How the Boston Tea Party Worked

During the Colonial period in North America, Britain taxed colonists without allowing the colonies to have governmental representation. Learn how the Boston Tea Party came about as a result of British colonial policies in this HowStuffWorks podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jeane McGrath.
Hey there, Candice, Jane. It's getting to be that time
of year when people are doing their holiday shopping and

(00:22):
the kids out there compiling their Christmas list, and a
little Candice, you know, from the days of yore, one
of the hottest items I ever ever wanted was an
American girl doll you ever have strowing out. All my
friends talk about how they love them. When I growing up,
they were the best, and I guess it was just,
you know, fate that I turned out to be sort
of a history buff because these dolls are all steeped
in history, American history. And the one I loved the

(00:44):
most was Felicity because she was a redhead like me.
And the premise behind Felicity was that she was a
colonist and her parents for patriots. And there was a
time that came when Felicity, who was learning how to
be a young woman with manners, had to start refuge
in Tea because her parents. Again we're teaching the family
that it was unpatriotic to drink tea. That's really interesting.

(01:06):
That would have been hard for me because I liked
you a lot now and it's free here, you know,
at the office. Why not, Yeah, gulp it down. And
it wasn't just you know, without rhymer reason that Felicity
had to refuse tea. There's actually historical basis for this, yeah,
and uh it all started basically back in colonial days
when like American Commons were still being ruled by Britain.

(01:29):
And uh basically Britain had left the colonies alone for
a long time, like they do your own things sort
of thing. And soon the Parliament started instituting taxes on
the columnist and already enforcing it in such a way
that like columnsts were used to it, and they're like,
this doesn't make sense anymore. You're treating us like below citizens.
And uh so they enforced the stamp backed way back

(01:51):
in seventeen sixty five, and uh, this this was an
interesting people kind of think that it all only had
to do with like stamps, like mailing stamps would actually
lots of things had had to be stamped at this
time because of the tax, like newspapers and playing cards,
even had to be stamped. This TAXI had to pay
something for the for the stamp in order to pay
the taxes to Britain. And so this was seen a

(02:12):
sort of an oppressive act and so uh um, the
columnists rejected it and Britain came back. I was like, okay,
all right, you can't. You can't take internal taxes. That's fine.
What we're gonna come back and do and we're gonna
tax the stuff you're what's called duties. Um uh, things
that were taken in imports, to the to the colonies.
And things got so bad around the time of the

(02:33):
Stamp BacT that the people who are actually in charge
of overseeing the stamping resigned and left their posts. Yeah,
it was such a big scandal. But you know, you've
probably all heard the expression no taxation without representation. You
certainly didn't miss that in history class. But you may
not know why this was such a big deal. And
so before we get into the t side of the situation, um,

(02:54):
I have an analogy for you, sort of like when
you're off at college, you're doing your own thing, you're
in charge of your self. You know, you may not
be paying the bills your parents may be helping out
a little bit, but essentially you're ruling ruce. Just set
your schedule, you go to class, you feed yourself, and
then Christmas break strikes and you come home and you're
back under your mom and dad's roof, and all of
a sudden, you know, curfew is back on. They want

(03:15):
to tell you what you're gonna be eating for dinner,
They want to tell you how to spend your time
when you were seeing. You want to know where you're
going exactly. And this is probably how the colonists sort
of felt because Parliament was essentially loving all these rules
and policies against them, and if they made enough noise,
Parliament back off. They'd either amend the policies or they'd
repeal them entirely. And so the colonists learned that this

(03:38):
would work. Make enough noise, cause enough riots, protests, just
enough and Parliament's going to stop. And the thing is,
people over in England who were under the monarchy's rule, Yeah,
I was sort of okay for Parliament to make the
rules for them because they had representatives, but and the
colonies there was no one. It's right, and they when
they started rallying the taxation with representation. They didn't. They

(04:01):
didn't vote for anybody to represent them in parliament. So
they thought, why do you have the right to tax us?
We don't have a say in it. And UH Parliament
argued that the colonies did have representation is something they
called virtual representation, that every single um person in in
UH in the government represented all of the colonies. But
that didn't sit well with the colonists, not at all.

(04:23):
And so you mentioned that things that were imported into
the colonies had taxes attached to them, and one of
these items was tea. And you've got to understand how
popular te wise. M Essentially it was the only thing,
you know that well, it wasn't the only thing that
people drink. But yeah, it's hard to imagine in our

(04:44):
coffee obsess culture. But I guess if we replace it
with coffee, and we think if all of a sudden
there was a monopoly on coffee, or or all of
a sudden coffee was taxed um of the wazoo, like
we would we would get really upset because a lot
of caffeine addicts would be upset, exactly. And I think
that the colonies were con doing about one point two
million pounds pounds waite wise, not money wise, but here

(05:05):
that is a ton of tea. And if you drink coffee,
like you were saying, Jane, you've got a couple of
different purveyors that you can choose from. You know, you
can go to Nary, you can go high class, you
can get middle of the road grocery store brand whatever.
But for the colonists, it was only the tea coming
from the British East India Company, and that upset a
lot of people, like especially merchants who had contracts with

(05:25):
with other providers and all of a sudden they had
to only deal with with English tea and they were
a little upset about that as well. So the idea
behind these different laws regarding the taxes on teas where
that Parliament could levy the popularity of tea and the
limited supply of tea to raise money for the French
and Indian wars. And again the colonists were mad about

(05:45):
this because they felt like they had no say in
these wars. They're helping to fund a war that they
weren't really participating in that much. Yeah, it's interesting, I mean,
I guess you could say England had a somewhat of
a good case in saying that, you know, the French
and Indian War went on in the colonies, we were
protecting you, protecking your lives from from the French and
the Indian forces, and we want to pay for not
only the deaths that we incurred during that war, but

(06:07):
for a standing army to protect it. But at the
same time, I mean, obviously England wasn't acting exactly selflessly
like they had steak in their American colonies. They had
value to them, so it's not just that they were acting,
you know, to protect the colonists. Right and out of
all the colonies, I think Boston was really one of
the hot seats, yeah, for this sort of protesting sentiment

(06:30):
sweeping through the colonies. And one of the reasons was
that there were soldiers stationed there starting around in October
seventeen sixty gay and you have to imagine, you know,
there's unrast, people are talking, people are dissatisfied, and then
these soldiers come in. And not only that, the colonists
were asked to actually quarter them in their homes. I
can't even imagine what that was like. The quartering um

(06:50):
idea of of um British soldiers shoulder soldiers coming in
and saying you do you Uh, we're not going to
pay you back, but you have to give me a
place to a and uh, you know, you deal with it.
But the people of Boston weren't ready to do that,
and so they fought back. So as far as the
question of tea goes, they did to make a lot

(07:10):
of noise, get the laws repealed thing, and that worked
a couple of times. We had the seventeen sixty nine
Indemnity Act which repealed the t tax, but then the
Townshend Acts restored it, and then those were repealed in
seventeen seventy. But then in seventeen seventy three we have
the Tea Act that comes along. So it lowers the
price of tea because the British East India Company can
bring the tea directly to the colonies, but there's still

(07:32):
a tax on it. So that's true. And there's sort
of two things going on here. One is the fact
that only the East India Company could provide the tea,
so there was a monopoly that they were enforcing on
the colonies. And also, even though there was the most
recent thing that happened was that it was sort of
a cut on the Texas on t so they could
get tea a little bit cheaper than they usually could.
So it wasn't just about money. It was about the principle,

(07:52):
and it was about the monopoly right, the principle of
the matter. And so on November seventeen seventy three, there's
us notice that goes up in Boston, and essentially it's
informing the citizens that the quote unquote detested tea is
on its way from a ship called the Dartmouth. And
so some people from Boston gathering the old Meeting House,

(08:14):
the Old South Meeting House, excuse me, and they start
talking about what they can do about this tea. And
there's a couple of different solutions that they flowed, a
couple different ideas, and ultimately these sorts of meetings go
on for months and months and months. And during this time,
the Royal British Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, he's getting wind that

(08:35):
the colonists and the Patriots and in particular planning something
and so he tells his troops to use force to
keep the ships in the harbor. Because one of the
tactics that the colonists have tried, was asking if the
ship's captains would just sail away, just leave, and this
is sort of a stand sill. We should also know
that the ships wanted to unload their tea, but the
columnists particularly didn't want them to do that because then

(08:56):
they would have to pay the duty. One is, apparently,
according to the law, as soon as the tea was unloaded,
somebody had to pay the duties on it, right, So
that's really significant. So not just keeping the ships, you know,
in the harbor, but keeping the tea on board the ships.
So over time, these meetings start to draw about five
thousand different people, and that's a really big number considering

(09:18):
that the population was only around fifteen thousand. And eventually
they get enough people clamoring, especially um By Virtue of
the Sons of Liberty, who were pretty active group of
protesters and patriots, that they Sam Adams Pow reviewer John Hancock,
that they decide they can do something about this. And
around this time there's two more ships that come in,

(09:41):
the Eleanor and the Beaver. So they're down at Griffin's Wharf.
The people are at the old South Meeting House. They've
been meeting for months they've been discussing and then finally,
out of nowhere, well maybe not out of nowhere, but
sort of unexpectedly, someone lets out sort of a battle cry,
and it's more of a guttural noise I think than
anything else, and it eiles the people up and they

(10:01):
and they turned into a mob, and they stormed down
to the wharf and they spent three hours. There's a
hundred sixteen of them dumping tea into the harbor and
they ended up dupping nine pounds I think it was. Yeah,
and by today's dollars, that's about one million dollars worth
of tea or eighteen point five million cops. And the
water was brown for days. But it was sort of

(10:23):
a I guess, a polite mobs as far as you
can use that. There wasn't it wasn't violence. Yeah, I
think that there was some kicking and screaming um. And
the colonists who actually tried to filter some day and
take it home for themselves, they were rebuked by kicking, pinching, hitting,
that sort of thing, which shows the testament to the
principle of the matter. Like the writers had some pride

(10:44):
in in the principle of the thing right, they were
making a statement. It was completely against the British government.
It wasn't about each other. And only one man out
of that one hundred sixteen people was arrested. And so
at this point, you know, the colonists sort of had
to revive. Wait, well, what happens next. And the day
after this, which would have been December seventeen, seventeen seventy three,

(11:07):
they went back. They observed the harbor there were still
some tea floating around, and so they they beat it
with their oars and you know, made it go underwater,
and it had all but been destroyed. But the British
government didn't get word of the Tea Party it was
called until January seventeen, because obviously it took some time
for the news to get over there. With the ships.
There wasn't planes back then, um. So when the message

(11:30):
finally got there, they were less than pleased, to say
the least, um, And they enacted a few different things
to punish as as punishment to Boston. In particular, one
was the port of Boston was closed and they said
you can't reopen until the East India companies reimbursed for
all the tea that you destroyed and other things where

(11:51):
like the Quartering Act was reinstated. Um, the idea of
making British troops they can stay in the in the
houses of of colonists at the time, and another one
was that British officials who were accused of major crimes
couldn't be tried in in the colonies. England was obviously
suspicious of that at this point, so he said, you
have to ship them back to Britain before you try them.

(12:13):
And uh. And finally, I think there are restrictions on
town meetings in Massachusetts in particular, and they were obviously
afraid of more rebel rousing going on there. And so
a lot of people have the misconception that the Boston
Tea Party was the direct link to the American revelation.
It's kind of the idea you getting history class, of course. Yeah,
and that's not true because we know that again, the

(12:35):
concept of make noise, get it repeal. This sort of
went on for a little while. But then finally, I
guess it was about ten months after the tea Party occurred. Uh,
some citizens got together and this is when the Declaration
of Independence began to be drafted and people really started
to think about having UH an organized rebellion against England,
not just the citizens of Boston, not just Massachusetts, been

(12:56):
all the colonies who had been feeling this way for
a while. And you could make the case even um
other columnsts who were for independence eventually looked at the
Boston Tea Party as like rebel rousers, as a nuisance,
sort of an uncalled for mob. Some people considered UH.
And it's interesting to look back on it and and
see now, well, now it goes down in history as
as this myth of our creation of the United States

(13:19):
at least. And I love the name Boston Tea Party.
And I'm not quite sure how that came to be,
but we know that one of the cry that was
uttered during the rebellion was, you know, let's let's make
a teapot off the harbor. And they did, they did,
And I just think it really speaks to the American
spirit that these people were inventive and they were sort
of ingenious and what they did because in the end,
like you said, you know, they owed some money to

(13:41):
the British. He didn't accompany, but there weren't lives lost,
you know, it was all done in good patriotic forms,
protestists somewhat you know. Yeah, moms are funny like that. Yeah,
And if you want to learn more about moms, there's
a there's a podcast called Smart Moms on Stuff you
should know another house stuff works podcast, you want to
check that out. And for even more about the city
of Boston and the American Revolution and t itself, be

(14:02):
sure to check out how stuff works dot com. For
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