Quick History: The Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party
- In This Quick Guide:
- A Snowball in Hell
- Tossing Tea
Two important events in American History that laid the groundwork for the American Revolution were the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. In this guide, we look at what prompted each event and what happened during them.
A Snowball in Hell
In London on March 5, 1770, Parliament repealed the Townshend duties on all items except tea.
On that very same day, across the Atlantic in Boston, a crowd composed largely of rowdy apprentices taunted Redcoat soldiers by throwing frozen snowballs and chunks of ice. One soldier broke discipline and fired into the crowd, and other shots followed. When smoke from the muskets cleared, five men had been killed or mortally wounded—a rope maker, a leather worker, an apprentice ivory turner, and two sailors, including Crispus Attucks, who was part Indian and possibly part black. Another six had received serious wounds.
The next day at Faneuil Hall, where the city’s public business transpired, the body of the people gathered. The meeting sent an ultimatum to Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson: the two British regiments occupying Boston must leave. Hutchinson passed the decision off to the military officer in charge of the troops, William Dalrymple, who agreed to remove one regiment. But this was not good enough for the body of the people, who had moved to the larger hall at Old South Meeting House. The compromise solution was rejected by a vote of 4,000 to 1.
Samuel Adams chaired a committee that responded to Hutchinson and Dalrymple. On behalf of the people gathered at Old South, Adams told Dalrymple “that if he could remove the 29th regiment, he could remove the 14th also, and it was at his peril to refuse it.” In the end Hutchinson, his governing Council, and Dalrymple capitulated. Samuel Adams is sometimes credited with having effected the bargain, and he did play his part, but the most powerful men in Massachusetts did not back down because of his say-so. They relented because the body of the people, 4,000 angry souls, could have turned Boston upside down if the soldiers were not withdrawn.
Tossing Tea
After a decade of tussles, things came to a head in the strangest of ways. The climax started on the other side of the globe when the giant East India Company overextended itself with its colonies in India. Soon thereafter, a speculative bubble burst in Europe, and the company found itself deep in the red, and with 18 million pounds of surplus tea. Because Britain considered the company too important to its economy to fail, Parliament offered it a corporate tax break so it could undersell American smugglers and dump some of its surplus on the American market. No new taxes were levied in America, nor were any taxes raised.
Boston merchants, who were smuggling Dutch tea, realized they would be undercut. They gained the support of rank-and-file patriots, who still had issues with British tea since it was the last item being taxed under the Townshend Act.
The story of the Boston Tea Party, a name bestowed more than half a century later, is well known. On the night of December 16, 1773, several dozen men, thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, chopped open the chests of tea stored in the hulls of three ships and dumped the contents into the Boston Harbor. Less celebrated, but equally important, is the buildup to that event. For almost three weeks, starting with the arrival of the first of the vessels, the body of the people—several thousand strong—held repeated meetings in Old South, showing their displeasure and debating the appropriate response. On the day of the event, the crowd overflowing Old South was estimated at 7,000. Through popular resistance, common people sanctioned the most consequential act of political vandalism in American history. And Boston was not the only scene of popular protest. Tea shipped to New York and Philadelphia was sent back to London before political vandals could get to it, and the following year shipments of tea to Annapolis, Maryland, and Charleston, South Carolina, were destroyed.
From protesting Writs of Assistance to hanging Stamp Tax collectors in effigy to boycotting British goods to intimidating local Tories to hurling snowballs at Redcoats, colonials had taken concrete actions to register their resistance. They had also written their share of petitions and passed resolutions without end, but words alone did little to affect British policies. It was actions that mattered.
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers by Ray Raphael
