The Boston Tea Party

After the Stamp Act was repealed, Parliament imposed the Townshend duties in 1767 on imported goods including tea. Colonial boycotts led Parliament to repeal most of them, but it kept the duty on tea as a symbol of its authority to tax. Many colonists drank smuggled Dutch tea instead.

In 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act to rescue the struggling East India Company. It allowed the company to ship tea directly to the colonies free of the taxes paid by other importers. Although tea would be cheaper, the arrangement put colonial tea merchants out of business, and colonists saw it as a trick to make them accept the tea tax and Parliament’s right to impose it.

On December 16, 1773, colonists — some disguised as Indians — boarded the East India Company’s ships in Boston Harbor and threw crates of tea overboard. The protesters targeted the tea itself; the action was meant as a political statement against the company’s monopoly and Parliament’s tax.

British officials were determined to restore order. Parliament closed the port of Boston until the East India Company was compensated and passed further laws in 1774 placing Massachusetts under more direct royal control; General Thomas Gage was appointed military governor. Colonists called these the Intolerable Acts. Opinion was divided — some Bostonians offered to pay for the tea — but most colonists agreed on the need for a collective response, and the colonies sent delegates to the First Continental Congress.

The Tea Party transformed a dispute over taxation into a confrontation over Parliament’s power to govern the colonies at all. The punishment of Massachusetts convinced many in other colonies that their own liberties were at risk, and it set in motion the events that led to Lexington and Concord.