Well before the Boston Tea Party took place, furniture upholsterer and wallpaper merchant Moses Grant was politically active in the politically charged town of Boston, Massachusetts.
A member of the Corps of Cadets, a volunteer militia under the command of John Hancock, Grant served with a number of fellow would-be Boston Tea Party participants.
When assigned as honor guard at the governor’s annual election day dinner for the Customs Commissioners in May 1773, fellow Cadet James Foster Condy and Grant refused to show proper respect to the despised commissioners. Hancock dismissed the two on the spot, so they joined the already-gathered crowd in further insulting the commissioners by pelting them with mud.
Prior to the Boston Tea Party itself, Moses Grant stood as a volunteer “guard” aboard the tea ship Dartmouth on November 29, 1773. Grant was reportedly one of the men (along with Boston Tea Party participants Samuel Gore and James Brewer) who spirited away two three-pound brass guns from the West Street gun house before they could be turned over to British General Gage upon his arrival in Boston on May 13, 1774. On December 7, 1774, at the Boston Town Meeting, Grant was “appointed one of a committee to appoint a committee to see that the Resolutions of the Continental Congress were carried into execution,” along with Samuel Gore and James Brewer. Further to that service, Grant was chosen as a member of the Committee of Correspondence, Inspection, and Safety at a March 10, 1777, Town meeting. In 1776, Grant was drafted from the Ward 6 militia in Boston for service in the Continental Army. Grant served as Deacon at the Brattle Street Church from 1793-1817.
Moses Grant died on December 22, 1817, in Boston, Massachusetts, and is buried at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End neighborhood.
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