The little boy comes home from school and his mother asked him: “what did you learn today?” “Oh, about the Boston Tea Party.
According to my teacher it was the Mother of all Parties!”
This was only an ice-breaker! The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was one of many build-ups and actually the final straw for the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 as the result of the “
colonists” taking up arms against imperialist England.
But let us start at the beginning. In the 16th Century Britain had a roaring trade with the East and it was especially tea that was at the top of the shopping list and also at the top of revenue earners for the British Empire. The British East India Company had controlled all tea trading between the East and the British
colonies. To ensure constant revenue, tea from the East was exported to all British Colonies, including the colonies of America, and it was expected of the Colonies to take this tea at exuberant prices.
Naturally, the colonies were not satisfied with this state of affairs as they could produce it cheaper or even import it from elsewhere much cheaper. The British Government was much concerned about this state of affairs and they were determined to prevent the British East India Company from going out of business.
But what would they do? It was going to force the colonists to buy their tea. In May 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act. The Tea Act allowed the British East India Company to sell tea directly to the colonists, bypassing the colonial wholesale merchants. This allowed the company to sell their tea cheaper than even the colonial merchants who were selling smuggled tea from Holland.
But, in even those early times everything had a political agenda. Parliament’s intent in enforcing the tea tax was only symbolic and meant to re-affirm that Parliament had absolute sovereignty over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” as the Declaratory Act of 1766 had stated. This brought a stalemate situation. The American Colonists saw through the political agenda. They realized that they would now get their tea at a cheaper price than ever before.
However, if the colonies paid the duty tax on the imported tea they would be acknowledging Parliament''s right to tax them. Tea was a staple of colonial life - it was assumed that the colonists would rather pay the tax than deny themselves the pleasure of a cup of tea, but everyone was wrong! The colonists were not fooled by Parliament''s ploy.
When the East India Company sent shipments of tea to Philadelphia and New York the ships were not allowed to land. In Charleston the tea-laden ships were permitted to dock but their cargo was consigned to a warehouse where it remained for three years until it was sold by patriots in order to help finance the revolution. In Boston, the arrival of three tea ships ignited a furious reaction.
The crisis came to a head on 16 December 1773 when as many as 7,000 agitated locals milled about the wharf where the ships were docked. A mass meeting that morning decided that the tea ships should leave the harbour without payment of any taxes. A committee was selected to take this message to the Customs House to force release of the ships out of the harbour. The Collector of Customs refused to allow the ships to leave without payment of the prescribed taxes.
Stalemate again! Now the motto that is even today still applicable came to the fore: “no taxation without representation”. On the same evening of 16 December 1773, a group of men calling themselves the "Sons of Liberty" dressed as Mohawk Indians went to the Boston Harbour. They boarded the three British ships, the Beaver, the Eleanor and the Dartmouth and dumped forty-five tons of tea into the Boston Harbour.
It went down in history as the Boston Tea Party but the significance of the event was that it is seen as the fuse that lit the explosion of American independence.