Boston Tea Party

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 Faced with such widespread opposition, the British government repealed the Townshend duties (taxes) in March 1770.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).