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December 12—18, 1773

Boston's Patriots Hold a Tea Party in the Harbor

"Voted, that this body will oppose the vending of any tea sent by the East India Company to any part of this Continent, with our lives and fortunes." So read the declaration passed by the 1,000-person Town Meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston on Nov. 5, 1773. What could possibly have motivated such a strong stand against buying tea—was it poisoned? In a sense, it was. The story of the Boston Tea Party of Dec. 16, 1773 begins with the British Parliament's passage of the Stamp Act.

After the end of the French and Indian War in 1761, a war which had also been fought in Europe and Asia under the name of the Seven Years War, Great Britain acquired a vast empire. Trying to recoup some of the expenses of the war, the British oligarchy decided that the American colonials should bear part of the burden. Never mind that Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts had spent considerable sums on behalf of Britain and had never been paid back.

First came the Sugar Act, which fixed the price of molasses and limited the American molasses trade to the British West Indies, which could not possibly meet the American demand nor absorb the exports the colonies used to pay for the molasses. Then came the Stamp Act, which went into effect in 1765. This tax on licenses, publications, and legal papers sparked protests, including the Virginia Resolves, which were endorsed by most of the other colonies.

Then the Massachusetts Legislature sent out a call for a Congress of all the colonies to meet in New York to consider united action. That body produced a Declaration of Rights and Grievances, stating that only the colonies themselves could levy taxes on colonists. That statement caused an Englishman who was living in America to write home, contrasting "the remarkably pliant and submissive disposition of the inhabitants of Bengal," with that of the frisky American colonials.

The British East India Company, which was fast becoming the controlling factor in the British Empire, was already developing plans to tame the Americans into submission. It was dealt a setback, however, by massive American demonstrations against the Stamp Act and a partial boycott of British goods. British merchants and manufacturers became alarmed, and the new Rockingham Ministry repealed the Stamp Act. However, American joy at the repeal was quickly tempered by Parliament's refusal to repeal "The Declaratory Act," which allowed Britain to pass restrictive laws and levy taxes on the American colonies. A very specific Parliamentary pronouncement stated that the right to tax the colonies had always existed and would exist for all time.

When the Ministry of Charles Townshend, better known as "Champagne Charlie," came to power in 1767, a new attempt was made to force the colonies to admit that they had the "right" to be looted by the British Empire. The Townshend Acts taxed imports from Britain such as paper, lead, glass, paint, and tea. But there was a new and very threatening element embedded in the Townshend Acts, which the colonists did not take long to recognize. The Writs of Assistance legalized by the acts were blank search warrants which could by used by Royal agents at their pleasure, and anyone could be dragooned to help in the searches.

The Townshend Acts also established an American Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston, whose members were directly answerable to the Royal Treasury. Ostensibly, these members were to use the funds to defend the colonies, but the phraseology of the act stated that they would defray "the Charge of the Administration of Justice, and the Support of Local Government." Thus, the colonies would lose not only any fiscal control over their activities, but their self-government as well. Men who were responsible to the Crown and East India Company would control local government and the courts.

Again, the colonies united in protest, and in February 1768, the Massachusetts Legislature published a Circular Letter to the other colonies, stating that the Townshend Acts established taxation without representation, that colonial representation in England was impossible, and that the very idea of making colonial judges and governors independent of the electorate was intolerable. The new Prime Minister, Lord Hillsborough, furious over the Circular Letter, dissolved the Massachusetts Legislature.

Not content with that, Hillsborough sent a large flotilla of the British fleet, loaded with British Redcoats, to police Boston and ensure that Royal officials could carry out their tax-farming duties. Parliament also threatened to transport any American protesters to England for trial, and the colonies answered with a much larger boycott against British goods. In 1770, the Townshend Acts were repealed, but one subversive tool of empire was left intact, and that was the tax on tea.

In 1773, the East India Company's stock on the London Exchange dropped from 280 pounds to 160 pounds, and the company was facing bankruptcy. Parliament obligingly granted the company a tea monopoly for the American colonies, in order to put a dent in the surplus of over 17 million pounds of tea sitting in warehouses in England. The price of the tea was dropped to well below that of Dutch tea, which the Americans were smuggling into the colonies, but the 3-cent tax was left in place. Even with the tax, the price of the tea was so low that the East India Company was confident that the Americans would give in to the temptation to break their boycott.

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