Remembering the Boston Tea Party

 

“The Dye is cast: The People have passed the River and cutt away the Bridge: last Night Three Cargoes of Tea, were emptied into the Harbour. This is the grandest, Event, which has ever yet happened Since, the Controversy, with Britain, opened!

The Sublimity of it, charms me!”  

Those were the words of John Adams writing to friend James Warren on December 17, 1773. The evening prior nearly one hundred Bostonians, thinly disguised as Native-Americans, had boarded three ships docked at Griffin’s Wharf and tossed at least 340 chests of tea weighing upwards of forty-five tons into the water below. This was of course the Boston Tea Party, the 250^th anniversary of which is this Saturday, December 16.

                                        Silver teapot made in New York by Jacob Boelen, circa 1690–1700

Americans—or colonists as they still were when Adams wrote the above lines—had long protested British efforts at “taxation without representation.” Just eight years previously in 1765 colonists had vehemently, even violently, opposed the Stamp Act, which was quickly rescinded in March 1766. After its repeal however came the equally-loathed Townshend Revenue Acts, most of which were  themselves revoked in 1770. Parliament passed a Tea Act on May 10, 1773, granting the financially strapped British East India Company a monopoly in the American colonies. Grown overseas and introduced by traders in the seventeenth century, tea by this time had long been part of American culture. Silversmiths like Paul Revere had been crafting beautiful tea pots and services for decades by this time. British officials thought there would be little outcry; the tax after all was nominal, designed more to combat the smuggling of contraband “Dutch tea” and to shore up the ledger books of the floundering East India Company than to generate revenue per se. The British plan back-fired. Now the question on everyone’s mind was how King George III and Parliament would respond once news reached London regarding the Boston protest. The punishment came that winter and spring in the form of the so-called Intolerable Acts, a set of punitive measures demanding payment for the tossed tea and tightening British political and military control in Massachusetts. These measures led the colonists to resistance, revolution, and eventually independence.

Protests against the tea tax were hardly unique to Boston. Less than two weeks prior to the Boston Tea Party leaders in South Carolina had decided they too would not allow an East India Company shipment that had just arrived in Charleston to be sold, eventually impounding the tea and keeping it under lock-and-key to make certain the tax would not be paid. Nor would Griffin’s Wharf be the last place of protest; well over a dozen tea demonstrations of various forms took place throughout the colonies in 1773 and 1774. Still colonists grasped—as John Adams had just hours after the fact—that Boston was, in Adams’s words, the cutting away of the bridge. The rest of the world understood too. Here we see a remarkable political cartoon by the Dublin-born artist and engraver John Dixon entitled “The Tea-Tax-Tempest (The Oracle)” from 1774. 

Dixon, who by the 1760s had relocated to London, created this rendering just months after the Boston Tea Party, and a year before the firing at Lexington and Concord. The mezzotint shows Father Time using an early type of visual projection called a magic lantern to show the fighting soon to come. Through the depiction of the various figures representing individuals of different backgrounds, Dixon also captures the global implications of what would very much become a world war. The five varieties of tea dumped into Boston Harbor—Bohea, Congou, Hyson Singlo, and Souchong—were themselves the products of international trade and interaction. Dixon’s allegorical cartoon became iconic and was imitated and satirized several times throughout the Revolution.

What came to be known as the Boston Tea Party thus was part of American and world iconography from the outset. One hundred and fifty years ago this week people turned out at numerous functions in Boston for several days of celebration marking the centennial. The New England Woman Suffrage Association hosted an event at Faneuil Hall on December 15. Speakers at the “Woman’s Tea Party” included, among others: “Battle Hymn of the Republic” author Julia Ward Howe, Mary A. Livermore, Lucy Stone, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, who like many of the others in attendance had long supported women's suffrage in addition to abolitionism and civil rights.

In the twentieth century the Boston Tea Party grew even larger in the public imagination. Esther Forbes won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for her non-fiction “Paul Revere and the World He Lived In” and a Newbery Medal in 1944 for “Johnny Tremain: A Novel for Old & Young,” her coming-of-age story whose protagonist witnesses the Boston Tea Party and events that came after it. Ironically, Forbes downplayed tensions between Colonists and Redcoats in “Johnny Tremain” because she wrote the novel during the Second World War—by which time the United States and Great Britain were no longer enemies but allies. On the Fourth of July in 1973 the United States Postal Service issued this set of se-tenant stamps, among the first in what would eventually be more than one hundred commemorative issues in the Bicentennial Series.

This week in 2023 there are again services and commemorations across the country marking this major anniversary in American history.

 

Image credits:

The Tea-Tax-Tempest (The Oracle), by John Dixon, 1774

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Silver teapot made in New York by Jacob Boelen, circa 1690–1700

The piece was owned at different times by the Philipse and Jay families.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

New England Woman’s Tea Party ticket, 1873

Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Tea Party Bicentennial Era stamp series, 1973

United States Postal Service

 

Keith J. Muchowski, a librarian and professor at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn, writes occasionally for the Morristown National Historical Park Museum & Library blog.