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Most Americans can tell you that the first unofficial “declaration of independence” happened in Boston, when a band of tax-hating renegades dumped King George’s beloved tea into the harbor, a spirited act of defiance that united the colonies in revolution.
But as with most well-trod origin stories, the true history of the Boston Tea Party is far more complicated than the grammar-school version, and the real facts of what happened on that fateful night in 1773 might surprise you.
1. Colonists weren’t protesting a higher tax on tea.
Easily the biggest surprise about the Boston Tea Party is that the uprising wasn’t a protest against a new tax hike on tea. Although taxes stoked colonist anger, the Tea Act itself didn’t raise the price of tea in the colonies by one red cent (or shilling, as it were).
The confusion is partly timing and partly semantics. Boston’s Sons of Liberty were absolutely responding to the British Parliament’s passage of the Tea Act of 1773 when they planned the Boston Tea Party. And with a name like the Tea Act, it’s fair to think that the law was all about raising taxes on tea.
The truth is that tea imports to the American Colonies had been taxed by the Crown since the passing of the 1767 Townshend Revenue Act, along with taxes on other commodities like paper, paint, oil and glass. The difference is that all of those other import taxes were lifted in 1770, except for tea, a pointed reminder of the King’s control over his far-off subjects.
Benjamin Carp, a history professor at Brooklyn College and author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, says that the Tea Act of 1773 was onerous in a different way. It was essentially a British government bailout of the British East India Company, which was hemorrhaging money and weighed down with unsold tea. The Tea Act allowed the East India Company to unload 544,000 pounds of old tea, commission-free, on the American Colonies at a bargain price.
Cheaper tea sounds good, says Carp, but for the Sons of Liberty—many of whom were merchants and even tea smugglers—the Tea Act smelled like a ploy to get the masses comfortable with paying a tax to the Crown.
“You’re going to seduce Americans into being ‘obedient colonists’ by making the price lower,” says Carp. “If we accept the principal of allowing parliament to tax us, they’ll eventually make the taxes heavier on us. It’s the slippery slope argument.”
2. The attacked ships were American and the tea wasn’t the King’s.
The popular notion of the Boston Tea Party is that angry colonists “stuck it to King George” by boarding British ships and dumping crate loads of the King’s precious tea into the Boston Harbor. But that story’s not true on two accounts.
First, the ships that were boarded by the Sons of Liberty, the Beaver, the Dartmouth and the Eleanor, were built and owned by Americans. Two of the ships were primarily whaling vessels. After delivering valuable shipments of sperm whale oil and brain matter to London in 1773, the ships were loaded with tea en route to the American Colonies. Although not British, some of the ship’s American owners were indeed Tory sympathizers.
Second, the tea destroyed by the night raiders was not the King’s. It was private property owned by the East India Company and transported on privately contracted shipping vessels. The value of the 340 chests of squandered tea would total nearly $2 million in today’s money.
3. The tea was Chinese, not Indian, and lots of it was green.
This is another naming problem. The East India Company exported a lot of goods from India in the 18th century, including spices and cotton, but it obtained almost all of its tea from China. Trading ships traveled from Canton to London loaded down with Chinese tea, which was then exported to British colonies the world over.
The East India didn’t install its first tea plantations in India until the 1830s.
Another surprising tidbit is that 22 percent of the tea that the patriots sent to the bottom of Boston Harbor was green tea. According to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were fans of a particular Chinese green tea variety called “hyson.”
4. The Tea Party, itself, didn’t incite revolution.
There’s this idea that the Boston Tea Party was the rallying cry that galvanized the colonies for revolution, but Carp says that many strong opponents of British rule, George Washington among them, denounced acts of lawless and violence, especially against private property.
While the Tea Party itself didn’t mobilize Americans en masse, it was Parliament’s reaction to it that did. In 1774, the UK passed what are known as the Intolerable Acts or the Coercive Acts, a series of punitive measures meant to teach the rebellious colonists who was boss.
Many of these sanctions were levied on the Massachusetts Colony and Boston itself, including the closing of Boston Harbor, replacing Boston’s elected leaders with those appointed by the Crown, and forcing the quartering of British troops in private homes.
“Taxation without representation was a dangerous precedent in and of itself, but now they were messing with the Massachusetts charter,” says Carp, “taking away rights that Massachusetts had previously enjoyed. As uncomfortable as some colonists might have been with the Tea Party action itself, they were way more uncomfortable with the authoritarian reaction by Parliament.”
In response to the Coercive Acts, the First Continental Congress met in 1774 and Jefferson wrote “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” Revolution was officially in the air.
5. Yes, Tea Party protestors dressed as ‘indians,’ but not convincingly.
The Sons of Liberty famous masqueraded in Native American dress on the night of the Tea Party raid, complete with tomahawks and faces darkened with coal soot. But were they really trying to pass themselves off as local Mohawk or Narragansett tribesmen?
Not likely, says Carp. For starters, it was customary in 18th-century England for protestors to “crossdress” in one way or another—blackening their faces, dressing as women, or even Catholic priests—to create an atmosphere of misrule.
Secondly, the Sons of Liberty were cashing in on the image of the Native American as an independent spirit, the epitome of anti-colonialism. “By adopting that identity, they’re saying, ‘We are defiant. We are unbowed. We won’t be defeated,’” says Carp.
And third, there was the practical reason for masking their identities. They were committing a crime! Even if they knew that no one would believe they were actual Native Americans, the disguise sent a clear message to anyone who would dare to snitch: don’t you dare!
6. No one called it the ‘Boston Tea Party.’
The Boston Tea Party occurred in 1773, but the very first time that the words “Boston Tea Party” appeared in print was in 1825, and in most of those early mentions, the word “party” didn’t refer to a celebratory event with cakes and balloons, but to a party of men. An 1829 obituary of Nicholas Campbell notes that he was “one of the ever-memorable Boston Tea Party.”
Soon after the rebellious act was committed, Carp says, it was simply referred to as “the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor, or something similarly cumbersome.”
There’s some question if the social known as a “tea party” even existed in the 1770s. The British practice of high tea didn’t take hold until the Victorian Era in the mid-19th century, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, with its famous “Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,” wasn’t published until 1865.
7. After Boston, there were other ‘tea parties.’
According to a 2012 book by Joseph Cummins, there were at least 10 “tea parties” up and down the Eastern seaboard that were inspired by the original and most famous.
During the Philadelphia Tea Party, which took place just nine days after Boston’s, no tea was destroyed, but the captain of a ship carrying the largest delivery of East India Company tea was threatened with being tarred and feathered if he didn’t return the “wretched weed” to England. Which he did.
In Charleston, South Carolina, a ship arrived in November 1774 carrying tea, but the captain swore that he was unaware of the controversial cargo. Angry residents blamed local merchants who had ordered the tea and forced them to dump it in the harbor themselves.
7 Surprising Facts About the Boston Tea Party - HISTORY
Thomas Jefferson, President 1801-1809
Born on April 13, 1743, Thomas Jefferson was a leading figure in our country’s quest for independence. A native of Virginia, Jefferson also played important roles in the early history of our fledgling nation as its Minister to France, Secretary of State and third President.
A true Renaissance man, Jefferson is known for his many talents in writing, economics, religion and philosophy as well as horticulture and mathematics. He spoke 6 languages including English, French, Greek, Italian, Latin and Spanish. He also had a love for the written word, having written over 19,000 letters in his lifetime.
A Multi-Talented Thinker
Jefferson was an inventor, lawyer and educator. He graduated from the University of William and Mary at the age of 18, two years after he enrolled in 1762. He was the designer of Monticello, the Virginia State Capital and The Rotunda at the University of Virginia among other notable buildings. His influential style has become known as “Jeffersonian Architecture”. Monticello and The Rotunda are both World Heritage Sites.
He Went on a Hunger Strike (and Encouraged Others to Join Him)
As a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, Jefferson called for a day of prayer and fasting in support of the citizens of Boston when the British government closed the harbor in response to the Boston Tea Party. As he had hoped, this action allied Virginia with the Patriots’ cause in Massachusetts and fueled opposition to the Intolerable Acts.
He Was the Major Pen of the Declaration of Independence
At the age of 33, Jefferson was one of the youngest delegates to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He became acquainted with John Adams, a leader of the Congress, and through this budding friendship, Jefferson was appointed to the Committee of Five that was tasked with drafting the Declaration of Independence. Over the next 17 days, he would create the first draft. Jefferson is considered by many to be the primary author of the document because the committee left intact more than 75 percent of his original draft. Many believed that John Adams would be the primary author of this important document, but he had persuaded the Committee to choose Jefferson instead. The preamble is regarded as one of the most enduring statements of human rights and the phrase “all men are created equal” is considered one of the most well-known expressions in the English language. Jefferson was an eloquent writer, but did not fancy himself a public speaker, and chose to show his support of the Patriot cause through written correspondence.
Writing to Justify the Actions of Discontent Bostonians
In 1774, Jefferson penned a pamphlet entitled “A Summary View of the Rights of British Americans”. In the pamphlet, he outlined a set of grievances that the colonies had against King George III. Jefferson also wrote that “an exasperated people” who felt oppression, when given the chance, would act out in defiance. The perfect example of this defiance was the “destruction of the tea”, or what would become known as the Boston Tea Party. Like his colleagues George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson believed the act was destruction of private property subject to local laws, but his pamphlet outlined why it was justified as an act of political protest.
His Proudest Moments
Jefferson’s grave is inscribed with an epitaph of the three things of which he was the proudest. They are his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, the Statute of Virginia that guaranteed religious freedom and his founding of the University of Virginia in 1819. There is no mention of him being President on his gravestone.
A Family Man
Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, in 1772. He fathered six children, though only two daughters survived to adulthood. Throughout his life, Jefferson had twelve grandchildren several of them having lived with him at Monticello. Jefferson loved to play with his grandchildren, teaching them how to play chess and a game called Goose. (Goose was one of the first board games in the United States, rather similar to our modern version of Chutes and Ladders.) After his wife died, historians believe he began a relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. After his death, Jefferson’s daughter allowed Hemings to live as a free woman in Charlottesville until she died in 1835. DNA tests in 2000 show a familial gene common between their descendants.
A Controversial Start to His Presidency
It was only after the chaotic election of 1800 between Jefferson and John Adams that Congress decided to ratify the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. The debacle occurred when Jefferson received the same number of electoral votes as his running mate Aaron Burr and Burr refused to concede the election. The House of Representatives decided the election after 36 ballots on February 17, 1801. They chose Jefferson as President and Burr as Vice President.
Landmark Acquisition
Early in his presidency, Jefferson was able to achieve one of the greatest acquisitions of his political career with the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the size of the United States. The 529,000,000-acre tract of land is one of the most fertile on Earth and eliminated the nation’s reliance on other countries for its food. Jefferson did not believe the Constitution gave him the power to make the $15 million land acquisition, but agreed with Congress to make the purchase. He appointed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead an expedition known as the Corps of Discovery to explore the newly acquired territory. Sacagawea, who both men acknowledged as providing an indispensable service, accompanied them on the journey.
Lifelong Connection
After meeting at the Second Continental Congress in 1775, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams became lifelong friends. Their relationship deepened through years of letter-writing, including letters written between Abigail Adams and Jefferson. They spent years in France together as Jefferson and Adams served as trade ministers in Europe. The two remained close friends despite their political differences that is, until Jefferson beat Adams in the Election of 1801 to become President of the United States. They resumed their close friendship after about 10 years of separation. Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Legend holds that Adams’ last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Unbeknownst to Adams, Jefferson had died a few hours earlier. They were the last surviving members of the original group of Patriots that became known as America’s Founding Fathers. Jefferson and Adams also share the distinction of being the only Declaration of Independence signatories who would later serve as President.
Facts about Boston Tea Party 1: what did the demonstrator do?
The Boston Tea Party was conducted by the demonstrators as a sign of protest. They ruined the tea for shipment by throwing them on the Boston Harbor.
Facts about Boston Tea Party 2: the respond of British Government
The Boston Tea Party led into the American Revolution because the British gave a very violent and harsh respond about it.
Facts about Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party
On December 16, 1773, the evening before the tea was supposed to be landed, the Sons of Liberty, in three groups of 50 Boston residents each, organized by Samuel Adams, burst from the Old South Meeting House and headed toward Griffin's Wharf. Three ships — the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver — had hundreds of crates of tea on them. The men boarded the ships and began destroying the cargo. By 9 pm they had opened 342 crates of tea in all three ships and had thrown them into Boston Harbor.
They took off their shoes, swept the decks, and made sure that each ship's first mate knew that the Sons of Liberty had destroyed only the tea. The whole event was remarkably quiet and peaceful. The next day, they sent someone around to fix the one padlock they had broken.
John Adams and many other Americans considered tea drinking to be unpatriotic following the Boston Tea Party. Tea drinking declined during and after the Revolution, resulting in a shift to coffee as the preferred hot drink of Americans.
- The Boston Tea Party didn’t protest excessive taxation. They protested a corporate bailout that threatened small merchants in Boston. For years the East India Company had to ship its tea to Britain and pay a commission, or tax, before selling it in the other colonies. In exchange, Parliament gave it a monopoly on tea. The tax paid by the East India Company in Britain made its tea more expensive in America than tea smuggled in from Dutch traders. When the East India Company ran into financial trouble, Parliament gave it a special deal. The company was allowed to keep its monopoly and export tea directly to America without paying the tax in Britain. That made East India tea cheaper in America than Dutch imported tea. It also made small, independent tea merchants less competitive than the East India Company. And even though Parliament’s action reduced the price of tea, it established the principle that America was subject to British taxes. Hence the Boston Tea Party.
John Singleton Copley, detail from self portrait
John Singleton Copley, the artist who painted so many of the important people of the late 18 th century, tried to work out a compromise with the Sons of Liberty. His father-in-law, an East India merchant, needed the tea. At the Old South Meetinghouse on Nov. 30, 1773, Copley argued for unloading the tea and keeping it in a warehouse while the colonists pressed their case with the governor and the Crown. He didn’t win his argument.
What caused the Boston Tea Party?
Many factors including “taxation without representation,” the 1767 Townshend Revenue Act, and the 1773 Tea Act.
In simplest terms, the Boston Tea Party happened as a result of “taxation without representation”, yet the cause is more complex than that. The American colonists believed Britain was unfairly taxing them to pay for expenses incurred during the French and Indian War. Additionally, colonists believed Parliament did not have the right to tax them because the American colonies were not represented in Parliament.
Since the beginning of the 18th century, tea had been regularly imported to the American colonies. By the time of the Boston Tea Party, it has been estimated American colonists drank approximately 1.2 million pounds of tea each year. Britain realized it could make even more money off of the lucrative tea trade by imposing taxes onto the American colonies. In effect, the cost of British tea became high, and, in response, American colonists began a very lucrative industry of smuggling tea from the Dutch and other European markets. These smuggling operations violated the Navigation Acts which had been in place since the middle of the 17th century. The smuggling of tea was undercutting the lucrative British tea trade. In response to the smuggling, in 1767 Parliament passed the Indemnity Act, which repealed the tax on tea and made British tea the same price as the Dutch. The Indemnity Act greatly cut down on American tea smuggling, but later in 1767 a new tax on tea was put in place by the Townshend Revenue Act. The act also taxed glass, lead, oil, paint, and paper. Due to boycotts and protests, the Townshend Revenue Act taxes on all commodities except tea were repealed in 1770. In 1773, the Tea Act was passed and granted the British East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies. The smuggling of tea grew rampant and was a lucrative business venture for American colonists, such as John Hancock and Samuel Adams. The Townshend Revenue Act tea tax remained in place despite proposals to have it waived. American colonists were outraged over the tea tax. They believed the Tea Act was a tactic to gain colonial support for the tax already enforced. The direct sale of tea by agents of the British East India Company to the American colonies undercut the business of colonial merchants. The smuggled tea became more expensive than the British East India Company tea. Smugglers like John Hancock and Samuel Adams were trying to protect their economic interests by opposing the Tea Act, and Samuel Adams sold the opposition of British tea to the Patriots on the pretext of the abolishment of human rights by being taxed without representation.
Debunking Boston Tea Party Myths
Britain’s Lord North forces tea down the throat of America (represented by a female figure) in a 1774 cartoon depicting retribution for the Boston Tea Party. (Library of Congress)
Many patriots viewed the destruction of the tea as an act of vandalism.
We all know and celebrate the climax to the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, several dozen men dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded three ships belonging to the East India Company, cut open 340 chests of tea and dumped the contents in Boston’s harbor. We fondly remember the carnival-like drama as a catalyst for the American Revolution, and over the years both liberal and conservative protesters have laid claim to its irreverent legacy.
Revolutionary-era Americans, though, didn’t celebrate the event. This might seem strange, since the patriots were the celebrating sort. They staged festive ceremonies to commemorate anniversaries—the first Stamp Act protest, the act’s repeal, the Boston Massacre, the Declaration of Independence—but the “action against tea” or the “destruction of the tea” (as they variously called it) went unheralded in public ritual. For a half century, Americans shunned the tale, and certainly did not call it a tea party. At first, they didn’t dare. Anyone who had anything to do with the event could face prosecution, or at least a lawsuit. Privately, some people knew who was behind those Indian disguises, but publicly, nobody said a word. Moreover, many patriots viewed the destruction of tea as an act of vandalism that put the Revolution in a bad light. Patriots also downplayed the tea action because of its devastating impact. That single act precipitated harsh retaliation from the British, which in turn led to a long and ugly war.
The Boston Tea Party is now an iconic event suffused with myth, but below the surface is the story of a true act of revolution, carried out in a context of power politics, with surprising parallels in the modern era.
Myth 1: The dispute was about higher taxes
The immediate catalyst was a tax break—not a tax increase—that effectively made imported tea more affordable for colonists. What irked the patriots was that they had no role in the decision.
The saga began with the British government’s bailout of a corporation deemed too big to fail. The giant East India Company not only enjoyed monopolistic privileges in south Asia and China under a royal charter granted in 1600 it effectively ruled large sections of the Indian subcontinent. But in 1772, the company was hard hit by the collapse of speculative banking schemes throughout Europe, and its stock tumbled. Unsold goods accumulated in warehouses, and company directors asked the British government for a loan to forestall insolvency. Members of Parliament—like American congressmen today—staged committee hearings in which they grandstanded against greedy company officials, who had returned from India with huge fortunes and declared large dividends despite the company’s overwhelming debts. Meanwhile, they tried to figure out how to get the company, and the empire, out of the mess.
As MPs debated the advisability of a government takeover, they also discussed schemes for unloading the company’s 18 million pounds of surplus tea. The European market was already saturated, but the American market was not. In theory, the East India Company could sell many tons of tea there if taxes were lowered. Two separate taxes were involved: one imposed on tea coming through Britain on its way from India and China to Western markets and another imposed when it arrived in America. Although cutting either one was an economically viable option, repealing the American tax would have had the added benefit of improving relations with colonists. That’s precisely why Lord North, the prime minister, rejected the idea.
In the Tea Act of 1773, Parliament left the American import duties in place but decreed that the East India Company would no longer have to pay any duties on tea landing in Britain and headed to America, nor would it have to sell the tea at British public auctions. It could deliver its product straight to American consumers, untouched by middlemen and almost untaxed, save for a modest American import duty. The only people who stood to incur financial losses from the arrangement were American smugglers who had been peddling duty-free tea from Holland.
Few in London thought the sweetheart deal was a matter of consequence to anyone but the East India Company, and it received little notice. Some relief would be granted to the struggling corporate giant, without political cost. And surely, Americans would not object to receiving tea at bargain prices.
British prognosticators were wrong. For the Americans, the fundamental issue was one of self-governance. Whoever levied taxes got to call the shots, including how to spend the money. Parliament insisted on taxing colonists to support—and command—colonial administration. Colonists countered that they were more than willing to tax—and rule—themselves. No more “taxation without representation” became their rallying cry, not “down with high taxes.”
Myth 2: Tea taxes were an onerous burden on ordinary Americans
Land taxes and poll taxes assessed by their own colonial assemblies, as well as long-standing import duties on sugar, molasses and wine, were a much greater burden. The tea tax was a relic of the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, which also placed import duties on paint, paper, lead and glass. Parliament responded to widespread colonial protests and boycotts of the taxed items by repealing the Townshend taxes in 1770, except for the tea duty, which North kept to assert “the right of taxing Americans.” At three pence per pound, the tax on tea was barely felt by American consumers, who also had access to the smuggled competition.
Still, the tea tax maintained symbolic significance, and the boycott of tea involved complex overlays. Common folk might enjoy a sip or two of tea, but participating in the elaborate British ritual of teatime—with an array of fancy crockery and silver utensils—was prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of Americans. Calls for a continued boycott of tea dovetailed nicely with lower-class resentments. Tea was an easy target, a symbol both of Parliament’s arrogance and a crumbling social hierarchy.
Moreover, tea consumption was deemed suspect, even sinful, by a large segment of the American public. “That bainfull weed,” as Abigail Adams called it, was an artificial stimulant, what we would call today a recreational drug. Promoters of virtue, who had long been expounding the evils of tea, suddenly became patriots. One concerned writer, in a Virginia newspaper, claimed that ever since tea had been introduced into Western society, “our race is dwindled and become puny, weak, and disordered to such a degree, that were it to prevail a century more we should be reduced to mere pigmies.”
Pointing to his medical expertise, Boston’s Dr. Thomas Young declared authoritatively that tea was not just a “pernicious drug,” as some assumed, but a “slow poison, and has the corrosive effect upon those who handle it. I have left it off since it became political poison, and have since gained in firmness of constitution. My substitute is camomile flowers.”
Resistance leaders also launched a new wave of negative propaganda that played to anti-foreign sentiments: Tea from the East India Company was packed tightly in chests by the stomping of barefoot Chinese and was infested with Chinese fleas. In turn, a vast number of colonists vowed to protect American business from foreign competition, even if that business was smuggling. Beware of products from China, buy America, wage war on drugs, down with corporations—all these messages, as well as their better-known cousin, no taxation without representation—amplified the response to Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773.
Myth 3: Dumping British tea unified the patriots
The immediate effect was just the opposite. The morning after the tea action in Boston, John Adams penned a letter to his close friend James Warren. “The Dye is cast,” he wrote. “The People have passed the River and cutt away the Bridge: last Night Three Cargoes of Tea, were emptied into the Harbour. This is the grandest Event, which has ever yet happened Since the Controversy, with Britain, opened. The sublimity of it charms me.” But that opinion was far from universal among patriot leaders.
For Americans who called themselves patriots, the slogan “liberty and property” was a common rallying cry, shouted at least as often as “taxation without representation.” George Washington, among many others, chided Bostonians for “their conduct in destroying tea.” Benjamin Franklin was hardly alone when he argued that the East India Company should be compensated for its losses.
It was not the destruction of tea that pulled Americans together, but the punishments administered several months later through a series of laws dubbed the Coercive Acts (also called the Intolerable Acts by the Americans). Parliament closed the port of Boston and revoked the Massachusetts charter, denying citizens the rights they had enjoyed for a century and a half. The goal of the Coercive Acts was to isolate radicals in Massachusetts, but instead the 13 colonies formed the Continental Congress and agreed to mount a general boycott of British goods.
The destruction of tea had been a catalyst for events leading to independence, but its belligerent tone ran counter to the favored patriotic story line: The British were the aggressors, causing peace-loving Americans to act in self-defense. After the war was over and the nation was on its own, the saga posed another conundrum. “It was time to accept the new government, duly elected by the people, and strive to maintain law and order,” explains Tufts University historian Benjamin Carp. “Once this belief calcified into conventional wisdom, there was less room to celebrate a ragged group of mock Mohawks wielding hatchets in defiance of government.”
Finally, in the 1820s, Americans let down their guard, and a new generation of chroniclers toned down the truly revolutionary aspects of the action against tea and played up the carnival atmosphere. More than 50 years after the event was over, it was informally christened the Boston Tea Party. Once the story could be told playfully, it anchored every text intended for children, who liked to dress as Indians in any case. That’s still the version we see in our school texts, and in books for adults as well. Declawed and simplified, the event loses not only its revolutionary punch but also its political and economic context. A corporate tax break that lowered the price of tea in America? Too big to fail? Competition from cheap foreign imports? These don’t play well to children. But they do reveal that the action against tea was much more than a party.
Ray Raphael is the author of A People’s History of the American Revolution, Founding Myths and Founders.
Contents
The Boston Tea Party arose from two issues confronting the British Empire in 1765: the financial problems of the British East India Company and an ongoing dispute about the extent of Parliament's authority, if any, over the British American colonies without seating any elected representation. The North Ministry's attempt to resolve these issues produced a showdown that would eventually result in revolution. [3]
Tea trade to 1767
As Europeans developed a taste for tea in the 17th century, rival companies were formed to import the product from China. [4] In England, Parliament gave the East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea in 1698. [5] When tea became popular in the British colonies, Parliament sought to eliminate foreign competition by passing an act in 1721 that required colonists to import their tea only from Great Britain. [6] The East India Company did not export tea to the colonies by law, the company was required to sell its tea wholesale at auctions in England. British firms bought this tea and exported it to the colonies, where they resold it to merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. [7]
Until 1767, the East India Company paid an ad valorem tax of about 25% on tea that it imported into Great Britain. [8] Parliament laid additional taxes on tea sold for consumption in Britain. These high taxes, combined with the fact that tea imported into the Dutch Republic was not taxed by the Dutch government, meant that Britons and British Americans could buy smuggled Dutch tea at much cheaper prices. [9] The biggest market for illicit tea was England—by the 1760s the East India Company was losing £400,000 per year to smugglers in Great Britain [10] —but Dutch tea was also smuggled into British America in significant quantities. [11]
In 1767, to help the East India Company compete with smuggled Dutch tea, Parliament passed the Indemnity Act, which lowered the tax on tea consumed in Great Britain and gave the East India Company a refund of the 25% duty on tea that was re-exported to the colonies. [12] To help offset this loss of government revenue, Parliament also passed the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, which levied new taxes, including one on tea, in the colonies. [13] Instead of solving the smuggling problem, however, the Townshend duties renewed a controversy about Parliament's right to tax the colonies.
Townshend duty crisis
A controversy between Great Britain and the colonies arose in the 1760s when Parliament sought, for the first time, to impose a direct tax on the colonies for the purpose of raising revenue. Some colonists, known in the colonies as Whigs, objected to the new tax program, arguing that it was a violation of the British Constitution. Britons and British Americans agreed that, according to the constitution, British subjects could not be taxed without the consent of their elected representatives. In Great Britain, this meant that taxes could only be levied by Parliament. Colonists, however, did not elect members of Parliament, and so American Whigs argued that the colonies could not be taxed by that body. According to Whigs, colonists could only be taxed by their own colonial assemblies. Colonial protests resulted in the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, but in the 1766 Declaratory Act, Parliament continued to insist that it had the right to legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever".
When new taxes were levied in the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, Whig colonists again responded with protests and boycotts. Merchants organized a non-importation agreement, and many colonists pledged to abstain from drinking British tea, with activists in New England promoting alternatives, such as domestic Labrador tea. [14] Smuggling continued apace, especially in New York and Philadelphia, where tea smuggling had always been more extensive than in Boston. Dutied British tea continued to be imported into Boston, however, especially by Richard Clarke and the sons of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, until pressure from Massachusetts Whigs compelled them to abide by the non-importation agreement. [15]
Parliament finally responded to the protests by repealing the Townshend taxes in 1770, except for the tea duty, which Prime Minister Lord North kept to assert "the right of taxing the Americans". [16] This partial repeal of the taxes was enough to bring an end to the non-importation movement by October 1770. [17] From 1771 to 1773, British tea was once again imported into the colonies in significant amounts, with merchants paying the Townshend duty of three pence per pound in weight of tea. [18] [19] Boston was the largest colonial importer of legal tea smugglers still dominated the market in New York and Philadelphia. [20]
The Indemnity Act of 1767, which gave the East India Company a refund of the duty on tea that was re-exported to the colonies, expired in 1772. Parliament passed a new act in 1772 that reduced this refund, effectively leaving a 10% duty on tea imported into Britain. [22] The act also restored the tea taxes within Britain that had been repealed in 1767, and left in place the three pence Townshend duty in the colonies. With this new tax burden driving up the price of British tea, sales plummeted. The company continued to import tea into Great Britain, however, amassing a huge surplus of product that no one would buy. [23] For these and other reasons, by late 1772 the East India Company, one of Britain's most important commercial institutions, was in a serious financial crisis. [24] The severe famine in Bengal from 1769 to 1773 had drastically reduced the revenue of the East India Company from India bringing the Company to the verge of bankruptcy and the Tea Act of 1773 was enacted to help the East India Company.
Eliminating some of the taxes was one obvious solution to the crisis. The East India Company initially sought to have the Townshend duty repealed, but the North ministry was unwilling because such an action might be interpreted as a retreat from Parliament's position that it had the right to tax the colonies. [25] More importantly, the tax collected from the Townshend duty was used to pay the salaries of some colonial governors and judges. [26] This was in fact the purpose of the Townshend tax: previously these officials had been paid by the colonial assemblies, but Parliament now paid their salaries to keep them dependent on the British government rather than allowing them to be accountable to the colonists. [27]
Another possible solution for reducing the growing mound of tea in the East India Company warehouses was to sell it cheaply in Europe. This possibility was investigated, but it was determined that the tea would simply be smuggled back into Great Britain, where it would undersell the taxed product. [28] The best market for the East India Company's surplus tea, so it seemed, was the American colonies, if a way could be found to make it cheaper than the smuggled Dutch tea. [29]
The North ministry's solution was the Tea Act, which received the assent of King George on May 10, 1773. [30] This act restored the East India Company's full refund on the duty for importing tea into Britain, and also permitted the company, for the first time, to export tea to the colonies on its own account. This would allow the company to reduce costs by eliminating the middlemen who bought the tea at wholesale auctions in London. [31] Instead of selling to middlemen, the company now appointed colonial merchants to receive the tea on consignment the consignees would in turn sell the tea for a commission. In July 1773, tea consignees were selected in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston. [32] The Tea Act in 1773 authorized the shipment of 5,000 chests of tea (250 tons) to the American colonies. There would be a tax of £1,750 to be paid by the importers when the cargo landed. The act granted the EIC a monopoly on the sale of tea that was cheaper than smuggled tea its hidden purpose was to force the colonists to pay a tax of 3 pennies on every pound of tea. [33]
The Tea Act thus retained the three pence Townshend duty on tea imported to the colonies. Some members of Parliament wanted to eliminate this tax, arguing that there was no reason to provoke another colonial controversy. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer William Dowdeswell, for example, warned Lord North that the Americans would not accept the tea if the Townshend duty remained. [34] But North did not want to give up the revenue from the Townshend tax, primarily because it was used to pay the salaries of colonial officials maintaining the right of taxing the Americans was a secondary concern. [35] According to historian Benjamin Labaree, "A stubborn Lord North had unwittingly hammered a nail in the coffin of the old British Empire." [36]
Even with the Townshend duty in effect, the Tea Act would allow the East India Company to sell tea more cheaply than before, undercutting the prices offered by smugglers, but also undercutting colonial tea importers, who paid the tax and received no refund. In 1772, legally imported Bohea, the most common variety of tea, sold for about 3 shillings (3s) per pound. [37] After the Tea Act, colonial consignees would be able to sell it for 2 shillings per pound (2s), just under the smugglers' price of 2 shillings and 1 penny (2s 1d). [38] Realizing that the payment of the Townshend duty was politically sensitive, the company hoped to conceal the tax by making arrangements to have it paid either in London once the tea was landed in the colonies, or have the consignees quietly pay the duties after the tea was sold. This effort to hide the tax from the colonists was unsuccessful. [39]
In September and October 1773, seven ships carrying East India Company tea were sent to the colonies: four were bound for Boston, and one each for New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. [40] In the ships were more than 2,000 chests containing nearly 600,000 pounds of tea. [41] Americans learned the details of the Tea Act while the ships were en route, and opposition began to mount. [42] Whigs, sometimes calling themselves Sons of Liberty, began a campaign to raise awareness and to convince or compel the consignees to resign, in the same way that stamp distributors had been forced to resign in the 1765 Stamp Act crisis. [43]
The protest movement that culminated with the Boston Tea Party was not a dispute about high taxes. The price of legally imported tea was actually reduced by the Tea Act of 1773. Protesters were instead concerned with a variety of other issues. The familiar "no taxation without representation" argument, along with the question of the extent of Parliament's authority in the colonies, remained prominent. [44] Samuel Adams considered the British tea monopoly to be "equal to a tax" and to raise the same representation issue whether or not a tax was applied to it. [45] Some regarded the purpose of the tax program—to make leading officials independent of colonial influence—as a dangerous infringement of colonial rights. [46] This was especially true in Massachusetts, the only colony where the Townshend program had been fully implemented. [47]
Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business. [48] Legitimate tea importers who had not been named as consignees by the East India Company were also threatened with financial ruin by the Tea Act. [49] Another major concern for merchants was that the Tea Act gave the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade, and it was feared that this government-created monopoly might be extended in the future to include other goods. [50]
In New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, protesters successfully compelled the tea consignees to resign. In Charleston, the consignees had been forced to resign by early December, and the unclaimed tea was seized by customs officials. [51] There were mass protest meetings in Philadelphia. Benjamin Rush urged his fellow countrymen to oppose the landing of the tea, because the cargo contained "the seeds of slavery". [52] [53] By early December, the Philadelphia consignees had resigned and the tea ship returned to England with its cargo following a confrontation with the ship's captain. [54] The tea ship bound for New York City was delayed by bad weather by the time it arrived, the consignees had resigned, and the ship returned to England with the tea. [55]
In every colony except Massachusetts, protesters were able to force the tea consignees to resign or to return the tea to England. [56] In Boston, however, Governor Hutchinson was determined to hold his ground. He convinced the tea consignees, two of whom were his sons, not to back down. [57]
When the tea ship Dartmouth, [a] arrived in the Boston Harbor in late November, Whig leader Samuel Adams called for a mass meeting to be held at Faneuil Hall on November 29, 1773. Thousands of people arrived, so many that the meeting was moved to the larger Old South Meeting House. [58] British law required Dartmouth to unload and pay the duties within twenty days or customs officials could confiscate the cargo (i.e. unload it onto American soil). [59] The mass meeting passed a resolution, introduced by Adams and based on a similar set of resolutions promulgated earlier in Philadelphia, urging the captain of Dartmouth to send the ship back without paying the import duty. Meanwhile, the meeting assigned twenty-five men to watch the ship and prevent the tea – including a number of chests from Davison, Newman and Co. of London – from being unloaded. [60]
Governor Hutchinson refused to grant permission for Dartmouth to leave without paying the duty. Two more tea ships, Eleanor and Beaver, arrived in Boston Harbor. On December 16 – the last day of Dartmouth's deadline – roughly 5,000 [61] to 7,000 [62] people out of a population of roughly 16,000 [61] had gathered around the Old South Meeting House. After receiving a report that Governor Hutchinson had again refused to let the ships leave, Adams announced that "This meeting can do nothing further to save the country." According to a popular story, Adams's statement was a prearranged signal for the "tea party" to begin. However, this claim did not appear in print until nearly a century after the event, in a biography of Adams written by his great-grandson, who apparently misinterpreted the evidence. [63] According to eyewitness accounts, people did not leave the meeting until ten or fifteen minutes after Adams's alleged "signal", and Adams in fact tried to stop people from leaving because the meeting was not yet over. [64]
While Samuel Adams tried to reassert control of the meeting, people poured out of the Old South Meeting House to prepare to take action. In some cases, this involved donning what may have been elaborately prepared Mohawk costumes. [65] While disguising their individual faces was imperative, because of the illegality of their protest, dressing as Mohawk warriors was a specific and symbolic choice. It showed that the Sons of Liberty identified with America, over their official status as subjects of Great Britain. [66]
That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some dressed in the Mohawk warrior disguises, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water. [67] The precise location of the Griffin's Wharf site of the Tea Party has been subject to prolonged uncertainty a comprehensive study [68] places it near the foot of Hutchinson Street (today's Pearl Street). [ better source needed ] The property damage amounted to the destruction of 92,000 pounds or 340 chests of tea, reported by the British East India Company worth £9,659, or $1,700,000 dollars in today's money. [69] The owner of two of the three ships was William Rotch, a Nantucket-born colonist and merchant. [70]
Another tea ship intended for Boston, the William, had run aground at Cape Cod in December 1773, and its tea was taxed and sold to private parties. In March 1774, the Sons of Liberty received information that this tea was being held in a warehouse in Boston, entered the warehouse and destroyed all they could find. Some of it had already been sold to Davison, Newman and Co. and was being held in their shop. On March 7, Sons of Liberty once again dressed as Mohawks, broke into the shop, and dumped the last remaining tea into the harbor. [71] [72]
Whether or not Samuel Adams helped plan the Boston Tea Party is disputed, but he immediately worked to publicize and defend it. [73] He argued that the Tea Party was not the act of a lawless mob, but was instead a principled protest and the only remaining option the people had to defend their constitutional rights. [74]
In Britain, even those politicians considered friends of the colonies were appalled and this act united all parties there against the colonies. The Prime Minister Lord North said, "Whatever may be the consequence, we must risk something if we do not, all is over". [75] The British government felt this action could not remain unpunished, and responded by closing the port of Boston and putting in place other laws known as the "Intolerable Acts." Benjamin Franklin stated that the East India Company should be paid for the destroyed tea, [76] all ninety thousand pounds (which, at two shillings per pound, came to £9,000, or £1.15 million [2014, approx. $1.7 million US]). [77] Robert Murray, a New York merchant, went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down. [78]
The incident resulted in a similar effect in America when news of the Boston Tea Party reached London in January and Parliament responded with a series of acts known collectively in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts. These were intended to punish Boston for the destruction of private property, restore British authority in Massachusetts, and otherwise reform colonial government in America. Although the first three, the Boston Port Act the Massachusetts Government Act and the Administration of Justice Act, applied only to Massachusetts, colonists outside that colony feared that their governments could now also be changed by legislative fiat in England. The Intolerable Acts were viewed as a violation of constitutional rights, natural rights, and colonial charters, and united many colonists throughout America, [79] exemplified by the calling of the First Continental Congress in September 1774.
A number of colonists were inspired by the Boston Tea Party to carry out similar acts, such as the burning of Peggy Stewart. The Boston Tea Party eventually proved to be one of the many reactions that led to the American Revolutionary War. [80] In his December 17, 1773, entry in his diary, John Adams wrote:
Last Night 3 Cargoes of Bohea Tea were emptied into the Sea. This Morning a Man of War sails. This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History. [81]
In February 1775, Britain passed the Conciliatory Resolution, which ended taxation for any colony that satisfactorily provided for the imperial defense and the upkeep of imperial officers. The tax on tea was repealed with the Taxation of Colonies Act 1778, part of another Parliamentary attempt at conciliation that failed.
John Adams and many other Americans considered tea drinking to be unpatriotic following the Boston Tea Party. Tea drinking declined during and after the Revolution, resulting in a shift to coffee as the preferred hot drink. [83]
According to historian Alfred Young, the term "Boston Tea Party" did not appear in print until 1834. [84] Before that time, the event was usually referred to as the "destruction of the tea". According to Young, American writers were for many years apparently reluctant to celebrate the destruction of property, and so the event was usually ignored in histories of the American Revolution. This began to change in the 1830s, however, especially with the publication of biographies of George Robert Twelves Hewes, one of the few still-living participants of the "tea party", as it then became known. [85]
The Boston Tea Party has often been referenced in other political protests. When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi led a mass burning of Indian registration cards in South Africa in 1908, a British newspaper compared the event to the Boston Tea Party. [86] When Gandhi met with the Viceroy of India in 1930 after the Indian salt protest campaign, Gandhi took some duty-free salt from his shawl and said, with a smile, that the salt was "to remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party." [87]
American activists from a variety of political viewpoints have invoked the Tea Party as a symbol of protest. In 1973, on the 200th anniversary of the Tea Party, a mass meeting at Faneuil Hall called for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon and protested oil companies in the ongoing oil crisis. Afterwards, protesters boarded a replica ship in Boston Harbor, hanged Nixon in effigy, and dumped several empty oil drums into the harbor. [88] In 1998, two conservative US Congressmen put the federal tax code into a chest marked "tea" and dumped it into the harbor. [89]
In 2006, a libertarian political party called the "Boston Tea Party" was founded. In 2007, the Ron Paul "Tea Party" money bomb, held on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, broke the one-day fund-raising record by raising $6.04 million in 24 hours. [90] Subsequently, these fund-raising "Tea parties" grew into the Tea Party movement, which dominated conservative American politics for the next two years, reaching its peak with a voter victory for the Republicans in 2010 who were widely elected to seats in the United States House of Representatives.
Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum
The Boston Tea Party Museum is located on the Congress Street Bridge in Boston. It features reenactments, a documentary, and a number of interactive exhibits. The museum features two replica ships of the period, Eleanor and Beaver. Additionally, the museum possesses one of two known tea chests from the original event, part of its permanent collection. [91]
Participants
Second Boston Tea Party
In March 1774, a Second Boston Tea Party occurred. Around 60 colonists dumped 30 chests of tea into the water. [93]
Mob Etiquette?
The &ldquoDestruction of the Tea,&rdquo as it was called until the 1830s, was one of the most carefully planned acts of rebellion in American history. While it&rsquos true that the Sons of Liberty dropped over 92,000 pounds of tea worth nearly two million dollars in today&rsquos money into Boston Harbor, they were very careful not to damage the ships or private property. According to the reports of the time, there was no visible damage to the three ships other than a single broken padlock. The padlock, in fact, was replaced by the Sons of Liberty the following day. Furthermore, there was no reports of anything stolen or looted from the ships other than the tea. Several opportunistic Boston citizens were reprimanded or taken into custody by the leaders of the raid for trying to fill their pockets with the discarded tea for their own purposes. Interestingly, the participants in the Boston Tea Party followed the &ldquotea party&rdquo by cleaning the decks of the ships and putting back in place anything that was moved during the raid! That said, the vast quantities of tea dumped into the harbor fouled the water and floated in great mats for days to come. To prevent looters from trying to salvage the tea from the water, members of the Sons of Liberty would sail out into the harbor and attempt to sink the tea with clubs and oars. Despite their reputation as bloodthirsty vigilantes who reveled in tarring and feathering hapless tax collectors or loyalists, not one person was killed or injured by the Sons of Liberty in the Boston Tea Party.
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