On the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of angry Boston citizens
boarded three ships belonging to the East India Company docked in
Boston Harbor. In protest of the British Parliament’s Tea Act (1773), the
group quietly dumped more than ninety thousand pounds of tea into the
harbor. The incident has become known as the Boston Tea Party. It triggered a series of events that led directly to war and eventually to independence for America.
Parliamentary acts
The Boston Tea Party represents the difficult relationship between
England and the thirteen colonies following the French and Indian
War (1754–63). The French and Indian War was the last and most expensive of the colonial wars between France and England. The cost of
defending the American colonists throughout the war had wiped out the
British treasury.
Thinking that the colonies should help pay for past war debts and
for the future cost of keeping English soldiers for their defense,
Parliament passed a series of acts to raise money from the colonies.
Among the measures passed by Parliament, the Townshend Acts (1767)
were most unpopular. Instead of placing a direct tax on materials the
colonists bought and sold, these acts imposed duties on items imported
into the colonies. This made certain important items such as lead, glass,
paint, paper, and tea more expensive.
Citizens protested by refusing to buy the taxed products and by signing nonimportation agreements throughout the colonies. Faced with such
widespread opposition, the British government repealed the Townshend
duties (taxes) in March 1770. To prove that Parliament had the right to
tax the colonies, however, it preserved a three-penny duty on tea.
Corporate affairs
Between 1771 and 1773, the relationship between the colonies and
England seemed fairly calm. However, Parliament’s passage of the Tea
Act in 1773 brought the period of peace to an abrupt end. The Tea Act
was not passed with the intention of disciplining the American colonies.
It was instead an attempt to revive the struggling East India Company.
The legislation effectively cut wholesalers out of the tea trade by allowing the East India Company to sell tea directly to its own agents in
America.
By avoiding the cost of using wholesalers, the East India Company
was able to sell tea more cheaply than other tea companies could. This
allowed the company to monopolize, or dominate, tea sales in the
colonies. The monopoly angered colonists at all levels of society. Business
for wholesalers and local merchants decreased. Tea smugglers were hurt
by the competition of more affordable tea on the market.
In November of 1773, the first shipments of East India Company
tea since the passage of the Tea Act began to arrive in ports throughout
the colonies. They were met with hostile receptions. In New York and
Philadelphia, angry crowds forced officials to send the tea ships back to
England without unloading their cargoes. A tea ship was burned in
Annapolis, Maryland, and arsonists in New Jersey burned a warehouse
where unloaded tea was stored. The governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson (1711–1780), decided to face down the demonstrators in
his colony.
Boston’s tea
Three ships from the East India Company attempted to unload tea in
Boston. A group of Boston citizens, led by revolutionary statesman
Samuel Adams (1722–1803), refused to allow the tea to be taken off the
ships. Governor Hutchinson called on the Royal Navy to blockade the
harbor so the ships could not leave the port. Knowing that British law
required ships to unload cargo after twenty days in port, the governor
hoped to sidestep the demonstrators.
On December 16, the twenty-day period came to an end. Although
Adams and others tried to convince Governor Hutchinson to allow the
ships to return to England, he refused. Later that evening, a group of
about seventy colonists disguised as American Indians silently boarded the
ships. They broke open and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor.
In response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed a series of
measures, known as the Intolerable Acts, to punish the citizens of
Massachusetts. The punitive laws, however, served to unite the colonists,
who soon organized the First Continental Congress to plan a strategy for
dealing with England. (See Continental Congress, First.) The conflicts
between England and the colonies soon escalated into violence and the
American Revolution (1775–83).