A new act of Parliament, designed to help a struggling trading company, would next fuel the growing conflict between the American colonies and the British government. The company enjoyed many friends in the government, and responding to pleas for governmental assistance, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act in May to help the company.
Though Parliament did not pass the Tea Act as a revenue measure, patriot leaders saw the act as a cunning way to get the Americans to pay the hated Townshend duty on tea by undercutting the price of smuggled Dutch tea. This would undercut their claim that only colonial legislatures could tax the colonies. On the evening of December 16, , patriots disguised as Indians boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and threw over three hundred crates of tea into the water to make sure the tea did not get unloaded.
The British government swiftly reacted to the Boston Tea Party. Plenty, at least when it comes as part of a corporate bailout. Because that's what the Tea Act was: an 18th-century version of corporate welfare.
After Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea, colonists seemed to ignore the assertion of the right to tax the colonies.
Boycotts petered out, and colonial consumers began buying tea again. But not all that tea was taxed. A large portion -- by some estimates as much as 90 percent -- came from smugglers, who sold Dutch tea unburdened by the British duty. Meanwhile Parliament was struggling to rescue a corporation it had deemed too big to fail: the British East India Company.
The company was saddled with a large debt and even larger inventories. Its warehouses were stocked to the rafters with unsold tea among other things , and lawmakers soon hit on a brilliant idea: lower the tax on company tea, permit its direct exportation to the colonies, and let the company undercut the smugglers. The colonists, however, were unswayed by the prospect of legal, affordable tea. Instead they invoked the specter of monopoly, insisting that the East India Company would soon grow too powerful to resist.
Colonial merchants would be ruined, the company would tighten its grip on the marketplace, and average consumers would be left at the mercy of a mercantile leviathan. As one writer noted at that time: The scheme appears too big with mischievous consequences and dangers to America, [even as we consider it only] as it may create a monopoly; or, as it may introduce a monster, too powerful for us to control, or contend with, and too rapacious and destructive, to be trusted, or even seen without horror, that may be able to devour every branch of our commerce, drain us of all our property and substance, and wantonly leave us to perish by thousands.
Rather than settling down with a nice cheap cuppa, agitators found their way to Griffin's Wharf, boarded the tea ships, and tossed the imported Bohea overboard. The Tea Party was a grass-roots movement -- with an element of AstroTurf. What moved Bostonians to activism? Ideology certainly played a role. But so did political leadership, particularly on the part of the Sons of Liberty, Adams, and Boston's merchant class.
It bears repeating that the colonists were not objecting to the financial burden of the tea tax. Or any other tax, for that matter. Instead, they were making a point about political legitimacy. They were more than willing to pay taxes imposed by their own representatives. But they were utterly unwilling to pay taxes imposed by Parliament -- a more or less alien power, given the lack of colonial representation. Historian T.
Breen recently made that point in an article for The Washington Post. Even after the Tea Party, he noted, colonists in Massachusetts continued to pay taxes originally levied by the Crown.
But instead of sending the money to British authorities, they gave it to one of their own leaders. But if complaints about taxation without representation were necessary to the Tea Party, they were not sufficient. Leadership proved pivotal in mobilizing mass action against the East India Company and British authority.
Many of those organizing the Tea Party -- and it was a highly organized event -- were drawn from Boston's mercantile class. Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
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