1768 Stampless Folded letter, Boston to Newport, From John Lowell Referencing the Sons of Liberty, Privately Carried

Stampless folded letter datelined Boston, April 18, 1768, addressed to Mr. Christopher Champlin, Merchant, in Newport and carried "By Capt Elsbie"
The letter is written and signed by John Lowell of Boston who instructs Champlin that future shipments should be consigned to a third party with bills of lading kept under cover,
"for our Sons of Liberty have Excited the assessors to examine the manifests of every London ship to Rate the Importers for their Value, especially those that refused to sign the Association."
The "Association" referenced is the Boston Non-Importation Agreement of March 1, 1768, in which Boston merchants pledged to refrain from importing specified British goods in protest of the Townshend Acts of 1767. The letter documents that the Sons of Liberty were pressuring Boston tax assessors to examine ship manifests and to rate non-signing importers at the full value of their imports as a means of enforcing compliance with the Agreement. The letter was written approximately two months before the seizure of John Hancock's sloop Liberty by customs officials on June 10, 1768, an event that triggered the Liberty Riot and accelerated the events leading to the Boston Massacre and ultimately the Revolution.
The writer is John Lowell (1743 to 1802) of Boston, a Massachusetts lawyer who served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, helped draft the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and was appointed by President Washington to the United States District Court for Massachusetts in 1789.