Boston Tea Party

On the evening of 16 December 1773, colonists in Boston, Massachusetts, some disguised as Mohawk warriors, boarded three ships in the harbour and tipped their entire cargo of East India Company tea into the water. The protest, organised by the Sons of Liberty against Parliament's Tea Act, provoked harsh British reprisals that united many of the Thirteen Colonies and pushed them towards the American Revolution.

After the French and Indian War Parliament tried, for the first time, to raise revenue directly from the American colonies. Many colonists argued that, as British subjects, only their own elected assemblies could tax them, since they sent no members to Parliament: "no taxation without representation". Protests forced Parliament to withdraw the Stamp Act in 1766. The Townshend Acts of 1767 placed new duties on goods including tea, met by boycotts and widespread smuggling of cheaper Dutch tea. In 1770 Parliament dropped all the Townshend duties except the one on tea, which Lord North's government kept to uphold its right to tax the colonies. The revenue also paid some colonial governors and judges, making them independent of local assemblies.

By 1772 the East India Company, among Britain's leading commercial concerns, was in serious financial trouble, with a vast unsold surplus of tea. The Tea Act, which received royal assent on 10 May 1773, let the company ship tea directly to the colonies through appointed agents. Even with the remaining three-pence duty, its tea could now undercut smuggled tea. The measure was not about raising prices, which actually fell. Colonists objected because it still assumed Parliament's right to tax them and created a monopoly that threatened local merchants and smugglers alike.

In the autumn of 1773 seven ships carried East India Company tea to Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston. Elsewhere, pressure forced the company's agents to resign, and the tea was either sent back or left unclaimed. In Boston, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, two of whose sons were among the consignees, refused to give way. When the Dartmouth arrived in late November, mass meetings led by Samuel Adams demanded that it leave without paying duty. By law the cargo had to be landed and taxed within twenty days. On 16 December, the final day, thousands gathered at the Old South Meeting House and heard that the governor still would not allow the ships to leave.

That evening a group of somewhere between 30 and more than 100 men, armed with axes, boarded the Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver at Griffin's Wharf. In about three hours they emptied 340 or 342 chests, sources disagree, into the harbour, about 92,600 pounds of tea valued by the company at £9,659. Contemporaries called it simply "the destruction of the tea"; the name "Boston Tea Party" became common only in the nineteenth century.

In Britain, even friends of the colonists were dismayed. In 1774 Parliament passed what Americans called the Intolerable Acts, closing the port of Boston and curtailing self-government in Massachusetts. Rather than isolating Boston, the measures alarmed colonists everywhere, who feared their own charters could be overridden. Delegates met in the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia that autumn to coordinate resistance. Within eighteen months, in April 1775, fighting broke out at the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

The protest became a touchstone for later movements. Gandhi alluded to it when meeting the Viceroy of India after the salt protest campaign of 1930, and American activists across the political spectrum have borrowed its name and imagery.

Our 1715 map shows Britain's North American colonies, then part of the expanding British Empire, and our 1783 map shows the newly independent United States that emerged from the conflict the protest helped ignite.