Page 149 - American Stories, A History of the United States

the Final Provocation: the boston tea Party
5.1 In May 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, legislation the Americans might have wel-

comed. After all, it lowered the price for their favorite beverage. Parliament wanted to
save one of Britain’s largest businesses, the East India Company, from bankruptcy. This
5.2 commercial giant imported Asian tea into Britain, where it was resold to wholesalers. The
tea was also subject to heavy duties. The company tried to pass these charges on to con-
sumers, but American tea drinkers preferred cheaper leaves smuggled in from Holland.
5.3 The Tea Act changed the rules. Parliament not only allowed the company to sell
directly to American retailers, thus cutting out intermediaries, but also eliminated the
duties paid in Britain. If all had gone according to plan, the agents of the East India
5.4 Company in America would have undersold their competitors, including the Dutch
smugglers, and the new profits would have saved the company.
But Parliament’s logic was flawed. First, since the tax on tea, collected in American
ports, remained in effect, this new act seemed a devious scheme to win popular sup-
port for Parliament’s right to tax the colonists without representation. Second, the act
threatened to undercut powerful colonial merchants who sold smuggled Dutch tea.
The British government might have been well advised to devise another plan to rescue
the ailing company. In Philadelphia and New York City, colonists turned back the tea
ships before they could unload.
In Boston, however, the issue was less easily resolved. Governor Hutchinson, a
strong-willed man, would not let the vessels return to England. Patriots would not let
them unload. So, crammed with tea, the ships sat in Boston Harbor waiting for the
colonists to make up their minds. On the night of December 16, 1773, they did so. Men
disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded the ships and pitched 340 chests of tea worth
£10,000 over the side. John Adams sensed the event would have far-reaching signifi-
cance. “This Destruction of the Tea,” he scribbled in his diary, “is so bold, so daring,
so firm, intrepid, and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so
lasting, that I can’t but consider it as an epocha in history.”
Boston Tea Party Raid on british News of the Boston Tea Party stunned the North ministry. The Bostonians had
ships in which Patriots disguised treated parliamentary supremacy with contempt. British rulers saw no humor what-
as Mohawks threw hundreds of soever in the destruction of private property by subjects of the crown dressed in cos-
chests of tea owned by the east
india company into boston Harbor tume. To quell such rebelliousness, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts. (In America,
to protest british taxes. they were called the Intolerable Acts.) The legislation (1) closed the port of Boston
until the city compensated the East India Company for the lost tea; (2) restructured
Coercive act Also known as the the Massachusetts government by transforming the upper house of the legislature
intolerable Acts, the four pieces of from an elective to an appointed body and restricting the number of town meetings
legislation passed by Parliament in to one a year; (3) allowed the royal governor to transfer British officials arrested for
response to the boston tea Party to
punish Massachusetts. offenses committed in the line of duty to England, where there was little likelihood
they would be convicted; and (4) authorized the army to quarter troops wherever they
were needed, even if this required the compulsory requisition of uninhabited private
buildings. George III enthusiastically supported this tough policy; he appointed Gen-
eral Thomas Gage as the colony’s new royal governor. Gage apparently won the king’s
favor by announcing that in America, “Nothing can be done but by forcible means.”
The sweeping denial of constitutional liberties confirmed the colonists’ worst fears.
To men like Samuel Adams, it seemed as if Britain intended to enslave the American
people. Colonial moderates found their position shaken by the Coercive Acts’ vindic-
tiveness. Edmund Burke, one of America’s last friends in Parliament, noted sadly in
the Commons, that “this is the day, then, that you wish to go to war with all America,
in order to conciliate that country to this.”
If in 1774 Parliament thought it could isolate Boston from the rest of America, it
was in for a rude surprise. Colonists in other parts of the continent recognized imme-
diately that the principles at stake in Boston affected all Americans. Charity suddenly
became a political act. People from Georgia to New Hampshire sent livestock, grain,
and money to Boston. Ordinary colonists showed they were prepared to make a per-
sonal sacrifice for the cause of America.

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