START WITH THE POLICY
What the Tea Act actually did
It laid no new tax. That is the first thing to get straight, because it is the thing most often got wrong.
The threepenny Townshend duty on tea had been in force since 1767 and was kept when the rest were repealed in 1770. The Tea Act of May 1773 left it exactly where it was. What the Act changed was everything around it: the East India Company could now ship tea straight to America without landing it in England first, and could reclaim the English duties it had already paid. The effect was that legal Company tea, duty included, would undersell the Dutch tea that had been smuggled into every American port for years.
Parliament was not trying to squeeze America. It was trying to rescue the East India Company, which was close to collapse, holding something like seventeen million pounds of unsold tea in London warehouses, and owed money to a government whose members held a great deal of its stock.
Two features of the rescue turned it into a crisis. The first was that cheap tea would make the duty easy to swallow, which was precisely why men who had spent six years arguing about the principle found it alarming: a tax nobody minded paying is a tax that establishes itself. The second was the consignee system. The Company named particular merchants in each port to receive the tea and sell it on commission. Everyone else was cut out. So the Act simultaneously offended the constitutional argument, the smuggling interest, and every merchant who was not on the list.
The price could fall while the constitutional danger grew. The argument was not simply that tea cost too much. Cheap Company tea might persuade colonists to pay a parliamentary duty they had resisted in principle since 1767.
COMPARE THE LOCAL CONDITIONS
The two exits Boston did not have
Read down the grid and the shape of it is plain. Boston's column is the only one that is red the whole way down, and the reason is not that Boston was angrier. Every port refused the tea. The difference is that in three of them there was a way for the confrontation to end, and in Boston both ways out were shut.
EXIT ONE
Resignation
The consignees were the mechanism. No consignee, no one to receive the tea, no sale. In New York, Philadelphia and Charleston they were leaned on, and they resigned. In Boston they would not, and two of them were Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson, the governor's sons. A third, Richard Clarke, was connected to the family by marriage. Asking Boston's consignees to stand down meant asking Thomas Hutchinson to order his own sons to give up a lucrative agency in public, under pressure from a crowd, after years of being the man the crowd had already gutted one house for.
EXIT TWO
Clearance
Once a ship had formally entered at the custom house, her cargo had twenty days to be landed and the duty paid, or the customs officers would seize it. That clock is what made Boston urgent, and it only ran in two of the four ports.
The Polly never came up to Philadelphia and the Nancy never came into New York harbour at all; both were met downriver or at the Hook, before entry, and sent back. No entry, no clock, no crisis. In Charleston the London did enter and the clock did run out, and Collector Robert Halliday did the ordinary legal thing: he seized the unclaimed cargo and locked it in the cellar of the Exchange. The tea was off the ship, nobody had paid the duty, and nobody had broken anything.
That was the outcome available to Boston too, and the town would not have it, because seized tea becomes Crown property and Crown property gets sold. So Boston's meeting pressed instead for the ships to leave with the tea aboard, which required a pass from the governor. Hutchinson refused. By 16 December the Dartmouth's twenty days were up, the customs house would not clear her, the governor would not let her go, the consignees had withdrawn to the castle in the harbour rather than resign, and the tea could not be landed, could not leave, and could not stay.
Francis Rotch, who owned the Dartmouth and was twenty-three years old, told the meeting at Old South that the governor had refused him a pass. That is the moment the meeting ended and the wharf began.
FROM DESTRUCTION TO IMPERIAL PUNISHMENT
Who was punished
All four ports defied the Act. One was punished, and the punishment was aimed with great precision.
- The Boston Port Act, March 1774: the harbour closed to all trade until the East India Company was paid for its tea. Not Massachusetts. Boston.
- The Massachusetts Government Act, May 1774: the 1691 charter rewritten by statute, the council made appointive, town meetings restricted.
- The Administration of Justice Act, May 1774: Crown officers charged with capital crimes could be tried in England or another colony.
- The Quartering Act, June 1774: this one applied everywhere.
The aim was isolation. Punish the one town that had destroyed property, make an example of it, and let the other colonies notice that they had got away with turning ships around. It was not an unreasonable calculation. It failed completely.
It failed because the Port Act did not read as a penalty for the destruction of £9,000 of tea. It read as a demonstration that Parliament could close a port, dissolve a charter and alter a colony's government by statute whenever it chose, which was the exact argument Dickinson had made about New York in 1767 and the argument Boston had been making about itself ever since. Colonies that had spent December congratulating themselves on a cheaper resolution spent the summer sending food and money to Boston, and in September sent delegates to Philadelphia.
LOOK BEYOND THE FAMOUS NIGHT
And fourteen other harbours
The four ports on this page are the ones the Company shipped to in the autumn of 1773. They were not the only places tea went into the water.
Charleston had two more confrontations in 1774, the second of which ended with seven chests thrown into the Cooper River by the merchants who had ordered them. Annapolis watched the owner of the Peggy Stewart burn his own vessel with the tea aboard in October. Yorktown emptied two chests into the York River in November. Greenwich in New Jersey burned a cargo in the square in December. In Edenton, North Carolina, fifty-one women signed a public agreement to give up tea, and were mocked for it in a London print. York, in what is now Maine, had tea removed from a ship by men described as Indians and never seen again.
Counted generously there were around seventeen of these episodes before the war. Most involved no violence at all. What they had in common was not method but result: between the autumn of 1773 and the spring of 1775 the East India Company sold effectively no tea in North America.
05 Source and interpretation notes: where this account is approximate
- Arrival dates differ between sources, often by a day, because a ship might anchor in the roads one day and be reported the next. Charleston's London is given as arriving on 1 or 2 December; New York's Nancy on 18 or 19 April.
- Cargo figures are given as reported. The Polly and the Nancy are both commonly said to have carried 698 chests, which is suspicious, and at least one of the two figures may have migrated from the other account. Boston's 342 and Charleston's 257 are firm.
- The customs deadline is given as twenty days, which is what contemporaries said. Some modern accounts say twenty-one, probably from counting the day of arrival.
- The value of the Boston tea is usually given as about £9,659, a figure from the Company's own claim, and worth treating as the claimant's estimate rather than an audited one.
- Numbers at the meetings — five to seven thousand at Old South, perhaps eight thousand at Philadelphia — are contemporary guesses at crowds nobody counted.
- Who was on the ships in Boston has never been established. Participants kept quiet for decades, and the lists that exist were compiled long afterwards from memory and family tradition.