Boston Tea Party
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- This article is about a 1773 American protest. For other uses, see Boston Tea Party (disambiguation).
This 1846 lithograph has become a classic image of the Boston Tea Party.
The Boston Tea Party was a direct action protest by the American colonists against Great Britain in which they destroyed many crates of tea bricks on ships in Boston Harbor. The incident, which took place on Thursday, December 16, 1773, has been seen as helping to spark the American Revolution.
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Background
The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies despite a lack of representation in the Westminster Parliament. One of the protesters was John Hancock. In 1768, Hancock's ship Liberty was seized by customs officials, and he was charged with smuggling. He was defended by John Adams, and the charges were eventually dropped. However, Hancock later faced several hundred more indictments.
Hancock organized a boycott of tea from China sold by the British East India Company, whose sales in the colonies then fell from 320,000 pounds (145,000 kg) to 520 pounds (240 kg). By 1773, the company had large debts, huge stocks of tea in its warehouses and no prospect of selling it because smugglers such as Hancock were importing tea without paying import taxes. The British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly, thereby allowing them to sell for lower prices than those offered by the colonial merchants and smugglers.
The ships carrying tea were prevented from landing, as most American ports turned the tea away. In Boston, however, the East India Company had the help of the British-appointed governor named Thomas Hutchinson. Plans were made to bring in, by force, the tea under the protection given by British ships.
Event
On Thursday, December 16, 1773, the evening before the tea was supposed to be landing, the Sons of Liberty, three groups of 50 Boston residents each organized by Samuel Adams, burst from the Old South Meeting House and headed toward Griffin's Wharf, dressed as Mohawks in hopes to disguise their true identities to avoid reprimand and punishment. Three ships — the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver — were loaded with hundreds of crates of tea. (A fourth ship, the William, sank off the coast of Cape Cod before arriving to Boston Harbor). The men boarded the ships and began destroying the cargo. By 9 p.m., they had opened 342 crates of tea (worth approximately £10,000) in all three ships and had thrown them into Boston Harbor. They took off their shoes, swept the decks, and made each ship's first mate agree to say that the Sons of Liberty had destroyed only the tea, they were met with almost no resistance except for the first mate of the Eleanor, David Mathew, who fought valiantly taking out the eyes of several of the residents. The next day, they sent someone around to fix the one padlock they had broken.
Reaction
This act brought criticism from both colonial and British officials. For instance, Benjamin Franklin stated that the destroyed tea must be repaid, and he offered to repay with his own money. The British government responded by closing the port of Boston and put in place other laws that were known as the "Intolerable Acts", also called the Coercive Acts, or Punitive Acts. However, a number of colonists were inspired to carry out similar acts, such as the burning of the Peggy Stewart. The Boston Tea Party eventually proved to be one of the many causes that led to the American Revolution. At the very least, the Boston Tea Party and the reaction that followed served to rally support for revolutionaries in the thirteen colonies who were eventually successful in their fight for independence.
As far as tea drinking itself was concerned, many colonists, in Boston and elsewhere in the country, pledged to keep from the drink as a protest, turning instead to "Balsamic hyperion" (made from raspberry leaves) and other herbal infusions. This social protest movement away from tea drinking was, however, not longlived.
International influence
The Boston Tea Party is known around the world and has been inspirational to other rebels. For example, Erik H. Erikson records in his book "Gandhi's Truths" that when Mahatma Gandhi met with the British viceroy 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."
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