Boston Tea Party
On the night of 16 December 1773, some 116 men organised by Samuel Adams's Sons of Liberty boarded three ships in Boston Harbour — the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver — and over three hours systematically broke open 342 chests of tea and emptied them into the water. The tea, worth approximately £18,000, belonged to the British East India Company, which had been given a monopoly on colonial tea sales under the Tea Act of May 1773. The Act actually lowered the price of tea for colonists, but it gave the Company a direct retail channel that bypassed colonial merchants, and it carried a tea duty that the colonists had been refusing to pay for four years. The organisers dressed loosely as Mohawks — a disguise thin enough to be symbolic rather than operational — and acted after a mass meeting at Old South Meeting House at which Governor Hutchinson refused to allow the tea ships to leave the harbour without paying duty. No other property was damaged; one participant who broke open a padlock to steal private tea for himself was expelled. The political discipline of the action was part of its message. Britain's response — the Coercive Acts of 1774 — was aimed specifically at Boston and Massachusetts, closing the harbour until the tea was paid for and restructuring the colony's government. The Tea Party thus had the paradoxical effect of transforming what had been a Massachusetts crisis into a continental one, as the other colonies rallied to Massachusetts's defence against what they read as a precedent applicable to any of them.
- Year: 1773 CE
- Category: Political
