Background to the Boston Tea Party
The tea supply was, after all, made possible by the might and spread of the British Empire. Taxing people who enjoyed that commodity to support the imperial government therefore might seem justified.
Many colonists would have paid the stamp tax directly, making it easy for American Whigs to show that new revenue laws affected everyone, even farmers (and most Americans were farmers). In contrast, only the merchants importing tea paid the tea tariff. They passed that cost on to their customers, to be sure, but it wasn’t so obvious.
Furthermore, unlike some of the actions taxed by the Stamp Act, such as court filings and marriages, no one was legally required to buy tea. And yet, because tea supplied that pleasant touch of caffeine, many Americans were in the habit of drinking it.
In 1765, therefore, Americans might well have grumbled about an imperial tea tariff, but not massively and energetically enough to render the new law unenforceable. Would that revenue have satisfied the ministry in London enough that successive administrations wouldn’t have tried new tax laws? Or would it have provided a precedent for more tariffs based on similar commodities?
As it was, the ideas that the British constitution rightly bars taxation without representation, that corrupt royal appointees were draining money from the colonies, and that these problems could affect even people in small towns far from the ports were widespread by 1773. That made the Tea Act loom larger than it otherwise would have.
In this Sestercentennial year for the tea crisis, many institutions are examining that conflict through events and exhibits. Of course, the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum focuses on the climax of that crisis every day. It’s got two events coming up exploring the background of the event and commemorations of it.
Thursday, 8 June, 7:00 to 8:30 P.M.
Canton to Boston: How Chinese Tea Steeped at American Revolution
Abigail’s Tea Room and online (registration required)
Tea historian Bruce Richardson was recently granted access to the vaults of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, where he searched for teas like those tossed into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. He will share news of his detective work and the fascinating journey of the Boston teas as they left Canton bound for London’s East India Company warehouses and Colonial America.
Sunday, 25 June, 7:00 P.M.
Rev War Revelry: The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum
Facebook Live
Join the hosts at Emerging Revolutionary War as they talk with staff of the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum on the history of the events leading up to and on December 16, 1773, learn more about their interactive museum and learn about all the events planned around this year’s 250th anniversary.
2 comments:
It occurs to me that a key reason the Stamp Act caused such a particular uproar is that the occupational group for whom it caused the most pain and aggravation was colonial British American printers.
In other words, the Stamp Act was a piece of legislation inadvertently designed to p-o exactly the constituency best positioned to raise the maximum ruckus about it.
Has such a perspective figured much in the existing historiography?
The Stamp Act certainly presented a financial and practical headache for printers, as well as lawyers and merchants. Joe Adelman’s Revolutionary Networks goes into this, with its second chapter titled “A Trade under Threat: Printers and the Stamp Act Crisis.”
The printers’ stance guaranteed that the opposition message would spread. However, that profession involved a tiny slice of the population mostly confined to the larger ports.
How did newspaper coverage take hold as strongly as it did? Why did ordinary mechanics, laborers, and eventually farmers see their interests aligned with the printers, elite attorneys, and merchants? I think it’s because this law ultimately affected everyone.
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