Storming the Old Granary: The Boston Bread Riot of 1713 & America's First Act of Civil Disobedience

 The Puritans who settled in Boston during the early 17th century built a large wooden structure on Boston Common in around the year 1635 that they called The Granary.  

Since there is little arable land surrounding Boston, the Granary was, arguably, the most important building in the city during many of the years prior to the American Revolution.  This large wooden warehouse, which stored mostly flour and corn, was the key to survival for Boston’s residents throughout the long months of the harsh and unforgiving New England winter when coastal shipping and fishing was perilous and very limited.

By the year 1713, some seventy years after it had first been built, the same structure still stood in its original spot on Boston Common, but by that time the citizens of Boston--grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the city’s first settlers--had taken to calling the building, not without a slight touch of affection, “The Old Granary”.

As the 18th century dawned, and the Granary in Boston turned into “The Old Granary” the English colonies in North America had been thrown into a state of great upheaval with the outbreak of what history has called Queen Anne’s War in 1702.  Queen Anne’s War was a vicious struggle for dominance of colonial possessions between England, France and Spain--a 1700’s version of a World War that would pop up periodically throughout that century--and engulf the American continent in nearly eight decades of continuous warfare.  Colonial Americans living in Boston, and all across New England for that matter, had to defend themselves on all sides from French and Spanish naval fleets and from constant attacks by hostile Native American tribes that had been recruited by their enemies to lay waste to the British colonies.

It was during this period of tumult and conflict that wealthy merchants in the city of Boston, none more so than one man Andrew Belcher along with the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s own Lieutenant Governor, sought to profit from the war and cash in on rising grain prices.  Belcher and other wealthy merchants, with a wink and a nod from the local government, hoarded grain in the Old Granary as the price rose due to Queen Anne’s War.  They neither distributed the grain to shops and bakeries in Boston, nor would the merchants led by Belcher sell the grain back to the citizens at reasonable prices.  Instead, the merchants held on to the grain in the Old Granary as prices rose and then sold it back to the British Royal Navy for export to English colonies in the Caribbean at an immense profit.

Meanwhile, as war raged around them and wealthy merchants hoarded food in the Old Granary during the winter of 1713, the citizens of Boston, few of whom owned land and could even vote, starved.  The majority of the civilians still living in the city at that time were women and children as most of the men were constantly being called away by the colonial militia to fight hostile tribes in the countryside, so that the majority of those who died in Boston in 1713 due to starvation because of the greed and profiteering of Andrew Belcher and his ilk were helpless women and children.

The Site of the Old Granary on Boston Common 

And then, something happened for the first time in American history--the people rose up in protest against the constant food shortages that they had endured during Queen Anne’s War.  Actually, it was a little bit more than a protest--it’s called the Boston Bread Riot of 1713 for a reason. 

On May 19, 1713 two-hundred angry Bostonians gathered in protest over the exorbitant price of grain on Boston Common.  Keep in mind, two-hundred people would have represented a very sizable portion of the city’s population at a time when historians believe that the total population of Boston hovered somewhere around only about 9,000 individuals.

As the protest gathered momentum on this warm and sunny spring day in 1713 the crowd swelled in size and rose in anger led by the cries and screams of Boston’s starving women who sought only to feed their children.  Reaching an absolute fever pitch--the crowd broke down the old wooden iron-reinforced doors and stormed the Old Granary!

In the past, there had been other protests in Colonial Boston.  Some had protested customs duties, and the more religious minded in the city had protested brothels and taverns, but nothing like the force and violence of the Boston Bread Riot of 1713 had ever happened in the largely peaceful and still Puritanical New England city before.

The Boston Bread Riot happened even though the city’s famous Pastor Cotton Mather, of Salem Witch Trial fame, had counseled the starving citizens only the week prior in one his sermons on the Sabbath saying, “Tis the Lord who has Taken away from you what He has given to Others.”

Mather’s words fell on deaf ears and the poor and starving citizens of Boston sought to take back what had been taken from them by force on that momentous day of May 19, 1713.

On the afternoon of the riot the Lieutenant Governor, a man named William Taller who was a close friend of Andrew Belcher's, attempted to stop the storming of the Old Granary.  He tried to hold back the hungry and angry mob by holding up his arms and exhorting the citizens of Boston to follow Mather’s lead.  He even offered to negotiate and lower the price of grain temporarily to sell back to the city’s shops and bakeries.  He was ignored.  When he continued to try and stop the rioters from looting the Old Granary he was shot in the arm.  Those who shot him were never brought to justice.

Storming the Old Granary May 19, 1713

As darkness descended on Boston Common on the evening of May 19, 1713 the Old Granary was left empty and nearly in ruins.  The starving citizens had taken all the grain for themselves and left the rich merchants of the city like Andrew Belcher, at least temporarily, broke and out of work.

The unexpected violence and ferocity of the Boston Bread Riot of 1713--the first true largescale riot or act of civil disobedience in American history--so shocked and scared the normally slow moving colonial legislature that local colonial officials sprung into action in a largely futile attempt to pass legislation which would hopefully mitigate the frequent food shortages in Boston through regulation designed to prevent hoarding and price gouging of grain by the city’s wealthy merchants and wholesalers.

William Taller would recover from his wounds and go on to serve as the colony’s Lieutenant Governor until 1716.  Andrew Belcher, for his part, would live to the ripe old age of seventy-nine years.  Always true to his colors, Belcher would prove to be a traitor to the Patriot cause in Boston during the start of America’s War for Independence in 1775, and he would flee the city with departing British forces for Nova Scotia in 1776 where he would go on to have a long and successful career as a judge and assemblyman in Halifax.  At the time of his death in 1841 Andrew Belcher would STILL be considered one of the wealthiest men in North America.  

Though Belcher still profited in the end, as a direct result of the Boston Bread Riot of 1713, laws were established that required all ships which docked in Boston to sell at least some of their grain back to the city’s then fifteen bakeries at cost and another granary in addition to the “Old Granary” which had been built so long ago by the Puritans was constructed on Boston Common solely to provide grain to the city’s poor who did not own any property.

Andrew Belcher

It would seem that for a time at least, these changes worked and there is really little mention of popular unrest in the historical annals of colonial Boston between the years 1713 to 1741.  But, in 1741 due once again to conflict overseas and bad harvests at home food shortages would come to plague the poor citizens of Boston once more.  This time they would burn the Old Granary, that by then had stood for over 100 years, to the ground for good!

In the end, although Bread Riot of 1713 may not have done much to alleviate the suffering of the poor in colonial Boston it was an act of defiance against local colonial government and it should be remembered in American history as the spark that may have led directly to the Sons of Liberty and the start of America’s War for Independence in the city of Boston only two generations later in 1775.