On the 18th of March, 1766, the Stamp Act was repealed. It had remained in force but one year, and was then repealed in an effort to pacify the colonists. A duty was placed on tea and other imports which the colonists had always admitted to be a valid act of the Parliament. Whatever might be said of the Stamp Act, the tea duty was certainly not a real grievance to Americans, for Parliament had relieved the colonists of a duty of 12d. in the pound which had hitherto been levied in England, and the colonists were only asked, in compensation, to pay a duty of 3d. in the pound on arrival of the tea in America. The measure, therefore, was not an act of oppression, but of relief, making the price of tea in the colonies positively cheaper by 9d. per pound than it had been before. But the turbulent spirits were not to be satisfied so easily. They organized an immense boycott against British goods and commercial intercourse with England, and appointed vigilance committees in many communities to see that the boycott was rigidly enforced. Hutchinson, in describing them, says: "In this Province the faction is headed by the lowest, dirtiest, and most abject part of the community, and so absurdly do the Council and House of Representatives reason, that they justify this anarchy, the worst of tyranny, as necessary to remove a single instance of what they call oppression; they have persecuted my sons with peculiar pleasure." August 26, 1770, he wrote to William Parker, of Portsmouth: "You certainly think right when you think Boston people are run mad. The frenzy was not higher when they banished my pious great-grandmother, when they hanged the Quakers, when they afterwards hanged the poor innocent witches, when they were carried away with a Land Bank, or when they all turned "New Lights," than the political frenzy has been for a twelve-month past."[31] [31] "Life of Hutchinson," page 195. In December, 1773, three ships laden with tea, private property of an innocent corporation, arrived at Boston, and on the 16th of that month, forty or fifty men, disguised as Mohawk Indians, under the direction of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and others, boarded the vessels, posted sentinels to keep all agents of authority off at a distance, and flung the three cargoes, consisting of three hundred and forty-two chests, into the harbor. How can we, law-abiding citizens, applaud the "Boston Tea Party" and condemn the high-handed conduct of strike-leaders of the present time? In this transaction some respectable men were engaged, and their posterity affects to be proud of it. But they were not proud of it at the time. In their disguise as Indians they were not recognized, and the few well-known names among them were not divulged till the rebellion became a successful revolution. It probably made no "patriots." We have proof that it afterwards turned the scales against the patriot cause with some who had sympathized with it and taken part in it.