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86BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL SOCIETY THE PHILADELPHIA COUNTERPART OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY. (As shown by the correspondence of James & Drinker.) INTRODUCTION. BY THOMAS B. TAYLOR. The introduction to the following letters is an attempt to portray some of the conditions in America and Philadelphia in the year 1773. The correspondence here presented is between James & Drinker, of Philadelphia, and Pigon & Booth, of London, England, and New York, concerning the attempted importation of tea from England under the provisions of the act of Parliament passed in May, 1773. The firm of James & Drinker was composed of Abel James and Henry Drinker, members of the Society of Friends, and prominent among the merchants of the town. They were large importers of dry goods and general merchandise , and owners of vessels used in the ocean carrying trade. Their warehouse was on the river front near Race Street. Henry Drinker was for some time Clerk of the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia, highly esteemed as a member of the Society, and died in the year 1809. Pigon & Booth were correspondents of James & Drinker in London and also in New York, where they maintained a house in charge of Benjamin Booth. James & Drinker were subscribers to the celebrated non-importation agreement by the merchants and traders of Philadelphia entered into on October 25th, 1765, as a protest against the odious stamp act and evidently took an active part in its promotion, as Abel James was one of the committee of eleven named in the document to attend to obtaining sub>scriptions of the merchants of the town. As appears by letters of Henry Drinker published in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (Vol. 14, page 41), he himself became a member of the Executive Committee during or prior to 1769, when the non-importation agreements were renewed throughout the Colonies as a protest against the Revenue Act then existing. As we shall see by this correspondence James & Drinker and also Benjamin Booth received the appointment of Tea Commissioners in 1773. The letters of James & Drinker are from their original drafts made with pen and ink, to be copied by clerks, and filed with the originals of Pigon & Booth. We have all as school children learned of the riotous act of the Bostonians in emptying ship-loads of Tea into their harbor, but many of us did not know or realize that the agitation and first steps of the resistance which developed into that riot were taken in the State House PHILADELPHIA TEA PARTY, 177387 yard, in Philadelphia; and that Philadelphia, as a community, was in as much of a ferment during that summer and autumn as was Boston or New York, the difference being simply in the temper of the respective peoples and their mode of treatment. For three generations or more prior to 1764 the American Colonies had but lightly felt the governing hand of England. The country had been peopled largely at first by those whom England was well satisfied and even glad to be rid of—Puritans, Quakers and other religious dissenters , besides large numbers of political offenders, and criminals, whose sentence, to be "transported beyond sea," meant that they be landed in America to begin life anew. These, in all comparatively a few thousand, had, at the time of which we write, grown, by natural increase, to a population of over 2,000,000 white inhabitants. Moreover in the free and open political and social atmosphere of America there had developed among them a strong and self-reliant citizenship, fully capable and willing for self-government, keenly alive to their advantages of location so far away from England, and jealous for the retention of their given and acquired rights. Historians point out that it was the menace of the French colonizing on the Northern and Western borders that, prior to 1763, prevented England from attempting a more rigorous system of government for the Colonies. When, after the defeat and subjugation of the French Colonies, in 1763, the Mother Country the following year did commence the reconstruction of her Colonial affairs it proved to be too late. The transition into practical self-government and a condition of semi-independence had been going...

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