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In 1770 the British Parliament repealed most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.
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