In Boston 250 years ago this week, on Dec. 16, 1773, a throng of radical patriots called the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians, swarmed aboard three British ships in the harbor, broke open 342 crates of Ceylon and Darjeeling tea worth almost 10,000 pounds — nearly $2 million in today’s money — and spent the next three hours dumping the contents into the water.
The Boston Tea Party, as the event soon became known, has been hailed ever since as an admirable act of civil disobedience. When I first learned about the American Revolution in grade school, the famous raid by the Sons of Liberty was presented as an intrepid show of resistance by Massachusetts colonists chafing under British rule — a heroic blow for freedom and a noble step in the liberation of the American colonies from King George. That is the view embraced in Boston’s annual reenactment of the event, celebrated on US postage stamps, and portrayed in popular art and culture from Currier & Ives to Hollywood.
It was also the view of John Adams, who wrote in his diary that the destruction of the tea had been “most magnificent” and gushed: “There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire.”
I’ve come to a different view.
The events preceding the Tea Party were complicated. Parliament had imposed a modest duty on tea sold in the American colonies, triggering a widespread boycott. Many Americans turned to illegally smuggled Dutch tea, which they could buy for less than the taxed English product. When that caused financial distress for the British East India Company, Parliament responded by exempting it from the tax. That instantly brought down the price of English tea — but it also undercut local merchants, unleashing new outrage.
So when half a million pounds of tea were shipped by the East India Company to America in the fall of 1773, the opposition was intense. In New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, S.C., protesters prevented the tea from being unloaded; the ships’ captains eventually decided to return to England with their cargo and avoid a potential confrontation with angry activists.
But in Massachusetts the reaction was different. Three British ships — the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver — arrived in Boston in late November. They too encountered a hostile atmosphere and could not unload their cargo. But the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, refused to let the ships leave the harbor. The standoff continued for several weeks. At last, during a meeting at the Old South Meeting House, Samuel Adams gave a prearranged signal and the Sons of Liberty, armed with axes and hatchets, blackened their faces and swung into action, shouting “Boston Harbor, a teapot tonight!”