Greenwich Tea Burning

On the night of December 22, 1774, the village of Greenwich, New Jersey, did not look like a place where history planned to stop. It sat along the Cohansey River, quiet and provincial, the sort of town that lived by tides, fields, sermons, and gossip. Its market square was no grand civic plaza, just an open space where people traded goods, news, and glances. Yet that winter night, the square burned bright enough to be seen from the river, and the flames carried with them something more volatile than tea. They carried the sound of a society deciding that patience had run out.

The bonfire itself was simple. Chests of East India Company tea were stacked, split, and thrown into the fire. Sparks rose into the cold air, leaves curled and blackened, and men who had grown up together danced and shouted around the blaze. It was not quiet. It was not subtle. It was not the careful theater of Boston Harbor a year earlier. Greenwich was making a statement in the open, and it did so late in the long season of colonial protest, when illusions about compromise had grown thin. By December 1774, the argument was no longer about whether Parliament might listen. It was about whether obedience still made moral sense.

The Tea Act of 1773 was supposed to be clever. Parliament believed it had found a way to save the East India Company from collapse while reaffirming the right to tax the colonies. By allowing the company to sell tea directly, cutting out middlemen, British officials assumed colonists would accept a cheaper product and quietly swallow the tax that came with it. Instead, the act landed like an insult wrapped in a bargain. The price was lower, yes, but the principle was unbearable. To buy the tea was to accept Parliament’s authority to tax without consent. That was the trap, and colonial leaders across the continent saw it clearly.

Resistance followed in a pattern that now feels familiar, though it did not at the time. Boston’s destruction of tea in December 1773 captured imaginations and headlines, but it did not stand alone for long. Charleston seized tea and locked it away, only to see it dumped later when tempers hardened. Philadelphia turned ships away under threat of violence. Annapolis forced a merchant to burn his own ship, the Peggy Stewart, along with its cargo, as a kind of public penance. Princeton students raided their college steward’s tea supply and burned it in January 1774, youthful rebellion with a theological backbone. Tea was becoming radioactive. No port wanted it. No town wanted the moral contamination that came with it.

New Jersey occupied an odd position in this geography of resistance. It had no dominant port city like Boston or Philadelphia, but it sat between them, threaded with roads, rivers, and small harbors that suddenly mattered a great deal. When the larger ports closed themselves to tea, British captains looked for quieter places. Greenwich, a principal settlement of Cumberland County, founded by the Quaker John Fenwick decades earlier, seemed an unlikely flashpoint. It was rural, devout, and deeply Presbyterian in its political temperament. That temperament mattered more than geography.

In early December 1774, the brig Greyhound entered the Delaware Bay. She was bound for Philadelphia, carrying tea owned by merchants who believed that time and discretion might succeed where force had failed. The Greyhound’s captain, J. Allen, received warnings from pilots who knew the river and the mood upriver. Philadelphia, they told him, was in no condition to welcome tea. Committees watched the docks. Crowds gathered easily. Tempers were sharp. Allen listened. He turned the Greyhound north and then east, up the Cohansey River, toward Greenwich.

The town saw the ship arrive between December 12 and 14. The landing was meant to be discreet. Captain Allen found a local loyalist, Daniel Bowen, willing to store the tea in his cellar until it could be moved overland. Bowen’s cooperation was not unusual. Loyalism in New Jersey often took the form of quiet assistance rather than loud declarations. Goods came and went. Cellars were deep. Roads were long. The plan might have worked if Greenwich had been less attentive to itself.

It was not. People noticed the activity at the wharf. They noticed carts, whispers, and the kind of careful behavior that always draws attention in a small town. Word spread quickly. Tea had arrived. Not rumor, not theory, but physical chests sitting beneath Bowen’s floorboards. The baneful leaf was among them.

The first response was procedural. Cumberland County had committees like everyone else, and they convened one. Five men were appointed to investigate, and then a larger committee of thirty five met at Bridgeton to decide what to do. Their instincts were cautious. Store the tea, they suggested, and wait for instructions from the Continental Congress. It was a reasonable answer in a year when committees still believed they were managing a crisis rather than tumbling toward a war.

That answer did not satisfy everyone. It especially failed to satisfy the younger men of the county, many of them educated, serious, and shaped by the intellectual climate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. Presbyterian thought ran deep here, especially the idea of political jealousy, the belief that virtuous citizens had a moral duty to watch government closely for corruption and tyranny. Liberty was not passive. It required vigilance. It required action.

Philip Vickers Fithian, a local son and Princeton graduate, captured this mindset in his journals. He wrote about luxury as a moral failing, about resistance as a spiritual obligation. For Fithian and his peers, the tea was not merely taxed goods. It was a symbol of moral decay, of a distant authority attempting to train colonists in obedience through comfort. To store it quietly was to participate in the corruption.

While the committee deliberated, a different meeting took shape. Richard and Lewis Howell, brothers from a prominent local family, opened their home near Shiloh to like minded young men. Plans were made with urgency and clarity. If the committee would not act, they would. The decision was not impulsive, but it was resolute. Tea would not sit quietly in Greenwich. It would burn.

On December 22, between twenty three and forty men gathered, depending on whose memory one trusts. They disguised themselves as Native Americans, following the precedent set in Boston, though reports suggest the disguises were uneven at best. This was not theatrical pageantry. It was symbolic anonymity, a way of signaling that they acted as a people rather than as individuals seeking credit.

They marched to Bowen’s house on Ye Greate Street. There was no pretense of legality. They forced entry into the cellar and hauled the chests into the open. From there they carried them to the market square, where a fire was already waiting or was built quickly enough to seem inevitable. The chests were broken open and thrown into the flames. Tea leaves hissed and burned. Smoke rose thick and unmistakable.

Unlike Boston’s operation, which later generations would romanticize as disciplined and solemn, Greenwich’s burning was loud and celebratory. Witnesses recalled dancing, shouting, and the unmistakable joy of release. For a moment, the burdens of petitions, pamphlets, and unanswered grievances lifted into the night air. This was not about persuading Parliament. It was about refusing it.

The story of Henry Stacks has survived because it feels so human. In the chaos of the fire, Stacks attempted to stuff tea into his trousers, perhaps thinking no one would notice, perhaps hoping to salvage a little value from the destruction. He was caught almost immediately. His companions forced him to return the tea to the fire, and the nickname Tea Stacks followed him for the rest of his life. The anecdote endures because it punctures any temptation to mythologize the event too neatly. These were not saints. They were young men, capable of temptation and ridicule, bound together by shared purpose rather than perfection.

The morning after the burning, Greenwich woke up to consequences. The tea’s owners, William Duffield and Thomas Hepburn, filed civil suits for trespass and damages. Law still existed. Courts still met. Royal authority still claimed jurisdiction. The question was whether anyone believed in it enough to enforce it.

The community responded by raising a defense fund. The burners were represented by prominent Whig lawyers, including Joseph Bloomfield and Elias Boudinot, men who understood that this case was about more than compensation for destroyed goods. It was about whether resistance itself could be criminalized at a moment when obedience was collapsing.

In May 1775, a grand jury convened. The Loyalist chief justice, Frederick Smyth, charged the jurors to indict the men responsible. The jury listened. They deliberated. They refused. Smyth sent them back out. They returned with the same answer. No indictment. The foreman, Daniel Elmer, was himself a Whig sympathizer. The jury’s refusal was an act of defiance as clear as the bonfire had been months earlier. Royal law had lost its teeth.

Within a year, the question became moot. War broke out. New Jersey adopted a new constitution. Royal judges fled or were removed. The civil suits quietly disappeared. The tea was gone, and so was the world that had produced it.

What makes the Greenwich Tea Burning remarkable is not just the act itself, but the people who carried it out. These were not anonymous laborers destined to vanish into the footnotes. Many became the leadership of the new state and the new nation. Richard Howell served as a major in the Continental Army and later became the third governor of New Jersey. His granddaughter, Varina Howell, would marry Jefferson Davis, a reminder that revolutionary pedigrees did not dictate future loyalties. Ebenezer Elmer, a medical student at the time of the burning, became an army surgeon, Speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, and a United States Congressman. He later provided the list of participants, ensuring the event did not fade into rumor. Andrew Hunter Jr., another Princeton graduate, became a chaplain in the Continental Army and later a professor. Philip Vickers Fithian did not live to see independence, dying in 1776 while serving as a chaplain, his journals left behind as testimony to the moral seriousness of the moment. James Ewing went on to become mayor of Trenton.

These careers matter because they challenge the idea that revolutionary action was the work of a reckless fringe. In Greenwich, it was the future establishment lighting the fire. They were young, but they were educated, connected, and deeply invested in the moral language of liberty. They believed, with a conviction shaped by sermons and syllabi, that tyranny thrived on delay and decorum.

Memory, however, is selective. Boston’s Tea Party became iconic, replayed endlessly in textbooks and reenactments. Greenwich’s burning faded into regional history, commemorated locally but rarely nationally. In 1908, a granite monument was erected in the market square, listing the names of the participants and marking the place where the tea burned. The town preserved Ye Greate Street. Reenactments kept the story alive. Yet outside New Jersey, Greenwich remained obscure, despite being one of only a handful of places where tea met fire in the years before the war.

That obscurity tells its own story. American memory prefers clean symbols and central stages. It likes harbors and headlines. It struggles with rural complexity, with events that emerge not from a single flash of outrage but from months of argument, prayer, and planning. Greenwich does not fit the mold of spontaneous rebellion. It represents something more unsettling, a community that moved deliberately from protest to refusal.

The Greenwich Tea Burning matters today not because it offers a tidy lesson, but because it reveals how revolutions actually ripen. They do not begin with declarations. They begin with committees that fail, with young people who lose patience, with moral languages that turn practical. They begin when law no longer commands loyalty, and when ordinary places become stages for irreversible choices.

On that cold December night, the people of Greenwich did not know exactly what would follow. They did not know the names of battles yet to come or the cost that independence would demand. What they knew was simpler and heavier. They knew that the tea could not remain. They knew that waiting had become a form of surrender. The flames in the market square did not start the American Revolution, but they signaled, unmistakably, that in New Jersey, there was no turning back.