Causes of the Boston Tea Party

Few uprisings in American History are as well known as the Boston Tea Party. Aside from popularimages of colonists dressed as Indians dumping tea into the Boston Harbor, the Boston Tea Partymarks the turning point between the American colonists and the British government. It helped todeepen the divide among the Patriots and the Loyalists, bringing the 13 colonies one step closer todeclaring their independence.

End of the Seven Years War

Most people know that the Boston Tea Party was somehow related to taxation withoutrepresentation. Following the end of the Seven Years War between the British and the French in1763, Great Britain found itself mired in debt. This debt, coupled with protecting their newlyacquired territory of Quebec with 10,000 soldiers, left the Mother Country scrambling for revenue.During the Seven Years War British officials noted how much more prosperous the Americancolonists were. With their spacious farms and villages and towns with bustling shops and tradesmen,the colonists had much higher living standards than many people back in Great Britain. Britishauthorities also saw how many colonial merchants ignored trade laws and taxes. And the colonistspaid little in taxes, compared to a British citizen, who paid 26 shillings a year in taxes, whilecolonists paid an average of one shilling per person in taxes. To this end, it seemed completelyreasonable to the British government that the colonists pay their fair share in taxes. So in 1767 thegovernment placed new taxes, known as the Townsend Act, on various goods from Great Britain,including paper, lead, glass and tea. Colonists organized boycotts of British goods, and theTownsend Act was repealed, except for the tax on tea.

The East India Company

When the Townsend Act went into effect, colonists were drinking roughly 1.2 million pounds of tea ayear. The remaining tax on tea made English tea expensive and soon colonists began drinkingsmuggled tea from the Netherlands. However by 1773 the boycott of British tea began to wane.However the boycott had its intended result. Sales of British tea, especially from the East IndiaCompany, dropped drastically and in May 1773 the market for colonial tea was so low that the EastIndia Company on the brink of collapse. There was a great deal of vested interest in the East IndiaCompany. Many members of the British Parliament held shares in the East India Company and werenot about to let the company to go bankrupt. So they passed the Tea Act which placed special dutieson tea. In Boston, East India tea could only be sold by seven designated tea agents, calledconsignees. The Tea Act allowed the East India Company to skirt any middlemen and undersell theircompetitors, even undercutting smuggled tea. Parliament would not be able to resist such cheaplypriced tea. They soon found out that the colonists were not going to overlook any tax, no matter howsmall.

The Boston Tea Party

Tensions over the tea tax came to head on December 17, 1773. Between fifty and sixty men of allsocial classes left Old South Meeting House, some (not all) dressed as Mohawk Indians with blanketsand headdress. They headed to Griffins Wharf, where three ships holding English tea wereanchored. The men used hatchets to force open 342 chests of tea (estimated to be around 18.5million cups of tea) worth 18,000 (about 1 million dollars today) and threw it into the harbor. Crowdsgathered on the docks and cheered the men on, calling for more saltwater tea. The waters of Boston

Harbor turned brown for several days. The Boston Tea Party, as it became known, inspired otheracts of rebellion in places such as Annapolis, New York and New Jersey.

Sources:

Faragher, John Mack, Mari Jo Buhle, Daniel Czitrom and Susan H. Armitage. Out of

Many: A History of the American People. New Jersey: Prentice Hall P, 1995.

Lancaster, Bruce. The American Revolution. New York: Mariner Books, 2001.

Norton, Mary Beth, David M. Katzman, Paul D. Scott, Howard P. Chudacoff and

Thomas G. Patterson. A People and A Nation: A History of the United States. Boston: HoughtonMifflin Company,1994.

Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.