American History Hit - Tea, Tax & Revolution: Boston Tea Party Aftermath

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Why did the Boston Tea Party happen? Why Boston? And how did the events of December 1773 fit in to the American Revolution?In this episode, we are taking a broader look at the Boston Tea Party with Benjamin Carp, the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College. Why was tea the focus of debate and how did it become such a legendary patriotic event.Benjamin is the author of ‘Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution’; ‘Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America’; and ‘The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution’Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In short, the ministry may rely on it, that Americans will never be taxed without their own consent, that the cause of Boston, the despotic measures in respect to it,

I mean now is and ever will be considered as the cause of America. And we shall not suffer ourselves to be sacrificed by piecemeal, though God only knows what is to become of us, threatened as we are with so many hovering evils as hang over us at present. On June 10, 1774, George Washington wrote these lines in a letter to his friend George William Fairfax. Six months after the destruction of the tea at Boston Harbor, he detailed the increasing frictions in the colonies and their growing solidarity in supporting the cause of Boston. The Tea Party was considered by many as an unsavory crime, not approved of by Washington or other prominent officials. nonetheless, Boston had now emerged as an urgent point of unification for the colonists in their dangerous run-up to revolution.

Hello, hello, and welcome to another hit of history here at American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. In the sweeping timeline of this great nation, there are any number of instances when American citizens have gotten wild and crazy in acts of political protest. We're kind of known for this, maybe not as routinely as, say, the French, but we can do a pretty good job. of rattling our cages. Rallying to the cause, or more properly, the right of the people peaceably to assemble is inscribed in our Constitution. But the patriotic event we discussed today happened well before there was a nation and certainly a constitution, and it was not at all peaceful. Indeed, according to British authorities at the time, this assembly qualified as a good old-fashioned treasonous riot. Something else were pretty well known for these days. It's the Boston Tea Party. 250 years ago

this month, one of the first headline anniversaries of the looming U.S. semi-quincentennial celebration. 250 will soon be burned into our brains. From the Declaration of Independence onward, we've got a decades worth of commemoration heading our way. Fortunately, you have a podcast to explain it all. And today, in the esteemed company of Dr. Benjamin L. Karp, Professor of American History at Brooklyn College here in New York, an author of Defiance of the Patriots, the Boston Tea Party, and the Making of America. Greetings, Professor.

Thank you so much, Don. Your book says it all right on the cover, The Boston Tea Party, an act of patriotic defiance in defense of a nation yet to come, one that involved some very colorful imagery, thousands of colonists meeting in protest, a strike force dressed in Native American garb,

whooping and cheering, I can only imagine, sending countless crates of delicious tea into the water. It's the size and scope of this event. That's so surprising, isn't it? It was a major moment. Yeah, just the vividness of it is, I think, what appeals to us so much. much. Exactly. So let's go through some of the nuts and bolts of what was happening that night.

What was that issue at this time in 1773? Sure. Well, there had been a tax on tea imported into the American colonies going all the way back to 1767. So the tax was not new. Actually, what the T Act of 1773 did was for the purposes of bailing out the British East India Company, which was the Parliament had decided it was too big to fail. And so they said to the East India Company, all right, you've got a bunch of excess tea and you need some more revenue. Why don't you use? sell tea directly to the American colonists. They won't object. It'll make tea cheaper for them, but as it turned out, the colonists found a lot about this to object. They saw it as a way to seduce them into paying this tax because they had begun, you know, trying to boycott British tea and smuggling

it from other European East India companies instead. That was one problem. The other is that it seemed like Parliament was propping up a monopoly company that had an exclusive right to sell goods at a rate that other merchants wouldn't be able to compete at. And that, you know, if the Americans start taking monopoly tea, then Parliament might start to force all sorts of other monopoly commodities on them. What's always surprising is how sophisticated the tax structure, at least the taxation practice was in these days. I mean, when you start reading for real about this stuff, you're in the weeds. You know, there's a lot of reasons why all that tea built up in England based on things that really aren't valid to the average American, but it's extraordinary to imagine

how they were run in the government in those days. Yeah, I mean, you know, compared, I mean, not that we necessarily think our government is efficient today, but the way the British government was run in the 18th century, there certainly were a lot of inefficiencies. But, you know, keep in mind, it also took four to six weeks to get news or messages across the Atlantic. So, you know. So we're dealing with two headline taxations. The Stamp Act of 1765, which comes and goes within that decade, I think I'm saying, that's followed with the Townsend Acts, 1767, which was more of a general tax that was repealed in 1770, right? It was a specific tax on a somewhat wider range of commodities. Actually, the Stamp Act was going to have a bigger impact because it was like all legal papers,

all newspapers, just anyone who used, you know, official paper of any kind in their lives would have had to have paid the stamp tax. The Townsend duties are on tea, lead, glass, paint, just a few commodities like that. And tea was the one that was the big deal. And the deal was that this was taxation supposedly paying for the debt that was incurred. fighting the French and Indian War, essentially. Yeah, correct, the seven years war. Not just that, but also to pay ongoing troop commitments because the British still had red coats stationed in what we now call the Midwest and Canada.

Why did that not make sense to the colonists? I've always wondered that. Well, the colonists, you know, it made sense to them that the British government might need revenue, but their feeling was, well, we have our own elected representatives. We, in theory, would voluntarily give you money, although in practice, of course, the colonists never did that. But the idea of forcing us to pay money when we don't have an opportunity to give consent in Parliament, that struck the American colonists as really offensive. That's the core issue. I mean, of course, we learned this from great school. Taxation without

representation. But that representation would have been, what, a member of parliament? How did they see that? Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, in practice, it wouldn't have worked out anyway, because even if the Americans had had representatives in parliament, and they did have lobbyists, that's what Benjamin Franklin did for almost 10 years, you know, that anyone who was hanging out in London for too long just would have been corrupted by the British government and wouldn't have truly been representing the American colonies. And just that distance of trying to govern a continent from 3,000 miles away, it was just difficult. So I don't think that anybody realistically thought that Americans being represented in Parliament would solve the problem. But the Americans were like, look,

realistically, we can't be represented here as long as that's still going to be the case. You need to come up with some other arrangement where we are not paying direct taxes. This also niggles at my consciousness. These are ideas. How much were ideas being discussed by the average American or is our history really what comes down from, you know, the thinkers who wrote the books? Oh, this is such, you know, live debate among historians, right? The ideological school under Bernard Baylon, yeah, insisted that Republican ideals were significant and that people really responded to them, whether it was in the digested version of Thomas Paine, or for the more educated, reading people like John Dickinson or Thomas Jefferson, et cetera. You know, other historians feel, look, Americans were also responding to certain kind of emotional appeals. They had material interests on Western lands, you know, on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. They had pocketbook interests at stake.

There was the impressment of men on the high seas, right? That, like, it's not all about high-minded ideals, that there are also pocketbook issues and emotional issues that were at stake for Americans. And a good cup of tea, turns out. this was a new tradition for Americans, right? Or for the colonists? I mean, for a few couple of generations at this point. But yeah, I mean, you know, most Europeans had never tasted tea if you're talking about the early 1600s, right?

But it becomes more and more this commodity that is effectively marketed to British people and American colonists. And then it becomes this little luxury item that everybody feels they have to have. And so, you know, it was an affordable luxury. It's not like having silver, you know, or really high-end ceramics or. high-end linens or something like that, most people could afford at least enough tea to have it as a kind of occasional treat. And it had this kind of whiff of exoticism and elegance plus the hit from caffeine, you know, that was really just kind of transformative for a lot of American

consumers. It's hard to, you know, really put ourselves in that context. There are so few precious goods in those days compared to today. This is not a consumer-driven economy, really. And so when you take the one pleasure, this new exciting thing away, or at least tax it heavily, it really hits. Yeah. And I mean, look, Americans felt had a little bit of a mixed feeling of this. Well, technically, we don't need this to survive. It is a luxury good. But that's all the more reason to be like, then we're going to abstain from drinking it to show our patriotism. And we won't drink any tea from the British East India Company as long as this tax is in place. Right. So it kind of works for them both ways. It's both something they all want and continue to

want, but also something they can make a big deal out of abstaining from. What was Labrador tea? What was that? Labrador tea is, I forget what the Latin name is. It's also called Hyperion tea. It grows naturally in the, like the maritime provinces and parts of Canada and parts of the American Northeast. It's just another plant, right? Like, we think of herbal tea, but herbal tea is not tea. It's a tisane, right? It's something else leafy that you can dissolve in water, whether it's mint or chamomile or, you know, or whatever. So Hyperion was another thing where it's like, what if we had that as a substitute? But most Americans were like, gross, this is not doing it for us. Bring back our white and green tea and black tea. It's like serving chicory at Starbucks.

Sorry, that's what we're serving today. Nobody would go for that. So how does this all gear up to revolutionary levels? I mean, what's going on for them? Sure. Well, they hear about the Tea Act. And then the ships start crossing the Atlantic, right? What Parliament does is it picks a few merchant firms in each of four cities, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, South Carolina. they say, okay, one ship to each of those more southern ports, four ships are going to Boston, they're all going to have tea on board. These specific merchants are going to receive the tea, pay the tax, sell the tea to Americans. And so the American colonists are like, uh-oh, you know, what are we going to do? And so first they start trying to pressure these agents, the consignees,

the merchants that we're going to receive the tea. And they say, hey, you know, resign this commission, don't take the tea. And the commissioners are like, yeah, we're not sure we're going to do that. Let's see what happens. And then we're going to. the ships arrive, they say to the ship's owners and the ship's captains, like, hey, could you just turn that ship around with the tea still on board and just head back to London, you know, so that they get the message that we don't want this tea? And the ship owners are like, technically, that's illegal. The Royal Navy could seize my ship and sell it and everything in it at auction if I knowingly violate customs regulations, so I can't do that. You know, so in New York and Philadelphia,

eventually, the local authorities kind of look the other way and say, all right, send the ship back. We don't want this mess. But in Boston, the officials refused to do that. And so that is what they finally realize on December 16th as thousands of people are gathered in the Old South Meeting House. They're waiting for Francis Roach, who represented one of the firms owning the Dartmouth, which was one of the ships. He has walked all the way to Milton, talked to Governor Hutchinson. He's come back. He shows up at the Old South Meeting House and he says, I'm sorry, but the governor's not going to let me turn this around. And the meeting is like, all right, well, we don't hold you responsible for this. You're not to blame. And Samuel Adams at some

point says, look, this meeting can do nothing more to save the country. And then at some point after that, the war whoops begin, and guys are dressed in Native Americans, and they begin saying hurrah for Griffin's Wharf. That was the wharf where these three ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver were lying at anchor. And so everybody marches down to Griffin's Wharf and witnesses what's about to take place. How was this such a Boston event, as opposed to what might have happened in Philadelphia or Charleston? Well, what's really interesting is that actually the New York and Philadelphia's Sons of Liberty had been a lot more successful over the previous years

in boycotting tea. They basically got their legal tea imports down to zero. They were still drinking tea, but they were drinking tea that they had smuggled from the Dutch, you know, the Danish, etc. But in Boston, some legal tea was still entering that market. And so Philadelphia and New York Sons of Liberty say to Boston, like, what the heck?

Are you standing strong with us or aren't you? And there's a Boston Sons of Liberty who writes back from New York and Philadelphia, and it's like, you know, if we want to gain the confidence of the New York and Philadelphia's Sons of Liberty, we really need to stand strong. They doubt us. And so I think that peer pressure is a major reason why the Bostonians dump the tea into

the harbor. You're mentioning something is very important to recognize this is a wedge issue that can be used politically as an advantage for this new organization, this Sons of Liberty, which has not existed that long. And they're trying to make a name for themselves and get people riled up. Tea is one of the ways of doing this, the taxation acts, really. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and it seemed simple enough, right?

Like, if we're not careful, we're going to be seduced into paying these taxes. If we consent to taxes now, the British will make us into slaves. A very ironic thing for Americans to say, tragically. And so they say, look, we have to stand strong. You have to understand the rights that are being violated here. There were plenty of Americans who felt neutral towards this or were okay with being part of the British Empire. And so, you know, they might have been inclined to say, yeah, leave us alone or we'll pay this little tax. It's probably what we owe. There were plenty of people who were not, you know, necessarily getting all hopped up about this. But in Boston, the Sons of Liberty were pretty successful at converting a lot of people to

this cause. How much of those meetings about T were involving other conversations about ideas of democracy or Republican democracy? Were they using this as a platform to get the ball rolling? It's hard to say whether they were angling for a Republican government and independence just yet in 1773. I don't think most people were kind of conscious of that idea. And keep in mind, they're not just doing this work at meetings. They're also doing this in newspaper pieces, in pamphlets that they're circulating, broadsides nailed to the wall. You know, at first, it's like, look, colonists, we need to understand our rights.

Clearly, the king is being poorly advised by his cabinet and members of parliament. If only we could persuade the king, we know he'd protect us. So, you know, it's really not until 1775, 1776, where they're like, you know what? I think the king is responsible too, and we really want to get rid of monarchy. Right, that's what's so radical about when Thomas Payne writes common sense at the beginning of 1776. He's like, who needs kings and aristocrats? You know, so the Americans really aren't getting to that idea. But look, the British had representative government of a kind.

It was a constitutional monarchy. Yeah, there was a monarch, but taxpayers were also represented in parliament in some fundamental way. And so what the colonists think they're defending is not American liberties, but English liberties, right? They think we're only standing up for rights that every true Englishman would stand up for. for. Yes, exactly. How simply the solution could have been. I mean, we could definitely still be English or at least Canadians, right? Yeah, sure. I mean, right? The Canadians ended up leaving the British Empire, but peacefully in a few decades later, right? Like, a lot of bloodshed could have been spared if we'd gone that route. Exactly. But it does seem as if there was prior coordination

and some sort of pre-arranged signal that some of these guys had already prepared disguises. They were already dressed up. They were prepared for this eventuality that Governor Hutchinson was going to say no. And they say, that's it. The deadline is. about to expire. If the tea is not unloaded, then by law, it will be landed and we'll have given up our opportunity to do something about the tea. If we can't send it back and we can't land it, the only choice is to destroy it. It's a lot of tea. Yeah, 46 tons of it. This is 342 chests that all have to be very large chests that are getting tossed over, I suppose. There's some that still exist, don't they? You can find vials of the tea that exist. As far as the crates, I imagine that the

wood would have dissolved by now. It's not really necessarily clear to me. But one thing when I say when I ask people to picture the value of it is the value of a ton of tea would have bought you Paul Revere's house in the north end, which you can still visit. And so if you take a house in the north end and multiply its value by 46, that's the value of the tea that was destroyed. It's one way to measure the value of the tea that was destroyed. But it's really not the value so much as the act itself that they're really about, right? This is a demonstration of our power that we can tip the balance here if we want to. Sure. And again, it's not like it was the government's tea. It belonged to a private company, the East India company, even though it had special government-granted monopoly privileges.

But yeah, definitely the British interpret it as, oh, this is defiance, this is treason. They never prosecute anybody for treason because they realize they can't make it stick. So what instead they do is, let's find a way to punish Boston. They pass the Boston Port Act saying, until Boston repays the East India Company for the value of this tea that was lost, we will close Boston. We will close Boston, to all traffic except what's needed for the troops and things like that. So it's a waterfront town. Everybody will be thrown out of work if they close the port of Boston for an entire summer. How much of it was, you mentioned before that the other places were calling upon Boston to take a greater role.

How much of this was proving it? Well, I mean, after that, I think a lot of people are a little shocked. Like, okay, you guys stood strong. You know, there are some Sons of Liberty who really celebrate this and be like, yeah, that's the way. But there are other people like George Washington or Benjamin Franklin who are like, I don't know. maybe we should pay the East Inde Company back for its value. This was really like kind of upping the ante here. I'm not sure about this.

So, you know, a lot of people nowadays say, oh, the Boston Tea Party was what galvanized Americans to revolt. They were so inspired by this act. No, it's the coercive acts, right? It's when Parliament decides to punish Boston and Massachusetts. That's when the other colonists are like, whoa, Parliament is really coming down way harder than it should. Clearly, they don't really respect American rights.

It's time to meet as a Continental Congress and start doing these other things. Were they surprised at the reaction, those who were engaged in this act of defiance? Were they surprised at the severity of the punishment? Or was that kind of the point? That's really hard to say. Honestly, I can't answer that. I mean, I think they were maybe not surprised, but certainly shocked at the severity of the coercive acts.

And the Sons of Liberty really play this up. The Administration of Justice Act, right, like gave British officials the power to have a change of venue if they were standing trial for capital crime. And so the Americans begin calling it the most. murder act, right? They can murder us with impunity and they won't have to face a jury of colonists, right? So they begin playing this up and twerking it up more and more. I mean, definitely many Americans in 74, 1774 begin awakening to, oh, we need to start drilling the militia now, right? It really is going to kind of come to something really bad. We need to start ordering gunpowder from France and doing

other things. Can you detail the coercive acts? What exactly were they? The coercive acts were the Boston Port Act, which was going to close the board of Boston until Boston repays for the tea. It was the Massachusetts government act, which changed how Massachusetts counselors would be appointed and limited town meetings and did some other stuff. It was the Administration of Justice Act, which gave officials the power to stand trial for capital crimes elsewhere, and the Quartering Act, which it's not as bad as it sounds, but it made it easier for British troops to be located in local venues that were unoccupied if they needed barracks. Right. And no tea. Well, the T Act was still in effect, right? Like in theory, you still had to pay taxes on T under the 1767 Rivingue Act.

And this really does set the table for so much that comes afterwards. Yeah, I mean, people also add the Quebec Act, which really had more to do with Quebec than it did with the American colonies. But the Americans believe, oh, you're surrounding us with this French-speaking Catholic, French civil law colony that's going to block our expansion westward. So the Quebec Act also makes a lot of Americans really nervous. Yeah. Well, at the end of the night, they all go home. home, the tea sinks to the bottom of the harbor. What is not gone is the revolutionary spirit. That has been steeped, if you will, forgive me, into a very dark brew. Benjamin, how does this event

become such an iconic measure of the revolutionary spirit? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons why Americans and people abroad really look to the tea party. I mean, it's this vivid event. Some people see it as inspiration for an anti-tax protest. Some actually see it as inspiration for anti-monopoly protests. but it's also so tied to American origins. And it also strikes people as this great moment of civil disobedience, right? Here we are destroying property in the name of a higher principle, right, of not being taxed without our consent, et cetera, et cetera.

And so people have drawn inspiration from this from a surprising range, you know, women's rights activists, pro-temperance, anti-temporants, pro-slavery, anti-slavery, Martin Luther King in his letter from a Birmingham jail, but also the Ku Klux Klan, people protesting excessive. of taxes on marijuana establishments, people protesting the pizza oven law in New York, people have strapped tea bags to bombs and put them, you know, and injured postal workers. People have blown up SUVs and parking lots as part of environmental protests. And all of them have kind of said, look, protest is endemic to American history. It's been tied to Black Lives Matter protests.

Guys got back from January 6th and said, I've just participated in the Boston Tea Party 2.0. So left wing, right wing, lots of people draw inspiration from the Boston Tea Party. And it's interesting, right, because on the one hand, you can characterize it as a noble act of civil disobedience. But I think there's also an undercurrent of violence and mayhem and menace to it. You know, that also ought to either inspire us or, frankly, make us a little nervous, right? There are times when good trouble is necessary, disorder is necessary, you know, on behalf of civil rights or something like that. But sometimes trouble is just trouble, right? And it can be hard, you know, if you use history as too blunt and instrument,

it can be hard to kind of say, like, oh, are you interpreting this history correctly or aren't you? So, you know, I like to say that it's just such a part of who we are as Americans, but there's also been world leaders who have been inspired by the Tea Party as well. Yeah, well, giving it to the man. It's a sword that cuts both ways, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Benjamin L. Karp is the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College. He is the author of Rebels Rising, Cities and the American Revolution.

I cannot wait to read that, actually. defiance of the Patriots Boston Tea Party in the making of America. And most recently, the great New York fire of 1776, a lost story of the American Revolution. Thank you so much, Benjamin. Really nice to meet you. Thank you. Yeah, nice meeting you too. Thank you for joining us on another episode of American History Hit. Please hit like and follow wherever get your podcasts.

Leave a nice review there. And if you'd like to make suggestions on any future subject matter, send us an email at ah-h-h-h-h-historyhit.com. Thanks a lot. We'll see you on the next new episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. Bye for now.