Tomorrow in Greenwich they’ll be partying like it’s 1774.
No, not the Greenwich Village of New York City or the English one that divides east from west. I’m talking the village they pronounce “Green-which” down in southern New Jersey, nestled along the winding banks of the tidal Cohansey River four miles inland from the Delaware Bay.
250 years ago on December 22, residents of Greenwich burned a shipload of tea in defiance of the British Crown. It was the last of 6 tea-burning parties – the first being the famous one in Boston – leading up to the American Revolution.
My childhood home was a half hour’s drive from this Greenwich. When I was a boy, our city of Millville celebrated its 100th anniversary. Men grew beards. Boys donned suspenders. Girls wore bonnets. Women wore flowing ankle-length dresses. We celebrated as if it was 1866 all over again.
Actually, Millville was first incorporated as a township in 1801 when Joseph Buck, a Revolutionary War veteran, outlined streets along the east bank of the Maurice River (pronounced “morris”). But our city leaders in 1966 took advantage of the centennial of Millville becoming a city to throw a party.
When the American revolution started, there were no settlements in what would become Millville. Our end of Cumberland County was forest and swamp. The Lenape (Delaware Indians) still hunted there but lived nearer the Jersey shore to the east.
During our centennial, scant mention was made of these earliest inhabitants who had long before faded into the receding woodlands. The countryside along the Maurice River – Wahatquenak, they called it – served as hunting grounds for the Lenape, their preserve for untold centuries.
I grew up far more familiar with the Maurice River and its tributaries in the eastern part of the county than the Cohansey, which drains the west side. As does the Maurice, the Cohansey meanders its way to the Delaware Bay, bordered by marshlands and infested with mosquitos and greenheads, a most pernicious and despicable fly.
Greenwich, a day’s journey from the Maurice River back then, had been a bustling community along the Cohansey for decades. Its main drag, “Ye Greate Street,” had been laid out 90 years before that tea party. Founded by Quaker John Fenwick, Greenwich was by the 1770s a Presbyterian stronghold. The Presbyterians of Greenwich and nearby Fairfield had been peopled by yeoman farmers from New England.
Steeped in Calvinist faith, some of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of these earliest settlers were graduating from the new College of New Jersey (Princeton University), some of them becoming the area’s youngest generation of ministers. These Presbyterians, both clergy and laity, were also among the most fevered of colonists in revolutionary spirit.
Following the authorization of the Tea Act by the British Parliament, civil disobedience ensued. Most famously, colonists pulled off large-scale boycotts of tea and, in December 1773, the Boston Tea Party. The British Prime Minister, Lord North, reacted by imposing a series of measures known as the Admonishment Acts, including the closing of Boston Harbor. All this led to the colonists convening the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774.
As with many other colonists, residents of Greenwich and the Cohansey district took up drinking coffee and tarring and feathering British loyalists over partisan differences. But generally, the district tended to remain out of the limelight of major political developments.
Until the tea party.
Greenwich had long been a port of entry for the American colonies, situated as it was enroute to Philadelphia further up the Delaware. It was here in December 1774 that Captain J. Allen decided to dock his ship, the Greyhound, instead of going on to his intended destination in Philadelphia. With his cargo of tea, Captain Allen wanted to avoid conflict with agitators in the “City of Brotherly Love”. Upon arrival in Greenwich, the cargo of tea was quietly stored for safekeeping overnight in the cellar of a local British loyalist, Dan Bowen.
However, word spread quickly. Some of Bowen’s neighbors, by then coffee drinkers, met and decided to steal the tea from the cellar and set it on fire. Some of these tea burners were arrested, though by the time their case came to trial, the American Revolution had begun, and it was hard to find enough loyalists to convict them. One of those arrested later became governor of the State of New Jersey, another served in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Of all the tea partiers, the one that has caught historians’ interest the most is Philip Vickers Fithian. One of the most prolific diarists in the 18th century American colonies, Fithian was one of those local boys who grew up on a farm, went to Princeton, and became a Presbyterian minister.
I first ran across Fithian while researching and writing on Virginian Robert Carter III, famous for freeing his slaves following the Revolutionary War. Carter’s biographer, Andrew Levy, writes how Fithian came to serve as a teacher for Carter’s children for a year after graduating from Princeton. Through Fithian’s diaries, historians have gained much insight into Southern plantation life, a world far removed from the one in which Fithian had grown up.
After that year in Virginia, Fithian embarked on a mission tour, preaching among the scattered Scots-Irish settlers along the remote Susquehanna River of Colonial Pennsylvania and in the equally remote Shenandoah Valley of Colonial Virginia. He then served as chaplain of a battalion in the New Jersey infantry, dying in an army camp early on in the Revolutionary War. Though only 29 when he died, his story and his observations have lived on through his voluminous journalings, a goldmine for historians.
In the brief interval between his time with the Carters in Virginia and his mission to the Appalachian valleys, he returned home to his beloved Greenwich to complete licensing work as a Presbyterian minister. He arrived just in time to participate in and, quite possibly, organize the tea party.
Historian John Fea, Fithian’s biographer, writes of this young man’s deep faith. Having grown up in a Presbyterian family, he experienced a religious conversion at the age of 18 in 1766. His political passion grew out of that Calvinist faith and the mentoring he received from John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University and one of the nation’s founders.
Whatever Fithian’s precise role, the tea party was organized by a group of young people known as the Bridge-Town Admonishing Society and by other Cohansey Presbyterians. Bridge-Town (the county seat and now Bridgeton) was a crossroads settlement between three Presbyterian communities – Greenwich, Fairfield, and Deerfield – that formed the heart of Fithian’s agrarian homeland. The Admonishing Society had been organized by Fithian and some of his Princeton friends as a circle for intellectual discussion and civic refinement.
Though his fingerprints are all over the event, Fithian records little of his own role in the tea party. He may have kept his involvement low key as he was in the process of working toward ordination and had preached his first sermon 4 days before.
Nevertheless, Fea draws on evidence from tradition and oral history that puts Fithian squarely in the middle of that crime scene. In 1908, a monument to the Greenwich Tea Party was erected in the center of town, with Fithian’s name listed on the monument as a participant. Stories have come down that the organizing meeting was held at Fithian’s house and the road on which that house stands has been renamed Tea Burner Road.
Fithian recorded in his diary how he had witnessed another tea party, this one in Annapolis, Maryland, on his way home from Carter’s plantation. Meanwhile, Fithian was coming to believe that what he called “political jealousy” was a unifying force in an enlightened society. His was a patriotism spirituality connected with other enlightened partisans along the Eastern Seaboard. As Fea writes, what was happening in Greenwich was bound up with what had been happening in Annapolis, Boston, Princeton, and Philadelphia.
Having grown up in Cumberland County, I’ve often been struck by the composite nature of my home community, sandwiched between more cosmopolitan environs such as New York to the northeast, Philadelphia straight north, Baltimore due west, and Washington, D.C, to the southwest. The state of New Jersey is often joked of as being a unique and eccentric Northeast neighbor. But New Jersey is not of one mind either; South Jerseyans see themselves as quite distinct from the rest of state. And inside South Jersey, Cumberland County is a breed all its own.
The area is a melting pot of generations of immigrant and refugee populations – Pennsylvanians, New Englanders, southern Appalachians, eastern Europeans, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Scots-Irish, and Irish, as well as American Blacks who fled Southern slavery and segregation. Over many generations, that confluence of cultures has formed a new identity that appears at times set apart from the rest of the world. As these populations have contributed to the area’s self-image, something about the area has also impacted its people.
So, too, this unique sense of place was felt in Fithian’s time. New England yeoman farmers who had found a quiet and fertile haven off the beaten path forged a new identity – distinct yet in orbit of Philadelphia 40 miles away. Detached, yet somehow attuned.
Being a unique island in the midst of a cosmopolitan ocean is not the same as isolation. Sometimes the world finds you wherever you are. Such was the case with Fithian, whose universe greatly expanded via Princeton and the Presbyterians, even as his heart remained fixed in Greenwich.
So, too, it was with those Greenwich Tea Partiers. Just like the Greyhound tea, the revolutionary spirit found its way to this seemingly isolated colonial outpost. As Fea writes, “Cohansey Presbyterians engaged imaginatively with a universal and cosmopolitan set of religious, political, and moral ideals, but in the end the action that stemmed from those ideals was local. Such acts of resistance made them revolutionaries.” (149)
In other words, their little world was caught up in much greater happenings that played out in their own outpost. Their political fervor was in large part an outgrowth of their religious identity. Religious revivals had broken out during the Great Awakening of the 1730s. As a result, Presbyterians of the Mid-Atlantic split between “Old Side” and “New Side” factions. To state it simply, maybe too simply, the Old Side emphasized the rational head of faith and the New Side the emotive heart of faith.
Having grown up in mid-20th century Millville, it’s hard for me to picture an emotive heart side of Presbyterians. Gray-stoned First Pres down on 2nd Street, where I went to nursery school, was as heady as they came in the South Jersey sea of heart-warmed Methodists. But well before Methodists and Millville arrived, the Presbyterians had gotten their sides together. By the 1770s, the Calvinists had found a way to reunite heart and head. It was during that reunion that Fithian was converted.
It was that same Calvinism that also gave these colonial Presbyterians their civic fervor, a focus that at times seems to have surpassed their religious fervor. As Fea writes, this struggle was real for young religious leaders like Fithian and those who followed, as politics often came to eclipse faith.
But on that cold December night in 1774, as the tea burners lit their fire, Fithian’s spirituality was what was driving his pursuit of liberty. Spiritual and political freedom went hand in hand for Fithian and his compatriots.
As villagers in Greenwich celebrate their moment in history, I invite you to join me on a journey into the sometimes foggy borderlands between faith on the one hand and politics and civic ideals on the other. From time to time, I write about these borderlands. You are welcome to join me here.
For references used in this post, such as Fea and Levy, check the resource page of my website.
Photo montage: Clockwise from top right – Tea Burning Monument dedication (1908), Greenwich waterfront, Fithian house, cover of Fea’s book
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