Duty Party
Was the ‘Boston Tea Party’ a protest against duty on tea or actually the taking of the duty off?
I was taught at school that the Boston Tea Party was about a bunch of colonists dressing up as native Americans and dumping a cargo of tea into the harbour in protest about duty on the import. More recently someone told me that actually the colonists were smugglers who were upset was a reduction in duty was damaging their livelihood.
Your original understanding is correct, at least in the main. But it probably is missing the larger picture.
Here’s a couple of key things most people are unaware of:
1) The Tea Party was NOT part of the basic plan of the Sons of Liberty who ended up dumping it. It was a last minute makeshift.
a) What they were trying to do was to prevent its landing and force the ships to leave, WITH the tea. The ship owners were actually willing to do so, but Governor Hutchinson refused permission for him to leave.
b) The final decision to dump the tea was made because “the clock ran out”. According to the law, once the ship had been there for 20 days, the DUTY on the tea HAD to be paid. The 20th day was about to end for the first of the ships (the Dartmouth) at midnight of the night of the tea party (December 16, 1763).
Since this tax/duty WAS precisely the thing that they were all unified in protest about (regardless of any additional economic motives some may have had), they believed they could not let this happen. This fact disproves the contention that “it was not about the duty”.
c) Another evidence of the fact that neither theft nor destruction of property was the intent — the participants took great care not to harm any individuals, nor to damage anything EXCEPT the tea. In fact, the made sure that some minor accidental damage was repaired. (They also returned to make sure that NONE of the tea was taken away.)
2) The protest going on in Boston was basically the same as that in ALL the major port cities. At the end of 1763 colonists in New York, Philadelphia and Charles Town were likewise seeking to prevent the landing of the tea, through scaring shipowners and esp. through convincing the merchants who were supposed to RECEIVE the tea (“consignees” –all of whom British authorities had chosen from those they regarded as loyal) NOT to take it.
Results: in New York and Philadelphia the tea was turned back; in Charles Town, the tea landed but was locked up in a storehouse (for a few years… until revolutionaries took it to sell to raise money for the war effort).
The difference in Boston was that Governor Hutchinson was more stubborn, and his FAMILY members, who were consignees, did not back down.
If you know something of the Stamp Act and how that was protested, you’ll see that the colonists were attempting to do very much the same thing. The plan was NOT to destroy merchandise, but to BOYCOTT it.
And DO note that, as with the Stamp Act, there was WIDESPREAD agreement on this boycott effort. It was NOT the act of a handful of ‘wealthy smugglers’.
Also – MANY American merchants felt threatened by the whole program, since it involved creating a MONOPOLY and an effort to “dump tea” [pun intended] on the American market, which would help the powerful British merchants of the East India Company, but could drive American merchants out business. What was to prevent the same thing happening for any OTHER goods? In other words, the struggle here was one piece of a larger one, that involved representation, authority to taxes, etc. but ALSO the issue of “free trade”. Britain basically had complete say over American trade — by law restricting them in many areas to trading ONLY with the mother country.
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