The Boston Tea Party
Today is the two hundred fiftieth anniversary. No one had planned on it, but the cause and events forced it.
This is the start of my series marking the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution! Next is the First Continental Congress, on 5 September 1774.
Today is the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party: 16 December 1773.
As tensions were rising leading up to the American Revolution (which would erupt in April 1775), in protest of Britain's tax on tea, Boston Patriots1 threw 342 chests of tea overboard in Boston harbor rather than let the tax be paid.
Nobody had planned for this to happen. Nobody had guessed that the mass movement against British-imposed taxes to come down to these three ships, and nobody had planned or wanted people to throw the tea overboard. In fact, Patriot leaders took great steps to avoid it. But, events ran out of everyone's control until they were pushed into it - and afterwards, the Boston Tea Party itself helped tensions build further toward the Revolution.
The story doesn't start with the tax on tea, but with the previous "Stamp Act" (enacted 1765) where Britain taxed numerous legal documents and customer goods in the colonies. Britain had laid the tax to pay down their large debt from the French and Indian War (which they'd won in 1763, pushing the French out of North America). Taxes in Britain were already much higher than in the colonies, and had provoked several riots in Britain already. So, Parliament decided, why not make the colonies pay for this war which had (in part) benefitted them?
But many colonists objected. It wasn't just that they didn't like taxes. They argued that the British Parliament didn't have the right to impose taxes on them under the principles of English law itself. English law had long since established that the king couldn't impose taxes himself. All taxes needed to be approved by the people's representatives in the House of Commons.2 These taxes had been approved by the House of Commons, but the colonists argued that - analogously - taxes on the colonies should only be levied by the colonies' own assemblies.
Benjamin Franklin and many others urged Parliament that they would happily levy their own taxes if Parliament repealed theirs. This may or may not have actually been true - I personally suspect it was - but Parliament barely even considered taking Franklin up on the offer. Meanwhile, loose groups of colonists organized to protest the Stamp Act and harass anyone who'd volunteered to sell stamps. They called themselves "Sons of Liberty". They didn't have any formal organization outside the local level, such as Boston's "North End Caucus" which was literally from the north end of the city. And, even on the local level, their organization was quite loose. But, they quickly became quite popular and started informally coordinating with each other. By 1766, the Tory Thomas Hutchinson already said "The authority of every colony is in the hands of the sons of liberty."
But, Parliament refused. The colonists' massive protests made them repeal the Stamp Act (in 1766), but they replied with the Declaratory Act: declaring that the Parliament sitting in London had full legislative power over the whole Empire.3 Parliament acknowledged the colonies didn't elect Members of Parliament, but it insisted they were still "virtually represented" just like anyone else who didn't qualify to vote.4
With the Stamp Act repealed, Britain tried again with the "Townshend Acts" (1767): dramatically raising tariffs on many colonial imports, again to pay the war debt.
This, colonists insisted, was still essentially a tax.
The Sons of Liberty responded with a mass boycott of British goods. It started perhaps simultaneously in Boston (led by people like Joseph Warren and John Hancock) and Virginia (led by people like Patrick Henry). Many previously-imported goods started being produced for the first time in the colonies, in brand-new workshops and home businesses. Regular riots broke out against British soldiers, and also against merchants who broke the boycott and imported British goods.
Soldiers sent to enforce these Townshend Acts exacerbated the tensions. On the one hand, having so many soldiers present (especially in Boston, where ~2,000 soldiers compared with ~16,000 civilians in the city) caused tensions. But beyond their numbers, they were a constant reminder of the Crown's authority. The Boston Massacre (of 1770) was perhaps the worst individual incident - though with only five dead, it stood out more in Patriot propaganda than in reality where other incidents also lea to deaths.
The boycott drastically hurt British merchants, who complained to Parliament. Finally, in 1770,5 the Townshend Acts were repealed except for a tax on tea. This was a great victory for the Sons of Liberty; their boycott had succeeded almost exactly as they had planned! So, aiming to build on their success in hopes of ending the one tax Parliament hadn't already ended - and also to keep up the fight for their principle - they persisted in boycotting tea.
So, when the British East India Company shipped a large shipment of tea direct to Boston Harbor in late 1773, the stage was set for the Boston Tea Party.
The problem was: With the East India Company selling tea directly to the colonies and cutting out middlemen, even with the tax, their tea would be cheaper than smuggled (and hence untaxed) tea. If it was landed, the "consignee" who'd agreed to sell it at retail would immediately pay the tax. And once that was done, it'd almost certainly be bought. Many people believed in the boycott and would avoid it, but there were some people who wouldn't. Nobody knew just how many, and none of the Sons of Liberty wanted to find out. But that would break the boycott of British-taxed goods. And if that boycott was broken here, it - and the whole cross-colonial organization around it between different chapters of Sons of Liberty - would become much more fragile.
In all other colonies, protestors had coerced the tea consignees to resign (as they'd done earlier with the stamp agents under the Stamp Act), so no one would receive the tea from the ships. But in Boston, the royal governor had convinced the tea consignees to hold out - and then made the ships hold out as well, by denying them the papers they'd need to leave the harbor until the tea was unloaded.
So, as a matter of practice and principle both, the tea could not be landed.
The Sons of Liberty in Boston tried to resolve this standoff. For about three weeks, the tea-ships sat at dock, full of tea, with Sons of Liberty patrolling the dock preventing them from being unloaded. Meanwhile, they held constant meetings - both private meetings and mass meetings - to try to convince someone to back down or find some way out. The tea-ship owners, especially Francis Rotch who was a patient of the leading Son of Liberty Dr. Joseph Warren, cooperated; but the governor and consignees would not back down.
On the evening of 16 December 1773, Samuel Adams was leading one more mass meeting (with perhaps five thousand people present) to discuss the situation. While the meeting was going on, Rotch came to report the governor was still refusing to let the ship leave till the tea was unloaded. The dilemma was still unresolved.
Samuel Adams then adjourned the meeting with the announcement they "had now done all they could for the Salvation of their Country." The campaign of boycotts and meetings would no longer help; more direct action was needed.
Thereupon, about seventy or eighty Sons of Liberty, some disguised, all obviously having discussed this before, went down to the pier, boarded the ships, and - helped by the other Sons of Liberty still patrolling the dock - proceeded to open all the chests of tea and throw it overboard.
We don't actually know who was there on the ships at the Boston Tea Party. They knew better than to leave explicit records at the time. Some people claimed to have been there much later (after the Revolution was won), and historians often consider their claims plausible. But others had died before then, or kept it a secret. The biography of Dr. Joseph Warren I've read spends a couple pages debating whether he was there. However, it was an open secret that the leaders of the Boston Sons of Liberty - men such as Samuel Adams, John Adams, Paul Revere, and Joseph Warren - were involved in organizing it and probably were present for it too.
There was no resistance. Many hundreds of Bostonians watched from the waterfront, and doubtlessly recognized some of the people there. But no one testified who they were. The impasse being removed, the ships left Boston Harbor - to applause in the colonies, and uproar in England.
The Sons of Liberty had now gone beyond their boycott campaign. They quickly spread the word6 of what had happened, emphasizing the order of the act: this hadn't been a mob. They'd come from a mass meeting led by the respectable people of the city; they'd thrown overboard just the tea without stealing or disturbing anything else on the ships. All this was quite true, and it greatly raised sympathies for Boston in the rest of the colonies.
(But not everyone in the colonies agreed; this also pressed a firmer rift between Patriots and Tories. Around this time, Dr. Joseph Warren - a leading Patriot - stopped treating Tory patients. We don't know whether it was he or they who ended their relationship, but regardless, it speaks to the divide.)
But Boston would need those sympathies shortly.
"We must risk something," said Prime Minister Lord North. "If we do not, all is over." So, Parliament responded with the "Intolerable Acts" - including the "Boston Port Act" which closed the port of Boston until the East India Company was repaid for the tea. With that single decree, myriads of Bostonians were out of work and facing starvation. Even aside from how many Bostonians were working with the port, maritime trade was the main way to ship food and firewood and everything else to the city. Mercy Otis Warren, a Patriot, feared "the ruin of this once flourishing metropolis." Meanwhile, a new governor was sent: General Thomas Gage.
The Sons of Liberty had immediately known the Boston Tea Party would be significant, but they probably hadn't guessed how harsh the British response would be. But as they now scrambled to respond, the bonds between colonies became stronger, as other towns and colonies sent regular food aid to Boston on behalf of what they now reaffirmed was their common cause.
And, tensions with Britain rose further toward the coming Revolution. The Port of Boston would not reopen until 1776, when the royal governor General Gage and the British army evacuated in the face of George Washington and the Continental Army.
"Patriot" is technically an anachronistic term here. They called themselves "Whigs", after the British movement which had fought for more limits on royal power. They saw themselves as a continuation of that movement, as did the later American "Whig" political party.
This was, in fact, the principle the British House of Commons used to build their power until they became the most powerful entity in the kingdom.
They would hold to the principle of the Declaratory Act until the Statute of Westminster in 1931, in a far different era, where they first disclaimed legislative power over the Dominions (like Canada and Ireland) which had requested them to.
The principle of "virtual representation" said that each Member of Parliament "virtually represented" everyone in the Empire, not just the people who'd voted for him. Before the Great Reform Act of 1832, this significantly mattered, because some MP's were elected from "pocket boroughs" with just a few dozen eligible voters.
Coincidentally, on the same day as the Boston Massacre, though (with transatlantic travel times) of course nobody knew it at the time.
Paul Revere was one such messenger.
Only one question, and it is kind of pedantic. On footnote 3 it talks about the Statute of Winchester where Parliament declaimed legislative power over its dominions such as Canada and Ireland. But Ireland was independent by then. But then it occurred to me that this might be referring to just Northern Ireland. I looked up this statute -- https://www.britannica.com/event/Statute-of-Westminster -- which also refers to Ireland as a dominion. I assume both of you mean Northern Ireland?