BOSTON TEA PARTY

I

INTRODUCTION

Boston Tea Party, incident on December 16, 1773, when a group of citizens in Boston, Massachusetts, dumped tea into Boston Harbor. It was one of several events that led to the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775.

II

BRITISH TAX ON TEA

In 1770 the British Parliament repealed most provisions of the Townshend Acts, which taxed imports to the American colonies. However, Parliament retained the duty on tea to demonstrate its power to tax the colonies. Thereafter, Americans mostly bought tea smuggled from Holland.

Then in 1773 the British Parliament passed the Tea Act. This act was designed to help the nearly bankrupt East India Company by eliminating any tax on tea the company exported to America. The company’s tea, although still subject to the Townshend tax, was now cheaper than the smuggled Dutch tea most Americans drank. However, if the colonists bought it, they would be accepting the British tax.

III

COLONIAL RESISTANCE

Many colonists in America resisted the tea from the East India Company. Because the company appointed only certain American merchants as agents to distribute their tea, other merchants resented not being able to partake in the profits. Smugglers feared the loss of the valuable trade of Dutch tea. Popular politicians objected to the Tea Act on principle. They resisted “taxation without representation”—Britain taxing the colonists without giving them representation in government.

Throughout the colonies, people opposed the Tea Act. In most places, they either stored the tea or sent it back, but not in Boston. Led by Samuel Adams, the citizens of Boston would not permit the unloading of three British ships that arrived in Boston in November 1773 with 342 chests of tea. The royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, however, would not let the tea ships return to England until the colonists had paid the duty.

On the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of Bostonians, many of them disguised as Native Americans, boarded the vessels and dumped the tea into Boston Harbor.

IV

AFTERMATH

When the news of the Boston Tea Party reached Britain, an outraged Parliament demanded compensation for the tea. After the colonists refused, Parliament passed a series of laws to punish Boston and to make British control over Massachusetts more effective. Known as the Intolerable Acts, the laws closed the port of Boston to trade; curtailed the powers of the Massachusetts assembly and local town meetings; provided for the housing of troops in private houses; and exempted British officials from trial in Massachusetts. These acts further alienated the American colonists and hastened the start of the American Revolution.