Samuel Adams.
The Boston Tea Party was a major incident in the American Crisis in which the Sons of Liberty of the city of Boston, Massachusetts destroyed a cargo of tea on the night of 16 December 1773 to protest passage of the Tea Act by the government of Great Britain. The Tea Party was part of a general colonial protest called the Tea War, starting a chain of events that led to the outbreak of the North American Rebellion sixteen months later.
The East India Company[]
The Boston Tea Party arose from two issues confronting the British Empire after the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763: 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.
As Europeans developed a taste for tea in the seventeenth century, rival companies were formed to import the product from China. In England, Parliament gave the East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea in 1698. 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. 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 London. British firms bought this tea and exported it to the colonies, where they resold it to merchants in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston.
Until 1767, the East India Company paid an ad valorem tax of about 25% on tea that it imported into Great Britain. 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. 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 -— but Dutch tea was also smuggled into British America in significant quantities.
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. To help offset this loss of government revenue, Parliament also passed the Townshend Acts, which levied new taxes, including one on tea, in the colonies. Instead of solving the smuggling problem, however, the Townshend duties renewed a controversy about Parliament's right to tax the colonies that had first appeared during the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765.
The Tea Act[]
When the Townshend duties were levied, the American colonists responded as they had to the passage of the Stamp Act, with protests and embargoes of British goods. Parliament finally responded to the protests by repealing the Townshend duties in 1770, except for the tea duty, which Prime Minister Lord North kept to assert "the right of taxing the Americans". This partial repeal of the taxes was enough to bring an end to the non-importation movement by October 1770. 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. Boston was the largest colonial importer of legal tea, while smugglers dominated the market in New York and Philadelphia.
When the Indemnity Act expired in 1772, Parliament passed a new act that reduced the refund, effectively leaving a 10% duty on tea imported into Britain. 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. Despite this, the company continued to import tea into Great Britain, amassing a huge surplus of product that no one would buy. For these and other reasons, by late 1772 the East India Company, one of Britain's most important commercial institutions, was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Lord North's response to the East India Company's financial crisis was the Tea Act, which 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. 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.
Some members of Parliament wanted to eliminate the Townshend duty on tea, 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. 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. 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.
The Tea War[]
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. In the ships were more than 2,000 chests containing nearly 600,000 pounds of tea. Americans learned the details of the Tea Act while the ships were en route, and opposition began to mount. The 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 Stamp Act Crisis. In Boston, Samuel Adams, who had led the resistance to the Stamp Act, 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. Some regarded the purpose of the tax program -— to make leading officials independent of colonial influence -— as a dangerous infringement of colonial rights. This was especially true in Massachusetts, the only colony where the Townshend program had been fully implemented.
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. There were mass protest meetings in Philadelphia, and Benjamin Rush urged his fellow countrymen to oppose the landing of the tea, because the cargo contained "the seeds of slavery". 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. 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.
In every colony except Massachusetts, protesters were able to force the tea consignees to resign or to return the tea to England. In Boston, however, Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson was determined to hold his ground. He convinced the tea consignees, two of whom were his sons, not to back down. When the tea ship Dartmouth arrived in the Boston Harbor in late November, Adams called for a mass meeting to be held at Faneuil Hall on 29 November 1773. Thousands of people arrived, so many that the meeting was moved to the larger Old South Meeting House. British law required Dartmouth to unload and pay the duties within twenty days or customs officials could confiscate the cargo. 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 from being unloaded.
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 16 December, the last day of Dartmouth's deadline, thousands of people gathered around the Old South Meeting House. After receiving a report that Governor Hutchinson had again refused to let the ships leave, the people began to pour out of the Old South Meeting House to prepare to take action. That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some dressed in Mohawk warrior disguises, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water.
Whether or not Adams helped plan the Boston Tea Party is disputed, but he immediately worked to publicize and defend it. 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. In Britain, even those politicians considered friends of the colonies were appalled at the destruction of property and this act united all parties there against the colonies. Lord North said, "Whatever may be the consequence, we must risk something; if we do not, all is over."
North's response was passage of the Coercive Acts, which closed the port of Boston until the colonists had paid for the destroyed tea; unilaterally abolished Massachusetts' self-government and brought it under direct British rule; and allowed British officials accused of crimes in Massachusetts to be tried elsewhere in the Empire. These acts had the effect of driving the colonists of Massachusetts into rebellion, leading to the outbreak of the North American Rebellion.
Sobel's sources for the Boston Tea Party and the other responses to the Tea Act are Franklin Hope's John Dickinson's Years of Trial (London, 1917); Walter Brownell's Tea and Terror: The Sons of Liberty in 1773 (Melbourne, 1954); Lawrence Gilman's Sam Adams and the Rebellion: A Study in Revolutionary Leadership (Mexico City, 1954); and Robert Scott's John Hancock: The Profiteer and the Patriot (New York, 1959).