Boston Tea Party

BOSTON TEA PARTY. 16 December 1773. The Dartmouth, the first of three ships carrying East Indian Company tea, arrived in Boston Harbor on 28 November 1773, and docked at Griffin's Wharf three days later. It was followed shortly thereafter by the Eleanor and the Bruce. While the agents to whom the tea had been consigned waited to see if the cargo could be landed safely, the Boston Committee of Correspondence organized several mass meetings to prevent any unloading. Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to allow the ships to leave Boston. He seems to have assumed that, after twenty days when the law allowed customs officers to seize goods to pay the required duties (in this case, three pence per pound of tea as required by the Tea Act of 1773), the tea would be impounded, the agents would be able to pay the duty, and the principle of Parliament's right to collect revenue in the colonies would be upheld.

Hutchinson did not think that local Patriot leaders would destroy the East India Company's property. He was, therefore, surprised when, after a meeting at the Old South Meeting House on the evening of 16 December over which Samuel Adams presided, a crowd surrounded the wharf while a boarding party of between 40 and 50 men, "dressed and whooping like Indians," emptied 340 chests of tea into Boston harbor. In a notable display of controlled violence, the "Indians" destroyed nothing other than the tea and the chests in which it was contained. Although some people believed at the time that John Hancock had led the boarding party, the people who destroyed the tea have never been reliably identified. The East India Company never received restitution for its loss, valued at £9,000.

The "tea party" ratcheted up the level of confrontation between Britain and the colonies, and began a sequence of events that convinced activists across British North America that they had to cooperate more closely to resist what they believed to be imperial tyranny. In March 1774 Parliament retaliated for the "tea party" by passing the Boston Port Act, the first of the Intolerable Acts, which prohibited any ship from entering or leaving the port of Boston until restitution had been made for the cost of the tea and assurances had been given for payment of duties in the future. The activists reacted by calling the first Continental Congress to consider collective resistance.

SEE ALSO Adams, Samuel; Continental Congress; Hutchinson, Thomas; Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts; Tea Act.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Knollenberg, Bernard. Growth of the American Revolution, 1766–1775. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2002.

Labaree, Benjamin W. The Boston Tea Party. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

                              revised by Harold E. Selesky