of whom it had been reported that they had purchased some small quantities of the East India Company’s baneful tea lately cast ashore at Provincetown, and on examining these persons it appeared to the meeting that their buying this noxious tea was through ignorance and inadvertence, and that they were induced thereto by the base and villainous example and artful persuading of some noted pretended friends of Government from the neighboring towns and therefore this meeting thinks them excusable with an acknowledgement.
Truro’s town meeting thereupon appointed a committee of nine prominent male citizens to draw up a resolution bearing on the introduction of tea from Great Britain on which Americans would have to pay a tax—without representation.
The resolution, in the form of one long compound sentence of 475 words declared the Truro people’s love of liberty and dread of slavery to be equal to that of the people of any other part of the province that they considered it their “indispensable duty to contribute (their) mite in the glorious cause of libery and (their) country;” and their sentiment in union with that of their brethren in Boston. They referred to the “late and detestable scheme of sending tea to the colonies by means of the East India Company subject to the unrighteous American duty… a scheme designed to take in the unwary and maintain in idleness and luxury a set of worthless policemen and pensioners, and their creatures who are continually aiming at the sub-version of our happy constitution and whose examples tend to debauch the morals of the people in our seaport towns which swarm with them…”
The good people of Truro declared also that they were mortified that a few weak citizens among them had been “led astray,” “not any person in this town could be prevailed upon to accept the infamous employment of transporting the tea saved out of the Mssrs. Clark’s brigantine from Cape Cod to the Casel, but the repeated solicitations of the owners were refused notwithstanding the owners’ liberal promises of a large reward though we had several vessels here unemployed…”
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