The Boston Tea Party: The Night the Harbor Ran Brown
Everyone knows the story. Colonists, fed up with British taxation, dressed as Mohawk Indians and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773. It was, we are taught, a group of colonial patriots severely frustrated with Britain’s tyrannical reign. It was a moment of righteous defiance. The spark that lit the Revolution. However, almost every detail of that fateful night is wrong, and the truth is more calculated, dangerous, and interesting.
The tea tax the colonists were protesting was actually lower than it had ever been. The Tea Act of 1773 did not raise taxes on tea, it cut them. The British East India Company, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, had been given a monopoly to sell tea directly to the colonies, bypassing the middlemen who had previously handled the trade. The result was that legal, tax-paid British tea was now cheaper than the Dutch smuggled tea that Boston merchants, including John Hancock, one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts, had been profitably importing for years.
The Boston Tea Party was not simply a protest against taxation. It was also, partly a defense of a lucrative smuggling operation. The merchants who organized the event had a direct financial interest in preventing cheap legal tea from undercutting their black market trade. Samuel Adams, their political mastermind, understood that the East India monopoly represented exactly the kind of government favoritism that corrupted liberty, and he was right about that principle, even if the economics were complicated.
The Mohawk disguises deserve a second look as well. The participants darkened their faces with soot and grease and wore rough blankets, but no historian believes the British were fooled for a moment. The disguises were legal cover, a way to deny personal involvement while making the statement public. Paul Revere, who was probably there, never publicly confirmed his involvement during his lifetime.
The operation was perfectly organized like another chapter of the Ocean’s Eleven movie franchise. Samuel Adams's Sons of Liberty had been monitoring the tea ships, the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver, for weeks, holding mass meetings at Old South Meeting House to demand the ships leave Boston harbor without unloading. Governor Hutchinson refused to grant clearance. On the night of December 16th, Adams gave a signal, the phrase “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country”, and approximately 116 men in three groups marched to Griffin's Wharf.
They worked for three hours with discipline and focus, broke open the chests with hatchets, poured the tea into the harbor, swept the decks clean, and replaced a broken padlock they had accidentally damaged. No one was harmed, no other property was damaged, and then they disappeared quietly into the night. It was not a riot. It was an expertly executed political operation.
The British response named the “Coercive Acts”, closed Boston Harbor, suspended Massachusetts self-government, and united the colonies against Britain more effectively than anything in writing could have. Samuel Adams had predicted this would happen. He provoked the overreaction on purpose.
The greatest act of colonial resistance in American history was planned in a print shop, funded in part by smugglers' profits, executed with military discipline, and designed to make the British Empire lose its temper. It worked perfectly.
Sources
Labaree, Benjamin Woods. The Boston Tea Party. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Unger, Harlow Giles. American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2011.
Stoll, Ira. Samuel Adams: A Life. New York: Free Press, 2008.
Raphael, Ray. The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord. New York: The New Press, 2002.
Knollenberg, Bernhard. Growth of the American Revolution, 1766–1775. New York: Free Press, 1975.
