Essay 3-A: The Boston Tea Party and The People

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

Imagine yourself on Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s the evening of December 16, 1773—dark and undoubtedly cold. Three ships rest gently at the wharf, each with a cargo of a contested good—East India Company tea. From the darkness emerges a company of men, just over one hundred, with faces darkened and dressed like Native Americans. They proceed to board the ships, carry more than three hundred casks of tea onto the deck, break them open, and toss the tea into Boston Harbor. You’ve just witnessed the Boston Tea Party—although it didn’t get that name until the nineteenth century. The Tea Party matters both as a statement of the lack of popular consent to taxation and as an action that would thrust the question of consent to the foreground for all American colonists.

What had brought these Bostonians out? Their presence at the harbor was the result of local resistance to decisions that had been made far away in London. In 1767, in another attempt to raise revenue, Parliament had laid duties on many goods imported to the American colonies—goods such as paint, glass, paper, and tea. Americans resisted, writing against the acts and petitioning for repeal. Many Americans opted for practical resistance to the measures, refusing to purchase the taxed goods. They also formed groups that came to be known as the Sons of Liberty, dedicated to defending the rights of the colonists. Eventually, the protests worked, and Parliament repealed the duties—except for the tax on tea.

A tripwire was set for a new political crisis, with tea at the center. The Parliament-approved Tea Act of 1773 allowed the East India Company to sell its tea at a lower price, but for the colonists, buying the cheaper tea would be a practical endorsement of the right of Parliament to tax it. Americans across the colonies united in their opposition to the tea, but approaches differed. In Pennsylvania and New York, the ships bearing the tea were simply turned away. In South Carolina, the tea was unloaded but immediately locked up until the colony could decide what to do. But the real center of controversy was Boston. There, Governor Thomas Hutchinson was committed to enforcing Parliamentary rule. Once the ships docked, Hutchinson refused to let them leave until they unloaded their cargoes of tea—which the Sons of Liberty opposed.
The cargo of tea became the key point of political controversy—a symbol of the competing ideals between Parliamentary sovereignty and the right of Americans to be taxed only with their consent (directly or by actual representatives). Boston’s resistance leaders and Governor Hutchinson were at loggerheads. Meanwhile, plans were being made by the Sons of Liberty to deal with the tea.

On the evening of December 16, a public meeting was held to denounce the tea—and the governor—again. Thousands showed up. Significant public leaders like Samuel Adams gave speeches. Meanwhile, rank-and-file members of the Sons of Liberty proceeded in an orderly fashion to destroy the tea. Among those on board the ships, we know, was a common shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes—an ordinary individual who refused to accept unconstitutional taxation.

The activity of the Sons of Liberty at the ships was organized and intentional. It aimed to destroy the tea alone—not to engage in a more general destruction of property. The best example of this impulse was when one of the ship’s holds was padlocked, and to get into it the participants had to break the lock. Before the night was done, they paid the ship’s captain to replace the lock.

The consequences of the Boston Tea Party were severe. Parliament decided to teach Boston a lesson, which they did with a series of acts known as the Coercive Acts, but which the colonists dubbed the “Intolerable Acts.” The acts shut down Boston Harbor, removed local government from the colony, and installed military rule. Boston’s plight would be the prime point of discussion at the Continental Congress that gathered in Philadelphia in 1774. The opposition between the colony and the representatives of British power made Massachusetts a veritable powder keg. In fact, it was a British expedition to seize militia powder and shot that led to conflict at Lexington and Concord—and launched the American Revolution.

The citizens of Boston, then, had been engaged in a great debate over a key constitutional principle around consent. Defending their rights as Englishmen not to be taxed without their consent, they refused to accept Parliament’s repeated attempts to levy taxes on them. Their principled resistance led to practical actions—organizing to express popular sentiment, explaining reasons for resistance, and then symbolically destroying the tea. These New Englanders demonstrated the significance of consent—or lack thereof—in the conflict that produced the American Revolution.

Dr. Jonathan Den Hartog is the Carolyn and Don Drennen Chair of American History, Civics, and the Constitution at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, where he is also the Chair of the History Department. He received his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Notre Dame. Den Hartog’s historical interests are in the religious and political history of the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods of the United States. He has written the book Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation and has co-edited the book Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833.

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