Boston Tea Party
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The Boston Tea Party was a direct action protest by the American colonists against Great Britain in which they destroyed many crates of tea on ships in Boston Harbor. The incident, which took place on Thursday, December 16, 1773, has been seen as helping to spark the American Revolution.
Background
The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies with no representation in the Westminster Parliament ("no taxation without representation"). One of the protesters was John Hancock. In 1768, John Hancock's ship Liberty was seized by customs officials and he was charged with smuggling. He was defended by John Adams and the charges were eventually dropped. However, Hancock later faced several hundred more indictments.Hancock organized a boycott of tea from China sold by the British East India Company, whose sales in the colonies then fell from 320,000lb to 520lb. By 1773, the company had large debts, huge stocks of tea in its warehouses and no prospect of selling it because smugglers such as Hancock were importing tea without paying taxes (import tax). The British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly, thereby allowing them to sell for lower prices than those offered by the colonial merchants and smugglers.
The ships carrying tea were prevented from landing, as most American ports turned the tea away. In Boston, however, the East India Company had the help of the British-appointed governor. Plans were made to bring in, by force, the tea under the protection given by British armed ships.
The Boston Tea Party
On Thursday, December 16, 1773, the evening before the tea was supposed to be landed, the Sons of Liberty, three groups of 50 Boston residents each organized by Samuel Adams, burst from the Old South Meeting House and headed toward Griffin's Wharf, dressed as Mohawks. Three ships — the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver — were loaded with hundreds of crates of tea. The men boarded the ships and began destroying the cargo. By 9pm they had opened 342 crates of tea in all three ships and had thrown them into Boston Harbor. They took off their shoes, swept the decks, and made each ship's first mate agree to say that the Sons of Liberty had destroyed only the tea. The whole event was remarkably quiet and peaceful. The next day, they sent someone around to fix the one padlock they had broken.#redirect [[Template:Fact]]
The Reaction
This act brought criticism from both colonial and British officials. For instance, Benjamin Franklin stated that the destroyed tea must be repaid and offered to repay with his own money. The British government responded harshly by closing the port of Boston and put in place other laws that were known as the "Intolerable Acts", also called the Coercive Acts. However, a number of colonists were inspired to carry out similar acts, such as the burning of the Peggy Stewart. The Boston Tea Party eventually proved to be one of the many causes that led to the American Revolution. At the very least, the Boston Tea Party and the reaction that followed served to rally support for revolutionaries in the thirteen colonies who were eventually successful in their fight for independence.International Fame of Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party became famous in many parts of the world, and inspired other rebels, especially against the British empire. For example, the psychoanalyst and writer Erik H. Erikson records in his book "Gandhi's Truth" that when Mahatma Gandhi met with the British viceroy in 1930 after the Indian salt protest campaign, Gandhi took some duty-free salt from his shawl and said, with a smile, that the salt was "to remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party."External links
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