On the 18th of October, 1773, seven ships left England, bound for America with significant cargo from the East India Company. Four of them, named respectively the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, the Beaver, and the William, carried slightly more than 100,000 pounds of tea consigned to merchants in Boston. The ship Nancy, with twice that amount of tea, was cleared for New York. The ship Polly, with a cargo of more than 200,000 pounds of tea, was destined for Philadelphia; and the ship London, with 70,000 pounds of tea, was enroute to Charleston, South Carolina. A total volume in the seven ships of almost 600,000 pounds of a most controversial cargo!

Two hundred years later, you may ask, why the controversy over tea? As with all significant events, there were historic reasons for the ominous consequences which these tea shipments portended. Let us examine some of them.

No one knows precisely when the Chinese discovered that a palatable and pleasant beverage could be produced from the leaves of the tea plant, but it must have been relatively early in what we call the Christian era. In 1660, when New Hampshire was a very young colony indeed, the import of tea into England began, and by the end of the century tea drinking was a widespread fashion. The British public soon developed an apparently unlimited craving for the tasty brew, and the East India Company responded to this demand with alacrity. Just as the enthusiasm for the automobile in the America of our lifetime has produced profound changes in our economy, our customs, and our manners, so did tea drinking in England. The national treasury gained revenues from stiff import duties on the fragrant tea leaves. The East India Company itself grew rich, and was able to pay to its stockholders annual dividends of ten percent or more. The sugar planters of the British West Indies colonies prospered. The pottery industry of the Midlands in England flourished. Retail stores and tea houses sprang up all over England, similar perhaps to the growth of hamburger stands today. Silversmiths made elegant teapots for the more affluent. In short, by 1773 England was a nation of inveterate tea drinkers, consuming upwards of 13,000,000 pounds of tea each year. This worked out to an annual imbibing of almost 30 cups of tea for every man, woman, and child in the nation!

In America, including New Hampshire, tea became similarly popular. By 1773 the consumption of tea in the thirteen colonies was estimated at 1,200,000 pounds annually, approximately one-tenth that of Great Britain itself. Much of this was smuggled in from other countries such as Holland, which charged smaller tariffs on imports than did Mother England. A few American businessmen in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, South Carolina, controlled the tea trade. Boston merchants, of course, dominated the wholesale tea business in New Hampshire. In fact, the trade had become so lucrative that in the 1760’s the governmental authorities in Great Britain determined to put a special tax on tea, with the avowed purpose of raising additional revenue for the Crown. Their decision became law as a part of the famous but ill-starred Townshend Act of June, 1767. This law immediately stirred a violent reaction in the colonies.

Americans resented its obvious purpose to raise revenue by directly taxing colonial citizens. They resented, also, the fact that the income from these taxes would go to pay the salaries of royal officials, thus making these persons independent of appropriations by the provincial legislatures. And they resented collection of the tax in American ports. The first colonial response to the Townshend Act of 1767 was to make non-importation agreements among the thirteen colonies concerning goods from Britain taxed by its provisions. In modern language this meant a boycott of all such goods, including tea.

Popular substitutes for tea were soon devised by the colonists, and Americans were urged to drink only infusions brewed from such alternatives to real tea. These boycott agreements among the Americans proved so effective that the British Parliament, after an acrimonious debate in the spring of 1770, repealed all the provisions of the Townshend Act, except be it noted, for the tax on tea. An uneasy truce between Mother Country and colonies then ensued, lasting for the next three years.

But in 1773, a threatened fiscal collapse of the powerful East India Company precipitated a new crisis. By that year that company had become the largest business enterprise in the British nation, save only for the Bank of England itself. Its profits had been immense, its shares were widely held by the investors of Great Britain; its employees in London and elsewhere were numbered in the thousands. Its success was as necessary to the British economy, it was then thought, as we today would say the prosperity of our nation is related to the automotive industry and its innumerable offshoots. In 1773 the East India Company was on the brink of bankruptcy and ruin. Exactly as has been done many times in our country in recent years, when a basic industry seems to be tottering, so the British government intervened to save the East India Company from collapse.

In the early months of 1773, Company stocks of tea in England totaled more than 18,000,000 pounds. If only a method could be devised to sell this tea, then there might be some improvement in the fiscal structure of the great company. If the price were made low enough in America to render the sale of legal tea there more profitable than that of smuggled tea, much revenue would be gained. With these thoughts in mind, on 10 May 1773, Parliament, again after a long debate, passed the Tea Act of that year. Under its terms the price of tea in the colonies was made lower than that in the Mother Country itself. But a basic tax of three pence a pound was still to be paid.

This was the legal situation, then, when the seven tea ships sailed for America in October, 1773, bearing 2000 chests of tea to the four colonial ports already mentioned. As you will recall from what has already been said, the ships Beaver, Eleanor, Dartmouth, and William were destined for Boston. Even before they sailed, however, news of the Parliamentary Act of May had so stirred the emotions of the colonists that some kind of trouble was all but inevitable. In each of the four ports to which the tea ships were coming, opposition to the landing of the cargo became vocal. No landings were attempted in New York or Philadelphia; in Charleston the tea spoiled. In each of these ports the conclusion was drawn that Parliament was seeking to compel an overt recognition of its claim rightfully to tax Americans. Everywhere the slogan was heard: “No taxation without representation”!

The Dartmouth with 114 chests of tea aboard arrived at the outer islands off Boston harbor on Sunday, 28 November; the Eleanor with 114 chests of tea came in to Boston on Thursday, 2 December; and the Beaver, with 112 chests of tea, after being held in the outer harbor for two weeks because of a case of smallpox aboard, docked on Wednesday, 15 December. The William never reached Boston at all. It was wrecked on Cape Cod in a violent storm. A legalistic argument over what should be done with these 340 chests of choice tea agitated Boston for a fortnight. Finally, popular passion overcame reasoned discussion. A citizens’ mass meeting was called for the late afternoon of Thursday, 16 December, at the Old South Church. The place was packed with hundreds of people, and vigorous language filled the air. Finally, shortly after 6:00 p.m., the meeting dissolved into action.

Hastening to Griffin’s Wharf, the participants in what has ever since been termed the “Boston Tea Party” threw overboard more than 90,000 pounds of tea, garnered from the 340 chests on the three ships and worth about 9000 pounds sterling. As Professor Labaree remarks in his classic volume, The Boston Tea Party:

“Just who took active roles in the Boston Tea Party remains one of the mysteries of American history. A half-century later John Adams wrote that he did not know the identity of a single participant. The unparalleled secrecy which enshrouded their names for years afterwards has inevitably encouraged the growth of family tradition. One list of those active at Griffin’s Wharf was supplied by an alleged participant when he was 93 years old; another recorded his reminiscences at the age of 113, seventy-five years after the event. Most of these recollections contain obvious inaccuracies and contradictions.

“The undertaking had all the signs of a well-planned operation. The merchant Henry Bromfield declared the next day that the whole episode was conducted with such dispatch that there must have been ‘People of sense and more discernment than the vulgar among the Actors.’ The rain had stopped, and some people showed up with lanterns to supplement the bright moonlight that now illuminated the scene. Many had hatchets with which to break open the tea chests. Although accounts differ, most witnesses agreed that the active participants numbered between thirty and sixty and were divided into three groups, each with a competent leader. While two parties clambered aboard Dartmouth and Eleanor, the brig Beaver, lying off the wharf, was warped alongside. The custom officers on board each vessel were forced ashore, and the squads began their work. Some men dropped into the hold to attach block and tackle to the heavy chests; others hoisted them to the deck. A third gang broke them open with axes, shoveled and poured the tea over the side, and heaved the chests after it. The tide was nearly low, and the water was only two or three feet deep.

Soon the tea began to pile up, threatening to spill back into the vessels. Men pushed it aside as best they could to make room for more.

“At no time during the evening did the governmental authorities move to interrupt the proceedings. Colonel Leslie’s regiment of troops remained at Castle William. The navy squadron rode at anchor a few hundred yards out in the harbor, but orders to intervene never came. Admiral Montagu witnessed the scene from a house at the foot of Griffin’s Wharf. The next morning he allegedly warned members of a crowd that, although they had had their fun, they would soon have to pay the fiddler. Governor Hutchinson was still at Milton, the lieutenant-governor at his home in Middleborough, and the Customs Commissioners at Castle Island along with the consignees. With the throng of onlookers surrounding the wharf, it is doubtful that anything could have been done to save the tea without injury to hundreds. As Montagu explained in his report the following day, ‘I could easily have prevented the Execution of this Plan but must have endangered the Lives of many innocent People by firing upon the Town.’ The key to the Boston Tea Party’s success, then, was the decision in late November to force the vessels up to Griffin’s Wharf. From that time forward the fate of their cargoes was in the hands of the Boston patriots.”

Paul Revere, the famous horseman, promptly rode to New York to carry the news of the Boston Tea Party to that town. He arrived in Manhattan on Tuesday, 21 December. Three days later the news was known in Philadelphia. South Carolina and the Southern colonies heard about it by New Year’s Day. A fast-sailing ship brought the shocking information to London, England, on 20 January 1774. Parliament went into action almost at once. It was soon clear that a severe punishment for the tea destruction in Boston was to be forthcoming. That town had long had the reputation of being the most defiant of all American communities in its general attitude towards the laws of Great Britain. After hearing of the Boston Tea Party, early in 1774, one Englishan wrote Lord Dartmouth, the British Colonial Minister, that Bostonians were ” . . . not only the worst of subjects, but the most truly immoral Men.” In vain moderate Britishers pleaded that the Americans should be offered an opportunity to explain their attitude towards the tax on tea, and perhaps to pay the East India Company for its destroyed property.

The British reply to the Boston Tea party, however, was to be not conciliation but coercion. Debate on the so-called Boston Port Bill began on 14 March 1774. Seventeen days later it was passed by Parliament, and signed by King George III. The Port of Boston was to be tightly sealed off from all trade and commerce after the first of June that year. Later in the spring other severe legislation similarly directed against Massachusetts was enacted by Parliament. The government of Massachusetts was to be altered in favor of greater royal authority. British troops were to be quartered henceforth in the town of Boston itself. Accused persons might be transferred for trial to England. In short, Massachusetts or any other colony which persisted in defying the royal government would feel the heavy lash of punishment.

By 10 May the text of the bill to close Boston on the first of June was known in that place. The news came to New York two days later and to Philadelphia on the 14th of May. A wave of resentment spread across the entire thirteen colonies. Suggestions for an intercolonial fund to pay for the destroyed tea came spontaneously from many places, including New Hampshire. The hope was that such a payment would induce Parliament to repeal its several coercive acts against Boston. But it was too late. The Port Bill went into effect on the first of June.

That summer there was a vast amount of correspondence among the thirteen colonies; and, as you all know, the first Continental Congress was convened on 5 September 1774 in Philadelphia. A complete non-importation of British goods was pushed in many localities among the thirteen colonies. In New Hampshire the delegates to the First Continental Congress, John Sullivan and Nathaniel Folsom, named on 21 July, were instructed to work for a general non-importation agreement.

In all these events New Hampshire, because of its proximity to Massachusetts, had played an active part. When the news of the tea problem in Boston reached Portsmouth, the people assembled in a special Town Meeting. They resolved against accepting any similar cargo which might be destined for their town.¹ Similar town meetings with similar results were held elsewhere, including New Castle, Exeter, Kingston, and Dover. In June, 1774, a tea ship named Grosvenor actually arrived in Portsmouth; but an aroused populace so terrified the merchant who had ordered it that he reshipped it to Halifax without even unloading the tea chests. Another Portsmouth shipment of tea in September, 1774, had the same outcome. Many New Hampshire towns, after the Boston Port Bill went into effect 1 June 1774, sent large quantities of foodstuffs to beleaguered Boston.

So it was within a year following the Boston Tea Party that the lines had become drawn which were to result in the Revolutionary War for Independence. The colonists, from New Hampshire to Georgia, had become convinced that basic principles of freedom were involved, and that they would not submit to British legislation requiring direct taxation. With equal assurance the British government had become convinced that the Americans were to all intents and purposes in rebellion against their lawful government.

In November, 1774, King George III told his Prime Minister, Lord North: “. . . blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.” The Boston Tea Party with its concomitant parallels in other colonies like New Hampshire thus became a show of force which determined the British leadership in London to respond with force of its own. The Parliamentary legislation of 1774, following that Tea Party, compelled the thirteen colonies to draw ever closer together to confront their Mother Country.

Prior to the event of 16 December 1773, the Americans had no overpowering common reason to unite. After that event, and after the punitive Parliamentary legislation of 1774 collectively called the Coercive Acts, the Americans could truly say: “United We Stand.” As Labaree puts it: “The Boston Tea Party was the catalyst which brought about this revolutionary change.” That is the reason why we remember it 200 years later.

1The text of the Portsmouth protest, which contained eleven sharply worded resolutions, may be read in Provincial Papers, VII (Nashua, 1873), pp. 333-334.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Compatriot Squires, of New London, New Hampshire, had been a member of the New Hampshire Society, S.A.R. for more than forty years. A former President of the State Society, he had long served on its Board of Managers and as its Historian.

He had been Chairman of the New Hampshire American Revolution Bicentennial Commission since it was formed by legislative statute in 1969, and had also served as Chairman of the Bicentennial Council of the Thirteen Original States. In 1974 President Ford named him to one of the appointive posts on the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, which was charged by Congress with directing the national observance of the Bicentennial. He was chosen by that group to be its Vice-Chairman.