Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner
On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded three ships belonging to the East India Company and dumped its tea cargo into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party exposed the fragility of British authority and forced colonists to confront whether law could command obedience without consent—a problem later answered by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
What precipitated the action was not a tax increase, but a tax break. The colonists were upset, not because tea became more expensive, but because they had no say in the decision.
From Great Britain’s perspective, the Tea Act of 1773 was a critical part of a bailout for the East India Company, whose collapse would have endangered British economic and political interests. Parliament lowered the tax on tea in hopes of increasing American consumption and offsetting the Company’s losses, assuming that colonists would welcome a cheaper luxury good. Instead, the measure made the imperial logic unmistakable.
The deeper problem was not merely the price of tea, but what Parliament intended to accomplish through the tax. Revenue would support colonial administrators, making them more beholden to British interests than to colonial self-rule. In so doing, Parliament asserted its authority to reshape colonial institutions in ways that bypassed consent. Instead, colonists demonstrated that political dignity matters more than getting a good deal.
John Adams immediately grasped the significance of the Boston Tea Party. Writing the following day, Adams declared, “The Die is cast…The people have passed the river and cut away the bridge,” capturing the sense that the destruction of the tea marked an irreversible break.
The Coercive Acts, the consequences of the Boston Tea Party, demonstrated Great Britain’s tyrannical treatment of the colonies far more clearly than the Tea Act ever could. Rather than isolating Massachusetts, the British miscalculated. The Coercive Acts drew the colonies together. In 1774, all of the colonies except Georgia sent delegates to the First Continental Congress to coordinate a response.
The First Continental Congress marked a crucial step toward unifying the colonies, but the Continental Association, which it adopted, hesitated to endorse consent of the governed as the foundation for legitimate government. Nevertheless, the delegates could agree on a unified, colonial response to British mistreatment. They petitioned the King to support them against Parliament and accused Parliament of pursuing a “ruinous System of Colony Administration” aimed at “enslaving these Colonies.” What the Continental Association achieved was unity; what it lacked was a shared principle of justice capable of fully accounting for consent, legitimacy, and resistance.
Where the Continental Association came up short theoretically, the Declaration of Independence supplied what was missing. It begins by asserting that human beings are “created equal” and possess “unalienable rights” from “their Creator,” which is a claim about the natural or pre-political condition of human beings. Rights cannot be taken away by government. Being created equal means there are no natural kings or masters. All earthly authority is therefore conventional and grounded in human agreement. What is natural cannot be altered without doing violence to human dignity, while what is conventional can be made and unmade through consent.
From this foundation, the Declaration shows how natural rights limit and define legitimate political authority. Governments obtain their “just powers” from “the consent of the governed” for the mutual protection of rights. No longer do the colonists humbly petition a monarch whose authority derives from God or another source. Instead, they approach the king as the wronged party in a contract.
Should a government fail in this task, it forfeits its claim to “just powers,” and the people may invoke their right to withdraw consent and form a new government. The field of human creativity and ingenuity is open to establish new political institutions better able, in their judgment, to “effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The Constitution represents the Americans’ answer to this open field of political creativity. What distinguished a republic, Adams argued in “Thoughts on Government,” was not merely popular sovereignty but the rule of law itself. A republic was “an Empire of Laws, and not of men.” The task of constitutional design is to arrange the governing institutions so as “to secure an impartial and exact execution of the laws.” In Federalist No. 9, Alexander Hamilton boasts of constitutional mechanisms such as separation of powers, checks and balances, and an independent judiciary that both channel the popular will and guard against abuses of power.
The Boston Tea Party marks an early assertion of political dignity against authority exercised without consent. By establishing a republican form of government in which authority flows from consent and is exercised through durable institutions, the Constitution sought to ensure that Americans would live not under the will of others, but under laws of their own making.
Elizabeth Amato earned her B.A. at Berry College and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Baylor University in political science. She is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness and the American Regime: Political Theory in Literature (Lexington Books, 2018). She is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Gardner-Webb University.
Click here to receive our Daily 90-Day Study Essay emailed directly to your inbox.
Click here for the essay schedule with today’s essay and previously published essays hyperlinked.
