Dan Snow's History Hit - The Boston Tea Party

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

On December 16th, 1773, a band of American patriots quietly boarded three ships in Boston Harbour, under the cover of night. Armed with axes and hatchets, they pried open the crates on board and poured their contents into the ocean. The crates contained tea; black-leaved Bohea and green tea from China. Some 92,000 pounds of it cascaded over the side in protest of British taxation in the American colonies.These men were known as the Sons of Liberty, and they had just lit a powder keg that would lead to the explosive American revolution, and shake the British Empire to its core. In this Explainer episode, Dan takes us through the twists and turns of this foundational event in American and world history.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm standing on a pontoon in the dead of night. Around me are the lights of Boston Harbour. And it was here on the 16th of December 1773, 250 years ago, that an event took place that shook an empire and ignited the American Revolution. It was known at the time as the Destruction of the Tea. It's become known by the more familiar title, the Boston Tea Party.

That December night, a group of men moved through the walls of Boston Harbour in silence, more like a military unit than a mob. Their target were ships carrying a consignment of tea. Tea that, if it was landed, would attract the hated taxes imposed by the government in distant London. The men climbed aboard the ships, being careful not to destroy any property at all

apart from the tea. They opened the chests and poured the contents into the harbour. 92,000 pounds of tea went into these waters from 340 chests. The operation carried out in near complete silence. The destruction of the tea was treason or patriotism, depending on your point of view. And it set off a tit-for-tat series of reprisals and counter-strokes that would soon see Britain at war with its American colonies on the eastern seaboard. To mark the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party,

I have come to Boston. In this episode, I'll tell you the story of that night and the events leading up to it and explain why they mattered. We'll talk about the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbour, but I'll also explain that this was the culmination of an imperial crisis that spanned three continents, from Bengal to the banks of the Thames to here in Boston. And you can also go and watch my documentary on the destruction of the tea,

on the Boston Tea Party, by following the link in the description of this podcast. But first of all, I'm going to take you back more than 250 years to talk about an empire that's in crisis a crisis born from unexpected and extraordinary success enjoy t-minus 10 atomic bomb dropped on hiroshima god save the king no black white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. It's hard to know where to start with the story of the destruction of the T,

the beginning of the American Revolution. We could go decades, even centuries back. We'd start with the settlers, those first colonists who came to North America, like those on the famous Mayflower. The men on that ship, and it was the men, all signed a famous compact, a contract with each other. It was a governing document which gave all the men on board that ship a say in how their new society would be governed. Right from the beginning of English settlement in North America there was a sense that they were bringing new ideas about how they wished to rule themselves to the new world. And these ideas meant these subjects, the British crown, whilst they acknowledged that, saw their relationship with that crown differently to their relatives and their compatriots back in Britain. We could also

talk about how the descendants, those first settlers and the many immigrants who joined them, just developed a culture, a tradition of getting by without London's involvement. London was a long way away from the east coast of North America. I don't want to overemphasise this, but clearly their relationship with London can be different to those who lived in Norfolk or Lancashire. It made sense for decisions affecting New York and Massachusetts and the Carolinas to be made in those places, maybe with some communication with London, but the imperial capital seemed like a long way off. When we're trying to explain that breakdown, that parting of ways between Britain and its American colonies, I think we

could also talk about the people, those who'd gone to the Americas. There was a huge range, of course, that were aristocrats and loyalists who'd gone there to make their fortunes. But there were also plenty of people who weren't overly enamoured with Britain, with the British state, the way of doing things. There were people who actively hated Britain and its constitution, its monarchs, its dukes, its bishops. There were religious non-conformists, people that weren't Anglicans or Episcopalians, people who believed in a much more equal relationship of congregations without a great hierarchy of churchmen above them. And there were those who regretted the result of the upheavals of the 17th century, the civil wars, who rather liked parliamentary rule, and the religious settlement

under Cromwell. They weren't happy when King Charles II had swept back into power, bringing with him all the trappings of an Anglican aristocratic state. There were also Scotsmen and other Jacobites who'd been hounded out after the uprisings, particularly of 1745, and their hatred for the House of Hanover had been sharpened in many cases by months, languishing in the bowels of prison ships before they were offloaded onto North American shores. There were also huge numbers of Irish immigrants, certainly no friends to the British state, which to them embodied a rapacious, land-hungry, uncaring force which had torn their green lands in Connerton, Munster, Ulster and Leinster from them,

prescribed their faith and left the lucky ones, starved and penniless, to seek their fate in America. They and their descendants would be all too happy to spread their enmity to the British imperial project, to others in the colonies. And perhaps less bitter, but just as dangerous, were those people who were born in America at two and three and four generations removed from Britain, for whom the mother country was no such thing. And those are just some of the things in the background as we look at the events, the actual things that happened in the middle of the 18th century. Because long-suffering

listeners to this podcast will know that I'm fascinated by the great upheavals that tore the world apart in the middle of the 18th century. It's a period I think I know best of all, so it's where we're going to start. And so we're going to start with how the seeds of revolution, the seeds of the 18th century. It's a period I think I know best of all, so it's where we're going to start. And so we're going to start with how the seeds of revolution, the seeds of the most catastrophic defeat in the history of Britain, were sown at the very moment of its most comprehensive, overwhelming victory. So there's a huge range of factors that led to revolution and schism within the British Empire, But perhaps it's because it's a period I know best of all, I've bored you on the podcast many times talking about this before, I feel I do need to talk a little a bit about the Seven Years' War, that giant war, that global war

that gripped the world in the middle of the 18th century. I mean, to start with that, because the seeds of revolution were sown during that war. The seeds of Britain's most catastrophic defeat were sown during that war, which is strange because that war saw Britain's greatest, most comprehensive and overwhelming victory in its history. It's odd. I'll explain. The Seven Years' War, we call it in Britain. Now, it famously didn't last seven years, so perhaps the North Americans who call it the French-Indian War are more accurate. And in this war, as the title suggests, Britain and her American colonists fought the French and French-allied indigenous tribes.

Over the course of this dramatic war, the massive French Empire in North America, that stretched from the Atlantic, from the Arctic, all the way down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, that fell into British hands. Not just Canada, we're talking the modern Midwest, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, but also further south into what's today Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, basically everything east of the Mississippi that had been nominally French, although the indigenous tribes living there would have been surprised to hear of their claim of sovereignty. At the end of that war, in the early 1760s, Britain found itself presiding over a massive North American empire,

an empire on the scale of some of the great empires of the world, the Romans, the Inca. It was enormous. And that's not all. The British had won victories elsewhere in the world. They won victories in India, the Caribbean, in Africa. It was the most successful war in British history, no question. At the end of that war, the winners, well, they sort of looked at each other and said, now what? And they were right to ask themselves that question because there were some pressing matters to sort out. Victory had come at a price. Victory had been won not just by jolly Tars fired up with a sense of patriotism,

brave redcoats marching towards the enemy guns and God being an Englishman. Victory had been won because Britain had built ships, it had raised regiments it had sent expeditionary forces around the world on a massive and unprecedented scale and to pay for all that Britain had borrowed a ton of cash cash folks is the sinews of war and now that the war was over those debts needed to be paid at the end end of the war, Britain had a national debt of £137 million, and annual government revenue is about £8 million. Servicing that debt alone, paying the interest on that debt, is costing the British government £5 million a year,

the majority of the revenue that it receives. Now who's paying those bills? In the 1760s, the average Massachusetts resident is paying one shilling of tax a year. The average Brit is paying 26 shillings of tax a year. But as any Brit will tell you, that Massachusetts resident, if they meet the property qualifications and other restrictions, will be able to elect members to a Massachusetts assembly, a parliament in Massachusetts, but will not be able to vote for any MPs in Westminster. The peoples of North America are represented in their local assemblies, but they do not send delegates or members to the parliament in London.

And this, friends, is the problem. So those debts need to be paid. A huge new empire needs policing. In fact, right at the end of the Seven Years' War, right at the end of the French-Indian War, there is a big war, another war, against American Indian groups, the so-called Pontiac's Revolt. So it's clear that there are going to be enormous military costs in protecting, extending, entrenching this North American empire. So in the 1760s, you get a British attempt to put this empire on a sound fiscal basis, a big reorganisation.

sound fiscal basis. A big reorganisation. Sadly, that fiscal reorganisation is not accompanied by a political reorganisation. As with any great British political crisis, alcohol plays a central part. Booze. In this case, particularly rum. Because the British had attempted in the past to impose taxes on their empire in the Caribbean and North America. This was a tax on sugar or molasses. The British had attempted to regulate the sugar trade since the early 18th century. They'd wanted to support their plantations in the Caribbean where enslaved people were producing the wonder commodity of the early modern world, sugar, in enormous quantities. And the British in 1733 had slapped huge tariffs on molasses or sugar from Dutch and French plantations in the Caribbean to try and force the Americans to buy British to try and protect, to try and support the British plantations in the Caribbean. This did not work. The Americans just laughed. They

ignored it. Merchants, officials, everybody just simply smuggled much cheaper sugar from Martinique, Guadeloupe, islands like that controlled by the French or the Dutch, and kept making New England rum and turning a profit. The merchant class, the distillers, they had absolutely no interest into submitting to this piece of British legislation. So in North America, as the 18th century progresses, you have a ruling elite, you have a mercantile elite, very, very comfortable with ignoring British legislation. This was a significant tradition. But after the Seven Years' War, the British decided to try again. 1764.

And the merchants knew exactly what to do. In 1764, Parliament passed the Sugar Act. Now, the preamble to this act stated, It is expedient that new provisions and regulations should be established for improving the revenue of this kingdom. And it is just and necessary that a revenue should be raised for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same. So the empire has grown. North Americans have benefited enormously from that growth and for the removal of their existential

French enemies across the border in Canada and elsewhere. So the North Americans can help pay for it. It was reasonably cunning, the Sugar Act. It replaced that old bit of protectionist legislation I'd mentioned before, which was a dead letter anyway. No one had paid any tax at all. It replaced it by massively reducing the tax. So reducing the import duty on sugar, but the British government got serious about collecting it, enforcing it. Customs officers, customs ships patrolling the waterways, merchants made to actually pay that tax. And the North Americans just weren't having it. There were complaints to Britain,

there were embargoes on British goods, people said don't buy British till they repeal this hated tax. There was a bit of trouble, a bit of violence, a bit of riots, scuffles with customs officers. And particularly, the hotbed of the trouble was in the province of Massachusetts. Massachusetts was actually where the Mayflower had landed all those years before. It was a province dominated by the great city of Boston. Boston sitting on its beautiful natural harbour, access to the massive cod fisheries just off the coast. In its interior, great forests of pine to make ships. It was a thriving centre of settlement in North America. And its political culture had evolved, had grown up. It was in its boisterous adolescence. It had a swagger. It did not want to be condescended

to by the distant British. One prominent Bostonian was a man called James Otis, and he wrote that this new tax was unacceptable. Why? Because, of course, of history. Like any politician, like any activist, trying to come up with an iron-clad reason why your point of view is the only one that is legitimate, you reach back into the past. You draw upon history and tradition to prove your righteousness. He wrote that it is humbly conceived that the British colonists, except only the conquered, are by Magna Carta as well entitled to have a voice in their taxes as the subjects within the realm. Are we not as really deprived of that right by the Parliament assessing us before we are

represented in the House of Commons as if the King should do it by his prerogative? Can it be said with any colour of truth or justice that we are represented in the House of Commons as if the King should do it by his prerogative? Can it be said with any colour of truth or justice that we are represented in Parliament? It's pretty straightforward. These colonists, like James Otis, were asserting their rights, their historic rights as Britons, not to be taxed without due process, not to be taxed without their representatives having accepted it in Parliament. But James Otis and those who thought like him, they were the true defenders of the British tradition against this dangerous, innovating, would-be tyrannical new regime in London. And it wasn't just sugar, folks. The British government went even further. It decided to impose something called the Stamp Act. It passed in March 1765. It was an effort

to raise even more money in North America, to pay for the standing army required to protect this new empire. It taxed colonists for every piece of paper that they used. If you want to buy a newspaper, if you want to get married, if you want to buy playing cards, you need to pay the tax. There has to be a little stamp on it saying the tax has been paid on this document. There were violent protests. The first use of the expression pops up at this point, that there should be no taxation without representation. The Stamp Act was, frankly, a bonkers piece of legislation, unbelievably stupid on behalf of the Brits. It managed to particularly alienate lawyers, who use lots of paper and are shuffling around and require licences for things and issue them, and publishers. and require licenses for things and issue them, and publishers.

So lawyers and publishers, often the cleverest, most argumentative, articulate people in society and those who control the megaphone. You do not want both of them in the opposition corner. And that's exactly where the British government forced them. Coming just a year after the Sugar Act, it provoked even more anger. Riots, boycotts of British goods, complaints, frantic transatlantic communication. And the British listened. It was repealed a year after it was passed in March 1766, thanks to the furore it caused. But the damage had been done.

It had radicalised people, particularly in Boston, the capital, the principal settlement in Massachusetts. It had radicalised people there, but the response to it had also in some ways radicalised many in the British political class. They were furious that their American brethren were refusing to shoulder some of the burden that had been incurred in the recent war. British troops, British powder and muskets had stopped American Indian raids up and down the frontier. They had protected those American farms that otherwise would have seen crops burnt in the fields, their owners abducted, killed, their scalps taken as trophies.

British troops and ships had conquered French North America. They'd removed the existential French threat looming over the American colonies. Why were the Americans refusing to pay their share? Well, the Americans answered, because the British were excluding them from the political process. They were denying them their ancient rights as Britons, as free men. And it was in Massachusetts that a group of those free men came together, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, to advance their cause. Perhaps even at this stage, to the point of outright independence from Britain. They were a grassroots organisation. They were organisers. They were protesters. They advocated civil disobedience, but occasional

direct action, direct violence, to express their outrage at the British government and to help convince their fellow Americans to join them, to spread hostility towards the British. They came together in 1765 in opposition to the Stamp Act and they took their name actually from a speech given in the British Parliament by Isaac Barré, a parliamentarian who referred to colonials who opposed unjust British measures as sons of liberty. And here I should say that the British political class was badly divided on this, like I say some were furious at the Americans, Others, particularly those we call the Whigs, came to sympathise with the Americans. They agreed the British Parliament should not be

taxing people without representation. They saw the American question as an extension of the question of constitutional change within Britain itself. Things needed to change. The British Parliament needed to be more representative. They agreed with that and their American brothers and sisters were allies in that cause. It wasn't just America that would be split down the middle by the onset of revolution. It would be Britain too. The Sons of Liberty would come to be dominated by one Samuel Adams and there's a great Adams quote which describes what he and the Sun's Liberty were trying to do. It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting bushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

And that is exactly what they did. Even after the Stamp Act in 1765-66, I'm sure the vast majority of Americans weren't conceiving there'd be a formal split with Britain. But the Sons of Liberty got to work, and they are one of the most successful examples in history of that age-old phenomenon. Time after time, a small group of highly motivated, disciplined people who know what they want to achieve have wrought enormous change. From Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union to the early Chinese Communist Party, the Sons of Liberty moved the debate. They just changed the minds of their fellow Americans, shifting the entire fulcrum of American politics. And they were pretty lucky in their antagonist. The British government,

time after time, just made clumsy decisions that made sense on the green benches of Parliament in Westminster and the corridors of Whitehall, but the effects of which were just clumsy, alienating, insensitive when they were put into effect on the streets and the fields, towns and villages of the American colonies. In 1765, the British government passed the Quartering Act. This made colonial legislatures, the local assemblies in each of the provinces, made colonial legislatures, the local assemblies in each of the provinces, responsible for paying and providing for the accommodation of regular British troops who were stationed in America. So the British would send over regiments to the Carolinas or Georgia or Massachusetts. The locals would be given no choice but to pay for those soldiers. And the government announced those

soldiers would stay in public houses, in inns, livery stables, ale houses, vittling houses. And if then there was no space available, the houses of people selling wine, the houses of people selling rum, brandy, strong water, cider. And beyond that, they could stay in uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns or other buildings. So basically, if you were lucky enough to have a red-coated regiment march into town, you might find them billeted in your shed, in your stables, in your local pub, and you were given absolutely no choice whatsoever about it. Now, if you're the Sons of Liberty, if you're trying to convince your fellow citizens that the distant British government is tyrannical, imposing arbitrary taxes on you. And then the British government, well, plays into your hands rather conveniently. The British government comes along and imposes a load of musket-wielding soldiers literally on people's properties without their

permission. Well, said the Sons of Liberty, that is pretty much what arbitrary, tyrannical governments do. The Americans resisted. A shipload of soldiers arrived in New York and no accommodation was made available for them at all. They had to stay on their crowded ships. Time after time, the American colonies were simply refusing to comply with legislation passed by Parliament. And Parliament, the British government, kept backing down. The Stamp Act was shelved. The Quartering Act was allowed to run out after a year or two of no one observing it. The Americans kept getting their way. But the British government did pass one, I've always thought it's a strangely petty act at this point.

They passed the Declaratory Act of 1766. As they repealed the Stamp Act, they simultaneously passed this act, which simply stated that the British Parliament had the same rights of taxation in North America as they did in Great Britain which is choosing not to impose any tax at the moment thank you very much and that might have been accepted to the Americans if the following year in 1767 the British hadn't decided to test that hypothesis. They decided that they would impose new taxes. The famous Townsend Acts. After the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townsend, these were a series of taxes passed by Parliament to impose duties on goods

being imported into the American colonies. The American colonies were dependent on industrial imports from Britain, and now the British would impose a tariff on those. Things like china, glass, lead, paper, and tea. When news of those new taxes arrived in America, everything kicked off again. Customs officials were beaten up, tarred and feathered, run out of town. In 1768, the following year, Boston had become so unruly that the British were forced to send regular troops to keep order. This was immediately painted by the Sons of Liberty as a military occupation. In some ways, people said that the American Revolution had begun. The British were occupying Boston. And when you send hundreds of teenage redcoats into a small town, things are not going

to go well. There is going to be friction. There are brawls in ale houses. There are arguments over girls, over money. There is trouble on the streets of Boston. And on the 5th of March, 1770, things really escalated when a scared young redcoat, a lad called Hugh Montgomery, discharged his musket into an angry crowd of Americans that had been taunting a group of British sentries. A few of his fellow soldiers followed suit. There was no order to do so. There was no plan. It was a kind of ragged, disorganised volley. But three Bostonians were killed instantly, and two were left mortally wounded. There was no tyrannical master plan to mow down Americans in the streets. But there were now corpses in front of the state house in the heart of Boston and the city went

berserk. The Sons of Liberty had their moment. I won't try and label this metaphor but they'd been stockpiling gunpowder and someone had just thrown a match in. They had their moment and they were determined to make the most use of it. They painted the British government now as an alien occupying force, an existential threat to the liberties of Americans, to their way of life, to their freedom, their property and their futures. And with every little instant magnified, every little moment of hostility between the Redcoats and the Bostonians, the Sons of Liberty were able to win over more and more of their fellow Americans to their cause.

Now, ironically, on the very same day as this so-called Boston Massacre, a new British Prime Minister, Lord North, decided to suspend the Townsend duties, even before he heard news of the killings in Boston. He realised that they were more trouble than they're worth. But he didn't entirely dismantle the Townsend project. He removed the duties from things like paper and lead. But he did leave the architecture of the revenue collection in place, the hated customs officers and the boats that carried them. He left that in place because he did still want to raise a little bit of revenue

and he did still want to prove the point. He did still want it to be accepted that Britain had the right to levy taxes in the American colonies. And to do that, he left one duty, just one solitary duty on one little commodity. And that was the tax on tea. The next few years were, you'd probably say tense. Life went on, but it wasn't a great time to be a customs officer in North America. They continued to be beaten up and ignored and ostracised. Tea continued to be smuggled in, brought in by the merchants, who might also be members of the Sons of Liberty. Strangely, men whose politics and personal financial circumstances were in precise alignment smuggled in from French and Dutch providers, their ships playing cat and mouse with British customs men who sought to board and check the cargoes.

Other Americans who weren't smuggling in tea decided the best way was to boycott tea, and it's in this period that coffee became the principal drink of the Americans, an obsession that endures to this day. In the summer of 1772, so about two years after Lord North had withdrawn all the taxes apart from that on tea, a British naval customs vessel went aground in Rhode Island. The tide went out and it was left on a mudflat. Locals swarmed out, attacked the ship and burnt it. This was pretty direct. This was violence towards His Majesty's servants trying to uphold the law in North America. This couldn't last.

But the situation was not yet beyond hope. But what tipped it over the edge was another, simultaneous British imperial crisis. Not one in North America, but in India. Not in Boston, but in Bengal. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. To be continued... who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts.

We're going to need to back up a little bit here. I'm afraid, although I'm not, to the Seven Years' War. I'm going to have to quickly explain what had been happening in a different theatre of that war. If Britain had been reasonably surprised to find out it controlled a vast North American empire after the Seven Years' War, it had experienced even greater shock in India. A century and a half before, a trading company, the East India Company, had been set up. Their plan had been to access the fabulously wealthy markets and providers of desirable commodities around the Indian Ocean and into the South China Sea, Asia. What was described at that point as the East Indies, so South and East Asia today. That trading company sent out ships, then they'd get permission from local rulers to trade, set up

a little trading station, they'd build a warehouse, they'd accumulate luxury goods, and they'd send them back on ships to England. It was all quite straightforward at first. The East Indies company was in the business of going to the world's most dynamic economies and trying to persuade the uncertain locals to buy Lancashire cloth in return for the finest silks and muslins. But over a century and a half, particularly in South Asia, the Indian peninsula, the politics had transformed. And the East India Company had found itself propelled into the position of a regional power, wielding control over not just its own warehouses, but of whole towns, cities, and regions of India. Its pursuit of profit had dragged it first into Indian courtly political

intrigue. First of all, the East India Company might back their candidate to be the local governor, for example. Then they found themselves having to support that candidate against any competitors, particularly European ones like the French or the Dutch or the Portuguese. And the next logical step was to just get rid of that middleman and take direct control of the province for themselves. That process took a long time, but it reached a climax during the Seven Years' War when there were some stunning victories. You might have heard of Clive of India. He defeats the French-backed claimant to rule Bengal.

And instead, the East India Company finds itself in charge of what was one of the richest and most productive regions of India. The East India Company of traders was now in the empire game and this pivot came with challenges as you might expect. States you'll be unsurprised to learn are not the same as businesses. There are things to worry about other than simple profit targets. The EBITDA and the welfare and loyalty of the people of Bengal are not one and the same. And the East India Company servants were now torn between governing Bengal for the good of their new subjects or just trying to hit their profit targets. And this became more complicated, more utterly tragic, as Bengal was afflicted with astonishingly bad famine that

killed vast numbers of people in 1770. It was a humanitarian tragedy. And it was made worse by the fact that East India Company's agents, the local people on the ground, were insisting on collecting taxes from dying peasants and artisans. They were doing so because they were obeying the instructions of their masters in London, who were months and months away and were not walking the streets of Bengal, did not feel any empathy at all, were unable to respond to a local situation on the ground, A, because they were so far away, and B, because it took about a year for them to receive information and then for their new requests to be delivered to their servants in India. It was a perfect storm

of natural disaster, misrule, and death on a gigantic scale. And to shorten a long and complicated story, the upshot, apart from unimaginable suffering from the people of Bengal, was that the East India Company ran out of money. Despite the efforts of some of its more heartless servants, revenue had fallen in Bengal, the demand for its products in Britain and the rest of the world was a bit soft, and the East India Company couldn't pay its debts. But the East India Company was, you guessed it, too big to fail.

It was responsible for a vast share of British trade. If the East India Company collapsed, so too would British trade, so would the British position in India. The French would slide back into Bengal, slide back into the bits of India from which they'd been excluded during the Seven Years' War. Lots of MPs, as it happened, were shareholders in the East India Company. So there was a big coalition of voices, a lot of influential lobbyists, to get the company propped up. The British government had no choice. They planned a massive bailout. There was one man in London, he seemed to know all this was happening, almost before the Prime Minister at Lord North, and that was the polymath, the inventor, the thinker, the sort of North American representative, the agent in London, Benjamin Franklin. He wrote a

letter in December 1772, just as the extent of the East India Company's crisis was becoming known, to a man called Joseph Galloway, the Speaker of the East India Company's crisis was becoming known, to a man called Joseph Galloway, the Speaker of the Provincial Assembly in Pennsylvania. And Franklin wrote, The company have accepted bills which they find themselves unable to pay, though they have the value of two millions in tea and other India goods in their stores, perishing for want of demand. Their credit thus suffering and their stock falling. Government will lose £400,000 per annum. Can an American forbear smiling at these blunders? So what Franklin

is taking some enjoyment in describing there is that the East India Company have accepted bills. They have been presented with IOUs, which they have to pay. They can't pay, but they do have lots and lots of tea, millions of pounds worth of tea and other things in big warehouses in London without a market for them. And they're perishing for want of demand. They've got trade goods. They just don't have any cash. And as a result, their stock is falling. And he points out, if they go bankrupt, if the East India Company disappears, the British government will lose a major source of revenue. Not just all the money, it makes more the trade,

but because the East India Company pay a giant chunk of cash to the British government every year for its license to operate. So if the East India Company goes down, the British position in India collapses, British trade collapses, and British government finances are even more shafted. As Franklin knew, it was bailout time. The East India Company asked for one and a half million pounds. That's about 20%, one fifth of the British state's annual revenue.

And here, friends, is where that crisis starts to affect North America. friends, is where that crisis starts to affect North America. Because the Prime Minister, Lord North, looked at this situation and thought he spotted an opportunity. He saw an opportunity to stabilise not just India, not just Britain's trade and Britain's finances, but also solve the crisis with the North American colonies. He was going to wrap it all up, solve everything in one fell swoop. A piece of legislation that on the face of it looks so fiendishly clever that you have to admire its brilliance. Except for the fact that it caused the most catastrophic war in British history and the dissolution of the British Empire. But apart from that, it was brilliant. That piece of legislation, folks, was called the Tea Act. So the East India

Company, as you've heard from Benjamin Franklin, it's got a lot of tea in its warehouse in London. It can't shift. Demand is not there in Britain or elsewhere. So, Lord North, the Prime Minister, says, you can have a gigantic loan. We're going to take a more active role in the company. There's all sorts of internal management changes going to take place. But role in the company. There's all sorts of internal management changes that are going to take place. But to help you pay back that loan, you can take all that tea in London without paying tax on it as it passes through London,

so without paying the British duties on it, and you can flog it to the Americans. You can dump that cheap tea on the Americans. It will be a new market for the East India Company. Fantastic. You can dump that cheap tea on the Americans. It will be a new market for the East India Company. Fantastic. It will restore the health of the company. It will make tea cheaper in America because it's travelling from the East through London without paying any taxes on the way,

straight to the American market. Then, therefore, it will undercut those pesky smugglers, bring you in from Dutch and French sources or put the smugglers out of business. And here's the kicker. When it lands in America, it will still be liable for that little tiny bit of duty, that tax payable, before it reaches American cups and mouths. It's a nominal amount. It's a smidgen. It won't really raise much money in America. It won't really push up the price of tea,

but it will establish the principle that Britain can tax American imports. So Lord North thinks to himself, the East India Company survives, the British imperial position in India survives, the British imperial position in India survives, the British government gets its loan back, the Americans get cheaper tea, the smugglers, who are usually these radical troublemakers, will be put out of business, and the British will have established the precedent on taxing the Americans. Brilliant.

the Americans. Brilliant. May 1773, the Tea Act. I've held that act in my hands, friends. I've gone to the Victoria Tower, above the House of Lords, into the Parliamentary Archives. They unlocked a little grey locker. We took out the Stamp Act. We took out the original Tea Act with George III's assent written right on it. I've held it in my hands and I wept bitter tears. Because that tea act, inadvertently, was the death warrant of Britain's North American empire. Lord North didn't know that, though. Parliament debated the tea act for a day. It passed.

He went home thinking he'd just won that three-dimensional chess. Lord North was wrong. Through the summer of that year and into the autumn, the fall, ships carrying East India Company tea sailed across the Atlantic. On November 28th, the Dartmouth ship owned by wealthy Nantucket Quakers arrived in Boston. It moored at Griffin's Wharf with its cargo of tea. The Sons of Liberty immediately distributed pamphlets proclaiming, Friends, Brethren, Countrymen, the worst of plagues, the detested tea shipped for this port by the East India Company has now arrived in the harbour. The hour of destruction,

or manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny stares you in the face. It's pretty hyperbolic about a cargo of tea, but you know, you get their point. That mob of volunteers made sure that no one even tried to unload that tea. The following day, the Sons of Liberty arranged a meeting to discuss the tea crisis. So many people turned up, so many citizens and patriots turned up that they had to move that meeting to the biggest enclosed space in colonial Boston, which was the Old South Meeting House. It was, and still is, a beautiful, big, congregational church building right in the middle of downtown Boston. You can go and visit that. I was filming

there a few weeks ago for my Boston Tea Party documentary for History Hit TV. So they have a series of public meetings. People go, debate, vote. It's a form of popular citizen direct democracy in action. A rugged North American alternative to the kind of politics being practiced in London. The temperature just goes up and up. On December the 2nd, the Eleanor, another ship, arrives at Griffin's Wharf with a cargo of tea. That ship was owned by a Boston merchant. And on

the 15th of December, the Beaver, which had been delayed by an outbreak of smallpox, so it was in quarantine, it was in Boston's outer harbour, it makes its way into the inner harbour and arrives at Griffin's Wharf, also with a cargo of tea. Now, as I said, I visited Boston a few weeks ago to make a TV show for History Hit, and when I was out there, I recorded this. I'm back on the quayside in Boston Harbour now. Now, the shape of the harbour has changed dramatically. There's been huge land reclamation here in Boston, what used to be mudflats and sandbanks. I've now got towering buildings, skyscrapers built on them. So where I am now on the edge of the harbour is probably a couple of blocks, a few hundred metres away from

Griffin's Wharf, where the three ships were docked. They were three ships that were in a form of legal stasis. They couldn't unload their cargo of tea because the moment they did their owners would have been liable to pay duty on that tea the hated duty and they also couldn't leave the harbour because that was also against the law the Brits would have impounded the ships and the ship owners would have faced their ships being confiscated the ship owners were getting pretty nervous by this point they knew there were several outcomes most of which ended up with them losing the value of their vassals. Either British government seized them, or the radicals, the patriots, burned them to the waterline. That was the situation in Boston Harbour in mid-December 250 years ago, and there was a very definite timeline. British law required that Dartmouth, timeline. British law required that Dartmouth, the first ship to arrive, unload its tea and pay its duties within 20 days, or customs officials could board the ship and confiscate the cargo.

Now that deadline ran out at the end of the 17th of December. Everyone knew that deadline. They did not want that tea to be unloaded. There's a huge meeting in that same building, the Old South Meeting House, on December the 14th, and Samuel Adams records that the people met once again at the Old South Church. Having ascertained the owner, they compelled him to apply at the customs house for a clearance for his ship to London with the tea on board, and appointed 10 gentlemen to see it performed, after which they adjourned. So the meeting found the owner of the ship, forced him to go to the customs officials, and asked for permission for that ship to sail out of harbour without unloading its tea to return to London. Now, the British governor did not

give permission for that ship to head back out to sea. It was a standoff. On December the 16th, they'd say something like five, six, seven thousand people gathered at the Old South Meeting House. Now I've been in that building. It's a big building, but it can't fit that many people. So I think we have to imagine that the streets outside were packed. There were people clinging, looking through the windows, looking through from neighbouring buildings. Something like a third of the city's population was said to have turned out. And that is the meeting where things get really heated. Adam Coulson, who was a leather dresser in his 30s from Boston,

he attended that meeting. He'd attended all the ones before as well. And he famously shouted out from the gallery in that building, which you can still go and see today, Boston Harbour, a teapot tonight. And then the great Samuel Adams stood up and brought the meeting to a close, saying portentously, this meeting can do nothing more to save the country. Let's get back to the streets of Boston. They moved down here with great purpose,

stealthily in complete silence. They knew their job. Many of them would have been dockers themselves. They were no strangers to unloading the cargoes that they were no strangers to unloading cargoes on these wharves they boarded the three ships which bizarrely were unguarded they were very very fastidious they were very careful not to destroy any private property other than the tea they did not want people thinking that this was an anarchist movement. Property was sacred in the 18th century. It was a bedrock. You did not mess with property if you wanted to remain within the political mainstream. And so when they broke open the tea chests in the holds of these ships, if they did have to smash a padlock, they made sure to replace that padlock

immediately. Nothing was taken off those ships. Nothing was destroyed apart from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions,

and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm in the hold of the replica of one of the Tea Party ships, the Beaver, in Boston Harbour. It's a one-to-one scale replica, and the first thing that strikes you is how small it was. At this time in the 18th century,

cargo ships were still so small compared to what would come in the century following, let alone the super tankers and container ships that we have today. Below decks, it's a very simple ship. Nearly all of the space is set aside for cargo. There's some crew bunks right at the front some crew quarters right up at the bows and a couple of berths for officers here at the stern probably three or four the captain has a nice little stern cabin those handsome windows looking out over the wake of the ship as it traveled along a bit of space for a

desk and a bed but the men would have been up for it wedged in surrounded by chests of cargo the hold is where the tea would have been there were just over 110 chests of tea on this ship they picked them up from london alongside other trade goods those had all been unloaded and sold there was no tax no duties on any of those other things. So there was no problem getting them ashore. The tea, however, was sitting down here. The British wouldn't let it leave the harbour. The Patriots wouldn't let it land. On that fateful night, a group of around 55 men and boys boarded the ship. There was no struggle. The crew knew a lost cause when they saw one. The captain of this ship was actually a Quaker. He was a pacifist. And he decided that discretion was the order of the day. He stayed in his little

stern cabin. I'm looking at the stern cabin now, fine windows where the captain would have sat at his desk writing nervous letters to the owner and to anyone else he could think of. He must have feared for his life. But actually the whole operation was done under conditions of very tight discipline. They didn't destroy anything, steal anything, vandalise anything. They were simply interested in making a political statement about the tea. The chests varied in size. Some were, I don't know, as little as 30 kilograms that could just be carried up by one person. Waterproof wrapping, canvas wrapping taken off, chest broken open and the tea poured overboard. Others were much, much heavier, took two or three men to manhandle them up the companionway. And then they had to use their shoes, their hats, their hands to bail the tea out over the side of

the ship before they could pick up the chest and empty the rest in. The whole operation took perhaps three, three and a half hours. It was watched by a thousand people, men, women and children on the shore, as these gangs worked in silence. So came the Sons of Liberty to emphasise that despite breaking one very particular law, they were on the whole believers in the rule of law and in property, that when one man was found stealing tea,

he was immediately stripped of that tea and sent off the ships. Even the padlocks that they were forced to break were replaced the following day. It was low tide, so the tea actually piled up on the harbour floor. It started sticking out of the water, and boys were sent over the side with rakes to make sure that every single tea leaf was immersed in the waters of the harbour. As we think, over a thousand people watched, 340 chests of tea were broken open and 90,000 pounds of tea was poured into the harbour. No government officials or soldiers tried to intervene or played any part. In the years that followed, it actually became very difficult to know who'd been there that night, who'd done the throwing in, in the aftermath. It was a deadly secret, of course, because that

destruction was treason. No one was owning up to it. No one was telling. We do know one person who was definitely there, Francis Ackerley. He was born in Boston in around 1730. He was a participant because he was the only person imprisoned for it at the time. He was a self-employed wheelwright, and he would go on to become a militiaman during the American Revolution. He was killed in the fighting. We think that other people there included Paul Revere, who would play such an important, famous part in the Revolution, he would gallop out of Boston and forewarn militiamen further upstate

that the British were coming in the famous ride of Paul Revere. Samuel Pitts, a man in his 30s, he was a prominent merchant, ship owner. He was in the West India trade, therefore he was a bit of a smuggler. And so he had a very clear and present economic desire to get rid of that tea, as well as no doubt a philosophical commitment to the principles at stake. James Brewer was a Boston pump maker and block maker. Love these titles. He'd been part of the mob during the Boston Massacre.

He later testified in a trial against the British that had shot into the crowd. Thomas White was there, we think. He'd been born in Kilkenny. He's very recently arrived, Irish immigrant into Boston. No love lost for the Brits. He was a card-carrying member of the Sons of Liberty as soon as he arrived. And he would serve under George Washington when war came. They were just some of the people that we think were there. Decades later, of course, well, everyone was there. There's an old story about the SAS, the British Special Forces, that stormed the Iranian embassy in London when it was taken over by terrorists. And people say that if you count up the number

of SAS men who say they were on the balcony breaking in through the windows, then that balcony would have collapsed under the weight. Well, I think the same might be true of the destruction of the T in Boston Harbour. Whoever was there, however many people, at the end of the night, they'd melted back into narrow streets and alleyways of Boston, leaving the waters of Boston Harbour stained brown with tea. And everyone knew, from the very second it happened, that it was massive. John Adams, who was a future president of America, wrote in his diary the next day, the destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible,

and it must have so important consequences and so lasting that I can't but consider it as an epoch in history. Well, as far as contemporaneous notes go, that's pretty impressive. He was absolutely right. It was an astonishingly provocative act against the British government, against the empire, against the East India Company, a big powerful corporation. It was calculated to provoke a response for the British that would further deepen the crisis, further alienate the American people, the colonies from Britain. The Sons of Liberty knew that any British response would drive people into their camp. The crisis would deepen, and that cuts out the middle ground. It sidelines those who advocate for some kind of compromise.

It makes the idea of compromise itself untenable. So often in history. There's an eye-catching massacre, there's a raid, there's an act of destruction which forces the enemy to respond, deepens the hostility, and in turn that deepening drives people on both sides into more radical positions. The Sons of Liberty had set a trap for the British government, and the British obligingly marched straight into it. Lord North said in London, The Americans have tarred and feathered your subjects, burned your ships, denied obedience to your laws and authority. Yet so clement and so forebearing has our conduct been, that it is incumbent on us now to take a different course. It goes to all. We must control them or submit to them. He also said, whatever may be the consequence,

we must risk something. If we do not, all is over. Well, with that attitude, the British government would respond they would impose punishing measures which provided the sons of liberty with yet more ammunition saying that britain was now a tyrannical power from which the americans needed to free themselves the destruction of the tea in boston harbour the punitive british response would make violent resistance to British rule. It would make war a lot closer. And you'll be hearing a lot more about all of that as the 250th anniversaries come up one after another.

So friends, that is how the American Revolution essentially began in Massachusetts Bay. As everyone tells you in the Commonwealth today, we did the legwork, the Pennsylvanians did the paperwork. And all that's coming soon on Dan Snow's History Hit because we're going to hit those anniversaries. Because history is your go-to place, folks, for all things American Revolutionary 250. So check out History Hit TV. We've got our documentary on the Boston Tea Party and many more coming up. And watch this space. See you next time. you