George Robert Twelves Hewes

(August 25, 1742 – November 5, 1840) 

Unique among known Boston Tea Party participants, local shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes not only admitted his involvement, but he also exploited it.

In 1835, Hewes’ autobiography entitled  Traits of the Tea Party […], was published, relating his first-person accounts to numerous pre-revolutionary events in Boston, Massachusetts, including the “destruction of the tea.” This source provided one of the first published comprehensive lists of Boston Tea Party participants, given to the publisher by “an aged Bostonian,” which historians have largely assumed to be Hewes, although never outrightly stated.   

Hewes was born in Wrentham, Massachusetts, and in 1773 had a shop near Griffin’s Wharf, near the corner of Purchase and Pearl Streets. By his own account, in the years before the Boston Tea Party, Hewes attempted to enlist in the British army at the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754 but was rejected due to his short stature. Hewes was present in the crowd at the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770, and caught the mortally wounded James Caldwell as he fell, then helped carry him to a nearby doctor. Later that year, Hewes spent time in a debtor’s prison. Confirming that their financial situation likely remained precarious, Hewes’ wife, Sarah, reportedly remarked when he returned home from tossing the tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, that she hoped he brought home “a lot of it [tea].”  

During the destruction of the tea, Hewes was charged with being a “lookout,” and recalls in his autobiography that he was a part of Lendall Pitts’s boarding party on the Brig Beaver, and was chosen to be lookout due to his whistling talent. He served as “boatswain” of sorts during the destruction. Hewes’s autobiography is also the earliest to state that it was about 100-150 men who boarded the ships to destroy tea, split into three separate groups. Hewes also recounts that he was the one who caught a hold of a man named Charles Conner (or O’Conner), who had filled his coat with stolen tea as he was working. Hewes spotted him, reported this to Lendall Pitts, and caught Conner by his coat-skirts as he tried to escape, aware that he had been caught. According to Thatcher in the autobiography,

“He turned out to be an old fellowapprentice of Hewes — having once lived with him at Downing’ s. They recognized each other in the course of the scuffle, and O’Connor, calling him by name, threatened to “complain to the Governor.” “You had better make your will first !” quoth Hewes, doubling his fist expressively — but he fled, without awaiting the result of the argument.”

Hewes’s vivid account of the night’s events is one of the most reliable overall accounts of the life of an ordinary person living through the Revolutionary period that has been produced.

In the month following the Boston Tea Party, emotion ran high as George Hewes got into a confrontation with a known customs informer, John Malcom. The gathered mob sided with Hewes and tarred and feathered Malcom. Hewes’ Revolutionary War pension stated that in 1777, he volunteered aboard the privateer Diamond out of Providence, Rhode Island, for months. The following year, he volunteered to serve again in the battle of Newport and from there went to sea again on the Defence sailing from Boston. The ship and her crew were remarkably proficient at capturing British ships and munitions while under sail up and down the East Coast and as far asea as Jamaica. 

Following the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia in 1781, George Hewes marched with Colonel Drury’s regiment from Attleboro, Massachusetts, to West Point in New York. Hewes and his family lived in Wrentham, Massachusetts, for years before moving to Richfield, Otsego County, New York, by 1820, where he lived for the rest of his days. 

George Robert Twelves Hewes died in German Flatts, Herkimer County, New York, on November 5, 1840. He is buried in Lakeview Cemetery in Richfield Springs, New York.