Boston Tea Party
Men disguised as Mohawks threw 342 chests of tea into Boston harbour on the night of 16 December 1773. The Tea Act that produced it was not a tax increase. It was a rescue of the East India Company, which was near bankruptcy with some 17 million pounds of unsold tea in London warehouses, and it allowed the company to ship directly to America and undercut the smuggled Dutch tea that most colonists actually drank. The Townshend duty on tea remained, which is the constitutional objection, and the direct consignment to selected agents was a monopoly, which is the commercial one. The smugglers and the constitutionalists therefore agreed for once. Three ships lay at Griffin's Wharf, and Massachusetts law required that cargo be unloaded and duty paid within twenty days of arrival or be seized by customs. The town meeting demanded that the ships leave and Governor Hutchinson, whose sons were consignees, refused clearance. On the last night some 5,000 people met at the Old South Meeting House, Samuel Adams announced that nothing more could be done to save the country, and a party went to the wharf. They broke open the chests methodically, threw about forty-six tonnes of tea into the water, swept the decks and replaced a broken padlock, and took nothing. Britain answered with the Coercive Acts closing the port, and the other colonies sent food and money. The name is later. Participants called it the destruction of the tea, and the phrase tea party appears in the 1830s, by which time the last survivors were being interviewed as celebrities. The value destroyed was about £9,600, some two million dollars today.
- Year: 1773 CE
- Category: Political
