The Boston Tea Party: The Kettle Boils Over
250 Years Since Tea was Dumped in Boston Harbor
On 16 December 2023, the city of Boston will be commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. We are in the middle of a spate of 250th Anniversaries in regards to the American War for Independence, so this is a good time to get a very good understanding of what the actual timeline of everything that happened felt like. For example, we are still about a year and a half out from 19 April 2025, the 250th of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
Donations of loose leaf tea for the 250th Anniversary have been pouring in to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, where the tea dumping will take place. The reenactment will start at Old South Meeting House on Washington St, before moving to the ships.
Because of this anniversary, I’m sending this newsletter out a couple weeks early. The next newsletter will be back to the third Wednesday in January.
Out of context, the Boston Tea Party sounds like a petty rebellion. It sounds like a toddler’s temper tantrum. A bunch of colonists getting dressed up to obscure their identities and barging onto ships in Boston Harbor to dump the entire shipment overboard. 240 chests of bohea, 15 hyson, 10 souchong, 15 congou, and 60 singlo all ended up in mountains in the low tide shallow waters of the harbor, pushed down by the boots of the men who were helping disperse it.1
But one starts to wonder why such drastic action seemed necessary. Especially because the Tea Act went into effect in 1767 as part of the Townshend Acts. The Townshend Acts were eventually repealed in 1770, though the Tea Act was left in place, the lone act to keep pressure on the American colonists. For six years, the Tea Act taxed tea in the colonies, so why did this come to a head in 1773?
The super simplified answer is money. The East India Company was struggling. Badly. With a monopoly on British trade of tea, they could charge high prices that would normally cover the cost of shipping and taxes. However, much of their customer base was discovering that they could get tea much more inexpensively from smugglers. The East India Company seemed to ignore this slow drop in sales and was continuing to bring in more and more tea each year. To quote Benjamin Carp, “It was a colossal mistake”.2
Meanwhile, another revenue source for the East India Company was also drying up. Drought had plagued Bengal, and many of the people living under the East India Company rule could no longer afford to pay taxes. East India Company estimates from the time say that millions of people died during this drought. The taxation coupled with a lack of resources meant that there were few people left to try and bring the fields back to their full potential, perpetuating the economic situation further. “At the end of [1770], the managers [of the East India Company] in Calcutta issued a mountain of new IOUs, which came to be known as the Bengal bills. Hoping for the best, they borrowed more than £1 million and charged it all to their superiors in London.”3
“The [East India Company] can be accused of many things, but nobody could fault its record keeping. Its books and ledgers survive, in impeccable calligraphy and bound in red leather, recording every item down to the last penny and rupee. When all the figures are added up, we find that the company needed £3 million to pay all the borrowings due in the next twelve months.”4 This was in 1772. In addition to the East India Company doing poorly, so was everyone else. A financial panic had swept the country over the summer of 1773, thanks in no small part to Alexander Fordyce. Fordyce “bet more money than his bank had on East India Company stock” and in the process, managed to take down “ten more [banks] in the capital and and another nine in Scotland.”5
With all of this financial panic across the British empire, it’s no wonder that Parliament would act - and not in a way that would be agreeable to the American colonists. On May 10, 1773, Parliament enacted a new Tea Act intending to help the East India Company. The new act bailed out the company with a loan of £1.4 million and tightened Parliamentary control over the company, but it also made it significantly easier for them to unload cargo in the American colonies. It became clear to American colonists that Parliament cared more about the East India Company than it did about them, and that they thought that the East India Company would be a good tool to enforce the taxes they clearly did not want to let up on. By September, the ships were leaving London. The cheap teas on board those ships were “the sign for which many colonists had remained vigilant during the ‘quiet period,’ proof that the design of enslavement, twice repulsed, had not been abandoned.”6
Meeting after meeting was held in Boston about the consignees - the very people chosen (some of whom had explicitly asked) to be the receivers of the tea. The idea was to convince them to turn the tea away, but time and time again, they refused to do so. But time to decide what they would do was about to run out. On November 28, the ship Dartmouth arrived in Boston Harbor. This started the countdown clock. The owners of the tea had 20 days to pay the applicable taxes to the customs officials, or customs would have the right to seize that tea. That gave the citizens of Boston until 17 December to figure out what they would do. And in that time, two more ships carrying East India Company tea, the Eleanor and the Beaver, would also arrive.7
One last meeting was held at Old South Meeting House on 16 December 1773. From that meeting, townspeople marched down to Griffin’s Wharf to throw the tea from all three ships overboard. After failing to convince the consignees to turn the tea away, many felt they had no choice but to destroy it.
“Forty men had filled [the deck of the Beaver], broken open the hatches, and dropped down into the hold. They set up a hoist and hauled the tea chests aloft with blocks and tackle. Each one had come unopened from China, with those of Bohea weighing at least 335 pounds. The finer teas came in smaller boxes, but even those weighed 70 or 80 pounds each. It would take nearly three hours of hard labor to empty each ship, smashing holes in every chest and dumping the leaves into Boston Harbor. The tide was low and the water was shallow, but even so the tea spread outward in long plumes, drifting away to the south. Out from the shore came a few men in rowing boats, perhaps intending to scoop it up and take it home. They were swiftly warned off by the squad with muskets on the wharf. [ ] By nine o’clock the deed was done.”8
The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum: https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/tea-blog/types-of-teas-destroyed
Benjamin L Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 13-14.
Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 47.
Bunker, 132-33.
(I will further admit to keeping this whole quote in because of Nick Bunker’s description of the East India Company records.)
Carp, 13.
Bunker, 71.
Carp, 19.
Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson, A Social History of Tea: Tea’s Influence on Commerce, Culture & Community (Danville, KY: Benjamin Press, 2014), 90.
Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, music, literature, and the theatre in the colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 246.
Carp, 95-97.
Bunker, 229.