Annapolis Burns Tea Ship: Colonies Defy British Rule

A crowd of Annapolis citizens forced the owner of the brigantine Peggy Stewart to set fire to his own ship — with its cargo of 2,320 pounds of tea still aboard — on October 14, 1774, in one of the most dramatic acts of colonial defiance before the American Revolution. The burning was more radical than the better-known Boston Tea Party ten months earlier, where protesters merely dumped tea into the harbor rather than destroying an entire vessel. The crisis began when Anthony Stewart, a wealthy Annapolis merchant, paid the import duty on a shipment of tea consigned to the firm of Thomas Charles Williams & Co., violating the colonial boycott of British-taxed tea. The Maryland colony had adopted the same resistance to the Tea Act of 1773 that swept through all thirteen colonies, and Stewart's payment of the tax was seen as a betrayal of the patriot cause. When word spread, an angry crowd gathered at the Annapolis waterfront. Local revolutionary leaders, including Matthias Hammond and Charles Carroll of Carrollton (later a signer of the Declaration of Independence), organized a meeting that demanded Stewart account for his actions. Stewart initially offered to destroy just the tea, but the crowd demanded the ship itself be burned. Faced with threats against his family and property, Stewart agreed to torch the Peggy Stewart at its moorings, with tea, sails, and rigging aboard. He personally carried the torch. The Annapolis Tea Burning demonstrated how quickly colonial resistance was escalating from economic protest to destruction of private property. Unlike Boston, where the Sons of Liberty carefully targeted only the tea, the Annapolis crowd demanded total destruction as punishment for collaboration. Stewart eventually fled Maryland as a Loyalist during the Revolution. The event is less famous than the Boston Tea Party primarily because Massachusetts produced more of the early Republic's historians, but the burning of the Peggy Stewart was arguably the more radical and consequential act of revolutionary defiance.