Saturday, December 16, 2023, marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.
The seeds of the Boston Tea Party were sown in the spring of 1773, when Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773 in an attempt to prevent the East India Company from going bankrupt.
This act authorized the company to sell a half million pounds of tea directly to the colonies, without paying the usual duties and tariffs.
This meant that the East India Company could undersell anyone, including smugglers, whose tea colonists had been drinking almost exclusively since the passage of the Townshend Acts that placed taxes on everyday items like glass, paper, and tea in 1767 (all the Townshend Acts except that on tea had been repealed in 1770).
Parliament reasoned that if the colonists could buy East India Company tea more cheaply than any other, they would begin drinking it again, thus saving the company.
Instead, the act revived the colonists’ old argument about taxation without representation and led to the events of December 16, 1773.
On that night, a party of men dressed as Native Americans boarded three vessels – Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver – that were moored at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, intending to destroy their cargoes of East India Company tea.
The act was the culmination of many days of posturing, threats, and counter-threats among the merchants, government officials and radical colonists.
Incensed at the landing of three ships carrying East India Company tea in late November, colonists had been blocking the unloading of the tea and convening meetings demanding that the tea be returned to England without delay.
Earlier that day, a mass meeting at the Old South Church attracted thousands of people from Boston and the surrounding towns.
After a day of inflammatory discourse, Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s refusal to allow the ships in port to leave without discharging their cargoes of tea was apparently the last straw.
Samuel Adams rose, announcing that he did not see what more the inhabitants could to do save their country. At this, war-whoops filled the hall, and between 30 and 60 men, disguised as Indians, rushed out of the hall and into the streets of Boston, heading for Griffin’s Wharf and its three tea-laden ships.
In all, 340 large wooden chests containing some 90,000 pounds of tea were dumped into Boston Harbor that night.
The small glass bottle shown here contains tea leaves gathered across the harbor from Boston, on the shore of Dorchester Neck, on December 17, 1773, the morning after “The Destruction of the Tea” as it was called in Boston in 1773.
This is one of five relics of the Boston Tea Party (including tea caddies said to have been emptied at the Tea Party, and a china punch bowl from which participants are said to have drunk) in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
You can view the bottle up close here or in person at “The Dye is Cast,” an exhibition now on view at the Historical Society in Boston.
You can also view a presentation of the Society’s collections related to the Boston Tea Party here.
In April 1774, the city of New York had it’s own tea party.
Illustrations, from above: W.D. Cooper’s engraving “Boston Tea Party” form The History of North America, 1789 (Library of Congress); and a photo of glass bottle containing tea leaves from the Boston Tea Party (Massachusetts Historical Society).
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