The Boston Tea Party Destroys a Cargo of East India Company Tea

The Tea Act, which the American Battlefield Trust says Parliament passed on May 10, 1773, let the East India Company sell its tea directly to colonists through its own appointed agents. The Trust notes that the act actually lowered the price of imported tea, but that many colonists feared it would set a precedent for Parliament's and the Company's authority over the colonies. Opposition spread in the months that followed. On October 16, 1773, a Philadelphia meeting resolved that the duty Parliament placed on tea landed in America was a tax levied without consent, and that anyone who aided in unloading or selling the Company's tea while the duty stood was an enemy to his country. In every colony except Massachusetts, the Trust reports, protestors persuaded the tea agents to resign and the tea ships were sent back to England.

In Boston the outcome was different. The Trust says the ship Dartmouth anchored in the harbor in late November 1773, followed by two more tea ships, Eleanor and Beaver, and that Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused the colonists' demand that the ships be allowed to leave. On December 16, after a crowd of thousands met at the Old South Meeting House and word came that the governor would again not let the ships go, an assembly voted that no one should unload or use the tea. That evening, the Trust says, between 30 and 130 men, many of them Sons of Liberty and some disguised as Mohawk warriors, boarded the three ships, opened 342 chests of tea with axes and threw the contents into the water. According to the Trust's account, the group harmed no other property or people.

Reactions were divided. Hutchinson called the act treason, and John Adams, according to the Trust, praised it as an exertion of popular power, while Benjamin Franklin and George Washington disapproved. The Trust reports that Lord North, the prime minister, concluded that Britain should respond firmly, and that Parliament's answer was the Coercive Acts, which the colonists called the Intolerable Acts. Those measures, taken up next in this record, pushed the colonies toward the First Continental Congress and the first common body that spoke for them.