censured Britain for passing the Coercive Acts and called for their repeal.By the time they adjourned in October 1774, they’d written The Declaration and Resolves which: #Taza de te how toThe delegates were divided on how to move forward but the Boston Tea Party had united them in their fervor to gain independence. On September 5, 1774, elected delegates from all 13 American colonies except Georgia met in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress to figure out how to resist British oppression. Many colonists felt Britain’s Coercive Acts went too far. The event didn’t earn nearly as much notoriety as the first Boston Tea Party, but it did encourage other tea-dumping demonstrations in Maryland, New York and South Carolina. Thanks to their Native American costumes, only one of the tea party culprits, Francis Akeley, was arrested and imprisoned.Ī second Boston Tea Party took place in March 1774, when around 60 Bostonians boarded the ship Fortune and dumped nearly 30 chests of tea into the harbor. Though led by Samuel Adams and his Sons of Liberty and organized by John Hancock, the names of many of those involved in the Boston Tea Party remain unknown. The participants reportedly swept the ships’ decks clean before they left. No one was hurt, and aside from the destruction of the tea and a padlock, no property was damaged or looted during the Boston Tea Party. He voiced strong disapproval of “their conduct in destroying the Tea” and claimed Bostonians “were mad.” Washington, like many other elites, held private property to be sacrosanct.īenjamin Franklin insisted the British East India Company be reimbursed for the lost tea and even offered to pay for it himself. In June of 1774, George Washington wrote: “the cause of Boston…ever will be considered as the cause of America.” But his personal views of the event were far different. While some important colonist leaders such as John Adams were thrilled to learn Boston Harbor was covered in tea leaves, others were not. (45 tons) of tea, which would cost nearly $1,000,000 dollars today. Hewes also noted that “We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.”ĭid you know? It took nearly three hours for more than 100 colonists to empty the tea into Boston Harbor. By December 16, 1773, Dartmouth had been joined by her sister ships, Beaver and Eleanor all three ships loaded with tea from China. Led by Adams, the Sons of Liberty held meetings rallying against British Parliament and protested the Griffin’s Wharf arrival of Dartmouth, a British East India Company ship carrying tea. The group of revolutionists included prominent patriots such as Benedict Arnold, Patrick Henry and Paul Revere, as well as Adams and Hancock. The Sons of Liberty were a group of colonial merchants and tradesmen founded to protest the Stamp Act and other forms of taxation. Still, with the help of prominent tea smugglers such as John Hancock and Samuel Adams -who protested taxation without representation but also wanted to protect their tea smuggling operations-colonists continued to rail against the tea tax and Britain’s control over their interests. Tea smuggling in the colonies increased, although the cost of the smuggled tea soon surpassed that of tea from British East India Company with the added tea tax. In May 1773, British Parliament passed the Tea Act which allowed British East India Company to sell tea to the colonies duty-free and much cheaper than other tea companies-but still tax the tea when it reached colonial ports. #Taza de te seriesIn the 1760s, Britain was deep in debt, so British Parliament imposed a series of taxes on American colonists to help pay those debts. WATCH: The Revolution on HISTORY Vault Why Did the Boston Tea Party Happen? It showed Great Britain that Americans wouldn’t take taxation and tyranny sitting down, and rallied American patriots across the 13 colonies to fight for independence. The event was the first major act of defiance to British rule over the colonists. American colonists, frustrated and angry at Britain for imposing “taxation without representation,” dumped 342 chests of tea, imported by the British East India Company into the harbor. The Boston Tea Party was a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts.
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