How the Boston Tea Celebration's 'destruction of the tea' modified American historical past

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How the Boston Tea Celebration's 'destruction of the tea' modified American historical past

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, a crowd of armed males, some allegedly sporting costumes meant to disguise them as Native American warriors, boarded three ships docked at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston. Within the vessels’ holds had been 340 chests containing 92,000 kilos of tea, the most well-liked drink in America. With help from the patriot group generally known as the Sons of Liberty, the intruders methodically searched the ships and dumped their tea into Boston Harbor.

In response to the British East India Firm, whose proprietors owned the destroyed cargo, losses totaled greater than one million {dollars} in right this moment’s foreign money.

The “destruction of the tea” – because the Boston Tea Celebration was initially known as – was the pivotal occasion within the coming of the American Revolution. Earlier than Dec. 16, a peaceable decision to American objections to Parliament’s repeated makes an attempt to tax the Colonies with out their consent appeared attainable. Afterward, each British and American Colonial positions hardened. Inside a yr, Britain and America had been at conflict.

An assault on personal property

As a result of it was an assault on personal property, the Tea Celebration offended many patriots in America. When George Washington discovered what had occurred, he made clear he disapproved of “destroying the tea.”

Benjamin Franklin so disliked the motion that he supplied to pay for the East India Firm’s losses himself. Samuel Adams, assumed by each his friends and fashionable historians to be one of many Tea Celebration’s organizers, by no means admitted to being concerned.

Reenactors, right here in 2017, dump tea into Boston Harbor from a ship on the Boston Tea Celebration Museum throughout annual celebrations and commemorations of the occasion.
Nicolaus Czarnecki, MediaNews Group/Boston Herald through Getty Photos

The unique multinational conglomerate

Given the significance that People connected to property rights, why had been Boston patriots prepared to take such a calculated threat? The reply was the corrupt discount that Lord North, the British prime minister, struck with the East India Firm in the course of the spring of 1773.

The East India Firm was Britain’s wealthiest, strongest company. The corporate had its personal military, which was greater than twice the scale of the king’s common forces. Political economist Adam Smith described the administration of its territorial empire in South Asia as “army and despotical.” But the corporate was on the verge of chapter – a sufferer of a devastating famine in Bengal and its personal corrupt administration.

North’s resolution was the Tea Act. Hoping to repair Britain’s issues in each India and America, Parliament gave the East India Firm a monopoly to promote 17 million kilos of tea in America at a diminished value – whereas protecting in place the Colonial tax on tea that Parliament had levied within the Townshend Acts of 1767. Even with the added price of the tax, the corporate’s tea promised to be cheaper than tea offered by anybody else, together with untaxed Dutch tea smuggled by retailers like John Hancock.

Parliament’s makes an attempt to tax the Colonies because the Stamp Act of 1765 had largely failed. American patriots feared that the Tea Act can be a victory for British politicians who believed Parliament had the fitting to lift a income within the Colonies with out the consent of Colonial representatives.

A person empties an envelope of dark powder into a plastic box holding even more of the same powder.

Yearly, People ship tea to the Boston Tea Celebration Museum to be dumped into the harbor throughout commemorative occasions. Right here, Kristin Harris, analysis coordinator on the Boston Tea Celebration Ships & Museum, blends many packages of mailed tea right into a container for dumping.
Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe through Getty Photos

A nationwide response

Though essentially the most violent resistance to the brand new measure occurred in Massachusetts, Boston was not alone. As opposition to the Tea Act unfold, New York and Philadelphia patriots refused to permit ships with firm tea to unload, forcing them to return to Britain.

Elsewhere, tea was unloaded and left on the docks to rot. After retailers in Charleston, South Carolina, paid for a cargo of tea, they had been pressured by native patriots to empty it into the harbor.

In Edenton, North Carolina, the resistance got here from girls, 51 of whom signed a petition pledging to not drink tea till the legal guidelines “to enslave this our Native Nation” had been repealed. Ladies within the port of Wilmington burned tea in town inexperienced.

Parliamentary anger

When information of the destroyed tea reached London, even Britons who sympathized with the American trigger had been appalled, partly for a similar purpose many Colonists objected: It was an assault on personal property.

Parliament responded with three punitive legal guidelines, limiting Massachusetts’ self-government, interfering with the Colony’s courts and stopping all commerce by means of the port of Boston till its individuals compensated the East India Firm for the losses. Historians right this moment bear in mind the statutes because the Coercive Acts. Colonists known as them the “Insupportable Acts.” Each descriptions had been correct.

If Parliament had responded much less harshly, People would have needed to weigh their objections to paying Parliament’s tax on tea towards the discomfort that a lot of them felt over the destruction of personal property in Boston. Finally, the lads who boarded the ships on Griffin’s Wharf might need been delivered to justice.

Because it occurred, although, Lord North claimed Parliament had no alternative. “No matter often is the consequence,” he advised the Home of Commons on April 22, 1774, “we should threat one thing: if we don’t, all is over.”

Nearly precisely a yr later, the federal government’s coercive measures, which North hoped would settle the dispute on Britain’s phrases, tipped 13 of George III’s Colonies into open revolt. No matter People considered the occasions on Dec. 16, the punishment imposed on Massachusetts terrified them much more, elevating fears {that a} related destiny awaited Colonists elsewhere.

If coercion was Britain’s solely alternative, then the Colonists started to see that maybe they, too, had only one alternative: armed resistance, adopted on July 4, 1776, by a declaration of independence.


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