Today, Dec. 16, is the anniversary of the most famous tea party in American history, at which no one drank any tea. There are quite a few misunderstandings about the Boston Tea Party, so why not debunk a few common ones — and appreciate the courage and political brilliance of our forefathers.
Most people who know anything about the Boston Tea Party are aware that it involved dumping tea into Boston Harbor, not sharing finger cakes and sipping Pekoe on deck. But did you know the tea tax wasn’t new? Did you know the Sons of Liberty were purely protesting the principle of taxation without representation, NOT the amount of money involved? And did you know it wasn’t a riot, but a very orderly and strictly controlled proceeding?
One of the misunderstood aspects of the Tea Party in the modern day, when anything perceived as racist elicits excessive explosions of hysteria, is the fact that the Sons of Liberty painted their faces and dressed up as Native American Indians to board three ships with the cargoes of tea. Historian Tara Ross explains they did this to make it painfully clear to King George III that they were Americans, not merely Brits living in a colony. They were identifying with the natives of the land where they had settled rather than their British rulers. It was a cultural and a political message.
Ross also confirms that the infamous Tea Act did not actually raise the tax on tea in 1773. Rather, the colonists had been paying taxes on tea since 1767 and the Townsend Acts. These were the hated acts that levied taxes on the American colonists, even though the colonists did not have any say in electing those who imposed the taxes. That was where the famous slogan “no taxation without representation” came from.
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Eventually, the backlash against those acts became so considerable that the British Parliament did consent to repeal most of them, including the taxes on paper and paint. They left the tea tax in place, however. It was not primarily about the money at this point, not for either side, though the money was certainly a secondary inducement for the British.
The British aristocrats and bureaucrats were making the point that they did (in their opinion) have the right and ability to impose taxes on the colonists without those colonists having any say. And the colonists hated the tea tax not because it bankrupted them, but because it was a constant reminder of the hated tyranny from across the ocean.
In Boston, ever a hotbed of Patriot sentiment, the tea tax’s continuance incensed the Sons of Liberty, which included such famous men as Sam Adams, Paul Revere, James Otis, and Joseph Warren. Dec. 17 was the tax deadline, and many Bostonians were angry that the British governor of Massachusetts had allowed three ships with tea to sail into their harbor.
So a group decided to take matters into their own hands, as American Battlefield Trust states:
On December 16, 1773, the day before tax deadline, another crowd of thousands gathered at the Old South Meeting House. After receiving word that Governor Hutchinson again refused to allow the ships to leave, the assembly voted to prevent anyone from unloading or using the tea. Later that evening, 30 to 130 men—most of whom belonged to the Sons of Liberty—boarded the three tea ships. Some disguised themselves as Mohawk warriors to conceal their identities. They pried open the 342 chests with axes and dumped the tea overboard into the water.
As noted above, the disguises were not purely for the sake of hiding their identity — any sort of face mask might’ve done that. The Sons of Liberty chose to disguise themselves as Mohawks to signify a break with Britain.
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As I mentioned above, it is also unfair to characterize the Tea Party Patriots as a “mob.” Turns out Walt Disney’s depiction of proceedings in Johnny Tremain was pretty accurate. Tara Ross writes:
The protest was more orderly than you might think. No looting was allowed. The protestors worked hard not to harm anything aboard the ships (except the tea). In fact, the protestors swept the ships and put everything back into place. And they returned, later, to replace the only non-tea item that had been harmed: a padlock on one of the ships.
The protestors then coolly returned home, without unmasking or rioting or celebrating. One protestor, George Hewes, remembered, “We then quietly retired to our several places of residence, without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates.”
He mused, “There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.”
Unfortunately, the British retaliated with the Intolerable Acts, but they were losing their grip on the American colonies. Many colonists were beginning to realize they had truly established a whole new political system and culture on this side of the ocean, and that the differences with Great Britain were irreconcilable. The splash of the Boston Tea Party was just the beginning of the tidal wave of Revolution.
