Peggy Stewart (ship)
Most ships' captains refused to carry tea, but in the summer of 1774, one merchant, Thomas Charles Williams, the London representative of an Annapolis family firm, thought he had found a cunning way around that problem.
The worried captain, Richard Jackson, was told that the packages contained linen,[5] but to avoid the possibility of being prosecuted for smuggling, Williams correctly identified the consignment as tea on his Customs declaration.
[6] However, once declared to Customs officials in Britain, the tea had to be taken to its appointed destination — preferably before the autumn gales began, for Peggy Stewart needed an overhaul and leaked quite badly.
Whatever Thomas had intended, his brothers had no interest in his mad scheme, so they refused to pay the tax, and arranged a meeting with the committee which supervised the tea boycott, to discuss the problem.
On the other hand, one committee member, Mathias Hammond, published a handbill on 15 October, denouncing Stewart (and omitting to mention that the Williams brothers themselves had been the ones who notified him of the tea importation), and stirred up a great deal of popular fervor.
Mr Stewart then voluntarily offered to burn the vessel and the tea in her...[9]A letter to the Baltimore Patriot newspaper immediately after the death of successful physician and businessman Dr Charles Alexander Warfield, in 1813 expands greatly on that short account.
[10] Warfield, recently appointed a Major in the new Anne Arundel County militia, had not only argued with moderate patriots like Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase; he had allegedly had a gallows erected outside Stewart's house.
The Gazette did publish a letter from the Williams brothers in which, among other things, they complained that their complete willingness to co-operate with the committee was "kept entirely secret" from the angry throng, and instead "a most ungenerous piece was drawn up by Mathias Hammond.
"[11] Anthony Stewart and his family spent most of the years of the American Revolutionary War living in New York, where he served on the board of directors of the Associated Loyalists; then in 1783 he attempted, with one Samuel Gouldsbury, to found a community called New Edinburgh, in Nova Scotia.
On October 19, 1904, the city of Baltimore commemorated the event with The Burning of the Peggy Stewart, a mural by Charles Yardley Turner (1850–1919), painted on the west wall of the Criminal Court Lobby in the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr.
